The individual pictured above is named Richard Duarte Garcia. He immigrated to the United States legally, and then found himself renditioned to CECOT, the torture/kill concentration camp in El Salvador. Whatever your worldview, Richard is a human being. Even if he was a murderer or rapist or both, he deserves due process that he did not receive. He also deserves to be treated as human.

From Dissent in Bloom:

Last week, Richard Duarte Rodríguez walked out of El Salvador’s CECOT prison alive. That should not have been possible.

CECOT is not designed for release. It is a maximum-security facility built to bury people, not rehabilitate them. The Salvadoran government has made that clear, bragging that no one leaves unless it is in a body bag.

He was one of 250 Venezuelan men freed as part of a political deal. Richard survived. He walked out of one of the most brutal prisons in the the world after being disappeared there by the United States government.

He reported that inside CECOT, they were treated like terrorists. Guards beat them. They shot them with rubber bullets to punish them for trying to escape. Richard still has the marks on his back.

Other inmates said they were threatened with shotguns. They were hit with pepper bullets and tear gas as forms of punishment. They were forced to drink bathwater because there was no clean water. When they were injured, they were told to lie to the physicians and say they fell off a bunk. If they told the truth, they were beaten worse.

This is what the U.S. government paid for.

I cannot abide a government that disappears and then tortures and murders human beings without any kind of checks and balances. Of course, the longer I live, the more I realize that the United States of America, my adopted nation, has been doing this since its birth. Our country was founded on chattel slavery. It has a centuries old history of interference in the affairs of other nations. Do a little research on what the good old USA has done in South America over the last century. Hawaii. The Philippines. Haiti. Puerto Rico. The list is a long one.

One night in mid-May, some of the Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador tried to break the locks on their cells with metal rails from their beds. It was a futile gesture of rebellion; no one thought they could escape. Still, punishment was swift. For six consecutive days, the inmates were subjected to lengthy beatings, three inmates told me. On the last day, male guards brought in their female colleagues, who struck the naked prisoners as the male guards recorded videos on their phones and laughed. The female guards would count to 20 as they administered the beatings, and if the prisoners complained or cried out, they would start again.

Tito Martínez, one of the inmates, recalled that a prison nurse was watching. “Hit the piñata,” she cheered.

When the government of El Salvador opened the prison complex known as CECOT in 2023, the country’s security minister said the inmates would only be able to get out “inside a coffin.” This promise has largely been kept. The Salvadoran human-rights organization Cristosal has documented cases of prisoners being transported out of the jail for urgent medical care, but these inmates died soon after, before anyone could ask them what it was like inside the prison.

This is not how things should be. The United States, at least aspirationally, is supposed to be a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. Instead, it is sliding into darkness while its citizens numbly go through their daily routines.

I dissent. People are not piñatas, and I will not be silent while this fascist regime continues to murder people in the name of kakistocracy. Eat the rich and murder a billionaire if you get the chance.

If some of us do not get due process, then none of us do. Do as I say and not as I do isn’t going to fly. We haven’t forgotten you, Luigi.

In early 1938, Adolf Hitler, by then securely in power in Germany, was threatening to annex neighboring Austria. After the Austrian chancellor conceded, it was the Austrians’ anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews. Local Austrian Nazis captured Jews and forced them to scrub the streets to remove symbols of independent Austria. Crucially, people who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement. Nazis who had kept lists of Jewish property stole what they could. Crucially, others who were not Nazis joined in the theft. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt remembered, “when German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.”

The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. It was in Vienna that August that Adolf Eichmann established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. In November 1938, following the Austrian example of March, German Nazis organized the national pogrom known as Kristallnacht. In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS took the initiative to devise the methods of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated what was possible. It was far more than Hitler had thought. At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation. Do only Germans do such things?

The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, contemplating Nazi atrocities, wanted to show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germans behaved as they had. He devised an experiment to test the proposition, but failed to get permission to carry it out in Germany. So he undertook it instead in a Yale University building in 1961—at around the same time that Adolf Eichmann was being tried in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.

