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- [00:00]
A
I'm Brian Reed. When I created S Town, I looked at how secrets lies and the stories we tell shape a small rural town. Now on my podcast Question everything, I'm going bigger. Hi, this message is for Senator Lindsey Graham. I head to Washington to take on a law that gives tech companies sweeping immunity.
- [00:19]
B
Is how these companies have gotten rich.
- [00:23]
A
Join me as I go after big tech on Question everything from placement theory and KCRW out Thursdays. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:30]
C
ICE is the current big bad attacking the United States. I mean, how can you not see this loosely regulated militia as anything but villains?
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D
You're breaking my window.
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E
Guys.
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F
I'm a US Citizen.
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A
Insane.
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G
Insane. This guy's breaking my window.
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E
Guys.
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F
I will kill you.
- [00:47]
A
You understand me? What the. The shooting of Preddy comes just weeks
- [00:55]
H
after the killing of Renee Good by an I in Minneapolis.
- [00:59]
C
They're breaking random people's windows, threatening violence, actually murdering people regardless of citizenship, and shirking the Constitution based on the lie that they somehow have full immunity to abuse whoever they want to get those good, good bonuses based on their arrest stats.
- [01:18]
F
That guy is protected by absolute immunity.
- [01:21]
G
He was doing his job.
- [01:22]
C
It's been a minute since fascism has been so overt on U.S. soil. And because of that, people have rushed to compare this authoritarian group to the Gestapo. But is that right? I'm Akilah Hughes, and on this week's episode of how is this Better? I'm asking what good it does to try to exoticize what is so clearly homegrown terror.
- [01:51]
E
ICE isn't just like the Gestapo. They're closer to slave catchers. And once that clicks, a lot of people get real uncomfortable real fast. Every time ICE comes up, someone reaches for that Gestapo comparison and I get why they do it. Raids in the middle of the night, neighbors disappearing, families gone before breakfast. That's the kind of terror that people were taught to recognize as long as it happened to people that look like them.
- [02:15]
C
You may have seen this now viral video of historian Ashley Barron, AKA Ashley the Baroness.
- [02:21]
E
My name is Ashley Baron. I go by Ashley the Baroness.
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D
The.
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E
The is a little. My little homage to Megan thee stallion, because I love her.
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C
Real hot girl.
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B
Shit.
- [02:32]
C
Correcting the impulse to compare current immigration officers conduct to that of the illegal Nazi police, the Gestapo. The video has amassed millions of views and I wanted to talk to her about why she felt it was important to set the record straight.
- [02:45]
E
I would call myself a public historian. And I also am just an overall curious individual. I like to link things together. So if I can make something in the past, relate to something in the present, then I'm going to do that. So I think when I saw the way that this administration was taking hold of our nation yet again, that disallowed me to find the joy in the world at that moment. So I felt the need to speak out because I know that on the agenda was getting rid of a lot of the history that we need, that we need to move forward, that we need to make our nation whole again. And I think that kind of triggered me, I guess, for lack of a better word. It definitely debated.
- [03:32]
F
You got you locked in.
- [03:33]
G
Yeah, absolutely. I just felt the need to like,
- [03:36]
E
you know, get out there and, and be louder than, than them. And I feel my delivery does that because of, you know, how I process things and the way that I, I relate them to you all and speak. I think that it makes it easier for the tough information to be absorbed. So I think that's why, I think I know that's why I started doing this. Trump pissed me off.
- [04:02]
C
Apparently Trump pissed a lot of people off based on how many people watched and shared her video. And so I wanted to know why she thought people were so quick to lump ice's behavior in with Nazi Germany, who admittedly were influenced by good old American Jim Crow.
- [04:19]
E
Because that's what we were taught in our history classes all through from K through 12. We were taught about the Holocaust. They don't talk about the atrocities in depth. I feel they should on that occurred on our nation's soil, I. E. Slavery for 400 plus years, I. E. The lack of civil rights that we are still fighting for. They don't talk about these things because they hit too close to home. America has this image of looking like the best and the greatest and we do no wrong. But we're not that. We've never been that. This country has never been that. And I think in order to move forward and to heal, we have to acknowledge what we've done on our soil. Not taking anything away from the pain that the Jewish population felt at that time, the Holocaust. Absolutely recognize that atrocity, that genocide. But I also want people to recognize the genocide that occurred here on our soil with African Americans, with black Americans. It happened here first.
