Dear Americans, Get Out!

Before it is too late.

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

Love affairs always end in tears. You might think you can hide it and get away with a few forbidden indulgences, but no, everyone in the restaurant can see you playing footsie under the table. This has never been more true than with the US’s long-time affair with fascism. With its trademark lack of subtlety, US politics has been sloppily tugging off fascism beneath the tablecloth for decades. The only thing keeping this romp beneath the surface was shame. The fear that the country’s “friends”, or rather those the US pressured into being its friends, would revolt in disgust. Well, these days, we have a president who appears to have undergone a shame-ectomy at birth, the “land of the free” openly gags on authoritarianism for the world to see, and Lady Liberty has run out of the restaurant in tears. Trump might have claimed that he would “drain the swamp”, but, like a red-pilled Shrek, all he wants to do is frolic in this filth with his white supremacist oligarch friends, and he is willing to violate anyone who disturbs his debauchery. That includes you. It’s time to vacate the swamp before you are drowned in its sludge. It’s time to leave the restaurant before you are slapped with the cheque. It’s time to get out of the United States — before it is too late.

First, they come for “them”.

For some, it is already too late. You have, in all likelihood, heard of the horrors Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia experienced. Garcia fled gang violence in El Salvador and sought asylum in the US in 2011. To prevent violating his human rights, a court order protected him from being deported back to El Salvador, given that doing so could be a death sentence. He lived a normal life and even started a family with a US citizen. In a way, he lived the American dream. He resided and worked peacefully in the US for over a decade and enjoyed freedom and prosperity.

And then Trump ripped it all away. Because he was brown, a migrant, and had erroneous tattoos, he was accused of being a member of the violent terrorist El Salvadorian gang MS-13, which resulted in him being rounded up and deported — all without ever having due process. And where was he deported to? Only the most violent prison in El Salvador, which has been accused of being a “black hole of human rights” that houses many members of the very gang Garcia was fleeing!

And it wasn’t just Garcia. 17 people have now been deported to this heinous prison, all without due process. They have been labelled “guilty” with no evidence and then brutally violated, shipping them off to a place where humanity goes to die. The Constitution ripped up and human rights disregarded, all for what?

This divide between “us and them” that all fascists love is tenuous. You can’t just dehumanise a select group. If you dehumanise one, you dehumanise them all. And the slow creep has already begun.

Then they come for you.

I highly doubt a man who proclaimed “Everything is computer!” when faced with a car from this century has the wherewithal to know when he is being recorded. And considering he’s about at good as keeping his lips shut as a person with ADHD after they’ve just inhaled a vat of pure cocaine, it was only a matter of time before he let something slip.

Sure enough, when the El Salvadoran President, Bukele, visited the US to lick American boots and to continue loudly denying Garcia even a whiff of his rights, Trump cocked up. The press meeting had ended, but a camera and hot mic were still rolling, and the footage caught Trump telling Bukele, “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places.” If that wasn’t explicit enough, just a few days earlier, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” US citizens to El Salvador’s prisons.

This is it. The final nail in the coffin. It’s no longer a love affair. The divorce from freedom and democracy has been finalised, and America is now standing at the altar, reciting its vows to fascism.

Unlike in 1934, Trump hasn’t been able to completely concentrate power towards himself. There are still democratic checks and balances in place to try to hold him accountable. So, he can’t just create concentration camps and violently “purify” his swamp. No, he has to find sneaky legal loopholes to achieve the same in all but name.

Garcia was Trump’s “patient zero”. If Trump could extinguish Garcia’s rights, deport him to a veritable death sentence with no evidence, no due process, and face zero consequences, his pathway to “draining the swamp” has been carved.

We are watching America’s concentration camps being constructed, and they are far from small-scale. Five more of those prisons could hold a quarter of a million Americans, and they would have no human rights. Murdering and torturing them has no legal recourse.

Now, if you have even a passing understanding of history — which I know you do, clever clogs — you will know exactly what comes next.

Fascism is inherently genocidal. It always devolves into the killing of the “other”. When you base your entire ideology on white men being the “victim” of a weak yet somehow existentially threatening “other”, this killing is inevitable. That’s why the Nazis didn’t exclusively wipe out Jewish people but anyone who wasn’t a white, non-disabled, straight Nazi. Hell, if openly Nazi-loving Elon Musk went back to Nazi Germany, he would be euthanised for being autistic. Again, dehumanise one, dehumanise all.

Trump is doing the exact same thing. Anyone who he considers a political enemy or unfit for his rhetoric will be shipped off, regardless of their rights. He has already deported a legal US resident for peaceful pro-Palestinian protests, branding him as a terrorist.

Hell, if you so much as scratch a Tesla, Trump has openly stated he wants to treat you as a domestic terrorist — an accusation that he knows he doesn’t have to prove in order to ship you off to a veritable death sentence. We have known of Trump’s disdain for the disabled, LGBTQ+, racial minorities, scientists, union leaders, and any religious group that aren’t American Christians, to name a few. He has unironically called them all terrorists and traitors.

Who wants to bet that when these people start peacefully protesting the horrors Trump is unleashing, he will officially brand them as terrorists? And when he does, he can now deport them to the “human rights black hole” to rot away or die.

This is not some speculative conspiracy theory. It is the natural progression of Trump’s ideology, rhetoric, and actions over the past decade.

So, what can you do?

This is the machine we were meant to rage against, but you can’t rage against it if you are left for dead in an El Salvadorian prison. For this regime to end, we need every person’s voice to remain outspoken and alive. Only then can a deafening chorus of condemnation grow loud enough to drown out this barbaric hate. Some can do this quite comfortably while staying put. If you are an able-bodied white male with a middle-income job, you can resist at home, knowing you are the last on their list. But if you deviate from those characteristics or even have a profession that threatens Trump, you need to consider leaving.

Canada, France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Portugal and a host of other countries readily accept US citizens and even allow them to seek asylum. Many people have already undertaken this. Jason Stanley, one of the leading researchers and voices on fascism, has already fled the US to Canada.

There are so many ways to fight fascism, and for many of them, you do not need to exist where the fascism is. Our collective future depends on your voice, your dissent and your action. You are so valuable. Protect yourself as such, and only then can we avoid the horrors of the past from repeating themselves.

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Sources: Huff Post, Will Lockett, NY Post, BBC, The Guardian