This is not a new idea. Several democratic politicians have suggested the re-education camps will be needed once they return to power. In June 2024, Paula Collins a New York Democratic Socialist candidate for the US House of Representatives, called for re-educating the MAGA movement if a blue wave materialized.
Collins realized the mistake in phrasing that she used but doubled down on the idea. Said Collins, “Even if we were to have a resounding blue wave come through, as many of us would like, putting it all back together again after we’ve gone through this MAGA nightmare and re-educating basically, which, that sounds like a rather, a re-education camp. I don’t think we really want call it that. I’m sure we can find another way to phrase it.”
I am sure that they would not want to call it that. That smacks of communism in many different countries where people were sent to “camps” to be re-educated into communist ideologies. Collins exposed just how far down the slippery slope she had gone when she made these statements.
In January, 2021, WaPo hack Eugen Robinson had this to say:
“We have, there are millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed. It’s as if they are members of a cult, the Trump-ist cult, and have to be deprogrammed. Do you have any idea how we start that process, much less complete it?”
Then there was Steve Hassan on CNN:
“An authority on religious cults told CNN Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s influence has been so great that “all of America needs to be deprogrammed”
There have been many others on the Left side of the aisle that have engaged in this type of rhetoric. Most recently, Paul Krugman, a former columnist for the NYTimes, has come out with this idea.
Specifically Krugman has coined the word de-MAGAfication to decribe this idea. Krugman openly admits that he wants to replicate Germany’s post-World War II de-nazification in the United States.
De-Nazification was an attempt to change the thinking of persons who had supported the Nazi regime. In the end a potential case load of 7,000,000 was identified. Many tens of thousands were sent to internment camps. Krugman thinks that the millions who supported Trump should face the same fate.
Krugman: Obviously, we need to defang Trump as much as possible, and make sure that neither he nor anybody who follows in his footsteps has power after the next two elections. But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a deMAGAfication, and that is, you know, I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War Two in Germany.
This man engages in supporting some very bad claptrap ideas. However, this one probably tops the list. As a NYTimes columnist, Krugman often wrote on political and economic issues. His ideas were so resounding bad, that a popular podcast ran for several years called Contra-Krugman where his economic fallacies were dissected. However, again this idea probably is at the top of a mountain of bad ideas.
All true Americans need to understand what the Left will do if they regain power. Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for freedom.