- [05:23]
F
Yeah.
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E
And that's what they don't learn.
- [05:25]
C
And this comparison has taken off with House Rep. Summer Lee putting it into the public record shortly thereafter.
- [05:32]
H
A lot of my colleagues have, have called ICE the Gestapo, which makes them seem foreign and new. It allows people to say that what we're experiencing right now is in some Way unprecedented. But this isn't a new phenomenon. If you just look back throughout our own nation's history, look back to the slave patrols or to racial segregation enforcement. If we look at the decades of run of the mill racism and authoritarianism, what we're seeing is America doing American things.
- [06:04]
C
You know, just talking a little bit
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F
about your video and how, as you say, ICE is moving more like slave patrols. Can you lay that out for us? Just sort of like broadly?
- [06:13]
C
Absolutely.
- [06:14]
E
So with slave patrols, I think that the first thing that we have to look at is at the fact that they've deputized themselves. Ice. They've deputized themselves. They've given themselves this overarching power over our communities that they just are not legally afforded. So, so slave patrols are alike in that manner. They're hunting a specific type of person. Back in the days of slavery, they were hunting us, they were hunting black Americans, you know, in order to take us back into captivity. And that's what they're doing now with the people that we're seeing in the streets. The Latin population is being targeted. Whether they're citizens or not, whether they're free or not, they were being targeted. It didn't matter what your paper said. And just like now, it doesn't matter what your paper said. I think that that's what people are missing. One, this is who we've always been. Two, ICE is like the slave patrols because they are following that same level of just disregard for legality as a whole. And I think that that's why we need to start looking at slave patrols and how they moved and how they traveled. There was nothing holding them back. And just like ice, we heard J.D. vance.
- [07:29]
C
So people keep reaching for historical comparisons when they talk about ice. Masked agents, endless surveillance, real deadly violence and surprise. It's not just slave patrols. American history already has its own long storied lineage of all of this. Systems designed around one principle. The state decides who gets to move freely, who gets to remain, who gets and who gets separated from their family. It's time for a segment I like to call the Laptop I use to bring Up Old shit. Slave patrols did more than chase runaways, which is bad enough. I mean, they were running away from rape, murder, and a lifetime of servitude. They monitored churches, funerals, social gatherings, night travel, endless surveillance centuries before your digital doorbell offered to narc or Fast forward to 1942 with Executive Order 9066 that resulted in Japanese American incarceration. Anyone who appeared Asian at all was profiled and regardless of their citizenship, were rounded up, placed in camps and had no due process. That happened here. Heard of the Palmer Raids? After a lone wolf assassination of the newly appointed attorney general, the relatively new FBI essentially decided to mass arrest and detain again due process where anyone they thought had dissenting views of the administration. In 1954, President Eisenhower launched Operation Racial Slur. I'm not saying because yikes. Coordinated sweeps and removals of Mexicans, whether they were US Citizens or not, across the Southwest. And this is just a few of the absolutely abhorrent examples from American history of the kinds of oppression akin to today's ICE raids. No need to look elsewhere for comparison. When we come back, we do look at the Gestapo to clock our current government's immigration forces similarities and figure out where all this leads.
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B
Right now, news and politics are moving awfully fast. It can feel overwhelming, to say the least. I'm Evan Osnos, a staff writer for the New Yorker on the Political Scene podcast. We slow things down to understand how power really operates in Washington, D.C. and what it means for you. My co hosts Jane Mayer and Susan Glaser and I have decades of reporting experience and every Friday we have conversations with insiders and experts to understand the forces remaking America. Join us Fridays for the Washington Roundtable from the Political Scene on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also hear insightful episodes from our New Yorker colleagues David Remnick and Tyler Fogg, available wherever you get your podcasts.
- [10:25]
C
If the Nazi era Gestapo is the bar for evil for some people, it's important to understand who they were, what they did, and exactly where. There's overlap with the immigration enforcement officers in 2026 USA.
