Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.

What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example — what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz” — is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.

It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.

A concentration camp built in eight days, in a state where over 30,000 people are experiencing homelessness.

Hartmann calls for us to engage through lawsuits; journalistic documentation of all that happens; direct action via peaceful protests, civil disobedience, and national mobilization; accurate language (it’s not a “detention center,” it’s a “political prison” or “migrant concentration camp”); and remembering and sharing history—in particular about Dachau and how it started:

Not with mass extermination, but with silence. With a single camp, surrounded by a fence, where people were put “for their own protection.”

He reminds us:

Dachau didn’t just hold communists. Over time, it expanded to include denaturalized Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and anyone who opposed Nazi policy. It became a national crucible of cruelty. It normalized the idea that “certain people do not deserve legal protections.” […]

Today, DeSantis is using FEMA funds intended for hurricane victims to build migrant cages. Tomorrow, it could be protesters. Journalists. Teachers. You.

It’s heartbreaking to witness the creation of another American concentration camp. I hope to witness its destruction—and history’s final judgment upon its perpetrators.