By J.T. Wrenfield – Reporting from the edge of the algorithm
They never open the camps with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. There’s no brass band, no ominous foghorn, no historical plaque that says “And here began the quiet apocalypse.” No. It starts with a whisper on the airwaves and ends with your neighbour quietly not being home anymore.
The question being asked with a tremble now – “When do the camps open?” – isn’t paranoid. It’s perceptive. It’s the question you ask when your government starts calling major cities “occupied territory” and when the President of the United States speaks about “liberating” them like they’re Fallujah with palm trees.
It doesn’t begin with searchlights and guard towers. It begins with language:
- “Invasion”
- “Illegals”
- “Insurrectionist mobs”
- “We will restore order”
Sound familiar? It should. The President said it last week while mainlining Diet Coke, tweeting from a golden toilet, and watching the ticker scroll like prophecy.
The Infrastructure of Repression Already Exists
They don’t need to build the camps. They already exist.
- ICE detention centres
- Private prisons with sweetheart contracts
- Military bases converted to “processing” hubs
- Emergency shelters turned long-term detainment sites
You don’t need new blueprints when the architecture of authoritarianism is ready to scale. All you need is someone willing to scream “Go.”
The Disappearances Begin Quietly
When do people start vanishing?
- When a protest leader is arrested for “inciting unrest” at a peaceful rally.
- When a migrant is “relocated” to a black site no one is allowed to audit.
- When journalists are declared threats to national security.
And when that happens, the rest of us look around and say:
“Surely not. Not here. Not us.”
And that’s when it’s already too late.
The Escalation Playbook
Every country with a dictator has played this game before. Here’s the cheat sheet:
- Stage a fake emergency
- Issue sweeping executive orders
- Let a loyalist judge validate them
- Watch the media shrug and spin
- Count on the public assuming it’s someone else’s fight
That’s not speculation. That’s history – repeated in slightly different fonts.
Ask Around
Ask Argentina what happened to the disappeared. Ask Hungary how democratic backsliding feels. Ask Germany about how it started with “cleansing rhetoric.”
Ask the U.S. – it ran internment camps for Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. On U.S. soil. Under a “liberal” president.
You think they won’t do it again? They kept the instructions.
The Threshold We’re Crossing
If you’re asking “when do the camps open,” it means you’ve seen the smoke and heard the crackle. You’re tuned in.
You’re ahead of the curve. You haven’t been lulled. Don’t let them gaslight you with:
- “It’s just rhetoric”
- “You’re overreacting”
- “This is just how he talks”
This is pre-authoritarianism in real time. And you should treat it accordingly.
Final Warning
When the state talks about “vermin”… Builds laws that can’t be challenged… Promises to expel millions… Targets dissenters as enemies of the state…
They are not bluffing.
This is not a drill. Stay loud. Stay visible. Stay connected.
Because when the sirens stop sounding – that’s when it’s already begun.
J.T. Wrenfield is a pseudonym for someone who remembers history and has no intention of letting it be repeated silently.
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Interestingly the same language has been used and heard in Australia by the far right, white Christian nationalists, faux centrist ecologists and bipartisan on migration, mooting potential policies and media stunts, to denigrate, demean and dog whistle ‘the other’.
Across the Anglosphere, now parts of Europe, a symptom of fossil fuel anti-immigrant Tanton Network and free market Atlas Koch Network, see Project 2025, Border Czar Homan and Stephen ‘Goebbels’ Miller*.
In a parallel universe is similar language and abstract constructs based on junk science of ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by Uni Sussex team in ‘Models of Doom’), carrying capacity, sustainability, degrowth and the steady-state economy; faux environmentalism & population control of Tanton Network* (grew from ZPG Zero Population Growth).
Much of this ‘sciency’ taxonomy emanates from the PR push of greenwashing and mainstreaming via the ’70s fossil fuel Club of Rome, suggesting similar of closed nations and/or cities for autarky models. Exemplars, maybe -> pre WWII Germany, Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chilean model (with Austrian-Chicago school, now Atlas-Koch) based on ‘segregation economics’, eugenics and ‘survival of the fittest’?
As a scholar interested in German history especially after 1870, I see too many similarities between the fall of the Weimar Republic and current Trumpery USA (United States of Apartheid). A minority of self-serving rich people controlling puppet politicians for their own pecuniary gain with little/no care for the commonwealth. Indeed, the greed requires that excluded persons are exploited for everything they have, even to death in convict chain gangs hired out at peppercorn rates to the members of the exclusive dominant political class.
Trumpery America is heading down the same route of suppression of working class persons that the democratically elected German government followed 1933 – 1945, when about 30% of the German people preyed upon the rest because corporate heavy industry supported the deliberate destruction of what at that time was the leading communal society in a Europe still shocked by WWI.
The cycle of history just rolls on and on and on.
There is always some one to target, some group presenting a threat, some one not worthy of sharing our space, whether it be suburb, state or nation, always some difference which needs elimination.
Yes, the lessons of history are quickly forgotten and then repeated to be forgotten again until a new enemy is conjured up, a new difference to be despised.
A new iteration of god who has anointed his special people to ruthlessly rule, to eliminate the unbeliever.
And so it goes.
And yet, when we look around us, there are always some who will embrace the different, will shelter the unwanted, will fight for the rights of humanity.
Who will be those people?