The Outsider Machine: State Violence, Operationalized by AI
Tyranny does not arrive as a moment
It is tempting to think tyranny arrives as a rupture you can point to later and say: that was it. A coup. A uniform. A mob. History is colder than that. Tyranny often arrives as a workflow. It arrives as language that makes pain feel explainable, as bureaucracy that makes punishment feel routine, and as a public trained to accept the explanation because it is easier than facing the truth.
The hard truth is that the 1930s were not an abstract decade. They were the Nazis. The outsider machine we keep politely describing in neutral terms had a name, an ideology, and a result.
Nazi Germany did not begin with mass extermination. It began with an outsider story that made suffering feel coherent.
Not “we made mistakes,” but “they did this to you.”
Not “our plans are failing,” but “the nation is being sabotaged.”
Not complexity, but contamination.
Propaganda did not merely persuade. It trained reflexes: who counts, who belongs, who can be blamed when reality does not cooperate. That mechanism is worth studying precisely because mechanisms repeat even when the aesthetic changes. And the United States is watching that mechanism being rebuilt in real time.
Break things. Blame outsiders. Scale the pipeline.
Here is the modern script, stripped of posture and reduced to function:
Break things.
Blame outsiders.
Scale the pipeline.
When policy choices create strain, responsibility is not absorbed. It is exported. When the numbers disappoint, the story is not “we miscalculated.” The story becomes simpler on purpose: someone else did this to us. Then the target list expands, because the point is not accuracy. The point is emotional direction.
Point the country outward.
Keep the base occupied.
Train domination to feel like leadership.
This is why rhetoric drifts toward symbolic conquest. Allies become foils. Territories become fantasies. Threats become theater. This is not normal governance behavior. It is rehearsal. A country trained to cheer threats can be trained to accept other forms of coercion too, especially when coercion is framed as protection and packaged as “order.”
And this is where I am not going to soften the comparison to make it easier to swallow. The pattern Trump is advancing mirrors the Nazi pattern in its operating logic: anointed “real” citizens, a targeted outsider class, and a narrative of national betrayal that turns policy failure into permission for punishment. Different era, different tools, same machinery.
The parallel to Nazi Germany is not aesthetic. It is structural. We are not collapsing history into a cheap equivalence. We are naming a governance pattern:
Define a “real” people who deserve safety and dignity.
Define an “outsider” class who deserves suspicion and punishment.
When reality turns against you, blame the outsider.
Then build systems that make the blame operational.
That fourth step is the modern upgrade, because propaganda no longer stops at the microphone. It becomes infrastructure.
AI is the new paperwork
In the 1930s, the Nazis built exclusion from files, lists, IDs, and neighbors trained to report. [10][11] The paperwork made hate administrative. It made cruelty feel procedural. It made disappearance feel like governance. [11]
In the 2020s, exclusion is built from data fusion, prioritization engines, and field biometrics. The paperwork is digital. The speed is the point. The scale is the weapon. The core promise is not only that enforcement is possible. It is that enforcement can be made efficient, frictionless, and therefore politically easier to expand.
Reporting has described ICE’s work with Palantir on “ImmigrationOS,” framed as an “immigration lifecycle” platform that includes targeting, enforcement prioritization, and logistics designed to move from identification to action more efficiently. [6][7][8]
Then there is the street layer.
Investigations by the Wall Street Journal describe “Mobile Fortify,” a facial recognition tool used in field encounters, effectively turning a phone camera into a portable identity claim. [9]
None of this needs to be “AI making final decisions” to be lethal to democracy. A system does not have to choose your sentence to decide your life.
It only needs to accelerate a pipeline:
Systems that decide who matters to enforcement.
Tools that identify people in public space.
Processes that treat due process as friction.
Once speed becomes the goal, rights become an inconvenience. Once throughput becomes the KPI, dignity becomes optional. Cruelty becomes a product requirement. The user experience gets polished. The harm gets normalized. The interface stays clean. That is the point.
And the comforting myth that protects authoritarian drift is always the same: it will only happen to them. But dragnets do not respect mythology. They respect incentives. In a volume-driven pipeline, errors are not anomalies. They are expected casualties. That is why “but what if I’m a citizen?” is no longer a shield. It is a prayer. It is also, increasingly, a bad strategy.