- [10:39]
D
So the Gestapo or the Geheimerstaatzpolizei secret state police, was an organization that existed within the Nazi regime. It was founded in 1933, so right after Hitler comes to power. It was led by Heinrich Himmler, which is a person that a lot of people will have heard of, like the name in some way, but that was really his thing from 1934 onward. And it had a pretty straightforward role or function, which was essentially to find, arrest and in some cases sort of eliminate people who were considered threats to or enemies of Nazi power and the Nazi regime. So their targets were people like Jews, of course, but also political opponents. So Communists, social democrats, anybody that the the regime had kind of determined was somehow an enemy as well as like resistance members, LGBTQ plus people, anybody who gets sort of labeled as an undesirable. So this also includes like Roma and Sinti people and Then they would basically arrest in sort of the arbitrary arrest format that we're. That a lot of people will think of, arrest them, torture, intimidate them. They also conducted wide scale surveillance operations, had an enormous network of informants. They're kind of famous for arresting people without trial, sending them to concentration camps, or just kind of outright killing them. And they disband in 1945, after Germany is defeated in World War II. They then get declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials, which at that point, the criminal organization designation means that they cannot exist in any format any longer. And that's kind of the Gestapo tied
- [12:21]
G
up in a little box for you.
- [12:23]
C
This is Claire Aubin, host of the fellow Ambies nominated podcast this Guy Sucked. And conveniently historian of Nazis and immigration. She's in the Yale Program for Antisemitism and a fellow in their Race Indigeneity and Transnational Migration programs, tldr. She's not new to this, she's true to this. And I wanted to get her take on people jumping to the Gestapo comparison for ice.
- [12:48]
D
I think it is a useful comparison in as much as it lets people connect something that they see that's wrong happening now to something that they see that was wrong happening in the past. I think people get very bogged down in trying to find exact, precise details to point to and start to say things like, well, the Gestapo operated this way. And what you're actually thinking of is the SS Totenkopf who did this, or you're actually thinking of auxiliary police battalions or whatever. And I think that stuff is actually preventing people from being able to understand history in a way that is useful to them. Because actually, what we're seeing, I think in terms of the ICE comparison is like a lot of different features of the Nazi regime. Gestapo, sure. But also collaborationist groups, like I said, auxiliary police battalions, the SS Totenkopf, or Death's Head Battalion.
- [13:44]
G
And so what's happening here is there's
- [13:46]
D
actually a lot of different features, but it. I think as a historian, there are other features that people are, I think, rightly drawing attention to from other historical examples. So things like slave patrols in the us so people who would catch self emancipated, formerly enslaved people, other occupying forces in other spaces, paramilitary groups. We have actually a huge number of historical comparisons that we can draw from.
- [14:14]
F
Yeah.
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G
And I think we can and should
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D
be drawing from all of them, actually, rather than saying it's this or it's this. Actually, no, this is a uniquely American experience. This is just like the Nazis. Like, I think it's actually, why does
- [14:26]
G
it have to be one? Is kind of my thought on this.
- [14:30]
F
Totally.
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C
And I mean, I guess, like, you
- [14:33]
F
know, are there better analogues to what ICE is doing now or how Trump is using his power? Specifically, like, in your mind, like, when you think of what you're seeing here, like, is there something that's a little bit closer to a 1 to 1?
- [14:46]
D
I'm not sure if I would say that there is something that's one to one, because actually, what we're seeing is many different historical expressions of the same ideology or of the same underpinnings of an ideology.
- [14:58]
F
Yeah.
- [14:59]
D
So, like, if we take, for example, the US Slave patrol example. Right. That requires people to either already be familiar or do the work of familiarizing themselves with American history, even if it allows them to see historical continuity. So that's good in one way, but has a drawback. The same with the Nazi comparison. It takes more piecing together, and maybe it's a little bit more distant, but it's more immediately accessible for people who've grown up hearing, like, Nazi equals evil.
- [15:27]
G
Like, in the sense of like, you're
- [15:29]
D
taught that in school.
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E
Yes.
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D
It just depends on what is more accessible and feels more useful to the person that's engaging with them.
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G
So I think it's kind of all
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D
of the things at once. Yeah, but the ideology, like, what they're united by, and what I think I really want to make sure people understand is that the ideology that animates them is what unites them, because it's predicated on the existence and the enforcement of what we would call a racial or racialized underclass by a group that's in power. All of these expressions are just different expressions of this same animating ideology. Really. That's what I would argue.
