The courts have not been defeated. They have been bypassed. In 1933, this distinction did not matter. There is no evidence it matters now.

A federal judge wrote Sunday that the Trump administration is attempting to “coerce perpetual, infinite detention” by defying court orders. Three hundred forty-seven district court judges have ruled against the administration’s detention policies. Twenty have ruled in favor.

Does a 95% win ratio sound good? It’s not enough, in a system designed to operate faster than judicial review. It is documentation of abuse, executive power operating without check.

The win ratio is both damning and the kind of success that failed to stop Hitler.

This requires explanation.

The Schutzhaft Mechanism

On February 28, 1933, Germany’s Reichstag Fire Decree suspended constitutional protections including habeas corpus. The decree enabled Schutzhaft (“protective custody”): administrative detention without judicial warrant or review. As the infamous saying went:

If you cannot recognise the will of the Fuhrer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge

Schutzhaft had three structural features:

1. Administrative classification. Detention was ordered by police, not courts. No judicial finding was required.
2. Speed. Detainees were moved to camps before legal challenges could be filed. Within two months, 25,000 people were detained in Prussia alone.
3. Parallel track. Regular courts continued to function for ordinary matters. Schutzhaft operated outside their jurisdiction entirely.

German courts were not abolished, packed, or corrupted. They became irrelevant to the detention system. Judges continued to rule. The camps continued to fill. These two facts did not contradict each other.

The Trump Version

The American detention apparatus today shares the exact same three features.

1. Administrative classification. In July 2025, DHS issued an internal memo reinterpreting existing law to classify most undocumented immigrants as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention. No legislation. No judicial approval. A memo.
2. Speed. The administration provides detainees 12-24 hours to express intent to challenge detention. Physical removal frequently occurs before judicial review. When Judge Boasberg issued a restraining order halting deportation flights to El Salvador, the planes had already departed. The detainees are now in CECOT prison. DHS officials transfer Minnesota detainees to Texas within days of arrest, removing them from the jurisdiction of Minnesota courts before cases can be heard.
3. Parallel track. Immigration courts are executive branch entities under the Department of Justice, not Article III courts. The administration has fired immigration judges and is replacing them with military lawyers. Cases pending in immigration court are dismissed; detainees are immediately re-arrested and placed in expedited removal, an administrative process with minimal judicial oversight.

The Relevant Numbers

District court rulings on detention policy: 347 against the administration, 20 in favor.

Supreme Court emergency stays of district court orders: 17 granted to the administration, 1 denied.

ICE detainees as of December 2025: 66,000, a record.

Deaths in ICE custody, fiscal year 2025: 23. Previous four years combined: 24.

The Logic

District courts rule against detention policy. The administration appeals. The Supreme Court grants emergency stays. Policy continues during appeal. Appeals take months. Deportations take days.

The 347 district court rulings create a record yet do not prevent detention. The detainees those rulings concern have frequently been transferred out of jurisdiction or removed from the country before the ruling issues.

A system in which courts rule correctly but after the fact is a system in which executive action goes unconstrained.

The Nazi Schutzhaft of 1933 is the entire Trump bypass story of 2026.

Judge Davis, in his Sunday ruling, identified the mechanism: the administration is “stretch[ing] the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights.”

Stretching the process to the breaking point is not the same as violating the process. The process continues. The detentions will ramp even faster.

The 2026 Reality

The German legal profession in 1933 observed that courts were still functioning. This was true. Cases were heard. Rulings were issued. The Schutzhaft system was not subject to those rulings. We know how the concentration camps evolved after that.

The question is not whether American courts are ruling correctly. They are. The question is whether those rulings have any hope of constraining the American detention system tomorrow if not today.

Current evidence, based on Nazi history, indicates they do not.

Grant’s Enforcement Acts were designed to do one thing: prosecute the Klan.

The Supreme Court gutted them within a decade.

United States v. Cruikshank (1876) established that the Fourteenth Amendment only restricts state action. The federal government cannot protect Black citizens from private white violence. That’s a state matter.

Southern states, well, you know, “declined” to prosecute Klan.

The Klan’s members often were state actors—sheriffs, deputies, judges—who refused to prosecute themselves. And the doctrine gave them an obvious loophole: put on a hood, become a “private” actor. The same men who wore a badge by day wore a sheet by night. Federal law couldn’t reach them in private citizen garb, and the state law wouldn’t because the state was them.

It’s why ICE wears masks today.

