Video evidence is being circulated of a plain clothes man who charged into a group of teenage girls to assault them and put one in a chokehold. The teenagers who tried to help victims of the man were then assaulted by uniformed officers who claimed the unidentified assailant was their Chief of Police.

Suddenly, a man in a tan shirt, since identified as McElree, appears to charge into the group of kids and grab one who had been backing away, holding a phone.

[…]

In the chaos, some people had no idea who the man was, the student said, and started defending themselves against the unknown attacker.

[…]

One of the students who appeared to jump in to defend a classmate against the tan shirted man was then thrown to the ground by a uniformed officer. The officer can be heard on video telling the kid that the man he went after is the chief of police — Scott McElree.

“He didn’t even announce he was chief of police. We were confused,” the student said.

Students were put in detention overnight at the Bucks County Youth Center for defending themselves against an unidentified man who physically attacked them. A person wearing a vest with the word “police” on the back is seen running toward the frame and then out of the frame as the man in tan continues to hold a teen girl in a chokehold.

So uniformed officers were present, saw their chief battering and choking a teen girl, and their response was just to let it continue while they tackled the kids around her trying to help?

Fascism protest indeed.

These kids deserve a medal for exposing McElree.

A quiet consolidation of power is the institutional design that made this possible, with a single man holding police chief, borough manager, and records officer. McElree unilaterally controls the police, the administration, and the records about both. It’s highly unusual.

And the way McElree seized this power is notable.

He has been Quakertown’s police chief two decades, since 2004. In 2007 he grabbed the borough manager job after the previous manager’s “sudden departure”, initially claiming approval for the dual role would only be temporary. The council instead pivoted and approved him as permanent replacement within a month. He’s now 72 years old, sitting on a contract clause that protects him from “any adverse employment action” by council if he resigns from either position.

He’s structurally insulated from consequences, which could explain why he wore plain clothes to charge into a group of teens to grab, shove, batter and choke them while his officers protected him instead of the public.

So how did he end up seizing control over Quakertown? I’m glad you asked. He left a 29-year career at a department mid-scandal. That’s the fact. McElree left a Whitemarsh Township police department during a racial profiling case involving a fellow sergeant, a DA criminal investigation, a federal probe, and federal civil rights lawsuits. He was just a SWAT team lead who suddenly landed this police chief’s job within months of the huge racism controversy. The new town “vetted” him unilaterally saying “we investigated”. And where does the SWAT turned Chief live to this day? Not Quakertown, still in Whitemarsh.

As a historian, I noticed a curious footnote to his name from an infamous lynching. About 40 miles west of Whitemarsh in 1911 a violent white mob battered, tortured and publicly burned alive Black steelworker Zachariah Walker. The leading defense attorney for Walker’s suspected killers was Wilmer W. MacElree, referred to then as “the legal sage of Chester County.”

[White violent mobs claimed that Walker] fell from a tree and suffered severe head wounds. After being transported to the Coatesville Hospital and treated for head wounds and a broken jaw while shackled to his bed, a crowd estimated at 2,000 later marched on the hospital and seized Walker, carrying him on the bed from the hospital to Strode Avenue and preparing a large bonfire.

Walker was thrown into the fire three times but managed to escape. On the mob’s last attempt, they cut Walker’s foot off and tied a rope around him and held him in the inferno until he died.

“Don’t give me no crooked death because I’m not white,” Walker told the mob.

As he was burnt to death, a crowd estimated at several thousand looked on and some in the crowd collected his bones as souvenirs. Later that year, Coatesville Police Chief Charles Umsted was indicted for involuntary manslaughter for his failure to the stop the lynching.

Umsted wasn’t merely indicted for failure to stop the lynching; he actively helped provoke it. A police chief who incites mob violence rather than preventing it. This led to passage of the Pennsylvania Anti-Lynching law in 1923, and yet by 1938 Black residents of Coatesville were organizing armed militias to prevent another lynching.

In 1937, the Soviet NKVD issued Order No. 00447, allowing them to arrest anyone, with quotas by region. Officers received two categories of targets:

• Category One for execution (i.e. Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Ruben Martinez)
• Category Two for Gulag imprisonment

Exceeding them brought rewards. The system’s defining feature was not cruelty for its own sake but bureaucratic incentivisation of detention. The machinery needed throughput to justify its budget. It found throughput.