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C
So what if it's not one or the other, but it's both? And it's clear that ICE has taken influence from a variety of authoritarian secret police throughout history. So what is the big picture? People are missing about the Holocaust and
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D
slave patrols, in part because my own research and my own work requires what I call, and what Christopher Browning, whose work I draw a lot on, calls empathy for perpetrators of violence. Which doesn't mean, like, sympathy, as in, like, being understanding and whatever, but it requires an understanding of humanity, that humans are capable of doing these things when put into specific situations, when raised certain ways, when surrounded by certain ideological circumstances. So understanding that this is something that doesn't just happen all at once, happens little by little, and requires a Culture in which these things are possible is to me the most important thing that comes out of the Holocaust. Obviously understanding anti Semitism and all of these other things very, very important to the particularities of the Holocaust. But if you want a lesson that's useful for today, it's understanding that this is something that happens in steps over time. Or if you want a lesson from the Nazi regime more generally, it's that this is something that happens in steps over time and that requires understanding human capacity for violence. It under, it means understanding human capacity for compliance with ideologies that seem harmful or that seem like on the face of them, at odds with what you
- [17:34]
G
say that you're interested in doing or
- [17:36]
D
want for your community. Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking myself into the brains of the people I'm talking about and understanding how they can do all of this stuff and how they can live with it afterwards. So it requires understanding the like, humanity that's involved not just on the part of the victims of this horrific violence, but also the humanity on the part of the people who enact it, because otherwise we can't counteract it.
- [18:01]
C
And so let's really get down to it. What's the ideology that ties all of this together?
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D
This sounds like such a cop out
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G
because it feels like such an enormous solution to a very specific problem.
- [18:12]
D
The real issue we see after the Holocaust is that the things that caused it, the anti Semitism, the ideological waters that everyone is swimming in don't actually go away. The people who enacted them get in trouble for it, but they don't go away. And so like a common issue afterwards is that in concentration camps, people stay there and they become displaced persons camps. So like people who are housed in concentration camps just are like, okay, now you get more food and you're living in the same place for months afterwards. So it's, it's kind of hard because we have this heroic narrative around what happened after the Nazis, which does not actually fit with what really happened afterwards.
- [18:55]
G
So it means that, like, what we actually need to solve is like, and this is what I'm saying as a cop out, what we need to solve is like racism. Like, yeah, what we need to solve is.
- [19:06]
F
You're right, you're right though. But you're right, I've been saying this the whole time.
- [19:10]
G
Look, many people have said that what we need to do is that, that really is this. Like what we need to solve is
- [19:16]
D
we need to clear out the water we're swimming in. Otherwise we solve this one problem and then it's just reappears. This is what happens after reconstruction, right? There's reconstruction. Things look a lot better. And then all of a sudden, things start going right back downhill again, like,
- [19:30]
F
really, really poorly, real bad.
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G
Like, it's so stupid, but like, this, that what we need to do is solve the big thing that's causing all of this.
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D
And there. That. And that's why people fail at fixing it, right?
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G
Because it's so big and it's so
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D
intertwined with so many different aspects of our lives. It's tied into our class system. It's tied into all these other things. And this is when I turn into Bernie Sanders and I'm like, exactly.
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C
That's what tough. It's like, I. I mean, not to, like, dump this on you, but it's like we.
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F
I think that our left today is becoming really united around class, which is so heartening because it's like, hello. Like, it would be great if people understood that, like, there are 10 people with all of the money on earth who are deciding all of these things, who are coming up with ways to divide us. But there's also this problem where, you know, the idea of solving racism is where that split happens, where people are like, but I still have to have more than them. Like, well, I still have to. Like, the reason we don't have class solidarity generally is because there are black people who would need it.
- [20:32]
C
And so I think that, like, I don't know.
- [20:33]
F
What I worry about is, like, if. If we are in a constant state of ebb and flow, but the big bad is still up here, will we ever have that progress that gets us past the sort of waters that we're swimming in? These, like, you know, stormy waters of, like, things are going to be unequal and there's always going to be some other that we have to point to
- [20:52]
C
if we can't get there.
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F
And so, like, you're the historian. Has. Have we ever come close? Is this the closest we've come? And we should be really happy. Like, what are we. What are we really doing?
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G
I have no idea. And I'm sorry that that's not a good answer. But, like, it depends what.
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D
What your terms are for this, right?
- [21:13]
G
Like, it depends where you're talking about. When you're talking about, like, some parts were, like, maybe we're doing a little bit better with economic equality, but, man,
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D
the racism is really bad.
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G
Or vice versa, right?
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F
Like, I don.
