Picture Show: A Modern Day Nazi Movement

NinaIllingworth May 6, 2025May 6, 2025 American Nazis, Amerikan Musik, CECOT, DHS, Donald Trump, El Salvador, FA1, fascism, film sessions, GOP, Honduras, ICE, immigration, MAGA, mass deportations, Michigan, Migrant Rights, Mike Figueredo, MP6, nationalism, Nina Illingworth, Picture Show, police state, Politics, Racism, ST2, The Humanist Report, Theory, US Constitution, Videos, white supremacy

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This Movement Has No Bottom

Imagine for a moment that you’re writing the script for a dystopian film set in the modern era, featuring a literal nazi movement that has risen to power in America as a background plot point. How would you quickly show viewers that America has fallen to a wholly domestic white nationalist movement; what kind of scenes might you write? Well one way you could make the point abundantly clear would be to show a political rally to celebrate the new regime’s first hundred days in office, in which the fascist President plays a propaganda video of brown men being stripped down to their underwear, shaven, and forcibly herded by armored security forces into a maximum security prison while the large crowd watching at the rally cheers and starts chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A!” Sure, a scene like that would be hacky writing, and your director might reject the scene as “too on the nose,” but the point that “this is fascism” and “these people are nazis” would be indisputably obvious to the audience.

What then can we say when the scene I’ve just described isn’t from a movie, but an accurate description of events at a real life Trump rally in Michigan last week? For confirmation, let’s briefly look at this April 30th, 2025 piece from Jake Johnson writing on Common Dreams:

‘Literal Fascism’: MAGA Rally Crowd Goes Wild as Trump Airs Migrant Arrest Propaganda

“U.S. President Donald Trump used a campaign-style rally in Michigan late Tuesday to display a propaganda video glorifying the deportation and offshore imprisonment of migrants without due process, a presentation that drew enthusiastic cheers and “USA” chants from the president’s supporters.

The video shows handcuffed migrants being forced off a bus at a notorious El Salvador mega-prison and having their heads shaved by masked guards. The prison, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, was where unlawfully deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was initially held.

“We are delivering mass deportation, and it’s happening very fast, and the worst of the worst are being sent to a no-nonsense prison in El Salvador,” Trump declared, despite the lack of evidence that the hundreds of migrants his administration deported to El Salvador have criminal records or gang ties.

“Watch this. Take a look,” Trump said before the video began playing on a big screen, eliciting loud cheers from the audience.”

I don’t want to spend too much time on this story but yes, everything you just read is completely real. The event in Warren, Michigan attracted a little over two thousand excited fascists, and even more anti-Trump protestors. The important thing to focus on here is the gleeful, enthusiastic, even ecstatic response of the crowd shamelessly engaging in nationalist chants while cheering fascist propaganda of chained nonwhite men being brutalized and caged. Does it look to you like those folks are having second thoughts about the Trump regime’s authoritarian agenda? Please keep in mind that we now know most of the men in that video weren’t criminals or narco-terrorists; they were just undocumented and from the wrong country. Yet, these fucking animals clearly love this nazi bullshit. If kidnapping migrants and trafficking to them to a torture prison in El Salvador doesn’t represent a red line for the MAGA base, what makes you think anything, even mass killings, actually would? This is a Christian Nationalist movement, lead by a fascist President, and the people who still support all this monstrous shit are literally the modern American equivalent of pre-war German supporters of the Nazi Party under Hitler.

Now maybe you didn’t need to hear that. Maybe after nine years of watching Donald Trump operate, or even three months of life under the white nationalist fantasies of his cracker consigliere Stephen Miller, it’s pretty obvious to you that you’re looking at a fascist cult of personality every bit as dangerous as Nazism. Maybe it doesn’t bother you to hear me compare MAGA, three elections into this fascist shit-show, to the political movement that knowingly gave the world Adolf Hitler and ultimately birthed the Holocaust. After all, it’s hard for any rational person to say that the folks who voted for and continue to support the Klepto Kaiser were deceived about his fascist intentions; virtually every nightmare nazi authoritarian thing the Trump regime has done so far was a regularly-repeated promise during Trump’s campaign rallies.

If however you’re mostly a consumer of corporate American news, there’s probably a better than even chance that what I just said does strike you as extreme, or hyperbolic. You may even be thinking, “look Nina, if you’re going to say this is a modern day Nazi movement in America, you’re going to need more than a racist propaganda video and poor crowd behavior at a rally in the white trashiest suburb of Detroit to back that up; that’s basically a Tuesday in Mississippi.” To that I say, “alright: challenge accepted.” Let me tell you another story.

A couple of weeks ago the Trump administration illegally deported three young children to Honduras without due process, all of whom were American citizens. One of the children, a four year old, has stage four cancer, and was removed from the country without medication or a chance to consult with doctors. The children, who by law can not be deported because they’re US citizens, were deported with their mothers and in at least one case, despite the presence of a father in America desperately trying to keep his child from being sent to Honduras. The mothers were taken into custody during routine check-ins as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program; which allows migrants to remain in the US while their immigration proceedings are underway, as long as they and their family attend regular scheduled check-ins. In other words, these weren’t hardened criminals. The families taken into custody were driven three hours away, prevented from contacting lawyers or other family members, and then flown to Honduras before the courts could even open the next morning. Almost immediately after the deportations, an arch-conservative, Trump-appointed judge basically accused the regime of illegally and unconstitutionally deporting a US citizen against her father’s wishes.

With that established, how do you think the Trump regime responded? Did they deny it? Did they make excuses, or apologize for making a mistake? Not at all; multiple high level members of the Trump Administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Border Czar Tom Homan went on national television to defend illegally deporting US citizens, including a child with stage four cancer receiving care in America. The twisted fascist logic employed to justify a clearly white nationalist immigration policy result is that after DHS engineered a Sophie’s Choice situation where migrant mothers with very young US citizen children were about to be shoved on a plane and literally could not contact other members of the child’s family, they “chose” to bring the children with them to Honduras when they were being deported. Whether they said this while twirling old timey picture show villain moustaches is unclear, but you’ll forgive me if I presume a fascist government, enacting white nationalist policy to create an ethnostate, isn’t all that broke up about illegally deporting a few “anchor babies” their entire movement demonizes as not real Americans anyway.

And what of the MAGA movement itself? Well if right wing news outlets and comments by Trump supporters online are to be believed, they’re absolutely fucking delighted. And why wouldn’t they be? This is exactly what the American right voted for; they want a white ethnostate, they enjoy the cruelty, and they love watching snappy propaganda videos of brown men being chained, abused, and caged. Not every Trump voter is a committed nazi, but anyone still supporting him after watching this Gestapo shit unfold the past three months is certainly fine with the fact that this is an authoritarian white nationalist regime. As Mike Figueredo from the Humanist Report notes in a recent twenty-minute video about this story, these folks are dangerous, vengeful reactionaries who have no bottom. They’re not going to come to their senses, there is no redline that will make them turn on the Trump regime even among the crowd that wishes he wouldn’t keep saying the quiet parts out loud, because they’re “a modern day Nazi movement” in America.