In January 2025, the Trump administration set ICE detention targets at 1,200-1,500 per day. ICE’s budget stands at $85 billion, up from $6 billion a decade ago. New recruits receive signing bonuses of $50,000. Multiple guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma independently told a detained British tourist that agents receive per-head bonuses for every person they bring in.

The NKVD didn’t publish its incentive structures either. ICE doesn’t either.

The British tourist was Karen Newton, 65, retired school administrator from Hertfordshire, no criminal record, travelling on a valid B2 visa. She was detained for 42 days. The stated justification: she was “guilty by association” with her husband, whose visa had expired. Her specific offence? ICE said helping him pack his suitcase was grounds for jail, which they officially called a detention to strip her rights away along with all her clothing.

Guilt by Association as Legal Doctrine

Soviet law formalised this as ChSIR — Член Семьи Изменника Родины, “Family Member of a Traitor to the Motherland.” Under Article 58 of the Penal Code, wives of accused enemies were automatically sentenced to five to eight years. The ALZHIR camp outside Astana was purpose-built for them. The principle was explicit: kinship itself constituted complicity. It was infamously echoed in American “Red Scare” McCarthyism, which led to outrage and protest.

A US border agent used the English equivalent of this doctrine of “guilty by association” for a woman whose husband’s paperwork had lapsed. The Soviets at least had an acronym.

Voluntary Confession, American Edition

On day three of detention, Karen signed a “voluntary self-removal” agreement waiving her right to see a judge and accepting a ten-year US entry ban. The agent told her it was the fastest route home. She then spent 39 more days in detention.

The Soviet “voluntary confession” operated identically: sign, and your sentence will be lighter. Cooperate, and this ends sooner. Both mechanisms use indefinite detention to manufacture consent to punishment, then continue the punishment regardless. The confession is a trick to increase funding for an additional length of control.

The Trump administration’s version adds a cash incentive. Project Homecoming offers detainees an “exit bonus”, $1,000 raised in January 2026 to $2,600 to “celebrate one year of Trump”, funded by redirecting $250 million from refugee aid. This is, structurally, a bounty system operating in both directions: agents are incentivised to detain, detainees are incentivised to waive their rights and be detained longer while convinced it would help them leave.

The Private Surplus

The Gulag extracted labour. Prisoners built canals, railways, and timber infrastructure the Soviet state couldn’t afford to pay free workers to construct. The economics were integral to the system’s persistence.

The American pivot is to extract profit from detention itself. Corruption of taxpayer money is how Trump is lining the pockets of an incarceration system bigger than North Korea. Kim Jong Un’s political prison camps hold an estimated 80,000-120,000. Trump already detained nearly 80,000 and has announced ICE plans to increase over 100,000. In the shadow of Amazon shipping warehouses and logistics processing boxes, ICE is telling Wall Street the movement of wrongfully detained humans will be an investor gold mine.

The Northwest ICE Processing Center is operated by GEO Group, a private company paid a daily federal rate per detainee. More bodies, more revenue. The stock price tracks detention policy. This eliminates the need for ideology altogether. The market provides sufficient motive. You can build a Trumpistan gulag on quarterly earnings alone, taking over warehouses to fill with humans.

ICE expects to spend $38.3 billion on acquiring warehouses nationwide and retrofitting them into detention centers holding tens of thousands of people. The plan includes eight “mega centers,” 16 processing centers, and 10 additional facilities, with total planned capacity reaching 100,000 indefinitely detained.

Two warehouse purchases alone cost $172 million, with one in El Paso to hold 8,500 beds. It’s among the largest jails of any kind in the world.

Outside Phoenix, ICE paid $70 million cash for a building the size of seven football fields in an industrial park. City officials said they weren’t aware of the purchase and hadn’t been contacted by DHS.

Warehouses are set up as logistics hubs near airports as a “feeder system” where detainees are briefly processed then sent to massive warehouses. They’re literally using Amazon-era supply chain infrastructure for human processing. The next obvious step will be what to do about all the deaths. And on that note, Trump literally just invoked the war powers act to enable dangerous pesticide use on domestic populations.