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D
Know if this is the best it's ever been. There are some people who will argue that because, like, this Is, you know, as insane as it sounds, fewer people are dying in like wars or whatever right now. But like I don't think that that's actually how we scale, you know.
- [21:39]
F
Yeah. All of human progress.
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G
I don't think that's actually how we,
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D
how we should be determining this.
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G
I think one of the things that
- [21:47]
D
I, I've been thinking a lot about in terms of this moment and what feels so frustrating is there are these cycles of violence, these ebbs and flows that you've talk. And part of what's so uncomfortable is that this is one of these like mask off moments where it becomes very clear that the state is not on our side. Right. Like that becomes very, very, very clear on our side or the side of its most vulnerable populations. And this happens before like this happened was happening during the Jim Crow period. This, this happens sort of cyclically, but it's been a while that since the last sort of mask off moment, if that makes sense. And so a lot of people in younger generations are, are used to sort of like the quotidian everyday violence and the like state violence that occurs in, in these like lower hum kind of ways, but are not as used to like oh, someone will just come and snatch your neighbor kind of thing. If that makes sense.
- [22:42]
F
Exactly.
- [22:43]
D
Yeah.
- [22:43]
G
There's no good answer to the like is everything good now?
- [22:47]
F
Because it's not. But also are we on the up and up?
- [22:50]
G
Like I, and I don't know because unfortunately the, the task of a historian is like looking backwards.
- [22:56]
D
And I'm not good at predicting the future as much as I try to.
- [23:00]
G
But I've been also thinking a lot
- [23:01]
D
about structures around law enforcement and like Gestapo Nazi stuff, because that has been coming up a lot. Not as in law enforcement like police officers, but like the concept of law enforcement. How this is what makes people so uncomfortable right now is like we are thinking about people who are supposed to be enforcing the law. Right. Like that's what they're saying they're doing, but they're also simultaneously creating it. And that's the paradox that we're living in. And that's the thing that we need to solve right now because we just imagine that there's this legal structure like here, the Constitution and by and large sort of devolution of law enforcement responsibilities onto the states and people follow it like that's what we think happens.
- [23:42]
G
But we have a lot of historical
- [23:43]
D
examples that people need to be drawing from, including the Nazi racial where people are representing themselves as enforcers of laws
- [23:52]
G
that a don't exist in the way
- [23:54]
D
that they're claiming they do or B, don't apply to the people they're enforcing them against. Right. Like when people get mad about the Anne Frank comparison, which I think is ludicrous, by the way. Like, the getting mad part I think is ludicrous.
- [24:08]
F
Yeah. It's like ultimately that is a little girl who's scared. Yeah.
- [24:12]
G
And beyond that also, once we get into. To the.
- [24:15]
D
Is it a concentration camp? Are these children alike thing. You've lost the plot a little bit.
- [24:18]
G
But like, because like this is an
- [24:22]
D
insane thing for us to be arguing the.
- [24:24]
F
The savannah. Right, Exactly. Like, well, they had a blanket.
- [24:27]
G
Technically they're outside. It's like, guys, guys, we can't be doing this.
- [24:32]
D
You can't.
- [24:33]
G
You sound insane.
- [24:34]
F
Like, I'm not splitting hairs about the concentration camp.
- [24:37]
G
Go tell a 6 year old this thing that you're saying to me.
- [24:40]
F
Yeah.
- [24:41]
G
You know, also for the unfranc example, she literally was made stateless by like,
- [24:46]
D
she was a German citizen in 1941. She loses her citizenship and she's like targeted in the Netherlands. So some of the things that people are saying like this isn't like that are like. Well, I mean, kind of literally. Yes, it is like that.
- [25:05]
F
Yeah.
- [25:05]
C
Right.
- [25:06]
F
Like there are US citizens who are now being deported to other countries and having their rights eroded by a government. So it seems pretty, pretty straightforward to me. But that's just me looking at logic.
- [25:19]
D
Yeah. I mean, and we're also seeing people who are in the literal process of seeking legal recourse and permanent residence or citizenship. People who are here, like not even
- [25:29]
G
just like in the illegal legal distinction,
- [25:31]
D
whatever, who are here with the documents that they need to be here. And those people are being just snatched off the street, like essentially kidnapped, especially in some cases while attending court dates. So they very much are following the legal structures. And like, that's the thing that people need to like really grapple with is that we have a million historical examples of law enforcers or law enforcement really like creating laws, whole cloth while they're functioning. And people are like, I don't like that one. Because the law is not exactly the same law as the one that we're talking about now.