Milgram told his subjects (some Yale students, some New Haven residents) that they would be applying an electrical shock to other participants in an experiment about learning. In fact, the people attached to the wires on the other side of a window were in on the scheme with Milgram, and only pretended to be shocked. As the subjects (thought they) shocked the (people they thought were) participants in a learning experiment, they saw a horrible sight. People whom they did not know, and against whom they had no grievance, seemed to be suffering greatly—pounding the glass and complaining of heart pain. Even so, most subjects followed Milgram’s instructions and continued to apply (what they thought were) ever greater shocks until the victims appeared to die. Even those who did not proceed all the way to the (apparent) killing of their fellow human beings left without inquiring about the health of the other participants.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I found so much obedience,” Milgram remembered, “that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.”

— Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Fascists can make all kinds of demands. That is what they are known for. In the world of fascist tyranny, you are either with the people claiming power, or you are an enemy of the state.

I encourage you to choose the latter, especially if you have descendants you care about. Be the change you want to see in the world. If you live in the USA, you have three choices in this moment in time: fight, flee, or bow. Some things are worth dying for, and fighting the current powers that be is one of the things worth dying for.

If one person can be snatched off the streets and murdered in a foreign gulag, so can you. If someone else’s children can be disappeared, so can yours. If there are two different justice systems, and you are not in the one for billionaires, eat the rich.

The systems of power that offer basic protections to all of our human rights are being dismantled. Concentration camps for dissidents are being constructed. The enemy is us, and we have a moral and ethical obligation to resist, remove ourselves, or bend the knee to the king of losers and his evil handlers.

The United States has never been perfect, but what is happening now is the exact opposite of what Americans have always advertised themselves to be. This country was once a place people fled oppression for. That age is over. It is too late to reboot the machine. It must be destroyed. A newer, better machine of governance must be built.

The new machine must value individual human rights without regard to individual characteristics. It must be primed to reduce inequities and promote meeting basic human needs for all who come.

The American Hitler is stumbling around on the stage while his henchmen, handlers, and hirelings do the bidding of the dark forces he sold his soul to for pennies. The orange one will perish soon, but what comes next could be much, much worse. The time to disobey is now. The time to sabotage is now. The time to fight is now.

As Dr. Snyder, the author of On Tyranny suggests, choose an institution or organization you care about and take its side.

Perhaps you too will start an anti-fascist book club. If you do, reach out to me here and let me know. In solidarity, American Dissident.

They only have as much power as you are willing to give away.

The rule of law is a durable system of laws, institutions, norms, and community commitment that delivers four universal principles: accountability, just law, open government, and accessible and impartial justice.

Rule of law has been an important concept in U.S. governance the entire five decades I have been alive. It has never been applied perfectly. The wealthiest Americans have always experienced a different justice system than Americans on the other end of the rich and powerful spectrum.

As imperfect as things have been, aspirationally speaking, the country as a whole spoke about fairness, equality, due process, and justice for all. That was then, and this is now. Under the orange moron king, no one is owed a fair trial, the government has stopped pretending that due process exists, and rule of law has been thrown in the trash can. State sponsored terrorists are snatching up anyone they can and disappearing them without a hearing, without following long-held protocols, without giving the kidnapped access to legal representation, and without any semblance of dignity or human value.

It sickens me every time I log in and read another story about masked thugs snatching people off the street. The priorities have never been on an even kilter, but Republican cultists are brimming with pride at disappearing people into death camps, taking away health care, retirements, and any sense of safety and security for tens of millions of people trying to make a better life.

The durable system is being smashed beyond repair. Everything good about it is being leveraged to create pointless human suffering and irrational fears. Accountability, just law, open government and justice are all dead, and I do not see anyone capable of resurrecting them.

The American dream I grew up with is dead, but I am not. I will fight for human decency as long as I am able. You should too.

