Fauci, Mamdani, and the New Totalitarians

It says much about our current condition that sometimes the most insightful political commentary appears as satire at The Babylon Bee. Yesterday morning one of the Bee’s headlines read “To Fight Antisemitism, Mamdani Announces Mandatory ‘Safety Camps’ for Jewish Residents.” The article has Mamdani supposedly saying that the “best way to keep Jews safe is by concentrating them into tiny camps away from those who would do them harm,” with further references to transporting them by train as part of the mayor’s “final solution” to the antisemitism problem.

This is the Bee, of course, and the whole thing, every word, is made up. Let’s be clear about that; Mamdani has said no such thing — at least not yet. But here’s the thing. Even as the Bee is indulging in putatively outrageous satire, over at the National Review, Noah Rothman presents an entirely serious — and chilling — suggestion that the satire might not be quite so outrageous.

The most frightening aspect is that there are many millions of American who are open to totalitarian solutions to political problems.

Rothman’s essay is titled “The DSA Envisions a ‘World Without Prisons,’ but Not One Without Camps.” A quick glance at the article’s comments section demonstrates that Rothman has touched a nerve with DSA adherents and those who sympathize with them, which includes virtually every leftist Democrat, even those who are not affiliated with the DSA.

In addition to summarizing how the supposedly “Democratic” Socialists of the DSA envision a wholesale attack on the U.S. Constitution, Rothman focuses on one of the great ironies of the DSA position on policing, namely that “defunding the police” or “doing away with prisons” or “abolishing the carceral state” is accompanied by an impulse to lock up all those with whom they disagree. Rothman observes that “the far-left activist class” almost unanimously supports the notion that the “entire Israeli government should be in prison.”

Start with arresting Benjamin Netanyahu should be visit New York, as Mayor Mamdani wished to do. But the “lock ‘em up” tendency extends much further. In DSA world, Donald Trump is a “war criminal” and, so too, variously, are Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and a host of others. “War criminals,” of course, are meant to be locked away, or, reaching back to the Nuremberg trials, executed by hanging. The DSA may want to end the “carceral state” with one hand, but their other hand very much wants the opposite for its declared enemies.

It’s this impulse that brings us back to the Babylon Bee’s satire and, specifically, its casting of locking up Jews and other enemies as something done for their own safety. It’s a little-known fact that this is exactly — not approximately, not figuratively, but exactly — how the real Nazis framed the foundations of the concentration camp system. One tends to think of the concentration camp system as it existed in its final wartime form, utterly divorced from any legal structure other than the murderous anti-Jewish passions of Hitler and the authority derived from his unlimited power as “Fuehrer.”

But in the early days, as the Nazi system of repression was first implemented, continuity with existing legal and administrative structure played an important role. Thus, the early Gestapo drew heavily upon pre-existing political police agencies and their personnel. The infamous Heinrich “Gestapo “Mueller, for example, got his start as a political policeman in Weimar-era Munich.

The legal justification for the first formal concentration camp at Dachau, and for those that soon followed, was found in pre-existing laws governing the application of something called “Schutzhaft,” or “protective custody.” As the name implies, this was a long-existing legal mechanism for taking someone into custody for their own personal protection. During the First World War, German police and military authorities had pioneered it adaptation to the purpose of “legally removing political undesirables from circulation, although this was applied on a case-by-case retail basis.

In 1934 the Nazis picked this up in a series of early decrees, applying it first to the wave of arrests of their political enemies in the Hitler regime’s early days, and then expanding its wholesale to include Jews and other “undesirables.” This, in turn, strained the capacity of existing prisons, leading to the formal establishment of the concentration camp system. What began, then, as the impulse to lock up political opponents and Jews thus led inexorably from Dachau to Auschwitz.

But it started, at least for public consumption, as providing “protection,” and sometimes this was made quite explicit. In the aftermath of the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, the round up of Jews was frequently cast as necessary to protect them against the “justified” anger of mobs of German citizens. When one reflects upon the treatment of Jewish students on our college campuses by pro-Hamas mobs, it’s not so great a reach to imagine a political leader of anti-Jewish inclination to trot out “protective custody” as a means of incarcerating Jewish citizens.

This is what made the Bee’s satire so apposite and so frightening. Could the DSA even hope to get away with such a thing. In our current state, it’s pretty much unimaginable. Still, this brings us full circle to Rothman’s larger point, namely that, if the DSA someday has its way, all our existing constitutional protections, the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court and separation of powers, might disappear or be reduced to mere formalities, utterly without substance.

We already have experienced multiple proposals for packing the Supreme Court. Moreover, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, already ratified by 18 states and the District of Columbia, is explicitly intended to destroy the Electoral College and its ability to deter unchecked popular “democracy.” Make no mistake, our constitutional republic is already under siege, and not just by the hard left radicals of the DSA.

The most frightening aspect, however, is not the existence of some 100,000 formal DSA members, or even the millions of leftist Democrats who’ve increasingly announced their fealty to DSA positions. The most frightening aspect is that there are many millions of American who are open to totalitarian solutions to political problems.

The recent release of the Fauci diaries and this week’s congressional attempt to finally hold Fauci accountable for his role in the excesses of the pandemic response serve as stark reminders of how quickly the totalitarian impulse can seize control of the body politic. At their worst, pandemic “health and safety” measures tore a gaping hole in freedoms we’d always cherished, freedoms we believed could never be taken. Lockdowns, masking, forced vaccination, jobs and lives destroyed, loved ones left to die alone and uncomforted by family. Things that, pre-pandemic, we would scarcely have imagined or countenanced.

And many millions of Americans became cheerleaders and, at worst, enforcers of this monstrosity. Looking back, however, and particularly, looking back over a period of several decades, this should not have been surprising. In 1982, humorist and political philosopher P.J. O’Rourke popularized the term “safety Nazi” to characterize the increasingly widespread movement to force our friends and neighbors to adhere to the latest popular health and safety fads.

C.S. Lewis had already identified this impulse, famously observing that “of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies…. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

It’s no great trick, after all, to persuade a mass of people that the things they like or approve of, whatever form these things take, are good in and of themselves, and that the world would be a better place if everyone would simply line up and take them, whether its lining up for shots, or lining up against “Islamophobia,” the terminological trick through which the left inverts its hatred for Jews and Christians.

When someone like Fauci can become a kind of rockstar, when his defenders still come out in force against those who would hold him accountable, we are in a bad place. When the benighted millions who went around wearing masks while driving still hold him a hero, then it’s all the worse for the rest of us. And when these same millions tend, as they too often do, to also buy into all the other shibboleths of the radical left, then we’re in a very bad place indeed.

They would like to put us all in “protective custody.” After all, it’s for our own good.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

When Islamists Joined the Nazis

Peace Process, Meet Reality

The Christian Slaughter the World Ignores

James H. McGee is a retired nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025. His next novel, The Cathedral of Sorrows, will directly focus on the plight of Africa’s Christians. You can find The Zebras from Minsk and his previous thriller, Letter of Reprisal in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon. The Cathedral of Sorrows will appear this fall.