Very Serious PeopleTM: "You can't run around pushing alarmist ideas about fascism and saying they're gonna build concentration camps!"

Me: "Are you kidding me? You already live in a fascist police state with a fully-functioning carceral industrial complex that actively profits from racialized warehousing of "undesirables" and nobody even blinks. The camps are already built, they're all around you we just call them prisons!"

Trump: "Lol, no; we're literally gonna build camps and put them in places where there is no law."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/gitmo-concentration-camp

'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo

"Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison," said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. "It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing."

Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that expansion of operations at Guantánamo "is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy."

I'd say between this and the Trump administration's brazen deal with El Salvador to jail even U.S. Citizens in their "mega-prison" it's very clear what this government's plan for purging people they don't like is, and yes that plan is every bit as cartoonishly fascist as even Trump's most ardent critics have suggested. Furthermore, I would note that as many observers at the time predicted would happen eventually if we embraced a fascist police state to "fight terrorism" in the wake of 9-11, the Trump administration is clearly borrowing heavily from both a bipartisan migrant carceral complex pattern, and a (again bipartisan) history of using offshore prisons in places where American law doesn't apply to commit human rights violations against "bad hombres" - the major difference here is that Trump is now planning on doing that to your neighbors and the lady who works at the nail salon up the street.

"According to critics like Robinson, "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."

You can't even say Robinson is speaking about a hypothetical situation because the American security state has already done this, for this precise reason, in slightly different circumstances - most people just weren't paying that much attention because "we gotta get Bin Laden." At this point the entire apparatus and justification for that apparatus already exists in "reasonable" American thought along bipartisan lines; the only thing we're missing from the literal Nazi blueprint is organized mass extermination campaigns and are YOU prepared to promise we won't get there? I sure couldn't.

While obviously this must be opposed vigorously, it's going to be pretty hard for a mainstream establishment that embraced the road to concentration camps in the name of national security, and has wholly surrendered to the idea that migrants are a "problem" that must be met with "carceral force" (that happens to make certain people very rich) to argue that this scenario is somehow different than the previous mind-numbingly fascist scenarios our entire state apparatus has supported in the past - both to stop migrants, and to prosecute the so-called "War on Terror."

You can't have a little fascism; and if you try, sooner or later you're going to have a lot more fascism. And boy, we've been trying for a very long time.