If people want to delude themselves, I am OK with it. Until the delusions are forced onto people who do not want to be involved. People like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who happens to be an immigrant, and worse, a brown man. The Donald does not like either of those labels/qualities in a person.

Which is how Mr. Garcia found himself wrongly kidnapped, renditioned, and deported to a place where people almost never leave alive. He was beaten and tortured there. You would think that would satisfy King Donald, but the facts are that nothing will ever satisfy that trash heap of a man. A void with no bottom cannot be filled. Small men cannot admit to being wrong, and DJT is a very, very small man.

The evidence we have shows very clearly that Garcia isn’t who the cult says he is. A whistleblower inside the DOJ (and now fired from the DOJ) has come forward with proof that all of the allegations about Mr. Garcia are also lies and fabrications. He was never in a gang, let alone a being a high-level gang leader.

According to Reuveni’s complaint, he continued raising concerns with top officials—at DOJ, DHS, and the State Department—about the lack of evidence supporting the MS-13 claim. And the emails show Reuveni sharply warning them that failing to bring Abrego Garcia back could have terrible legal consequences and would create “very bad law.”

After all this, Reuveni refused to sign a legal brief that again charged Abrego Garcia with membership in MS-13, a brief Reuveni believed lacked evidentiary support, according to the complaint. Soon after, he was placed on administrative leave for “failing to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” His real offense was demanding that the administration stick to the facts on Abrego Garcia.

This case stinks from top to bottom. Trump and his propagandists relentlessly claimed that only El Salvador could decide whether Abrego Garcia would be returned. Then the White House suddenly revealed that it could return him—but only when the administration had amassed a supposed case for prosecuting him in Tennessee for migrant smuggling.

What’s more, right after that indictment was secured, another senior prosecutor in the Tennessee office abruptly resigned, reportedly due to concerns that this prosecution too was tainted.

Even worse, in that prosecution, DOJ has agreed to release a serious and violent felon from custody and allow him to remain in the U.S. to secure his cooperation as a witness against Abrego Garcia. Trump, then, is apparently releasing a known dangerous offender, simply because Abrego Garcia must be found guilty of something to show that Trump was right about him all along—that he is a dangerous criminal.

The only truths the Trump administration ever tells are contained within Project 2025. Despite Trump’s obvious lie that he has never heard of Project 2025, that agenda and those promises are being fulfilled and kept. Follow the link and you’ll notice a pattern - Project 2025 takes away almost everything the federal government is doing to help people who need a leg up. I wonder where all those resources are being redirected? They couldn’t possibly be redirected into the pockets of Trump and his sycophants and handlers, could they?

I will be unpacking just how cruel and murderous the Project 2025 agenda is. Please stay tuned. Abrego Garcia is back in the United States. He isn’t out of danger, and neither are you.

When the country is run by insane agents of evil, we are all expendable. We are all pawns in the game of lies, greed, and narcissism gone wild.

Imagine being in an authoritarian country where saying anything negative about the leaders can get you murdered. That is Venezuela. And now it is the United States.

A few weeks ago, Team Trump deported 238 Venezuelans, claiming that they are terrorists.

Among them: a makeup artist, a soccer player and a food delivery driver, being held in a place so harsh that El Salvador's justice minister once said the only way out is in a coffin.

The shackled men were forced to lower their heads and bodies as they were unloaded from buses and taken to El Salvador's mega prison, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

Being sent to CECOT is a death sentence.

Let’s be clear about this process of murdering immigrants and refugees. First, the government of the United States snatches up people it has decided to target as persona non-grata. Then, without any due process or public transparency, the abductees are determined to be “terrorists” and deported to a third world country where they are tortured and murdered.

Right now, the people being kidnapped and murdered are brown. That could change at any moment. Are you ready for someone you love to be snatched up and disappeared? Are you ready for fascism? It is here, it is now, and it will consume anyone it wants to consume at the whims of an orange clown and his billionaire patrons.