- [26:06]
F
Yeah, exactly. And it's like, come on, that's not the point.
- [26:08]
C
Okay, so in a world where ICE isn't forever, what do we expect to happen? Because it feels impossible to move forward without accountability for this era.
- [26:17]
F
Like in some form or other, there will be a future. How do we sort of handle our neighbors who are in support of this or who worked with ice or who reported people to ice. Like, what happened in Germany? Did people kill themselves after they supported the Nazis? Like, what. What happened?
- [26:35]
D
Yeah, in some cases. And like, to be completely honest with you, yes, that does happen pretty, pretty regularly. We have several examples of this happening. Another thing that I really like. This sounds terrible, but that I like to point to is that in concentration camps, upon liberation, we have so, so many stories of survivors immediately murdering their guards. Like that. That is what happens, like, immediately upon liberation.
- [26:58]
C
Sure. But bigger picture, where do we actually go from here? How can we actually move forward?
- [27:04]
F
Look, Trump is sort of on an authoritarian tear right now.
- [27:09]
D
Sure.
- [27:10]
F
I hate to ask what comes next? Because, like you said, like, you're. You're studying what's happened to sort of come to a conclusion. But, like, you know, if he is following a playbook, what. What is the next thing. I know I want to skip ahead, too, but.
- [27:24]
G
But I can.
- [27:27]
F
But if that's not what's next.
- [27:29]
D
So,
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G
look, I can't.
- [27:31]
D
I don't know if I can say what comes next 100%, because we don't know, especially because it's been proven that this guy will just do whatever the fuck he wants. Right.
- [27:39]
G
Like, and.
- [27:40]
D
And that's also the. The fear around this. Right. I was in this round table last week where I was talking to other historians and scientists, and we were talking about how a lot of this is this anticipatory anxiety where, like, I'm stressed about what's coming next because I truly
- [27:55]
G
don't know what's coming next.
- [27:56]
F
Yeah.
- [27:57]
D
I can say what I am afraid of, if that's the thing that I am very worried about, is a lot of the people that I research committed, like, horrific, horrific crimes. We're talking, like, some of them are charged with murders of thousands of people. And they basically, because of a lack of documentation or because for some reason, they are, like, sent to jail for a year or two or imprisoned for a year or two afterwards and whatever, they basically just melt back into society. That is the thing that I am worried about. I am worried about the idea that there will be no reckoning, like, no justice whatsoever, with the fact that we have created a society where there are elements who are able to engage in, like, extreme brutality, who are able to take children away from their parents and stick them in a warehouse somewhere. Like, I am very worried that we will just say, which a lot of places did after the Second World War,
- [28:52]
G
we'll say, look, we'll do what we can.
- [28:54]
D
Right? Now, but, you know, we got to integrate them somehow.
- [28:58]
G
I need there to be a step in the middle between.
- [29:01]
F
Yeah, I'm ready for that. I'm ready for that. I think 100%. I think that there's gotta be some recourse because also it's like, I think
- [29:09]
C
we're already dealing with the fallout of
- [29:11]
F
there not being legal recourse for, you know, like, the insurrection. The fact that, I mean, I don't know that most ICE agents are insurrectionists, but we already know that certainly some of them are.
- [29:21]
C
And so it's like this idea that,
- [29:23]
F
like, they're folding back into society without having really ever had to reckon with what they've done.
- [29:28]
C
And also a lot of them are,
- [29:29]
F
you know, they're going back to jail for committing the same sorts of crimes they were committing before they did that. And so it's like there is ultimately like a culture issue that, like, if you just keep integrating abusers into the community, there's going to be a problem.
- [29:43]
D
Yeah. You're going to end up with a community full of abusers, unfortunately.
- [29:46]
F
Absolutely. So we have to figure that out.
- [29:49]
G
Need an immediate step somewhere along the way where we say, look, yeah.
- [29:54]
F
Like, hey, guys, you. You gotta do something about this.
- [29:57]
D
Yeah.
- [29:57]
G
If you just get to show up.
- [29:59]
D
And I don't know what that median step is in part because we haven't successfully done it elsewhere historically. Right. Like, the closest thing you can see to some of this are some of the, like, truth and justice tribunals and
- [30:11]
G
stuff like in post apartheid states, you can see some stuff like that.
