The Warning Signs Are Everywhere. Do We Still Have Time?

“The main lesson from Nuremberg was and is — and I hope it will remain — that war can make murderers out of otherwise decent people, including mass murderers.” - Ben Ferencz, Nuremberg Prosecutor

He said that as someone who had seen it firsthand, walking through the death camps in the days after liberation, collecting evidence of mass murder, and standing in court to make sure the world would remember what happens when hatred is allowed to thrive and power goes unchecked.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about how history actually happens. As I gathered with my family for Thanksgiving today, my mind kept drifting to those who have been separated by Trump’s personal army, ICE. I thought about the families torn apart. About the holding centers. About the fear. And about how, in history, it often starts this way, with people being rounded up, detained, held apart, and how that path has led, again and again, to the worst chapters we swore we would never repeat.

Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive all at once. It builds slowly, almost quietly. In language. In policy. In who gets blamed, who gets ignored, and who gets treated like a criminal. The worst chapters don’t begin with violence; they begin in the space where people choose comfort over confrontation. Where people convince themselves that the man doing the harm is actually helping them, even when the evidence is right in front of them proving otherwise.

The Holocaust didn’t begin with camps. It began with dehumanization. With silence. With the normalization of cruelty and the steady erosion of accountability. It began when ordinary people started telling themselves it wasn’t their problem, until it was.

No, we are not living through the Holocaust. But we are living in a moment that demands we remember what led to it.

That’s why Ben Ferencz’s words feel heavier now than they did just a few years ago. He didn’t only warn us about war, he warned us about the warning signs and how they always come before the breaking point. About the slow erosion of morality that happens long before a single shot is fired.

And if you’re watching what’s happening in 2025, the signs are everywhere. Truth is under siege. Entire communities are being scapegoated. Power is consolidating behind a man who sees the law as something to break or bend to his will. And those who dare to speak out against him are treated like enemies of the state.

What Ben Ferencz warned us about isn’t hypothetical anymore. Trump isn’t just repeating authoritarian language, he’s enforcing it through policy and power. The machinery is already in motion. ICE is rounding people up. Soldiers are being deployed for show. Loyalty is replacing law. And today, we saw exactly where that leads. Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old National Guard member, was killed during one of his domestic operations, a casualty of a system now built to serve one man’s image instead of the country’s safety.

And none of this is happening in a vacuum. It’s happening because Trump has stacked critical national security roles with men like Pete Hegseth, men who treat service like theater and war like a stage. For them, this isn’t about duty. It’s fun. It’s fantasy. It’s the chance to cosplay leadership while real people pay the price.

He’s filled critical security roles with unqualified extremists, and under their watch, a 20-year-old National Guard member is dead and another is fighting for their life.

She was killed standing guard in Washington, D.C., deployed not to defend against foreign threats, but to help enforce a show of force for the cameras. The man accused of shooting her had reportedly entered the U.S. under a Biden-era Afghan resettlement program in 2021, but his asylum was approved in April 2025 under the Trump administration. But rather than take any responsibility, Trump immediately blamed migrants. Blamed Democrats and Biden. Blamed everyone but the man in the mirror. The truth is, she should never have been there. Her life was gambled for optics. She died because Donald Trump wanted to look powerful and didn’t care who got caught in the middle.

Trump continues to use military force not as a last resort, but as a political weapon. And it’s not just his use of the National Guard he’s deployed inside our borders. Since the U.S. began airstrikes in September, now folded into an operation called “Southern Spear”, Trump has expanded military action across the Caribbean under the banner of fighting drug trafficking. His administration has continued to strike “suspected” drug-trafficking vessels, and dozens of people have been killed.

But that’s not where he’s stopping. Tonight, during a virtual address to U.S. service members, Trump announced that these traffickers are “no longer using sea routes,” and that land-based action against Venezuelan targets would begin “very soon.” He said this like it was already a done deal, like putting U.S. troops into a sovereign country without congressional approval was just another box to check off on his dictator to-do list.

This is not about public safety. It’s not even about Venezuela. This is about power. This is about attacking a country under false pretenses and with the knowledge that they lack the resources to even defend themselves in any real capacity, and he knows it.

He’s staging a conflict close enough to be loud, but far enough away to avoid real oversight. It’s the classic authoritarian formula: create a threat, stir panic, then demand more control to contain it. And while Americans are busy trying to make sense of the chaos at home, he’s laying the groundwork for war powers, not because we need them, but because he wants them.

And he wants them now. Because the walls are closing in. The Epstein files are coming. The courts are catching up. And Trump, like every authoritarian before him, is trying to change the subject by changing the battlefield.

And it’s already costing lives.

We’ve seen it before. Mussolini fueled street violence in Italy to justify his own rise. Nixon used racial unrest to launch a war on Black communities dressed up as law and order. These aren’t just echoes. They’re roadmaps, and Trump continues to follow them. Some nights, I wonder how much more obvious it can be?

And it’s not just the military. The corruption is spreading across every part of the executive branch. This week, explosive testimony revealed that the commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official, lied under oath, altering facts, misrepresenting timelines, and protecting Trump’s policies through deliberate deception. This isn’t one bad actor. This is what happens when entire agencies are bent to serve the will of one man instead of the rule of law.

When one of the top Border Patrol officials is accused by a federal judge of lying in sworn testimony and misrepresenting the timeline of his own use of tear gas, to help justify mass detentions and armed escalation, that’s not national security. That’s authoritarianism. This is what fascism looks like, fully integrated into the system. You don’t need tanks in the streets. You just need enough people in power who are willing to lie, stay silent, or follow orders without asking where they lead.

This is exactly what Ben Ferencz warned us about, not just war, but how it begins: with people, with governments, and with silence.

“Holocausts don’t just happen like a pandemic virus,” he said. “Holocausts are created by people and supported by governments for their own reasons. And if the public would say, ‘Hell no, we won’t go,’ they could stop it from happening. The power really lies in the people.”

He had seen it. Atrocities are built step by step, through policy, propaganda, and the quiet permission of the public. That’s why he insisted the power lies with the people. Because it does. Governments can pass laws. Courts can ignore the truth. But it still takes people to enforce injustice.

When Ferencz stood at Nuremberg, he opened with a line the world didn’t want to hear: “It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate murder of a million innocent people.” Sorrow for the victims. Hope that it could be prevented from happening again.

And then he said what still matters now: “Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.” It still is. Because what we’re witnessing today, immigrants being rounded up, dissent silenced, the military used against civilians, the rule of law collapsing, is not just a political failure. It’s a moral one.

And Ferencz gave us the answer: the law only works if we demand it. Justice only survives if we defend it.

And that’s what I kept coming back to today.

Even with everything we’re seeing, the violence, the lies, the erosion of law, I still found myself thinking about what hasn’t been lost, at least not yet.

We still have people willing to tell the truth. We still have laws that haven’t been rewritten. We still have the right to vote, to protest, to speak. And as long as those things remain, even in a damaged, weakened form, then not all hope is lost. If we still have the ability to push back, then we still have a responsibility to do it.

We still have something worth protecting. Something worth fighting for. And if we want to look our kids in the eye one day and tell them we didn’t give up, then we have to use what’s left while we still have it.

When I sat at the table this year for Thanksgiving, I wasn’t just thinking about what’s broken, I was thinking about what’s still here. About what hasn’t been taken. We still have each other, and we still have hope for better days. We still have time, but only if we decide to use it.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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