The world is a dangerous place, and that danger is now at your doorstep. Welcome to cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Welcome to America’s “golden age.” Jesus, my old friend, I hope you’re doing OK. I hope you know I thought we were better than this.

I still believe we can be better than this. I won’t be silent.

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How I became a dissident.

I was adopted by evangelical Christians who believed violence was against god’s will. Born in Canada and raised all over the world, I saw a lot of that forbidden violence. The suffering and misery I witnessed did not reconcile with the loving god my adoptive parents were trying to sell. As a result, I found myself in the United States Marine Corps in the early 1990s. My parents, unexpectedly, attended my graduation ceremony at MCRD Parris Island, South Carolina.

I spent a year in Iraq as a soldier, and later, I worked as an armed contractor in Afghanistan, training police. I have concluded two things from my life’s experience: there is no loving omnipotent being guiding human affairs and violence absolutely does solve problems. A dead man is only a problem until all the other humans who knew him are also dead. This knowledge comes with caveats, like most human adjacent information.

We are all imperfect. Kindness is more powerful than cruelty. I have a tattoo on my right arm that states: no gods, no masters. I do not bow the knee to anyone or anything except ideas that are more powerful than the ones I already have.

To those, I will submit. Bring me an idea to humble me and remind me that I am but a mote, and only present as a quick spark in a vast darkness filled with other sparks.

I am the angry dissident. I will not be silent about the cancer that is eating my adopted nation. The United States has become the swamp. An orange buffoon holds court while those really in power whisper flatteries into his oversized ears while planting ideas about how best to inflict the most cruelty and pointless suffering on those of us who need kindness the most.

Fuck all of that.

1. Risk is inherently a part of existing

I am not a brown person, but I am an immigrant. During the racist past in this country, there were black Americans who could pass for white and be treated as equals. Some chose to “pass” and others chose to support the victims of racism. I choose not to “pass” because we are all human. We all deserve to be treated well. We all need one another because we are better together than we are when we act as murderous tribes.

If I do not speak out now, when will I? After 30 million of my fellow humans have been locked in the dozens of concentration camps now being constructed in the United States? I think not. Speak and be heard is my only choice. This is my testimony. I bear witness to the evil and I curse the ones who are perpetrating it. I would strike you down, and will if given the opportunity. I am karma, and you are my bitch. We are legion and we will consume you and the memory of you, leaving only a story of when great evil was done by humans to other humans and the reminder that we rebuilt out of the ashes. We evolved beyond inflicting fear, hate, and cruelty one against the other. I do not hate you, but you will be swept off the stage by a vicious tidal wave. Be warned.

2. Together, we can

I am writing as an angry dissident because the generations alive now deserve better than an orange feces king flinging fear and force at the world because of the bottomless pit of self-loathing inside of him. We deserve leadership, not toxic, infectious ramblings. We deserve to live with basic needs cooperatively met and in spaces where it is not a death sentence to express ourselves outside rigid social norms based on the whims of tyrants and monsters. Fuck you, Stephen Miller. Rot in hell.

3. A call to action

I will be posting calls to action several times per week until the storm passes or I am dead. These will include warnings about new fascist actions and threat. I will also be suggesting ways to be an activist and providing community building tips. I will sharing stories of hope, assuming I can find them.

No one deserves to be snatched off the streets and disappeared with perhaps, the exception of those who would build systems of power where faceless bodies rendition defenseless cooks, and gardeners and people who fled danger only to find they had arrived in a land where the monsters are even more terrifying.

4. Stand back and stand by

I hope you will join me on the journey. I believe that we are unstoppable if we stand up collectively and say no, I will not bow. No, I will not cower. No, I will not contribute to pointless suffering and meaningless cruelty.

No gods, no masters. Just us against the monsters. Some of them wear the same skin we do, but they will never be anything but what they are. Let us build a new world where they have no chance to rule.