MAGA hat. James McNellis/Wikimedia commons
Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn’t just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it.
In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.
One message read, “Everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber … Great, I love Hitler.”
Another sneered, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”
These weren’t anonymous trolls lurking on the margins of the internet. They included elected officers of Republican youth organizations, embedded in party structures, cultivating power now.
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
And if you think that’s alarmist, look around. Nearly 60,000 human beings are currently locked away in ICE detention centers across the United States. Seven out of 10 have never been convicted of a crime.
Many were here legally, waiting for hearings, their status still pending. But under Trump, they are rounded up by masked agents, hustled into vans, and shipped off to secretive detention centers where families and lawyers can lose track of them for weeks, months, or altogether.
This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.
And Americans, by and large, are looking away.
History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.
But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.
At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”
By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.
That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”
And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “ detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at Brown people?
They pretend tearing people from their lives without trial is just part of the immigration process.
They pretend spiriting away hundreds of desperate migrants to a foreign dictatorship’s prison is ordinary enforcement.
They pretend masked men grabbing people off American streets are “just following orders.”
But what this really is — and what we must call it without hesitation — is the birth of an unaccountable neofascist American secret police.
This isn’t about whether we want immigration laws enforced; there’s virtually no debate about that. It’s about whether the president can create an authorized, masked secret police force that answers to him rather than the law.
When police are anonymous, when courts are bypassed, when disappearances are tolerated, freedom itself is on the line.
If it can happen to a farmworker in Texas, it can happen to a protester in Portland, a journalist in New York, or a political opponent anywhere in America. It can happen to me, and it can happen to you.
History irrefutably shows us that unaccountable power always expands.
We like to tell ourselves “it can’t happen here.” But it already is. People are being taken without judicial warrants. Families are left without answers. Courts are being circumvented. Transfers and detentions happen in the dark.
Meanwhile, Americans are being trained to look the other way, just as the “good Germans” did. That is how democracy has died in a nation after nation, from Russia to Egypt to Turkey to Hungary, not with a single dramatic blow, but with the slow normalization of injustice until the unthinkable becomes everyday routine.
And this is why shrugging, shaking our heads, or tweeting our dismay is not enough. History demands more.
The people who stood by in 1930s Germany told themselves it was temporary, or they stayed quiet, or they made excuses. Their silence made tyranny possible.
We must not make the same mistake.
JD Vance brushed off the scandal, telling Americans to “grow up” about the leaked Hitler-loving group chat, calling it “kids doing stupid things.”
As Robert Hubble points out in his excellent Substack newsletter:
The leaders were in their twenties and thirties and held political jobs, including:
— Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly member Mike Reilly;
— Staffer for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt
— Communications Assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach
— Employee at New York State Unified Court System
— Employee at Center for Arizona Policy
— Senior Adviser in the Office of General Counsel, U.S. Small Business Administration (in the Trump administration)
In short, these were not “kids,” nor were they “college students.” They were adults with responsible jobs.
To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism. When elected officials defend calls for racially based mass slaughter as harmless immaturity, they tell the country that hate is acceptable, cruelty is normal, and history no longer matters.
Every act of unaccountable state violence must be called out. Every attempt to sideline the courts must be resisted. Every agency twisted into a political weapon must be exposed and reformed.
The Constitution does not protect itself. Democracy does not run on autopilot. Freedom only survives when citizens refuse to accept the unacceptable.
That means showing up at protests, speaking out at meetings, demanding accountability from lawmakers, and refusing to let media normalize secret police tactics in the United States of America.
There was a time in America when Republicans like my father were the ones warning of the dangers of America becoming an oppressive police state. We must reach out to our Republican elected officials and remind them that Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Barry Goldwater would not tolerate this sort of thing.
America is at a turning point. We can let this slide and hope the system rights itself. Or we can recognize that once the precedent of unaccountable detention and disappearance is accepted, it will never stop at immigrants or refugees. It will spread, as it always does, to silence dissent and crush opposition.
Already Trump is publicly going through a new list of people he wants to prosecute. Even Victor Orban hasn’t gone that far; this is pure Putin stuff.
The masked men who today drag away the undocumented will tomorrow drag away the protester, the critic, the rival. That’s how it worked then. That’s how it works now in Russia, the country is Trump is praising and using it as his model.
So I’m asking you, as forcefully as I know how: stand up. Speak out. Call your elected officials, both federal, state, and local, particularly the Republicans.
Show up this Saturday for No Kings Day and every day after that. Refuse to live in a country where the president commands his own secret police. Refuse to look away when your government disappears human beings into the shadows. Refuse to be a “good German.”
This is still our republic, but only if we defend it. That time is now.
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