For the life of me I cannot understand why the American people are putting up with what is clearly happening right before our eyes. This article helps explain it. We must wake up!
Trump won 49.8 percent of the 2024 popular vote, meaning more Americans voted against him than for him. More than 75 million Americans rejected Trump at the ballot box, while millions never voted at all.
Democratic erosion begins when fear, exhaustion, and normalized extremism silence the remaining majority into passive observation
Wendy i will tell you i can skim these at best i am a raw nerve i am an empathetic person i am the grandson of five generations of rabbis i am anti-zionist as loudly as i can be you know i don't know what to do i don't know what we can do they have fractured the collective with razor sharp attacks a fucking nightmare what are we going to do to defend our safety
Your empathy is not weakness. Systems built on fear survive by isolating people into exhaustion and despair. We defend safety by refusing isolation, speaking out publicly, protecting one another locally, and keeping human conscience stronger than the machinery demanding obedience. We are in this together, Jonathan.
In the United States, so many minorities and poor whites have been numbed over the years by the growth of big city slums and small towns where the reason for being had disappeared. No hope and no opportunity, can be its own type of prison. So too for long-time prisoners, who need back into prison after release, because they can't adjust to 'the world.' These are predominantly the folks that this government has gone after. Until we heard of the atrocities committed on and to them, I wonder how many felt that was as low as people could go. And I wonder, once we found out the truth, how many decided that they could no longer tolerate living in a prison with no walls.
It is estimated that approximately 80 million immigrants came to America. Of particular interest to me were our early immigrants and what they endured to come to America.
It started in 1620, when 102 English separatist settlers landed on Cape Cod after 102 days at sea aboard the Mayflower. They lived on beer, dried meat, and biscuits for 102 days in the Mayflower's gun deck, the windowless lower level of a 100-foot-long, 24-foot-wide ship.
In the 18th century, over 1 million immigrants came to America in distinct waves: the first from Ireland, fleeing famine, and Germans seeking refuge from political revolution and economic hardship. The second wave came from Italy, Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Greece. In the mid-19th century, waves of Chinese immigrants came, escaping poverty in their homeland. Millions were processed at Castle Gardens and later at Ellis Island.
We also had indentured slaves coming to our country starting after 1800, when at least one million slaves were forcibly relocated to the South, and we had immigrants as a result of the treaty with Mexico that afforded 70,000 Mexicans citizenship in our country.
In the late 18th century, wooden boats were replaced by steamships, which affected immigration to our country, starting with the S.S. The great Western boat and continuing with the S.S. Louis, which carried Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.
Consider the plight of the immigrants and what they had to endure to come to our country. Before the advent of railroads, they had to travel on foot to get to the port of their departure. They traveled on cargo ships as steerage passengers in the bottom holds, with 100 additional passengers in one large space, no bathrooms, no beds, or windows, and the trip could take 40 to 90 days.
The plight of African slaves was unimaginable, beyond our ability to comprehend, and existed before 1800, in West Africa and in Europe, and long before the Atlantic Slave Trade to our country. In the mid-15th century, Portugal supplied slaves to Europe and, later, to the United States, as part of what is described as the slave triangle, running from the west coast of Africa to South Carolina and then to Europe and then back to the West coast of Africa. AI chat says that 12 to 13 million slaves came to America. One point of information is that slavery, including the selling, owning, executing, and buying of slaves, existed in Africa and was part of the existing culture of African tribes. In researching our immigration, I became aware of how little I knew about the continent of Africa.
Immigration in the 20th century was explosive, unlike earlier waves from Western and Northern Europe; millions arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Italy, Poland, and Russia). The country enacted the Immigration Act of 1924, which established strict quotas, and this was later revised by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Our recent immigration included people coming from Vietnam, Mexico, and China.
The message to me is that we are a country of immigrants, beginning in 1600 with 102 pilgrims and growing to a population of 320 million. How can anyone think or talk about real Americans as opposed to those immigrants? We are all the result of immigration, and we should be proud of our heritage.
I'm a big fan. Awesome parallels with the beginnings of Hitler. I tried to upgrade to annual - link doesn't work. Maybe you can address the foreboding we all feel going into this July 4th. I feel my country has been RAPED & so I'm just not in the mood to celebrate. I dreamed I was selling Grim Reaper costumes on the National Mall on July 4th & asking people if they wanted the American flag attached to the accompanying scythe upside down or normal.
