'The arc of concentration camps is twofold': Experts detail the 'logical endpoint' of MAGA’s rhetoric

Critics of President Donald Trump and the far-right MAGA movement have different views on the form that authoritarianism could take in the United States in the years to come.

Some fear that the U.S. could emulate the "illiberal democracy" model of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, where technically, there are still voting rights, but checks and balances are so eroded that the Fidesz Party is entrenched and dominant. Others fear an even more disturbing scenario in which the U.S. embraces an outright military dictatorship like Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet or Spain under Gen. Francisco Franco, a.k.a. "El Generalísimo."

Journalist Christopher Mathias, known his extensive reporting on far-right authoritarian movements, has been working on a forthcoming book titled "To Catch a Fascist." And in an op-ed published by MSNBC on March 30, he warns that extremist rhetoric from Trump and others in his administration should not be taken lightly.

"Speaking with Fox News host Laura Ingraham," Mathias observes, "JD Vance asserted that Germany is suffering an 'invasion' of people who are 'totally culturally incompatible' with 'western civilization.' This purported 'invasion,' Vance said, will lead to a 'civilizational suicide' if it's not stopped. It barely triggers a 24-hour news cycle anymore when the vice president and his boss, President Donald Trump, use the same language as fascist mass murderers. I've witnessed this process of normalization over the last eight years as a reporter covering the far right, seeing neo-Nazi talking points, especially around immigration, enter the mainstream discourse with horrifying, accelerating speed."

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Mathias adds, "I fear now that many of us here in America still haven't registered the logical endpoint of such rhetoric, which both dehumanizes subgroups of human beings and presents them as an existential threat."

Andrea Pitzer, author of the 2018 book "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," warns that history offers disturbing lessons on what dehumanizing rhetoric can ultimately lead to.

Pitzer told Mathias, "Concentration camp regimes always need a group they can turn into outsiders by making its members seem so dangerous that the government needs to remove those people from society. You can't typically do that without years — years! — of rhetoric demonizing them. Even with the Nazis, it took more than five years from Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany until the mass roundup of Jews as a group began with Kristallnacht in November 1938…. Over time, this demonization creates real fear and gets citizens to go along with measures like concentration camps."

Pitzer noted that some of the foreign students the Trump Administration is targeting for deportation were in the U.S. legally and had no criminal records.

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"The arc of concentration camps is twofold," Pitzer told Mathias. "First, there's supposedly some very bad group so dangerous that the government says they have to be removed from society. Second, the definition of who's dangerous expands, often coming to include political opponents and rivals. If the government can arrest civilians with no criminal record and put them on planes out of the country without accounting for who they are or for any actual legal process — as has been happening in recent weeks — what would stop them from deporting whomever they like?"

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Christopher Mathias' full MSNBC op-ed is available at this link.