In 1937, the Soviet NKVD issued Order No. 00447, allowing them to arrest anyone, with quotas by region. Officers received two categories of targets:

• Category One for execution (i.e. Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Ruben Martinez)
• Category Two for Gulag imprisonment

Exceeding them brought rewards. The system’s defining feature was not cruelty for its own sake but bureaucratic incentivisation of detention. The machinery needed throughput to justify its budget. It found throughput.

In January 2025, the Trump administration set ICE detention targets at 1,200-1,500 per day. ICE’s budget stands at $85 billion, up from $6 billion a decade ago. New recruits receive signing bonuses of $50,000. Multiple guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma independently told a detained British tourist that agents receive per-head bonuses for every person they bring in.

The NKVD didn’t publish its incentive structures either. ICE doesn’t either.

The British tourist was Karen Newton, 65, retired school administrator from Hertfordshire, no criminal record, travelling on a valid B2 visa. She was detained for 42 days. The stated justification: she was “guilty by association” with her husband, whose visa had expired. Her specific offence? ICE said helping him pack his suitcase was grounds for jail, which they officially called a detention to strip her rights away along with all her clothing.

Guilt by Association as Legal Doctrine

Soviet law formalised this as ChSIR — Член Семьи Изменника Родины, “Family Member of a Traitor to the Motherland.” Under Article 58 of the Penal Code, wives of accused enemies were automatically sentenced to five to eight years. The ALZHIR camp outside Astana was purpose-built for them. The principle was explicit: kinship itself constituted complicity. It was infamously echoed in American “Red Scare” McCarthyism, which led to outrage and protest.

A US border agent used the English equivalent of this doctrine of “guilty by association” for a woman whose husband’s paperwork had lapsed. The Soviets at least had an acronym.

Voluntary Confession, American Edition

On day three of detention, Karen signed a “voluntary self-removal” agreement waiving her right to see a judge and accepting a ten-year US entry ban. The agent told her it was the fastest route home. She then spent 39 more days in detention.

The Soviet “voluntary confession” operated identically: sign, and your sentence will be lighter. Cooperate, and this ends sooner. Both mechanisms use indefinite detention to manufacture consent to punishment, then continue the punishment regardless. The confession is a trick to increase funding for an additional length of control.

The Trump administration’s version adds a cash incentive. Project Homecoming offers detainees an “exit bonus”, $1,000 raised in January 2026 to $2,600 to “celebrate one year of Trump”, funded by redirecting $250 million from refugee aid. This is, structurally, a bounty system operating in both directions: agents are incentivised to detain, detainees are incentivised to waive their rights and be detained longer while convinced it would help them leave.

The Private Surplus

The Gulag extracted labour. Prisoners built canals, railways, and timber infrastructure the Soviet state couldn’t afford to pay free workers to construct. The economics were integral to the system’s persistence.

The American pivot is to extract profit from detention itself. Corruption of taxpayer money is how Trump is lining the pockets of an incarceration system bigger than North Korea. Kim Jong Un’s political prison camps hold an estimated 80,000-120,000. Trump already detained nearly 80,000 and has announced ICE plans to increase over 100,000. In the shadow of Amazon shipping warehouses and logistics processing boxes, ICE is telling Wall Street the movement of wrongfully detained humans will be an investor gold mine.

The Northwest ICE Processing Center is operated by GEO Group, a private company paid a daily federal rate per detainee. More bodies, more revenue. The stock price tracks detention policy. This eliminates the need for ideology altogether. The market provides sufficient motive. You can build a Trumpistan gulag on quarterly earnings alone, taking over warehouses to fill with humans.

ICE expects to spend $38.3 billion on acquiring warehouses nationwide and retrofitting them into detention centers holding tens of thousands of people. The plan includes eight “mega centers,” 16 processing centers, and 10 additional facilities, with total planned capacity reaching 100,000 indefinitely detained.

Two warehouse purchases alone cost $172 million, with one in El Paso to hold 8,500 beds. It’s among the largest jails of any kind in the world.

Outside Phoenix, ICE paid $70 million cash for a building the size of seven football fields in an industrial park. City officials said they weren’t aware of the purchase and hadn’t been contacted by DHS.

Warehouses are set up as logistics hubs near airports as a “feeder system” where detainees are briefly processed then sent to massive warehouses. They’re literally using Amazon-era supply chain infrastructure for human processing. The next obvious step will be what to do about all the deaths. And on that note, Trump literally just invoked the war powers act to enable dangerous pesticide use on domestic populations.

What the Pattern Predicts

Historically, quota-driven detention systems follow a consistent trajectory. They begin with a target population of limited public sympathy (undocumented migrants, political dissidents, class enemies). Then it expands because the institutional incentives demand expansion. Officers who need 1,500 detentions per day will eventually exhaust the supply of people who fit the original category and begin processing people who don’t. A retired British grandmother detained for packing a suitcase is not an aberration. She is the predictable output of a system that has begun to outrun its stated rationale.

The United States lost 4.5 million international visitors in 2025. The market is pricing in the risk faster than the political system is willing to name it.

Karen Newton’s advice to prospective travellers to America is wise:

“DO NOT GO.”

