While it's certainly true that one week seems to feel very much like another in our Hot Gestapo Summer, fascism continues unabated in American society - and thus The Skinny was there once again. Check out our newsletter featuring the best of my blogging from the past ten days.

https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/20/the-skinny-hot-gestapo-summer/2/

The Skinny: Hot Gestapo Summer

"If, as I and others have argued, these mass deportations are clear violations of constitutional and human rights, then ICE lawyers working to ram every brown person they can through via legally dubious methods (like say, declaring that a fake invasion by a Venezuelan gang nobody has ever heard of means you can ship people to foreign gulags without due process) would be legally accountable for their role in perpetuating these crimes. If you know what you’re doing is illegal, because you’re a lawyer, “I was just following orders” has a pretty poor track record as an excuse in court. So you can understand why it might behoove immigration judges, who literally work for Trump’s executive branch, not the judiciary, to hide the names of government attorneys doing the legal legwork for a fascist ethnic-cleansing project; a project that probably represents a real as fuck crime against humanity if several international scholars are to be believed. This isn’t about protecting ICE attorneys, it’s about protecting folks complicit in criminal atrocities."

I don't know if its an artifact of cable news, cowardice, or genuine ignorance but there's a countercurrent developing in the discussion around the disgustingly-named "Alligator Alcatraz" migrant cages in the Florida Everglades and I think it's important to nip arguments that it's not *really* a "concentration camp" in the bud. So I cleaned up a post from earlier this week, threw some links in, and got into how the camp is run, the efforts Trump and DeSantis are undertaking to keep much of this a secret, and what conditions are like inside.

https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/18/recommended-reading-yes-its-a-concentration-camp/

Recommended Reading: Yes, It’s A Concentration Camp

"I think the debate over whether or not “Alligator Alcatraz” officially qualifies as a “real” concentration camp is both farcical and insulting. However you feel about longtime DNC minion Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as a politician, it is inarguable that she’s objectively describing a type of concentration camp. With dozens of brown bodies packed into small cages, inadequate access to washroom facilities and water, purposely reduced caloric counts inadequate for the preservation of healthy adults, exposure to elements and insects; what else would you call what we’re doing in the Florida swamp besides running a concentration camp? It’s not an accident Wasserman-Schultz references America’s dark history with the term “interment camps” but I think she’s still being too generous to the Trump regime here; this is a camp of cages for cruelly concentrating migrants without any concern for their wellbeing at all – a concentration camp, to be precise."

At this point, I think we're probably still a long way from identifying the full web of influence, corruption, and misappropriation of resources behind Governor Ron DeSantis' concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, the obnoxiously named "Alligator Alcatraz." As such I'm going to keep this post pretty brief; more or less to keep the issue on our radar as more information emerges.

With that caveat note however, this Talking Points Memo article talks about the outlet's extremely nascent investigation into how DeSantis built the concentration camp, who paid for it, and who profits from it. Would it surprise you to learn that Florida's fascist governor is using a fake "emergency" to make this monstrous bullshit happen, the money trail is a hot mess, and Florida taxpayers are going to be the one's footing the bill for Ron's nazi apology to Downmarket Mussolini? Yeah, it didn't surprise me either.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/contracts-desantis-alligator-alcatraz

Contracts Show Millions of Dollars and Diverted Disaster Resources Were Used to Build DeSantis’ ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

"TPM has obtained and analyzed over a dozen contracts and invoices related to the construction and operation of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The documents identify eight previously undisclosed companies — including two firms with a Fortune 500 pedigree — involved with the controversial facility. They also show that, in at least one instance, resources allocated for the state’s “disaster preparedness” apparatus were diverted to the site as DeSantis’ office used emergency powers to quickly establish the camp, causing a shortfall that needs to be addressed during the ongoing hurricane season."

I must confess that part of me feels like I'm insulting my readers' intelligence when I remind folks, over and over again, that nightmare concentration camps for migrants, many of whom are guilty of nothing more than a civil violation, would be an unacceptable eliminationist outrage even if nobody was profiteering from it and it cost the public coffers zero dollars. In the grand scheme of things the lies, corruption, and misappropriation of public funds are a side story compared to the fact that we've just opened a real as fuck concentration camp in a remote part of Florida and there are already reports of widespread human rights abuses and unsafe conditions emerging mere weeks after "Alligator Alcratraz" opened. With that having been said, informed observers must know by now that the rich nazis running the larger American fascist movement do have designs on profiting from fascist repression, ethnic cleansing, and the migrant carceral complex - and projects like Alligator Alcatraz demonstrate how that odious business functions.

If you want to know the names of the eleven companies already identified as working with the government of Florida to make this eliminationist bullshit possible, who is getting paid for what, and how many of the folks directly profiting from this are DeSantis donors (there are several) I recommend you just read the article. The short version here however is that like Trump, DeSantis has declared "an alarming number of migrants in Florida" to be a state level crisis, he then used emergency powers to divert a bunch of money, including from disaster prevention and relief funding in a state notorious for having a "hurricane season," to build a fucking concentration camp surrounded by alligators as a make up gift for his ally and former GOP nomination opponent, President Trump. Along the way a bunch of very shitty companies are raking in the money for substandard work, and the entire DeSantis administration is working overtime to keep as much of this as possible a complete secret from anyone who might be in a position to conduct any oversight on this genocidal nazi boondoggle. Think "Halliburton in post-Saddam Iraq" but on a smaller scale.