Thank you again for upgrading to annual support, Joyce. I am very grateful for the generosity and wanted to make sure you still received additional value, so I will gladly extend your subscription a few extra months personally.
Wendy, this is painful to read, but necessary to comprehend. Reading your column yesterday about the signs of crematoria, I took seriously because I have come to trust that you do your homework before writing. Today's article has shaken me.
Decades ago, I read Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," and concluded that the Holocaust could happen in America. Indeed, our country has been built on murdering Native Americans, enslaving Black people, segregation; and now the systematic destruction of democratic institutions.
The Nazi regime copied American eugenics and other evil from us; now, "what goes around, comes around." It has come home to roost.
As a Jew, I am aware that my people are in as much danger as the immigrants who are being detained, tortured, and expelled.
Jerry, your reading of Shirer arrived decades before mine. The book joins my list tonight. Half my family came through that history alive. The relatives who did not are why the article exists. Your closing question is the right one. The answer starts where your comment ends. Writing that names the harm before willful blindness sets the schedule.
I know that if I had been born in 1936 Germany instead of in Boston, Mass., I would not be alive today. Wendy, I am so grateful to not be alone in confronting the horror of today; thank you for what you do.
I read your article, Wendy, then sent this to my former university student, now friend, who lives with family in Surprise, AZ. This friend works for Americans Defending Freedom, an entity that supports lawyers working on Republican/Conservative-tied cases and causes:
Hi! Just doing some reading on the new detention camps going up in the U.S. It’s quite a lucrative business. Lots of taxpayer dollars going into funding the system, including your hard-earned dollars, and my retired dollars.
Immigrant detainee deaths in Trump’s confinement warehouses: one person every six days. None of those people needed to die.
When Surprise gets its 1,500 detainees, some will be deported, some will die preventable deaths in Surprise, and new detainees will come in to fill the beds. I wonder what they do with the bodies, one every six days. That’s quite a lot of people. Do they bury them in Surprise, or cart them off by train somewhere else?
Diseases like measles, mumps, polio, Covid, and a host of others will spread, and, not only to the detainees. Guards, cafeteria workers, staff will get sick, as well, and bring it home to their mates and children, and it will spread through your community and into your schools, and, ultimately, into your children. Trump’s war on vaccines will make it a much worse problem. ‘Surprise’ takes on new meaning.
You’ll have new people in town, as ICE officers burn out quickly, protesters will chant outside, lawyers and social workers will come, families will come…and your hotels will be filled with ICE-related visitors.
What a sad story for a town with a wonderful name. Tourism, composed of nice singles, couples and families, won’t be able to vacation there. Your new neighbors will be prison-related.
I’m not trying to scare you, but I want you to go into it with eyes wide open. These people, the detainees, mostly came to the U.S. for a better life. I know some Hispanics who are here illegally, and they are good people, very hard workers trying to make it here, to have a better life here. They want more for their children, just as we did and do.
I hope you and your church will be compassionate to the inmates and the people who come in to represent them. The Pope kisses the feet of the homeless, to let them know they are equals in the eyes of Jesus. Christ kissed the feet of prostitutes, poor working women who resorted to the one possession they had, to let them know that they were loved, by him and God. I hope your church can find ways to help and show human compassion to these ‘illegals’, and to any children incarcerated there.
Did you know that more violence in the U.S. is done by white male citizens? Not Black men or Black teens. Not Hispanics or Muslims. Not women of any color. White men who have a twisted sense of privilege.
This system and its processes are just wrong. Is this who we, U.S. citizens, want to be? Cruel people?
Pam, you saw something most readers will not. The towns next to Dachau and Buchenwald changed the same way you described Surprise changing: tourism gone, hotels filled with regime business, schools downstream of whatever sickness the camp produced. The locals lived through it watching. Your friend now has the map before the territory arrives.
I have sent this along-so should you.
For the life of me I cannot understand why the American people are putting up with what is clearly happening right before our eyes. This article helps explain it. We must wake up!
I would like to believe that the majority of the American people will not go for this…
Then again a majority of the American people voted for Trump…
Trump won 49.8 percent of the 2024 popular vote, meaning more Americans voted against him than for him. More than 75 million Americans rejected Trump at the ballot box, while millions never voted at all.