The Gulag’s survivors said the same thing about the Soviet Union for decades. This warning comes from a retired British woman who simply went on holiday to Trumpistan.

George Bush on Presidents’ Day is criticizing authoritarian overreach, which is like the arsonist complaining about fire codes.

As America begins to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I’m pleased to have been asked to write about George Washington’s leadership. As president, I found great comfort and inspiration in reading about my predecessors and the qualities they embodied. […] Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility.

Humility? Hold on a minute, pardner.

The man who launched two unjustified wars on fabricated or inflated pretexts, authorized warrantless mass surveillance, torture, and indefinite detention, and whose administration’s “unitary executive” theory laid the legal groundwork Trump is now exploiting, including the “unlawful combatant” designation now being repurposed for Caribbean special operations. The man who created today’s Frankenstein, is now saying someone should do something about it because… humility?

Yeah, dude. You made this.

• Remember Bush deploying ICE in 2006 for “US secret prisons and twilight raids on immigrant homes“?
• Remember Bush deploying Rove in 2008 to spin political disinformation?
  

  There was a time when conservatives in America demanded a strong foundation in learning from well-known scholars and history precisely to fearlessly navigate new ideas. Strangely, Rove and pals have been able to hijack the group and turn it into drones waiting for instruction (e.g. fascism).

Bush’s absence of humility didn’t just create Trump’s legal architecture for authoritarianism, his administration built the shameless propaganda infrastructure that shoved the conservative base all the way into fascism.

This new Bush essay’s appeal to Washington’s “humility” is itself a Rove-style move: wrapping authoritarian complicity in aspirational language. It reads less like principled dissent and more like legacy management, distancing himself from the monster his own administration incubated, while enabling it to continue.

Invoking stories of Washington is always fraught with historiography. The voluntary relinquishment narrative that Bush tries to sell us is totally mythologized. Washington stepped down in part because he was exhausted, politically battered by partisan press, and understood a third term was politically untenable. It was not some noble philosophical commitment to republican virtue. The Bush hagiography serves the same function it always has: making supreme power appear self-limiting by nature rather than admit the contested struggle that actually forms democracy.

Bush is pumping deep propaganda about the man who owned over 300 enslaved people, pursued runaways relentlessly, rotated them through Philadelphia to exploit a loophole in Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law, and presided over a frontier policy of indigenous displacement. Bush calls out the defining motivational characteristic of Washington, human trafficking operations, and lands on “humility” and “self-restraint“?

You can’t model “putting the good of the nation over self-interest” while literally owning human beings as property.

Look at Georgia in 1733, Vermont in 1777, Carter 1793 who freed all his slaves and called out Washington for selfish refusal.

Georgia’s ban fifty years prior, and then Vermont’s constitution in his face, as well as Pennsylvania openly targeting Washington’s slaves, established that abolition wasn’t some anachronistic standard being imposed retroactively. The legal and moral frameworks existed and Washington was hiding and running. He knew, he wanted to be on the wrong side. He calculated. He moved against the entire world banning slavery, to selfishly force a new country to preserve and expand it instead.

Understand that Carter wasn’t some distant man from Washington. He was a hugely successful Virginia planter who looked at the same institution of human trafficking that Washington dreamed of profits from and said no. Carter shut it down.

It’s literally like someone today looking at Epstein and saying no. Who didn’t say no? That’s Washington.

Every generation of powerful elites produces legal architectures for dehumanizing people for value extraction while maintaining plausible deniability, and then produces apologists who write fraudulent essays about humility after the damage is done.

George should know George better. His history illiteracy continues the tragedy.

Think about the Caribbean war crime operations where Trump is using Bush’s own “unlawful combatant” framework. We have two presidents implicated in connected dehumanizing legal architectures, with one writing hagiography about the other.

In short, as a historian, here’s a scientific measurement of the Bush Presidential message:

James C. Scott wrote about a concept of legibility in Seeing Like a State — the idea that centralized power first needs to make populations readable before it can act on them.

There is a specific cycle by which legibility is achieved through voluntary compliance rather than surveillance. The state doesn’t need to find you if it can get you to identify yourself for targeting. Recently the U.S. government suddenly, illogically began requiring gun owners to register gender, under threat of felony charges for refusal.

The outcome of this type of registration pressure is consistent across five centuries: defiance or evasion — the behaviors the system initially punished — become retroactively the safer choice. People were told the rules would protect them, in order to trick them into compliance.

The Trump Trap Cycle

First he requires registration, promising protection. Then he does the opposite, uses the registry for removal. The people who trusted Trump enough to comply with him are the ones most exposed when he turns on them.

Every example below involves a group that was economically or militarily useful. Conversos held positions. Armenians dominated commerce. Jewish Germans were foundational to industry, agriculture, science and professionalism. Trans troops were serving. The trap targets the productive to weaken the state.

