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People deported from the United States, presumed to be members of a Venezuelan gang, at the Terrorism Internment Center in Tecoluca,
El Salvador, on Sunday, March 16, 2025. Photo: Press Office of the Presidency of El Salvador via AP
Without the slightest trace of a trial, and in defiance of the American federal justice system, 300 migrants alleged to be members of a Venezuelan gang have been deported indefinitely to a mega-prison in El Salvador with a sinister reputation: a modern-day concentration camp. By thus freeing himself from the rule of law, Donald Trump is confirming the coup d'état he is in the process of accomplishing. In the United States, but not only there. Behind the scenes of the “negotiation” with Putin on Ukraine, an influential ideologue of Trumpism reveals that it would be a question of “giving carte blanche to Russia not only in Russian-speaking territories, but right up to the English Channel” and of “totally removing American influence from the European continent”.
They are faceless, they are nameless.
Shaved head, shackled hands and ankles.
They are “sub-humans”, according to the term first used in 1922 by the American author and Ku Klux Klan member Lothrop Stoddard (1), then adopted by the Nazis (2).
By presidential order announced last Saturday, without the slightest court decision, Donald Trump had about 300 migrants, presented as members of a Venezuelan gang, “El Tren de Aragua” (3), deported aboard two planes. Without the slightest shred of evidence. “These are bad people,” Trump said. To give some semblance of legitimacy to this mass deportation, he invoked a 1798 law on foreign enemies, “the Alien Enemies Act”, which has only been used three times in the history of the United States (during the War of 1812 and during both world wars). This law requires the president to declare that the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or deport foreigners who would otherwise be protected by immigration or criminal laws. When asked about the possibility of invoking presidential powers used in times of war, Trump said: “We are at war”, describing the influx of criminal migrants as an “invasion”.
This first “wartime” deportation will undoubtedly be followed by many more... The US Congress has allocated 41,500 detention beds to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in holding centers. Where? White supremacist Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff of the White House (4), raised the idea of “large-scale assembly camps near the border, most likely in Texas”.
These first allegedly Venezuelan deportees were taken and imprisoned, again without the slightest trial, in El Salvador, in exchange for a payment of 6 million dollars to the freedom-destroying government of Nayib Ortez (5). Destination: the sinister Terrorism Internment Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca. With a capacity of 40,000 inmates, the CECOT is made up of eight sprawling pavilions. Its cells hold 65 to 70 prisoners each. They receive no visits. There are no programs to prepare them for social reintegration after their sentence, no workshops or educational programs. They are never allowed to go out.A concentration camp, no more, no less, now funded by the United States to get rid of undesirables, these “sub-humans” who are “bad people”. How far will the list of “undesirables” reach?
The Terrorism Internment Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Photos Salvador Melendez / AP
In a speech last Friday, after fulminating against his political opponents and making lengthy digressions about the late basketball coach Bob Knight, Donald Trump declared: “We are restoring fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
The “foreign enemy act” that Trump invoked to deport the supposed “Venezuelan terrorists” gives the president the power to quickly detain and expel “all natives, citizens, inhabitants or subjects” of a “hostile nation or government” in the event of a declared war against the United States or “invasion or predatory incursion”. However, the United States is not at war with Venezuela; and the Tren de Aragua clan, against which the presidential decree is directed, is not a “nation or government”; and it is by no means an invasion or incursion. Trump is trying to get around these numerous problems by claiming that Tren de Aragua is “closely aligned” with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, to the point that the gang and the Venezuelan government would constitute a “criminal hybrid state”.
Even more serious: a judge of the federal court of the District of Columbia, Judge James Boasberg, issued an emergency temporary restraining order on Saturday at 5 p.m. prohibiting the federal government from deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador. Trump ignored this court decision, claiming that the planes had already left (which seems untrue, at least for one of them). “Oops, too late,“ quipped the Salvadoran president with a tweet humorously picked up by Elon Musk. And on Fox News, Tom Homan, Trump's appointed ‘border czar,’ blurted out, without trying to be clever: ”We will not stop. I don't care what the left thinks. I don't care what the judges think."