ProPublica has documented more than 170 U.S. citizens detained by immigration agents, in a context where the government does not even centrally track how often this occurs. [1][2][3]
Then there is the offshore shadow. Systems that want fewer constraints look for places with fewer constraints. When visibility becomes a threat to consent, visibility gets managed. When consent depends on distance, exposure becomes dangerous to power, so exposure is controlled, delayed, litigated, pulled, buried, reframed as “misunderstood.” The public is not meant to see what the pipeline does to bodies. The public is meant to see the performance of strength, and to feel the relief of having someone else to blame.
Human Rights Watch has documented torture and systemic abuse against Venezuelans held at El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, and reporting has covered the U.S. role in sending detainees into that system. [4][5]
The verdict, and the failure modes
A leader becomes a monster when his legitimacy depends on an outsider class, when he normalizes coercion as protection, and when he scales harm through systems that make cruelty feel clean. That is what Trump is doing. Not as an insult. As a description of governance. He scapegoats when policies strain. He threatens when reality resists. He builds an enforcement stack that treats people as records to be prioritized, captured, transferred, and made hard to reach. [6][7][8][9]
And yes, that is why the Nazi comparison matters. The Nazis did not begin with camps. They began by teaching the public that some people did not belong, and then building the administrative means to make that belief actionable. Trump’s project is not a museum reenactment. It is the same type of machine rebuilt with modern infrastructure and modern excuses.
He cannot be trusted to lead a democracy because democratic leadership requires constraints he does not respect and accountability he refuses to practice.
The AI layer matters because it turns ideology into operations. The pipeline fails in three predictable ways, and each one breaks people while preserving plausible deniability:
Prioritization failure: opaque logic flags who comes first, fed by incomplete or context-free data, then treated as objective because it arrives as a ranked list. [6][7][8]
Biometric failure: field facial recognition turns an encounter into a near-instant identity claim that agents may treat as definitive, even when the match is wrong or overconfident. [9]
Throughput failure: speed becomes the goal, transfers and detention disrupt counsel and family, and even citizens get swept in because volume rewards speed, not certainty. [1][2][3]
Fight back: lawful friction
Do not fantasize about outsmarting the machine. Jam it. Create lawful friction. Systems like this do not collapse from one heroic act. They slow, clog, and break when enough people create resistance at every layer.
Personal (today)
Carry proof in two places: on you and with a trusted person (secure copy).
Memorize two phone numbers; do not rely on a locked phone as your only lifeline.
Reduce data exhaust: disable nonessential location history, reset ad identifiers, audit app permissions.
OPT OUT OF FACIAL RECOGNITION WHEN OFFERED (TSA/AIRPORTS)
Community (this month)
Join or fund a rapid-response or legal aid network; solitary people get processed faster.
Support one investigative outlet and one civil-liberties group tracking enforcement tech, then amplify their verified calls to action.
Attend one city or county meeting where surveillance or procurement is on the agenda, and ask what tools are being used in the field.
Policy (this quarter)
Push for bans or moratoria on field facial recognition with audit, retention, and redress written into law.
Demand contract transparency for enforcement tech and fund FOIA work that forces disclosure.
Require documented pathways to challenge misidentification and detention, with consequences for agencies that obstruct access.
Democracy is not a national trait. It is a maintenance practice. Monsters do not stop because you hoped they would.
They stop when enough people refuse to become customers of cruelty, and decide instead to become friction.
References
Citizens detained
[1] ProPublica (Oct 16, 2025): “Immigration Agents Have Held More Than 170 Americans…”
[2] Congress.gov PDF referencing the ProPublica findings (Nov 19, 2025).
[3] ProPublica follow-ups (Oct 21, 2025) on congressional investigation.
CECOT abuses / U.S. transfers
[4] Human Rights Watch report (Nov 12, 2025): “‘You Have Arrived in Hell’…”
[5] HRW news release summarizing the report and transfers.
ImmigrationOS
[6] Wired (Apr 18, 2025): ICE paying Palantir $30M to build ImmigrationOS.
[7] American Immigration Council (Aug 21, 2025): explainer of ImmigrationOS functions (targeting/prioritization, self-deportation tracking, lifecycle management).
[8] Brookings (Oct 6, 2025): “How tech powers immigration enforcement” (summarizes ImmigrationOS and functions).
Mobile Fortify
[9] Wall Street Journal (recent): ICE using Mobile Fortify facial recognition app.
Nazi administrative mechanisms
[10] USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia (Oct 5, 1938 timeline event): Jewish passports stamped with “J” and Jews obliged to carry identity cards indicating heritage.
[11] Martin Dean (Cambridge University Press excerpt), Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945: mass use of forms, inventories, and “legal” bureaucratic mechanisms to register and confiscate Jewish property as part of the persecution system.
