Christopher Mathias writes:

Before neo-Nazi Anders Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011, he emailed a 1,518-page document, a compendium of his own writing and other far-right texts, to over 1,000 people. The deranged screed warned that Muslim immigration to Europe amounted to an “invasion” of people — whose culture was “incompatible with Western society — that would lead to the “cultural and demographic suicide” of the continent.

Earlier this month, the vice president of the United States went on TV to say the same thing. Speaking with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, JD Vance asserted that Germany is suffering an “invasion” of people who are “totally culturally incompatible” with “Western civilization.” This purported “invasion,” Vance said, will lead to a “civilizational suicide” if it’s not stopped.

It barely triggers a 24-hour news cycle anymore when the vice president and his boss, President Donald Trump, use the same language as fascist mass murderers. I’ve witnessed this process of normalization over the last eight years as a reporter covering the far right, seeing neo-Nazi talking points, especially around immigration, enter the mainstream discourse with horrifying, accelerating speed.

I fear now that many of us here in America still haven’t registered the logical endpoint of such rhetoric, which both dehumanizes subgroups of human beings and presents them as an existential threat. I fear that even as the Trump-Vance administration now embarks on its extralegal campaign of mass deportation — paired with a campaign to rip away the judiciary of its power to keep the White House in check — many Americans are reluctant to come to terms with the idea of sprawling concentration camps, and worse, in America today. But the extreme actions and rhetoric being taken by the administration are not dissimilar from those deployed in the early stages of some of the worst regimes of the 20th century. [Continue reading…]