At this point if you cannot see that the Trumpenreich is actively engineering the conditions necessary for a fascist genocide of migrants and a massive ethnic cleansing project against brown people to create a white ethnostate, I need to ask if you've been living in a cave for the past six months. With recent news that the Trump administration is looking to fire up a mass denaturalization program, we are now in the process of both expanding the ethnic cleansing project to include American citizens and establishing the kind of stateless people fascist regimes are able to exterminate in unfathomable numbers. This isn't a debate anymore, and we're running out of time to stop this nightmare - mass graves are on the horizon.

https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/16/ominous-solutions-to-nonexistent-problems/

Ominous “Solutions” to Nonexistent Problems

"Folks, if this doesn’t terrify you I’m not sure you’re paying enough attention to the nightmare unfolding around us in Trump’s brave new Amerikkka. Historically, denaturalization policies have lead to some of the worst atrocities in Pig Empire history, including, you guessed it, the actual fucking Holocaust. If that sounds like scaremongering to you please let me remind you that we are currently bragging about building a concentration camp surrounded by migrant-eating alligators, and the Supreme Court has more or less signaled its willingness to let the Trump regime at least temporarily ignore the constitution to commit life-destroying human rights violations against non-citizens. How much longer do you think it’s going to take these fascist pigs to figure out that deportation flights are more expensive than bullets, or even just letting underfed people die in remote internment camps, far away from the public eye? We are through the looking glass now, and waiting until we’re finding mass graves outside of ICE facilities to recognize a rapidly escalating ethnonationalist genocide being conducted under the guise of immigration enforcement is an unacceptable course of action."

#Fascism #Trump #DOJ #MassDeportations #PamBondi #EthnicCleansing #Denaturalization #Ethnonationalism #Nazis #Genocide #WhiteSupremacy

(NIDC original post)

The higher the wealth inequality of a nation, the greater the effects of ethnonationalism and other far right/fascist political trends on that nation.

Graph taken from:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231241251714

@fightfascism

#FarRight
#fascism
#ethnonationalism
#inequality
#WealthInequality
#IncomeInequality
#GINI

The truth is, we've been saying for many years now that it's not just the #UnitedStates that's in danger of collapsing into an #authoritarian #ethnonationalism #fascism state.

Many major countries around the world have seen a resurgence in authoritarianism and ethnonationalism in recent years, not least among them the UK, France, Germany, India, Brazil, and Turkey. It just so happens that the US is seeing a sudden rapid decline due the unwise re-election of Donald Trump. #USpol

This is why #ethnonationalism is a synonym for #Fascism, and why these ideas inevitably lead to conflict, tragedy, and eventually, atrocity.

And it is easily demonstrated that all #authoritarian states are #expansionist and will seek to increase the territory they control by force.

They are never content to live in #peace with their neighbors, even if they could somehow achieve their ideal of genetic, ethnic, racial, and ideological purity and expel, or at least control, all "aliens". #USpol

As the fascist Trump regime moves to revoke the protected status of literally millions of law abiding, mostly non-white migrants who are, effectively, refugees from US imperialism and economic predation, I think it's instructive to take a look at what type of immigrants the administration *does* want to protect and provide a pathway to US citizenship for:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/06/white-afrikaner-donald-trump-america-us-administration

As a white Afrikaner, I can now claim asylum in Trump’s America. What an absurdity

"Imagine my bewilderment when Donald Trump and his “first buddy”, South African-born Elon Musk, declared that we Afrikaners are a threatened species; that our black compatriots are engaged in a “genocide”; that we are victims of oppression and discrimination and as such offered special refugee status in the United States – at the very point in time that thousands of migrants to that country are being repelled or deported. The US state department is even preparing “refugee centres” in Pretoria to house these “victims”.

The criticisms and threats coming from Trump, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Musk outraged the majority of South Africans because the claims were patently false and were seen as unacceptable meddling with internal affairs. A section of the white population, however – the ethnic Afrikaner nationalists and separatists – welcomed the US intervention, leading to harsh exchanges with racial undertones on social and other media.

Just for the record: Afrikaners are generally better off today than prior to 1994, when they gave up political power; materially, culturally and in terms of personal freedom.

South Africa’s progressive constitution with its extensive bill of rights is intact; the rule of law is maintained and the judiciary is independent and functioning; we are a genuinely open society with free speech and media that many other democracies, especially Trump’s America, can be jealous of."

So let's review here for a second. According to the regime, hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing a country destabilized by US policy to the point that it's being run by armed gangs, Haiti, are not deserving of US protection and harboring. But specifically white Afrikaners whose rights and liberties are being protected by a coalition government in South Africa that has a better human rights record than the US does, are endangered refugees who need to actively lured to the United States and offered the smoothest possible path to US citizenship because, um, Trump read fake fascist "news" stories about white farmers having their land seized by the South African government? A thing that objectively did not happen, but probably should have given the vast racialized wealth inequality still remaining from the fallout of the white nationalist Apartheid regime that ended in 1994. Well that sure sounds "about white."

Is this policy about appeasing white nationalists littered throughout the Trump regime? Yes. Is this policy about Trump doing a favor for his billionaire Afrikaner nazi donor Elon Musk; a man raised under the Apartheid system? Also yes. Is all of this just straight up racism and ethno-nationalist policy? Yes yet again. Finally of course, I don't think anyone should sleep on the fact that at the precise time the Trump regime is enacting objectively white nationalist edicts to fully restore and entrench white supremacy as official government policy, these cracker fascists are actively looking to import people who liked fucking Apartheid in South Africa.

The man…was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel.He completed his manuscript…at UC, publishing it as The #DualState, w/the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of #Dictatorship.The book explains how the #Nazi regime managed to keep on track a #capitalist economy governed by stable #laws—& maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of #lawlessness & state #violence in order to realize its terrible vision of #EthnoNationalism.