This protection of domestic terrorists worked exactly as intended. Trump’s father was arrested at a violent Klan march in 1927. Look how that turned out.

Black Americans died by the thousands without federal remedy. In Tulsa, 1921, white mobs murdered war veterans and dumped bodies into unmarked mass graves. The Klan built a celebratory hall on the ruins of Black Wall Street.

Trump talks about his destruction of the White House East Wing the same way.

Now watch what happens when you reverse the polarity, and put the enemies of President Grant in the White House.

The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating… charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers.

Black organizers protested violence by a federal official. The state is acting. No doctrinal barrier applies. Section 241, as the fragment of Grant’s law that survived, activates instantly to target the very people it was meant to protect.

The law was carefully stripped of power by jurists who saw Reconstruction as the crime. It couldn’t protect Black Americans from private violence.

Yet it retained full power to punish Black Americans if they dared to confront state violence.

The local courts, reversed from history, now try to provide some protection, while Trump intentionally tries to overwhelm them with frivolous and empty attacks. Minnesota magistrates have rejected warrant after warrant because of no probable cause, no evidence of crime. One judge threw out a complaint about an egg thrown at a car. Another rejected the charges, and then saw Bondi loudly announce them anyway.

Trump doesn’t care about laws. They don’t matter to him. The terror of an arrest, the harm of publishing charges, is the punishment. The waste of time and money in a painful process is the point.

“It’s our fucking city,” his CBP commander Gregory “SS Mantel” Bovino told masked men geared up to storm a neighborhood. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to.”

Imagine what Fred Trump said after being arrested at a 1927 Klan march, apparently for violence against police, and then look at that rhetoric.

See the long game? They call it QQQ.

This is the Lost Cause over three generations waiting for their Klan to rise yet again, repeatedly defeated yet never fully prosecuted.

This is using the legal system to be as racist as the legal system will allow. The Klan’s descendants didn’t repeal Reconstruction. They protested it and sabotaged it until they could capture it.

Prosecuting Black civil rights organizers under anti-Klan statutes was always the game plan. Whatever is architected for safety will be weaponized into a tool of terror.

It fits with decades of saying registration of guns would be the end of freedom, and then forcing registration. Or more recently, after decades of open carry being a sacred right, wearing a holstered gun in public is now a crime so severe it’s punishable by immediate state firing squad execution.

The BBC is spraying disinformation about Monroe Doctrine history in order to normalize Trump’s rejection of doctrinal frameworks entirely. Some reporters mistake this for historical analysis. Here’s an example from Allan Little:

When it was announced by the fifth president of the US, James Monroe, the doctrine that bears his name was widely seen as an expression of US solidarity with its neighbours… But the doctrine quickly became an assertion of Washington’s right to dominate its neighbours and use any means, up to and including military intervention, to bend their policies into alignment with American interests. President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1904, said it gave the US “international police power” to intervene in countries where there was “wrongdoing”. So could it be that President Trump’s re-interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine is simply part of a continuum in US foreign policy?

No.

Little’s piece does something sophisticated and dangerous: it uses a valid critique of American hypocrisy to launder an analytical collapse.

The piece opens with a Pakistani student’s observation from 2002 that the rules-based international order was “partially false”—that the strongest exempted themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, that international law applied with varying rigor depending on identity. This critique is correct. American hypocrisy is real. Guatemala, Chad, Indonesia, Somalia, Iran, Grenada, Panama—the record is damning.

But Little makes a fatal logical leap: because the US violated rules it claimed to uphold, Trump’s rejection of rules entirely is just “more of the same.”

That’s the sleight of hand. The Pakistani student’s critique depends on there being rules to violate. Hypocrisy requires a standard being betrayed. You can only call American intervention hypocritical if there’s a framework against which to measure the betrayal.

Trump’s National Defense Strategy announces there is no standard. It explicitly purges the “rules-based international order,” calling it “cloud-castle abstractions.” It replaces doctrine with “concrete interests first”—the sovereign decides, justification follows.

That’s not Monroe perverted. That’s Monroe rejected.

The difference is categorical: a policeman who takes twenty dollars to look the other way is corrupt. A policeman who announces “I am the law” is something else. The Nuremberg Trials drew this distinction for a reason.

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Little pulls historian Jay Sexton into his frame, asking whether Trump’s “unpredictability” gives America “a 19th century feel.” Perhaps excited to discuss his expertise, Sexton accepts the premise and speaks about Great Power rivalries from 1815 onward.

Wrong question, wrong century.

Nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics had rules—that’s what made it a “balance.” Monroe created a framework. Roosevelt perverted that framework. Trump says framework? What framework? There’s only me.

It’s like the BBC asking whether Bernie Madoff’s interpretation of retirement savings represents a continuum on Wall Street. Madoff was committing fraud while claiming to invest. The crime isn’t an aggressive interpretation on an infinite slope. The crime is that no interpretation was happening at all. The activity being claimed wasn’t the activity being performed.

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The interventions Little lists—Iran ’53, Guatemala ’54, Grenada ’83, Panama ’89—were all justified through frameworks. Anti-communism. Protecting democracy. Fighting drugs. The justifications were often lies, but the lies mattered. They created accountability surfaces. You could argue the US was violating its stated principles.

Trump’s “concrete interests first” eliminates the accountability surface. There’s no principle to violate. The justification is generated after the decision—by algorithmic slop if necessary.

Check the simple math. Trump applying Monroe would mean China is the threat to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. That’s foundational to Monroe. Yet the Pentagon was ordered to deprioritize China. The Trump NDS downgrades threats to the hemisphere while prioritizing “credible military options” against American neighbors and allies. China is opening trade with Canada and cementing itself in Latin America, yet Trump targets Canada while ignoring the thing Monroe would have worried about most.

That’s not Monroe extended. It’s Monroe inverted.

Monroe 1823	Trump 2026
Drafted by Adams, debated in cabinet, presented to Congress	Unilateral executive, note-card attention span
Welcomed by regional leaders as solidarity against colonization	Threatening neighbors and allies with military force
Framework to keep external powers out	“Concrete interests first”—no framework, external threats deprioritized
Created predictability by design	Unpredictability by design
Middle power proposing defensive solidarity	Superpower rejecting all constraint
Progressive. Embraced order and institutions	Regressive. Explicit rejection of “rules-based order” as abstraction

Little spends considerable space on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech, where Carney called for “middle powers” to unite against Great Power politics. Little frames this as a response to Trump abandoning the rules-based order. He doesn’t notice the irony: that’s exactly what Monroe was doing in 1823.

The US wasn’t a superpower then. It was a post-colonial republic barely four decades old, addressing other post-colonial republics, proposing mutual defense against the actual great powers—European empires. Monroe Doctrine was middle-power solidarity against imperial aggression.

Carney is the one who actually calls for a return to Monroe’s original posture. Trump is the empire Monroe organized against. Little cites both without seeing that his “continuum” runs in the wrong direction.

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The actual American lineage for Trump isn’t Monroe at all if you are familiar with Jackson’s Florida campaign in the 1810s. The future President manufactured security pretexts, delegitimized indigenous governance, deployed overwhelming force, ignored legal constraints. Mussolini studied this playbook for Ethiopia in 1935. Hitler industrialized it for the Sudetenland in 1938. Each iteration refined the template.

What we call this today is decisionism—Carl Schmitt’s theoretical framework that made Hitler’s foreign policy formally unpredictable by design. The sovereign decides the exception. All justification flows from that decision rather than constraining it. This is Trump, who calls it his “weave.”

Little’s piece won’t see this. His 19th-century goggles are what you wear when 1933 is too frightening to face. Trump prefers the misdirection, as he doesn’t want to be recognized: Those teenage Epstein girls were just for massage.

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Monroe was admittedly very racist, in the typical elite way of 1823—ambient, paternalistic, fearful. He wasn’t choosing a regression to centuries before him when he proposed a way forward. He was creating a progressive framework to be measured against.

Trump in 2025 is also very racist yet inverted to Monroe, consciously regressive. After the documented American genocide. After the Holocaust. After decolonization. After Civil Rights. After the science demolished race theory. After Reagan knew through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that he had to launder his racism through dog whistles.

This is the deliberate choice of race-based regression backed by infrastructure to enforce it at scale. The BBC normalizes this hate platform by grounding it in something it is not.

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Three reasons Trump could never be Monroe, and everyone should stop the precedent laundering:

1. Monroe Doctrine was drafted by John Quincy Adams, debated in cabinet, presented to Congress. Trump doesn’t care about drafts, debates, or separation of powers. He lights fires and focuses on the fire trucks.
2. Monroe Doctrine was welcomed by regional leaders as forward-looking solidarity against past colonial threats. Trump is the threat that Monroe was trying to prevent. Let that marinate.
3. Monroe supported law, order, institutions, procedures, consultation, and predictability. He didn’t reject progress; he built and sold solidarity to regional allies. Trump announces an abolition of frameworks, bullying allies, while wearing Monroe’s corpse as costume.

