Hello Again, Manzanar

In 7th grade, my English teacher had us read Farewell to Manzanar, a 1973 memoir which tells the true story of a young girl growing up inside the Manzanar Japanese-American internment camp during World War II. This was the first time I learned about what America had done to my fellow citizens in the very recent past. I was appalled. This was not the country I loved and believed in. I was somewhat comforted to know that this episode in our history was widely regretted, much the way any reasonable person looks back on the era of slavery or of Jim Crow with horror.

I did wonder, though, what people at the time (such as my grandparents) thought about this, and why FDR was so highly regarded when he was the one who signed Executive Order 9066, which set up the camps and caused the mass incarceration of about 120,000 innocent people.

Now I know. Most people simply did not think about it, just as today, most people choose not to think about what ICE is doing.

A new ACLU report, “Agents of Chaos and Cruelty,” goes into depth on the egregious, systemic civil-rights violations being carried out by this agency. It is “committing these violations at a scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s recent history.”

Earlier this month I wrote about whether the Left or the Right is worse on the issue of free speech. In that piece, I think I started to identify an issue that has much broader relevance, including to this topic.

I’ve noticed a near-universal trend when I speak with people who still support Trump, or more commonly, who say they disapprove of him but still think Republicans must be supported because the Left is so evil. First of all, they are fixated on the radical Left — the most extreme version of “liberal” ideology. I understand why that is. In many ways, the far Left is the most consistent and over time, consistency tends to succeed. Unfortunately, we’re seeing this play out in real time as young people are increasingly smitten with socialism (see my recent Substack: “Is Democratic Socialism the Next Big Thing?”).

But another big factor is that their focus is almost exclusively on future harm. They worry about all the terrible things the Left might do if elected. Again, this is not unreasonable — the Left (especially the far Left) will do terrible things, or at least try to, if they gain power.

But the part that is unreasonable is that in focusing so exclusively on the evil that the Left might do, they tend to ignore or minimize the evil that the Right is already doing right now.

Yes, it would be terrible for the country to institute a wealth tax. That is a scary possible future event. But why is so little outrage afforded to the taxes that Trump has already burdened the country with? Tariffs, of course, but also the stealth tax of the national debt. Trump has increased spending and debt more than any other president. While holding the office for only 2% of the country’s history, he is responsible for 25% of our total debt! This is a current and ongoing problem, not a hypothetical future one. But no one seems to want to focus on this.

These people also worry about the freedoms we will lose if the Left has their way. They are passionate when discussing all the evils that might befall us, but are curiously mute or subdued about the terrible laws and policies that millions of people are currently suffering under. Why aren’t they outraged about the biggest loss to human freedom in this country in my lifetime: the loss of a woman’s right to control her own body? Again, this isn’t some theoretical future harm — this is happening now. Millions of women have lost the right to control their reproductive health and decide when (and if) they want to have children. Women have gone to jail in some jurisdictions for how they’ve dealt with their miscarriages. Women are dying because doctors are so scared of running afoul of the law that they refuse to give pregnant women needed care.

And then, of course, there is ICE. In addition to shooting innocent people in the streets, harassing citizens, and acting completely outside of constitutional restraints (ICE has defied court orders over 4400 times since October 2025), ICE is currently detaining about 73,000 people. This isn’t quite at the levels of the Japanese internment camps — but it’s not far off either. And the conditions in these facilities are widely reported to be terrible. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, after inspecting seven facilities in the state, said conditions were “cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable.” This isn’t just the opinion of one “Leftie” — it is corroborated by numerous human-rights watchers as well as heart-breaking first-person accounts from the few who’ve been lucky enough to get out.

Again, this isn’t some future dystopia that might befall us — this is happening in present-day America.

I am not saying we should ignore the threat posed by the Left. But the fact is that they are not the ones currently running the government. The people who are running it are doing terrible things right now — and if we don’t push back and try to stop them, we not only implicitly sanction their actions, I think we actually increase the likelihood that the inevitable pendulum swing will bring us the worst version of the Left. I think our best bet for keeping the far-Left nut jobs from taking over is to marginalize the far-Right nut jobs — which means folks like Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Steve Bannon. We need to start moving the Overton window away from statism, which means supporting the more sane and moderate candidates (of whichever party) AND fervently opposing statist policies, regardless of the “side” of the political spectrum from which they emerge.

I brought up the Japanese internment camps at the start of this article because I believe that in another generation, our children are going to be reading about the ICE detention centers and having much the same reaction that I had in reading about Manzanar. How did we let this happen? Why did a free country treat human beings this way? We must not become so consumed by fear of what might happen in the future that we allow terrible things to happen in the here and now. Appeasing evil in the name of fighting some other evil doesn’t work. It merely normalizes evil. And despite their protestations, and their justified disgust with “the Left,” that is what those who still support this administration are doing.