Democratic erosion begins when fear, exhaustion, and normalized extremism silence the remaining majority into passive observation
Wendy i will tell you i can skim these at best i am a raw nerve i am an empathetic person i am the grandson of five generations of rabbis i am anti-zionist as loudly as i can be you know i don't know what to do i don't know what we can do they have fractured the collective with razor sharp attacks a fucking nightmare what are we going to do to defend our safety
Your empathy is not weakness. Systems built on fear survive by isolating people into exhaustion and despair. We defend safety by refusing isolation, speaking out publicly, protecting one another locally, and keeping human conscience stronger than the machinery demanding obedience. We are in this together, Jonathan.
In the United States, so many minorities and poor whites have been numbed over the years by the growth of big city slums and small towns where the reason for being had disappeared. No hope and no opportunity, can be its own type of prison. So too for long-time prisoners, who need back into prison after release, because they can't adjust to 'the world.' These are predominantly the folks that this government has gone after. Until we heard of the atrocities committed on and to them, I wonder how many felt that was as low as people could go. And I wonder, once we found out the truth, how many decided that they could no longer tolerate living in a prison with no walls.
I keep saying that we are repeating Hitler's playbook and nobody seems to notice.
IMMIGRANTS COMING TO AMERICA.
It is estimated that approximately 80 million immigrants came to America. Of particular interest to me were our early immigrants and what they endured to come to America.
It started in 1620, when 102 English separatist settlers landed on Cape Cod after 102 days at sea aboard the Mayflower. They lived on beer, dried meat, and biscuits for 102 days in the Mayflower's gun deck, the windowless lower level of a 100-foot-long, 24-foot-wide ship.
In the 18th century, over 1 million immigrants came to America in distinct waves: the first from Ireland, fleeing famine, and Germans seeking refuge from political revolution and economic hardship. The second wave came from Italy, Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Greece. In the mid-19th century, waves of Chinese immigrants came, escaping poverty in their homeland. Millions were processed at Castle Gardens and later at Ellis Island.
We also had indentured slaves coming to our country starting after 1800, when at least one million slaves were forcibly relocated to the South, and we had immigrants as a result of the treaty with Mexico that afforded 70,000 Mexicans citizenship in our country.
In the late 18th century, wooden boats were replaced by steamships, which affected immigration to our country, starting with the S.S. The great Western boat and continuing with the S.S. Louis, which carried Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.
Consider the plight of the immigrants and what they had to endure to come to our country. Before the advent of railroads, they had to travel on foot to get to the port of their departure. They traveled on cargo ships as steerage passengers in the bottom holds, with 100 additional passengers in one large space, no bathrooms, no beds, or windows, and the trip could take 40 to 90 days.
The plight of African slaves was unimaginable, beyond our ability to comprehend, and existed before 1800, in West Africa and in Europe, and long before the Atlantic Slave Trade to our country. In the mid-15th century, Portugal supplied slaves to Europe and, later, to the United States, as part of what is described as the slave triangle, running from the west coast of Africa to South Carolina and then to Europe and then back to the West coast of Africa. AI chat says that 12 to 13 million slaves came to America. One point of information is that slavery, including the selling, owning, executing, and buying of slaves, existed in Africa and was part of the existing culture of African tribes. In researching our immigration, I became aware of how little I knew about the continent of Africa.
Immigration in the 20th century was explosive, unlike earlier waves from Western and Northern Europe; millions arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Italy, Poland, and Russia). The country enacted the Immigration Act of 1924, which established strict quotas, and this was later revised by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Our recent immigration included people coming from Vietnam, Mexico, and China.
The message to me is that we are a country of immigrants, beginning in 1600 with 102 pilgrims and growing to a population of 320 million. How can anyone think or talk about real Americans as opposed to those immigrants? We are all the result of immigration, and we should be proud of our heritage.
I'm a big fan. Awesome parallels with the beginnings of Hitler. I tried to upgrade to annual - link doesn't work. Maybe you can address the foreboding we all feel going into this July 4th. I feel my country has been RAPED & so I'm just not in the mood to celebrate. I dreamed I was selling Grim Reaper costumes on the National Mall on July 4th & asking people if they wanted the American flag attached to the accompanying scythe upside down or normal.
Thank you. I managed to get my subscription changed to annual, but I did not get a discount.
Thank you again for upgrading to annual support, Joyce. I am very grateful for the generosity and wanted to make sure you still received additional value, so I will gladly extend your subscription a few extra months personally.
hi Joyce! You can upgrade from monthly to annual at the discounted rate here:
https://wendy664.substack.com/011ed80a?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Even without the discount, annual membership costs far less than monthly billing over a full year.