US Trans Military Ban: 2018–

1. Register	First-term bans serving trans troops, only allowing them to remain active if they accept an official gender dysphoria diagnosis
2. Comply	Trans service members obtain diagnosis through official military medical channels, building documented records
3. Normalize	Diagnosed troops continue serving, deploy, get promoted; the system appears to be working long enough to increase participation
4. Repurpose	Second-term administration uses the gender dysphoria diagnosis records that it required to identify and forcibly remove troops
5. Punish compliance	Undiagnosed trans troops are harder to identify and remove; the honest and open ones are punished the most. Morale plummets, as troops are incentivized to lie and passively disobey

Spanish Inquisition: 1478–1609

1. Register	Jews and Muslims told to convert and register as conversos or moriscos to remain in Spain
2. Comply	Conversos are baptized, registered in parish records, hold public positions
3. Normalize	Conversos integrate into Spanish society, some rise to prominence in church and government
4. Repurpose	Inquisition uses baptismal and parish records to investigate conversos for secret Jewish or Islamic practice
5. Punish compliance	Crypto-Jews who never converted are harder to find than registered conversos under Inquisitorial scrutiny

Ottoman Empire: 1839–1915

1. Register	Non-Muslim communities required to register through the millet system for legal autonomy and protection
2. Comply	Armenians comply, build institutions within the framework; community rolls, church records, and tax registries formalize their legibility
3. Normalize	Armenian communities prosper visibly within the system for decades, holding professional and commercial positions
4. Repurpose	Registration infrastructure becomes the targeting mechanism for the 1915 deportations and massacres
5. Punish compliance	The most administratively legible communities are the most efficiently destroyed; those outside the registration system are harder to locate

Rwanda: 1933–1994

1. Register	Belgian colonial authorities require ethnic classification — Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa — on national identity cards
2. Comply	Rwandans carry classified identity cards for sixty years as a routine fact of life
3. Normalize	The cards become ordinary bureaucratic documents; ethnic classification feels administrative, not existential
4. Repurpose	During the 1994 genocide, identity cards become the sorting mechanism at militia checkpoints
5. Punish compliance	Possession of a Tutsi card is a death sentence at the roadblock. Those who had earlier petitioned to change their classification, or obtained false papers, survive at higher rates

Nazi Germany: 1932–1945

1. Register	Nazi census and civil registry laws require declaration of religion and ancestry; Nuremberg Laws, based on American racism, formalize racial categories
2. Comply	Jewish citizens register with Nazi authorities, carry identification, appear in population databases
3. Normalize	Early restrictions feel manageable; emigration seems like overreaction to many
4. Repurpose	Census and registration data feed deportation logistics; IBM tabulation systems sort populations for ghettoization and mass extermination
5. Punish compliance	Jews who registered are systematically located; those who obtained false papers or fled early survive at higher rates

Soviet Union: 1932–1944

1. Register	Internal passport system requires citizens to declare nationality on identity documents
2. Comply	Citizens dutifully file nationality declarations on internal passports
3. Normalize	Registered nationalities live and work normally for years or decades
4. Repurpose	Stalin uses nationality registrations to identify entire ethnic groups — Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans — for mass deportation
5. Punish compliance	Undocumented individuals are invisible to the deportation apparatus

Russia: 2012–

1. Register	2012 law requires NGOs receiving foreign funding to register as “foreign agents” — framed as transparency, not restriction
2. Comply	Organizations register to continue operating legally; the alternative is criminal prosecution
3. Normalize	Registered organizations continue working, albeit stigmatized; the label feels bureaucratic, survivable
4. Repurpose	The registry becomes the shutdown list. Registered organizations face inspections, fines, forced closure, and criminal charges against leadership
5. Punish compliance	Organizations that registered are systematically dismantled. Those that refused and went underground or dissolved early are harder to prosecute retroactively

China: 1958–1966

1. Register	Hukou household registration system requires citizens to declare locality and class background — landlord, rich peasant, capitalist, worker, poor peasant
2. Comply	Citizens register their class origins as a routine administrative requirement
3. Normalize	Class labels become part of everyday bureaucratic life; the economic realities they describe fade but the categories persist
4. Repurpose	During the Cultural Revolution, registered class backgrounds become targeting lists for persecution, forced labor, and execution
5. Punish compliance	The bureaucratic category outlives any economic reality it once described; those who honestly declared prosperous origins are persecuted for a past that no longer exists

The gap between registration and repurposing is compressing. Spain took generations. Nazi Germany took years. The trans military ban took one presidential term. Digital infrastructure means Phase 1 through Phase 4 can collapse into a single policy cycle. The gun registration move is Phase 1 for the next target population, running while Phase 5 of the current one is still playing out. Trump is running multiple trap cycles simultaneously at different stages.

The faster the cycle, the faster the damage compounds. Every administrative trap degrades every future administrative process. Census participation drops. Medical disclosure drops. Voluntary compliance with anything drops.

The trap is an institutional autoimmune disorder that destroys the state’s ability to govern the next population it needs to make legible. The targeting falls apart, as fighting is turned within, and severe dysfunction takes over.

The trap selects against institutional loyalty, instead demanding Trump loyalty. The people most aligned with necessary institutional values — troops who believed in the Constitution enough to work within it and believe in law and order — are punished the most.

The Trump mechanism is anti-meritocratic as a loyalty test. Those least mentally fit to serve take over, because they’re the most willing to serve Trump.