- [30:16]
D
But those are moments in which a community decides for itself what they want to do about members of their community who have harmed each other.
- [30:23]
G
Like, like we can't on a state level necessarily.
- [30:26]
F
Right, exactly. To put it on the vote.
- [30:29]
G
Yeah.
- [30:29]
D
These people are also not behaving or like, not acting out of like a personal, like, I mean, they are also acting out of personal animosity, but they're not like, personally motivated.
- [30:38]
G
Like, they're not just doing this because they're like, I've decided they're on a payroll.
- [30:42]
D
Yeah. Someone somewhere said, and here's your gun
- [30:45]
G
and here's your, you know, like, yeah, here's the enemy.
- [30:48]
F
And you, you have immunity and you just go on out there and do your game, bro.
- [30:53]
D
And in turn, terms of the personal animosity aspect of it, an interesting thing to look at when we look at things like Nazi comparisons, is that a lot of the people I research, like these Holocaust perpetrators, enter their servitude to The Nazi regime, they're Eastern Europeans who enter their servitude by being taken through something known as the tricky program, which is like their Soviet prisoners of war, as in Red Red army soldiers who are prisoners of war.
- [31:17]
F
Got it.
- [31:18]
D
And the Nazis recruit the ones that they see as most willing to commit violence on the behalf of the regime to then become like SS Totenkopf members or like work in concentration camps. So, like, there is active recruitment of people who already have a predilection for violence, who already share the prejudices they're looking for, et cetera. And that is something that I think we're seeing here with ice. Like, there's active recruitment of people who already have said that they're willing to do the things that most of us would see as like, unconscionable.
- [31:46]
G
There needs to be some kind of something where we address us that later.
- [31:50]
F
Yeah, exactly.
- [31:51]
G
Like these are pre existing beliefs.
- [31:53]
F
Right? That's a problem because you could quit,
- [31:56]
D
like working at a concentration camp basically at any moment in time. We have plenty of examples of people who left because they were like, actually, I don't want to do this anymore. You could quit.
- [32:05]
G
You could quit ICE if you're someone
- [32:07]
D
who works for ice, which I feel
- [32:09]
G
certain whoever listening to this is not. But if you are, you can just quit, right?
- [32:14]
F
Go away. Like, stop it.
- [32:15]
C
I mean, I think that, like, it doesn't make any sense if you have
- [32:18]
F
a conscience at this point. Like, people don't approve of what you're doing and you shouldn't approve of what you're doing. But, you know, that requires, I think, some level of self awareness and like, humanity that I don't want to say that they don't have, but they've lost it somewhere along the way. Like, if you're making excuses for people being shot in the street, I don't know what to say to you anymore.
- [32:37]
D
Yeah, we also have examples. I was talking to Megan Kate Nelson, who looks at like the American west and pioneers we were talking about. There are plenty of examples of Confederate prisoners of war who are captured by Union army soldiers. And the Union army soldiers are like yelling at them and being like, why
- [32:55]
G
can't you just admit that, like, enslaved people are people?
- [32:59]
D
Like, why? Why would you fight for this? Why can't you admit this? And even in those moments they're captured, probably going to die, they still are like, sorry, I can't do it. It's just. It's just too far for me. So, like, this is a long term historical phenomenon that we're all being like, what the fuck? How do we deal with this?
- [33:16]
C
ICE is not the slave patrol. It's also not the Gestapo. It's both of those things and more. And what unites all authoritarian ideology that subjugates groups is, frankly, racism. It's the great replacement theory and lies about racial and cultural hierarchies. And we have to stamp that out to stop history from repeating itself. For the nine millionth time. I want to thank my excellent guests today for being so generous with their time and speaking about these difficult topics so eloquently. And I hope we all know there will be a day in the future without this current version of authoritarianism if we continue to fight for it. How Is this Better? Is a production of Courier. It's written and hosted by me, Akilah Hughes. It is produced by Devin Maroney. Video editing is by Shane Verkist. The rest of the team at Courier includes Kevin Dreyfus, Sam Hollows, Marianne Kuga, and Charlotte Robertson. Please subscribe to follow How Is this Better? On all the platforms YouTube, Apple, podcasts, Spotify, etc. And tell someone about your favorite episodes. If you're interested in sponsoring episodes or
- [34:24]
F
giving us products to try and try
- [34:26]
C
to sell, reach out to advertiseuriernewsroom.com.