Criticism of rules is grounds for improvement. Rejection of rules is their total loss—just loss.

The BBC’s “continuum” is a slippery slope fallacy. There’s no slope when discussing Trump and Monroe. There’s a cliff, because Monroe evaporates under Trump.

That’s not precedent. That’s laundering.

Als Amerikaner finde ich es äußerst seltsam, dass Deutsche russische Angriffe auf kritische Infrastruktur erleben, aber versuchen, die Nachrichten auf „linksextreme” oder „Umweltaktivisten”-Bedrohungen zu lenken.

Nehmen wir Juni 2025 als Beispiel. Bundesinnenminister Alexander Dobrindt präsentierte den Verfassungsschutzbericht. Er hält eine große Grafik hoch. Er verkündet selbstbewusst, dass gewaltorientierte Linksextremisten „deutlich auf 11.200 steigen.”

Verstanden? Steigend. Stark nach oben. Von was aus, fragen Sie?

Die Grafik zeigt, dass die Zahl von 11.200 auf… Moment… 11.200 gestiegen ist.

Flach.

Der Mann ist nicht blind, aber er kann nicht „sehen”. Er ist ein Regierungsbeamter, der einen offiziellen Bericht über gefährliche Bedrohungen vorlegt und anderen buchstäblich sagt, sie sollen auch nicht sehen. Sein Bericht zeigt noch immer: rechtsextreme Gewalttaten um 47% gestiegen. Linksextreme Gewalttaten um 26,8% gesunken.

Fakten.

Dobrindt stand vor der Welt und verkündete kaltblütig das genaue Gegenteil dessen, was seine eigenen Beweise zeigen.

Er hält es in seinen Händen, zeigt es hoch, und kann die flachen Linien nicht „sehen” oder rechnen. Noch schlimmer: andere machen mit, lassen ihn Monate später weitermachen und tun so, als hätte der deutsche Sicherheitsminister nicht gerade völlig versagt.

Der Spinnster spinnt

Es gibt Menschen, die von Daten herausgefordert werden wollen. Sie scheuen das Unbehagen des Unbekannten nicht. Sie haben eine Methode für Updates, ein Budget zum Ausgeben.

Es gibt Menschen, die wollen, dass Daten bestätigen, was ihnen Komfort gibt und was sie bereits glauben. Sie suchen wenig oder keine Herausforderung. Sie filtern vor und geizen mit jedem Cent.

Das ist eine nahezu universelle Architektur, eine epistemische Haltung, die als Präferenz für geschlossene Systeme auftaucht. Die Angst vor dem Unbekannten. Das Bedürfnis, vertraute Bedrohungen in vertraute Schubladen zu zwingen.

Dobrindt ist ein besonders schlechter Politiker. Er ist in Deutschland berüchtigt als der Mann, der Kupfer statt Glasfaser wählte und Deutschland auf den letzten Platz der europäischen Breitband-Rankings fallen ließ. Das war bevor er 11.200 und 11.200 betrachtete und einen „deutlichen Anstieg” verkündete. Und das war bevor er russische GRU-Spuren im Berliner Schnee um Infrastrukturangriffe herum betrachtete und erklärte „können nicht die Russen sein.”

Das Muster des Mannes handelt nicht von Fehlern. Es ist seine Funktion. Deutschland braucht offenbar noch immer Politiker, die Feinde als stabil und Bedrohungen als vorhersehbar erklären, unabhängig von der Realität. Linke Gefahr ist Dobrindts gemütliche Schublade. Russische Staatsführung ist es nicht.

1951 hielt Solomon Asch zwei Linien hoch. Eine war offensichtlich kürzer. Als alle anderen im Raum sagten, sie seien gleich lang, machten 75% der Probanden mindestens einmal mit. Danach gaben die meisten zu, dass sie wussten, dass die Antwort falsch war. Sie wollten nur nicht derjenige sein, der anders sah.

Dobrindt hält eine Grafik hoch. Die Linie ist flach. Er sagt „steigt deutlich.” Die Russen greifen an und er sagt „linksextrem”.