In line with what we wrote about the imminence of a coup (HERE and HERE), this sounds like a declaration of war... on the rule of law. This is indeed a “regime change”, as pointed out by historian Timothy Snyder, a Holocaust specialist, in his latest, formidable article, published yesterday on his blog (HERE, in English). “The expulsion [of the Venezuelans] was carried out in violation of a court decision, in accordance with a plan to undo the rule of law,” he writes: “This means that the action was not only specifically illegal, but was designed as a challenge to the rule of law as such.”
Timothy Snyder knows the history of totalitarian regimes, of Nazism in particular, well enough to add: "There is no basis for this deportation beyond speech acts and keyboard acts. It is the words (‘foreign terrorists’, ‘monsters’) that do the work. There is no procedure between the movement of the mouths and the movement of the bodies. If members of the executive branch are allowed to make truth claims that result in human beings leaving the United States, we are in a dictatorship. If we accept that the executive branch can simply deport anyone it labels a “foreign terrorist,” then none of us has any rights."
“The language used has a specific resonance that, historically, has been used to change the type of regime,” continues Timothy Snyder: "Beyond even questions of right and wrong, of reality and unreality, there is the question of language and behavior. We need to think about how words are chosen and what they are supposed to do for us. “Foreigner” means that they are not us. “Alien” means that we must hate them. “Terrorist” means that we must hate them enough to authorize a state of emergency, a suspension of normal practices, a change of regime. There is a long history of this, all over the world, including Hitler in 1933 and Stalin in 1934."
“We have entered a constitutional crisis,” wrote law professors and teachers in an opinion piece (HERE) on February 26: "The United States government and laws are not at the mercy of presidential whim. On the contrary, the President is required to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ And he is bound by oath to “faithfully execute” his office as President and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. (…) In the words of President John F. Kennedy: “Americans are free (…) to disagree with the law, but not free to disobey it. For in a government of laws, not of men, no man, be he ever so high-placed or so powerful (…) is above the law or beyond its reach.” (…) Our democracy can survive, but not without the law."
In the United States, denunciation is already starting to affect those who seek to defend the rule of law, first and foremost the judges, targeted by a shameful campaign conducted jointly by Fox News and Elon Musk, which makes public confidential data (information on their families and friends, tax records) that the young militiamen of the DOGE have illegally stolen from the computers of the federal administration. Simple political “opponents” will follow, the deviants, the recalcitrant... (In France, Darmanin had tried his hand at it, describing the activists of the Earth Uprisings as “eco-terrorists”, before being overruled by the Council of State). After the massive layoff of federal employees, after the discrediting of scientists and researchers, who's next? The poor, of course... Elon Musk has already begun to decimate social security and federal benefit programs (with fake news about alleged fraud), suggesting that these social programs would be a primary target in his crusade to reduce public spending.
In Washington, on February 5th 2025, assembled demonstrators aginst budget cuts to the USAid progam. Photo J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Until his wallet is affected, the average American may think this has nothing to do with him. And the same average American probably feels very far removed from Lesotho, the (small) African country that Donald Trump has thrust into the spotlight (in a non-Warholian way) by criticizing it for the millions of dollars that are allegedly being poured into it for LGBT actions (in reality, a program to fight AIDS, which has saved 26 million lives, especially in Africa). Certainly, the budget cuts made by the Trump administration and the DOGE pose serious threats to global health, but also to the United States, as we wrote recently when translating an article from The Atlantic (HERE), but it is unlikely that Fox News and Elon Musk's X account will relay such information to American households.
In an article published yesterday by Le Monde on the cancellation of 5,200 contracts under the USAID program, Jean-Michel Bezat attacks Donald Trump's “shopkeeper's vision”. Because “the Trump administration”, writes the journalist, “forgets that the development of countries like those in Africa also benefits Western industries. (…) This international aid has never been pure philanthropy. A bipartisan consensus, now defunct, considered it one of the means of stemming Soviet influence, like the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe in the 1950s. After the Cold War, the presidents of the Grand Old Party, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, made it part of the missions assigned to the United States: to defend the liberal economy and democratic values (despite serious setbacks in Latin America).
