SAY THE WORDS: AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMP

We are sending people there and they are not coming back.

Once again my plans are shot. I wanted to talk this week about one of the themes of my book but instead I am talking about concentration camps and fascism and speaking the truth. I hope these words help you in some small way to make sense of these times and to take courage.

SAY THE WORDS: AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMP

By all criteria, this a concentration camp. Not “concentration camp” as rhetorical inflation, or emotionally manipulative shorthand, or edgy metaphor—but as in: literally.

As in: detention without trial, state control, inhumane living conditions, forced labor, dehumanization, brutal violence, isolation from accountability, psychological torture, and—by every available logical extension—murder.

That last one we can’t yet verify in the strict evidentiary sense, but the circumstances suggest it like smoke suggests fire, and they are already trying to hide their actions and deny what is occurring.

This week Maryland Senator Van Hollen was initially not allowed in to see his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia that the US government admits was sent to the El Salvador prison falsely. This comes just weeks after Kristi Noem (the dog killer) was allowed to visit and take photos of the prisoners. She posed. Smiled. Framed her presence as proof of her own competence, her toughness, her readiness for whatever frontier America imagines itself poised to conquer.

The mega-prison in El Salvador is officially known as the "Terrorism Confinement Center", a name that might as well have been cooked up by a PR firm that got tired of subtlety and just went straight for dystopian chic. This facility, built under President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” houses over 40,000 men, most of whom were arrested en masse without any process resembling justice—just tattoos, zip codes, or looking nervous. Footage shows prisoners—emaciated, bald, shackled, bare-chested—packed into giant concrete cells like inventory, crouched in rows like products in a warehouse.

It is tempting to call this moment a new and shocking low. To say that something has gone terribly wrong in America. That we are becoming unrecognizable. That this is not who we are.

But it is exactly who we are.

The fascism is not imported. It is not creeping in through some rift in the social contract. It’s homegrown. It’s legacy software. It’s foundational.

America has always been a fascist state—for some. For Black people. For Indigenous people. For the poor. For the disposable. What is happening now is not a deviation. It is an expansion. The tools were always there. The tools were always sharpened on Black bodies. They are merely being used more broadly now, and with less pretense.

Consider that every one of these structures—the police state, the surveillance state, the carceral state—was road-tested on marginalized populations long before they began edging toward the middle class.

The Nazis saw it. They studied our racial codes. Our eugenics. Our reservation systems. Our lynch mobs. Our prisons. They called us a prototype.

And they were not wrong.

The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery "except as punishment for a crime," meant that slavery never truly ended—it evolved. Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th does an expertly precise job of tracing how that clause (a constitutional asterisk) morphed into the logic of modern mass incarceration. It follows the evolution of slavery through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, Clinton-era criminal codes, privatized prisons, and the emergence of what is now a penal economy. She shows that nothing ended; it only transformed. The old tactics found new forms. The chains became policy. The plantations got vending machines.

This is not new. None of it is new. The public is merely catching up to a reality that Black and Indigenous people have always known: that the state will turn on you, consume you, silence you, erase you—and call it justice.

What we are witnessing is not a collapse. It is a continuation.

A metastasis.

So when President Nayib Bukele visited the White House this week, it wasn’t a diplomatic meeting so much as a kind of ideological family reunion. Two men fluent in the theater of bullying dominance, exchanging notes on optics and containment. But the worst part was a candid moment…

Just before entering the Oval Office, Trump was captured in a hot-mic moment mentioned to Bukele how "home growns" should be next. He said: "The home growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."

Homegrowns, as in dissidents. As in protestors. As in anyone with the audacity to call America what it is. And the room, apparently, didn’t flinch. No gasps, no silence. Just a few smirks and nods, maybe someone jotting it down like a policy idea instead of what it is: an open fantasy of authoritarian expansion. The kind you laugh at in the moment and implement in pieces, bureaucratically, later. Bukele shook hands. Trump grinned. Everything he says is a kind of joke. A cruel joke that becomes the reality.

We must call it what it is because language is the first battleground. Authoritarians don’t always break laws—they often begin by redefining them. The work of resistance starts with refusing to speak in the language of the regime. You don’t call it a prison, you call it a concentration camp. You don’t call it a mistake. You call it a kidnapping. You don’t call it policy. You call it what it is: systematic violence.

It also means not shying away from a truth you don't want to face; the policies of Biden and Obama have helped bring us here. Mass deportation and refugees in cages is not a Trump thing. It is an American government thing.

And yes, it’s exhausting. Yes, it’s alienating. People will roll their eyes, accuse you of being dramatic, shrill, radical, negative, “divisive.” But division is not the problem. Division is the wound being revealed. What’s dangerous is the silence. The wound needs air and light if it has any chance of healing.

We often don't want to use the correct language, because we then we feel more keenly how terrible things are. But the ironic utility of using the right words is it actually robs the authoritarians of any sense of respectability.

Power without legitimacy reveals tyranny as high-powered tantrums, and they know it. With the right words we force them to govern naked, without the cloak of consent, without the borrowed moral authority that makes atrocity palatable to people who still think good and evil are matters of skin tone.

Language is not decoration. It is infrastructure. Tear out the words, and the whole narrative starts to wobble. What they want is to be seen as serious men doing serious work. What we must give them instead is the truth: that they are evil men doing violence with a PR team.

What’s wild—and quietly heartening—is that Republican constituents, actual voters, have been showing up to town halls this week and demanding that their own representatives—the ones they canvassed for, campaigned for, maybe even went to church with—bring Abrego Garcia back. They are angry. Not performative angry, not Tucker Carlson eyebrow-lift angry, but something closer to moral vertigo: that disorienting moment when you realize the ground you thought was stable is actually quicksand, and the people you sent to govern are just smiling as they push others in. There’s real unease, even among the GOP faithful, about this open disregard for the Supreme Court—a branch of government they once fetishized as the final word on law and order. And here’s the thing: when the machinery of cruelty gets too loud, too visible, too obvious, even the people who helped build it can feel the heat off its gears.

There is evil at work, and it’s so naked, so arrogant, that even those who once applauded its efficiency are beginning to feel the stirrings of conscience. Let’s hope that flicker of clarity—of courage—is contagious. Because the most dangerous thing a regime can face isn’t opposition from its enemies. It’s doubt from its believers.

POEM OF THE WEEK: Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye

ICYMI: Signed Copies of A REBELLION OF CARE

I am signing copies of my book to be made available through my beloved local indie bookstore Malaprop's. You will also get a free 5x7" print of my poem MUTUAL SANCTUARY

Here is the link to order: https://www.malaprops.com/preorder-signed-copies-rebellion-care-david-gate

Until next week - Be Excellent To Each Other 🤘 dg

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