Call It What It Is: A Death Camp

Words have incredible power.

They can create narratives, perpetuate myths, and amplify propaganda.
They can twist the truth, bury it altogether, or shout it through a bullhorn.
They can appeal to our better angels or conjure the worst of our demons.

And in these moments when our Republic is teetering precariously on the edge of a moral abyss, words can pull us back from a free fall from which we can never return.

We need to call this chain link Florida abomination what it is: a death camp.

It is not a prison.

Prisons are for those who, through due process and the rigors of our legal system, are found to have committed crimes for which they face accountability.

This is a human kennel; a sweltering dumping ground for fathers, sons, husbands, and best friends, who have been stolen from their homes, workplaces, churches, and graduation ceremonies, for no other reason than to satisfy the irrational bloodlust of ignorant white people who spend their Sundays cosplaying followers of Jesus.

This place is a cruel, inhumane living hell created by a sadistic, performative cadre of sociopaths who have completely abandoned the plots of Humanity, America, and Christianity.

It is the kind of place that now serves in Germany as a cautionary tale of how a society can devolve into unthinkable malevolence if good people allow themselves to be rendered silent or invisible.

It is not a prison, and we should never consent to calling it that.

And we cannot call it what the monsters who made it want us to call it.

We cannot and should not use that name: the one emblazoned on highway signs that white bigots rush to take gleeful selfies alongside, the one adorning t-shirts that closet racists snatch up for a dopamine hit, the name that they toss out like Molotov cocktails into their social media profiles.

That name is designed to dehumanize people, to cheapen the worth of those who find themselves there without cause or crime. It is yet another method for this sickening movement to commodify carnage and sell suffering.

When we use that name and those two words online, we feed the algorithms and boost the brutality. We normalize something that is inarguably fully abnormal.
We legitimize this vile, repugnant homegrown concentration camp.

The good people here need to stop playing by the rules of hate-addled human beings whose goal is to desensitize us to the point that their crimes against humanity become so culturally ingrained that we find ourselves in the shoes people stood 85 years ago an ocean away, people we look back at an judge harshly for not stopping a genocide when they had the chance.

We have to fight for the dignity of the diverse humanity around us, through our advocacy, through our activism, in our daily existence, and by refusing to allow war criminals to win the war of words.

Donald Trump, his Administration, Ron DeSantis, and the Republican Party have created a death camp in Florida, and we can’t rest until we bulldoze it back to the hell it came from.