So be it. But perhaps we seriously need to start considering that “the liberal economy” and “democratic values” are not, for Trump and the MAGA clique, objectives to be defended. And the scuttling of USAID programs would be all the less the “miscalculation” of a simple “shopkeeper,” including in terms of health. In the minds of Trump and a number of his supporters, there is no reason to bother with all these “shithole countries” or to come to the aid of vulnerable populations condemned to vegetate and die. A new form of eugenics on a large scale? Yes. It's part of the program. Suspense: we will see this in a future publication of les humanités.
Curtis Yarvin in July 2023, in a video posted on YouTube (1.7 million views)
where he explains that democracy must be scrapped.
And what about Ukraine in all this? This Tuesday, March 18, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are talking on the phone. What will they talk about? Perhaps the construction of a gigantic luxury hotel complex in Crimea? We're not making this up. Indeed: "Why isn't Crimea, one of the world's real estate gems, dotted with ‘charter cities’ full of global nomad workers? Crimea could be California but with real police. Instead, it's a half-ruined swamp run by a local thug.“
The author of these remarks is a fool, but a dangerous one, who does not understand that one can speak ill of the Nazis in Germany, since they ‘did a good job’ (”Nazi terror was legitimate because it worked"). A fool who plays the intellectual, and who, from his programmatic pulpit, whispers in the ear of US Vice-President J. D. Vance, among others. Les humanités have already talked about it (in “la facho-tech au cœur de Trumpland”, HERE): Curtis Yarvin, alias Mencius Moldbug. Together with Nick Land, a “thinker” of eugenics and “hyper-racism”, he founded an anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx).
Now, Curtis Yarvin has a plan for Ukraine, which has just been unearthed by our colleagues at Grand Continent(HERE). This text, which dates from January 2022, sends a chill down the spine. It is reminiscent of the text by Timofei Sergeev, the Kremlin ideologue, which we translated and published in April 2022 under the title “Putin's Mein Kampf” (HERE).
Curtis Yarvin fully adopts Putin's revisionism on Ukraine: "Ukraine was the core of the original Russian state and has been a province of Russia. Ukraine is hardly less Russian than Texas is American, and far more Russian than Alsace is French. Like “South Sudan”, the modern “nation” of “Ukraine” is a joke invented by the State Department—a historical coincidence conceived in the collusion between Stalin and Alger Hiss to give the former a vote in the UN, in the all-important General Assembly, for each of his provinces—and then born during one of Boris Yeltsin's vodka binges. And Wilhelm II is also in on it, in a way. It was an excellent way to dismantle the Soviet Union. And “the Ukrainian language is a peasant dialect”, etc., etc.
Trump has already made numerous concessions to Putin, particularly on the issue of war crimes: after suspending funding for researchers at Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, whose reports have informed the work of the International Criminal Court on child deportations, the US government decided to “reduce the work” of the War Crimes Accountability Team (known by the abbreviation WarCAT), the team within the United States Department of Justice that is also working on war crimes committed in Ukraine; and finally, Washington has just decided to withdraw from the International Center for the Prosecution of Crimes of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA), a judicial coordination platform created in July 2023 that brought together prosecutors from several countries, and which aimed in particular to collect, preserve and analyze evidence to identify those responsible for the crime of aggression committed against Ukraine.
With little more consideration for Slavs in general (those “snow monkeys in tracksuits”), Curtis Yarvin believes that all of Ukraine should be left to Putin, and not just Ukraine: "Trump should give Russia carte blanche not only in Russian-speaking territories, but all the way to the English Channel. The aim of a Trumpian foreign policy in Europe is to completely remove American influence from the continent. This will guarantee the defeat of liberalism there, while here in America it will show liberals and conservatives that liberalism is deadly—with considerable effects on the morale of both sides. But as Clausewitz said, all conflicts are above all a question of morale.Liberal ideas do not originate from this region. They are Anglo-American ideas. They were brought by a tide of money, fashion and bombs. And which nation has done the most and the best it could, over the last two centuries, to defeat liberalism in Europe? The Germans of the 20th century may have tried - but the Russians of the 19th century succeeded. (…) Today, it is Russia's destiny to restore order in Europe. But since America is stronger than Russia, Trump really needs to let Putin know that it is acceptable to do so. And there is only one way to send this message unequivocally: withdraw from Europe."
