If this feels uncomfortable to read, that's good. It should. From Colombia's death squads to America's detention camps, this is how societies relearn the cost of calling some lives disposable… Donald Trump's presidency now has a human body count. "We really feel like we're being hunted, we're being hunted like animals," an undocumented farm worker in Ventura county, California, told a reporter for The Guardian. I've seen this movie before. Or at least where it leads.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". —Edmund Burke. "Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness." —Desmond Tutu. May 2, 2025, was a bad day for the news. Trump proudly announced his executive order kneecapping NPR and PBS, both trusted sources of independent journalism, in a brutal rhetorical attack.

This wasn't a joke or a mistake but a warning about how racism, silence, and abuse of power are eating away at democracy… I've been talking into microphones since I did the morning news on WITL in Lansing Michigan in the late 1960s, and I've seen a lot of ugly moments in American politics. But every so often something happens that still takes your breath away, not because it's surprising, but because it's so painfully revealing. This latest racist stunt by Donald Trump — reposting a meme on his Nazi-infested social media site in which the Obamas' faces are superimposed onto the bodies of primates in the jungle set to the 1961 song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens — is one of those moments. That a popular pro-Trump account on X created this video and it has lived on that platform without consequence is disgusting in and of itself. But Trump — as our president, speaking in our voice — made it infinitely worse last night by promoting it to millions around the world.

ICE's nationwide detention system continues to expand under plans that would double its size while shielding it from meaningful accountability… As people testified before Congress yesterday about the brutality and violence they'd suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call "detention centers." Cable news people call them "prison camps" or "Trump prison camps," but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is: "[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes." Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes: "[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes." But what do you call a place where people who've committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is "concentration camp":