If the discount does not appear correctly, please try using a web browser instead of the Substack app.
Thank you again for supporting Glass Empires.
Wendy
But for enslaved peoples, this is the US's darkest timeline.
I just subscribed after someone recommended your Substack.
Well researched, clearly written article.
I also added it to this list (of 140) great newsletters. https://makeitfast.org/topnewsletters
Let me know if there are others that should be added at info@thedemlabs.org
Your great newsletters is a fantastic reader resource, Deepak. Thank you!
Thank you, Deepak!
Wendy, this is painful to read, but necessary to comprehend. Reading your column yesterday about the signs of crematoria, I took seriously because I have come to trust that you do your homework before writing. Today's article has shaken me.
Decades ago, I read Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," and concluded that the Holocaust could happen in America. Indeed, our country has been built on murdering Native Americans, enslaving Black people, segregation; and now the systematic destruction of democratic institutions.
The Nazi regime copied American eugenics and other evil from us; now, "what goes around, comes around." It has come home to roost.
As a Jew, I am aware that my people are in as much danger as the immigrants who are being detained, tortured, and expelled.
No one is safe unless we are all safe.
What are we going to do to defend our safety?
Jerry, your reading of Shirer arrived decades before mine. The book joins my list tonight. Half my family came through that history alive. The relatives who did not are why the article exists. Your closing question is the right one. The answer starts where your comment ends. Writing that names the harm before willful blindness sets the schedule.
I know that if I had been born in 1936 Germany instead of in Boston, Mass., I would not be alive today. Wendy, I am so grateful to not be alone in confronting the horror of today; thank you for what you do.
I read your article, Wendy, then sent this to my former university student, now friend, who lives with family in Surprise, AZ. This friend works for Americans Defending Freedom, an entity that supports lawyers working on Republican/Conservative-tied cases and causes:
Hi! Just doing some reading on the new detention camps going up in the U.S. It’s quite a lucrative business. Lots of taxpayer dollars going into funding the system, including your hard-earned dollars, and my retired dollars.
Immigrant detainee deaths in Trump’s confinement warehouses: one person every six days. None of those people needed to die.
When Surprise gets its 1,500 detainees, some will be deported, some will die preventable deaths in Surprise, and new detainees will come in to fill the beds. I wonder what they do with the bodies, one every six days. That’s quite a lot of people. Do they bury them in Surprise, or cart them off by train somewhere else?
Diseases like measles, mumps, polio, Covid, and a host of others will spread, and, not only to the detainees. Guards, cafeteria workers, staff will get sick, as well, and bring it home to their mates and children, and it will spread through your community and into your schools, and, ultimately, into your children. Trump’s war on vaccines will make it a much worse problem. ‘Surprise’ takes on new meaning.
You’ll have new people in town, as ICE officers burn out quickly, protesters will chant outside, lawyers and social workers will come, families will come…and your hotels will be filled with ICE-related visitors.
What a sad story for a town with a wonderful name. Tourism, composed of nice singles, couples and families, won’t be able to vacation there. Your new neighbors will be prison-related.
I’m not trying to scare you, but I want you to go into it with eyes wide open. These people, the detainees, mostly came to the U.S. for a better life. I know some Hispanics who are here illegally, and they are good people, very hard workers trying to make it here, to have a better life here. They want more for their children, just as we did and do.
I hope you and your church will be compassionate to the inmates and the people who come in to represent them. The Pope kisses the feet of the homeless, to let them know they are equals in the eyes of Jesus. Christ kissed the feet of prostitutes, poor working women who resorted to the one possession they had, to let them know that they were loved, by him and God. I hope your church can find ways to help and show human compassion to these ‘illegals’, and to any children incarcerated there.
Did you know that more violence in the U.S. is done by white male citizens? Not Black men or Black teens. Not Hispanics or Muslims. Not women of any color. White men who have a twisted sense of privilege.
This system and its processes are just wrong. Is this who we, U.S. citizens, want to be? Cruel people?
Pam, you saw something most readers will not. The towns next to Dachau and Buchenwald changed the same way you described Surprise changing: tourism gone, hotels filled with regime business, schools downstream of whatever sickness the camp produced. The locals lived through it watching. Your friend now has the map before the territory arrives.
Ending “willful ignorance”—a strong objective.