Vergangenheit ist nicht vergangen, wenn sie nicht verarbeitet wurde

Jede Kultur hat dieses Architekturproblem. Deutschlands Version ist besonders brüchig, weil sie glauben, hart gearbeitet und es behoben zu haben. Sie scheinen oft zu glauben, sie müssten nicht mehr hinschauen oder zuhören.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung behandelte den Inhalt einer Katastrophe. Und niemand hat offenbar die Struktur angegangen — die kognitive Maschinerie, die sich an falschen Narrativen festklammert und sie gegen alle Beweise hält, weil das Narrativ vollständig tragend ist.

Antisemitismus war in Deutschland so gefährlich, weil seine Lügen zur Infrastruktur wurden. Sobald ein falsches Bedrohungsnarrativ soziale Funktionen erfüllt — Identität, Zugehörigkeit, Erklärung, Komfort — werden alle Beweise zu Rauschen. Die Vorfilterungsschicht lässt widersprechende Daten fallen, bevor sie die bewusste Bewertung erreichen.

Dobrindt hält eine Grafik hoch, die seinen Worten offensichtlich widerspricht. Das System verarbeitet seine Autorität mit seinen Worten und verwandelt seine Beweise in einen Beweis, dass ein Filter funktioniert. Er testet die Maschinerie für ein anderes Ziel. Wenn Sie reagieren, werden Sie als Unruhestifter markiert. Wenn Sie sehen, fallen Sie als Ungläubiger auf, unfähig zu vertrauen, vielleicht versuchen Sie Konflikte zu verursachen.

Es ist nicht nur individuelles kognitives Versagen — es ist Konformitätsarchitektur. Sehen wird zur Abweichung. Die Vorfilterung ist nicht nur intern; sie wird überwacht.

Der Film Stasikomödie kommt mir als Illustration in den Sinn.

Deutsche weigern sich zu „sehen”

Thomas Zimmer, January 21:

The idea that there are no protests in the US and no one is standing up to Trump is proving incredibly hard to kill over here in Germany. It’s become dogma, utterly detached from empirical reality. I wonder if the people who keep talking like that understand they’re perpetuating regime propaganda.

Zwei Tage später: Minnesota hat einen Generalstreik. Hunderte von Geschäften schließen. “The Lotus” sagt Reportern, sie bleiben offen, um Demonstranten aus Respekt und Solidarität zu versorgen. 50.000 trotzen eisiger Kälte, um zu marschieren. Hundert Geistliche werden verhaftet.

Harvards Daten zeigen über 10.000 Proteste im Jahr 2025, was einem Anstieg von 133% gegenüber dem Vorjahr entspricht. Carnegie verfolgt es offen für alle Deutschen sichtbar. Die Beweise sind öffentlich, autoritativ und kostenlos.

Deutsche „sehen” die Zahlen nicht, weil „Amerikaner protestieren nicht” Infrastruktur für sie ist, um ihren eigenen politischen Komfort zu beschleunigen. Es erlaubt Besorgnis ohne Verpflichtung zu verstehen, was als nächstes kommt. Beobachtung ohne Solidarität. Moralischer Komfort beim Zuschauen aus einer Position der Selbstverleugnung.

Neugier würde echte Arbeit erfordern, Aktualisierung. Aktualisierung würde echtes Handeln erfordern. Handeln würde erfordern, ein Risiko des Unbekannten einzugehen.

Deutsche stecken oft in ihrer Vorfilterungsschicht fest. Das Unbekannte ist eine Ausgabe, die sie nicht bereit sind zu tragen.

Fiktionsfunktion: Komfortarchitektur

Dobrindts CSU-Partei setzt auf das Schüren von Hass gegen Phantome der „Linken”, weil die Erben der Nazi-Partei (AfD) ihre Stimmen von rechts auffressen. Eine politische Gefahr zu fabrizieren während man rechtsextreme Daten löscht, ist keine Verwirrung — es ist zynische politische Strategie.

Eine Regierung, die russische Angriffe anerkennt, muss auf komplexe Bedrohungen reagieren. Eine Regierung, die Phantome beschuldigt, kann unendlich Wahlkampf machen.

Nach dem Berliner Blackout schwor Dobrindt, gegen ein Phantom von Linksextremisten „zurückzuschlagen”. Staatsgewalt wurde gegen die sinkende Bedrohung versprochen, während die steigende Bedrohung ignoriert wurde — genau wie der Faschismus in Amerika.

Wenn amerikanische Demonstranten ausgelöscht werden, ist der Aufstieg von Amerikas Hitler so viel angenehmer für Deutsche zu schlucken.

Menschen, die das Unbekannte fürchten, bauen Systeme, um es fernzuhalten. Dann sind sie blind, wenn es in vertrauter Kleidung ankommt.