One of the disgraceful parts of America’s history that my generation didn’t learn about in school was the POW camps established during the Civil War–Andersonville being the most infamous–that inspired the Nazis in their creation of concentration camps as the primary engines in their inhuman desire to kill every Jewish person on the planet. The fact that they came so close to succeeding in their pogrom against Jews should terrify every sentient being.

And it shouldn’t surprise any thinking sapient that CNN, MSNBC, Faux Noise and Newsmin aren’t going to tell you that Trump’s Department of Homeland Insecurity is building “detention camps” throughout the U.S. Twenty-four cities have been targeted so far. Sam Seder, Brittany Page, and Kyle Kulinski have brought us reports from the ground in Gainesville, GA, and north Salt Lake City, where new construction is underway, or existing buildings are being repurposed.

Their primary stated purpose–so far–is to house the unhoused and undocumented. Detention camps, internment camps, any type of forced, coerced, involuntary internment – concentration camps by any other name, and they will smell just as fetid. Thankfully, the word is getting out via YouTube and social media, and some of the targeted cities are pushing back.

Last week, a video was posted on Facebook showing citizens in Roxbury, NJ, at a town council meeting, demanding that their city council reject the placement of an ICE “containment” facility in their city.

“Oh, but Trump said they’ll be bringing in doctors, psychiatrists, and addiction specialists to help the homeless, so that’s good, isn’t it?” Really? I mean, sure, the Nazi camps had doctors as well–like Josef Mengele. And all those nameless Nazi camp doctors whose idea of treatment was more forced labor for men and women already weakened by malnutrition and abuse. Because work makes you free, right? Right? And as for mental health, the only psychiatrists in the camps were among the inhabitants, like Viktor Frankl.

Do you really believe that Trump cares enough to give adequate mental and physical medical care to anyone, much less the unhoused? If so, I’d like to talk to you–starting by ripping those rose-colored glasses off your face.

And the most horrifying part is that each “camp” will have incinerators–ostensibly for disposing of hazardous medical waste (used hypodermics, linens, etc.) Do you not like that word? Would you prefer, say, crematoria? And do you really think they would just be used to dispose of used needles and bedsheets? And what on God’s green earth makes you think that the population of these camps will be restricted to the unhoused and other ‘undesirables’? We know they’ll go after anybody who badmouths their Gestapo–Minnesota proved that.

You want documentation. I understand that. Even though it’s easy to believe that Trump would actually do such things, arguments against this insanity must be bolstered by evidence. As they used to say on “The X-Files,” the truth is out there. Besides the podcasts by Seder, Page and Kulinski on YouTube, here’s a historic precedent that also isn’t mentioned in the syllabus. Two words: REX 84. That was the program created under Ronald Reagan–thankfully never authorized, funded or implemented–which proposed a similar solution to the problem of inconvenient people.

According to Google’s AI, which checks with my research notes from that time, “REX 84, or Readiness Exercise 1984, was a classified U.S. government plan and drill created in 1984 under the Reagan administration.

The plan tested the government’s ability to detain large numbers of U.S. residents considered “national security threats” during a national emergency, such as significant domestic opposition to a U.S. invasion in Central America.” It wouldn’t be surprising if one of the architects of Project 2025 dug up those old briefing books, dusted them off, and added some nefarious ideas of their own.

Speaking of REX 84…37 years ago, I made my first attempt at writing a multi-issue comic book. This was around the time when the term “graphic novel” emerged to describe books with serious adult themes, like V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Dark Knight, and The Sandman.

My artist friend Dale Rawlings handled the artwork, while I wrote the script. The basic premise was that in some future America, a fascist state is being created, and one of the first things the new President does is create camps for dissidents to be housed in. Once the dissidents are rounded up, they are sent to these camps–mostly in the Midwest–where they are imprisoned and killed if they try to escape. Sound familiar?

We didn’t get very far with the project, so I only ended up writing a script for the first issue, with rough ideas for the others. Also, I didn’t get into any of the real down and dirty parts, like what was done with the bodies of dissidents who were killed for rebelling and attempting escape. The very time this was created — late 1980s/early 1990s, the end of the “Reagan Revulsion” — colored the whole presentation. Then Clinton was elected, and we abandoned the idea. In hindsight, it was clearly not one of my best decisions.

It’s a chilling thing to see a work of fiction come to life before your eyes. One can only imagine the reactions of George Orwell and Sinclair Lewis if they were brought back to life in 2026 America. Anger and horror, surely. And Margaret Atwood–while she lived to see “The Handmaid’s Tale” become a TV show, how much worse to see her novel turned into a twisted playbook for incels with too much power and damned-up libidos.

Once you criminalize homelessness–as has been done quite successfully out here in the West, post-Grants Pass–you can pretty much do what you want with the unhoused. And Trump et al. clearly have some seriously dystopian ideas in mind. They can call it “human thriving,” or “work-conditioned housing,” or whatever hideous neologism they can conjure by contorting the English language. I say it’s Trump’s Newspeak used to justify the creation of concentration camps, and I say, “Hell with it.”  So should you.