Trans people and immigrants were first. Y'all just didn't care, just like the poem.
2. Journalists will be first. But everyone else is next.
How do we know this? Because it always is. It's the authoritarian playbook. Lawsuits are first. Prosecutions are next. America needs to learn these moves fast. It's already later than you think.
3/
This is actually a very clever subtextual way of signaling that the author does not think trans and queer and poor and brown and disabled people don't count because they're not really *people* like journalists are
Just like Niemoller and queer people, Roma and the disabled. Particularly galling with regard to queer people because they'd also been come for by the Allies (taken from the camps and dumped in jail, with their camp time not counting towars their sentences) before he wrote the f-ing poem.
The so-called allies freed the Jews and the Roma and the criminals and the journalists and trade unionists and communists…
…and made sure all the queer folk were transferred to prison to spend the rest of their natural lives.
This is a complete and utter lie, btw.
Some Jews were forced to remain in concentration camps until 1952, and some Roma were imprisoned in ghettos for literal decades.
Queer people who were imprisoned in camps were freed along most others.
Queer people in conventional prisons who had served their sentence were released. Those who hadn’t stayed imprisoned, which WAS an injustice.
There is no evidence of a single queer person being transferred to prison for life.
May 10, 2025 00:22
