I recently saw two stories back-to-back that chillingly underscored where we are as a country—and where we’re headed.

The first was via Heidi Li Feldman, who shared this Will Bunch article from The Philadelphia Inquirer with the comment:

Important Will Bunch column on American concentration camps.

I don’t know about you, but “American concentration camps” lands like a jackhammer to the chest.

Bunch interviews Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps:

“I’m particularly concerned about where we are now, because we’re well into that five-year period in terms of we’re already doing sweeps, right?” Pitzer said. “We’ve already got masked guys. We’re already disappearing hundreds of people to … foreign countries, or to the Everglades, or now to Fort Bliss” — the El Paso, Texas, military base, which the Trump regime just awarded a $1.2 billion contract for a large new camp.

Bunch:

The most famous case study, in Nazi Germany, is also the source of many current misconceptions, since the “final solution” death camps, such as Auschwitz in Poland, where some of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in gas chambers, have often been what people think of. But the first well-known German concentration camp, Dachau, opened less than two months after Hitler took power in early 1933, and was used to detain — not slaughter — the Nazis’ political opponents.

“It was used in a kind of social engineering way,” Pitzer said of Hitler’s early camps. “There were a lot of homeless people, there were a lot of career criminals that they put in the camps to kind of dilute the percentage of political prisoners. So it would be more of a PR thing. People would support it more. You saw detention, particularly, of gay men.”

Immediately after seeing this article, a second crossed my social feeds—yet another executive order, written to sound benign, yet is anything but. Robert Davis at Raw Story explains it:

The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” directs multiple federal agencies to discontinue funding services such as Housing First, Safe Consumption Sites, and other harm reduction practices. It also directs states to detain people with serious mental illnesses regardless of “forensic bed capacity at appropriate local, State, and Federal jails or hospitals.”

The executive order asserts:

Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.

It also calls for the government to:

enforce, and where necessary, adopt, standards that address individuals who are a danger to themselves or others and suffer from serious mental illness or substance use disorder, or who are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves, through assisted outpatient treatment or by moving them into treatment centers or other appropriate facilities via civil commitment or other available means, to the maximum extent permitted by law[…]

And it seeks to encourage:

civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public[…]

This was via Denise Wheeler, who, in linking to the article, noted:

Hitler targeted people with mental or physical disabilities for murder in what the Nazis called the T-4, or “euthanasia” program.

Evan Urquhart of Assigned Media pulls it together:

As usual it’s too early to tell what this will look like in practice, but at a minimum they’re clearing the way for involuntary commitment for any homeless people authorities decide to target as well as at least some non-homeless people with mental illness.

At maximum this seems to open the door for authorities declaring people mentally ill and institutionalizing them on that basis.

It could lead to attempts to use this against protesters who haven’t done anything arrest-worthy, and perhaps eventually activists/dissidents/ideological opponents.

We’re constantly being told that America’s present is nothing like Germany’s past—so why does it look so damn familiar? It’s increasingly disingenuous, verging on intentional ignorance. These articles and commentary testify that “authoritarian America” is no longer an historical allusion or a speculative future: it’s our present.