Russia will then be, for Curtis Yarvin, the centerpiece of the “neo-Russo-fascist” (fascist, to be precise) offensive in Europe: "Having carte blanche in Europe, Putin won't even need to use it. There won't be armies of tanks crossing the Fulda Gap, like in a wargame of the 1970s. Even a gas cut-off in winter would be unnecessarily clumsy. Did the United States invade the Warsaw Pact countries in 1989? They didn't need to - they were already clearly the center of gravity. Russia simply has to provide reinforcement and support to the anti-American regimes that will naturally emerge when American influence withdraws. (…) It follows that, just as post-war Europe was a laboratory of democracy, so the new post-Trump Europe must become a laboratory of reaction. Once Putin has carte blanche on the continent, each old European nation will find a helping hand to restore its traditional culture and form of government – the more autocratic and legitimate the better."
Needless to say, it has already begun. And at the heart of this “laboratory of reaction” and this “hybrid war”, on the Russian side, we find the Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin and the fascist billionaire Konstantin Malofeev, who recently married the “Orthodox” Maria Lvova-Belova after having financed the deportation of Ukrainian children; and on the American side, Mario Nawfal, a young protégé of Elon Musk, Andrew Napolitano, an old school libertarian, close to Ron Paul and Alex Jones, and Lex Fridman, a pseudo “journalist” loyal to the MAGA movement. All these fine people met in early March in Moscow: the whole thing was very well documented by Lise Dupas on her Facebook page (HERE).
In France? We already have a little Curtis Yarvin. One of them is called Pierre Gentillet. He was immediately spotted in the wake of Thierry Mariani's Franco-Russian Dialogue, engaged to Konstantin Malofeev, whom we have just mentioned. Nurtured on the milk of the Kremlin, it is no surprise that this Pierre Gentillet questioned the Butcha massacre in April 2022. This neo-fascist, who readily appeals to the thinking of Carl Schmitt, one of the henchmen of Nazi National Socialism, never ceases to intervene in various far-right media, with the same refrain: the enemy to be defeated is our “rule of law”, the spearhead, according to him, of the “liberal ideology” that must be replaced by a “national vision”. In the shadows, Pierre Gentillet is today one of the most influential “ideologues” within the Rassemblement National. No doubt he shares this maxim of Curtis Yarvin: “Dogs must be free to run and play. (...) The right to make war is the most fundamental attribute of national sovereignty. Each nation is independent: it exists by its own power. If this power fails, it disappears.”
Jean-Marc Adolphe
NOTES
(1). In the title of his book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. Stoddard thus refers to those he considers incapable of functioning in civilization, which he generally attributes (but only in part) to racial causes.
(2). “Untermensch” (plural: “Untermenschen”), literally “sub-human”, is a term used by the Nazis to describe non-Aryan “inferior beings”, often referred to as “Eastern hordes”, i.e. Jews and Slavs - mainly Poles, Serbs and Russians. The term was also applied to Blacks, mulattos and, temporarily, Finno-Ugric peoples. The Jews were to be exterminated in the Holocaust, as were the Roma and the physically and mentally disabled. According to the Generalplan Ost, the Slavic or Jewish population of Central Europe was to be eliminated, either by massacres like the Holocaust, or by mass expulsions to Asia or by reduction to slave status, in accordance with Nazi racial policy.
(3). The Tren de Aragua originated in an infamous prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied the exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their country's economy collapsed over the past decade. Mr. Trump seized on this gang during his campaign to paint a misleading picture of communities that he said were “under assault” by what were in fact only a handful of lawbreakers.
(4). Stephen Miller's views on immigration are so extreme that his own uncle wrote an op-ed in which he pointed out that, under his nephew's policies, their family would never have been allowed to come to the United States.
(5). In 2025, his emergency regime, renewed 34 times since 2021, led to the incarceration of more than 100,000 people, often without trial, with numerous testimonies from families with no news of their loved ones who disappeared after an arrest.
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