What the Pattern Predicts

Historically, quota-driven detention systems follow a consistent trajectory. They begin with a target population of limited public sympathy (undocumented migrants, political dissidents, class enemies). Then it expands because the institutional incentives demand expansion. Officers who need 1,500 detentions per day will eventually exhaust the supply of people who fit the original category and begin processing people who don’t. A retired British grandmother detained for packing a suitcase is not an aberration. She is the predictable output of a system that has begun to outrun its stated rationale.

The United States lost 4.5 million international visitors in 2025. The market is pricing in the risk faster than the political system is willing to name it.

Karen Newton’s advice to prospective travellers to America is wise:

“DO NOT GO.”

The Gulag’s survivors said the same thing about the Soviet Union for decades. This warning comes from a retired British woman who simply went on holiday to Trumpistan.

George Bush on Presidents’ Day is criticizing authoritarian overreach, which is like the arsonist complaining about fire codes.

As America begins to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I’m pleased to have been asked to write about George Washington’s leadership. As president, I found great comfort and inspiration in reading about my predecessors and the qualities they embodied. […] Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility.

Humility? Hold on a minute, pardner.

The man who launched two unjustified wars on fabricated or inflated pretexts, authorized warrantless mass surveillance, torture, and indefinite detention, and whose administration’s “unitary executive” theory laid the legal groundwork Trump is now exploiting, including the “unlawful combatant” designation now being repurposed for Caribbean special operations. The man who created today’s Frankenstein, is now saying someone should do something about it because… humility?

Yeah, dude. You made this.

• Remember Bush deploying ICE in 2006 for “US secret prisons and twilight raids on immigrant homes“?
• Remember Bush deploying Rove in 2008 to spin political disinformation?
  

  There was a time when conservatives in America demanded a strong foundation in learning from well-known scholars and history precisely to fearlessly navigate new ideas. Strangely, Rove and pals have been able to hijack the group and turn it into drones waiting for instruction (e.g. fascism).

Bush’s absence of humility didn’t just create Trump’s legal architecture for authoritarianism, his administration built the shameless propaganda infrastructure that shoved the conservative base all the way into fascism.

This new Bush essay’s appeal to Washington’s “humility” is itself a Rove-style move: wrapping authoritarian complicity in aspirational language. It reads less like principled dissent and more like legacy management, distancing himself from the monster his own administration incubated, while enabling it to continue.

Invoking stories of Washington is always fraught with historiography. The voluntary relinquishment narrative that Bush tries to sell us is totally mythologized. Washington stepped down in part because he was exhausted, politically battered by partisan press, and understood a third term was politically untenable. It was not some noble philosophical commitment to republican virtue. The Bush hagiography serves the same function it always has: making supreme power appear self-limiting by nature rather than admit the contested struggle that actually forms democracy.

Bush is pumping deep propaganda about the man who owned over 300 enslaved people, pursued runaways relentlessly, rotated them through Philadelphia to exploit a loophole in Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law, and presided over a frontier policy of indigenous displacement. Bush calls out the defining motivational characteristic of Washington, human trafficking operations, and lands on “humility” and “self-restraint“?

You can’t model “putting the good of the nation over self-interest” while literally owning human beings as property.

Look at Georgia in 1733, Vermont in 1777, Carter 1793 who freed all his slaves and called out Washington for selfish refusal.

Georgia’s ban fifty years prior, and then Vermont’s constitution in his face, as well as Pennsylvania openly targeting Washington’s slaves, established that abolition wasn’t some anachronistic standard being imposed retroactively. The legal and moral frameworks existed and Washington was hiding and running. He knew, he wanted to be on the wrong side. He calculated. He moved against the entire world banning slavery, to selfishly force a new country to preserve and expand it instead.

Understand that Carter wasn’t some distant man from Washington. He was a hugely successful Virginia planter who looked at the same institution of human trafficking that Washington dreamed of profits from and said no. Carter shut it down.

It’s literally like someone today looking at Epstein and saying no. Who didn’t say no? That’s Washington.

Every generation of powerful elites produces legal architectures for dehumanizing people for value extraction while maintaining plausible deniability, and then produces apologists who write fraudulent essays about humility after the damage is done.

George should know George better. His history illiteracy continues the tragedy.

Think about the Caribbean war crime operations where Trump is using Bush’s own “unlawful combatant” framework. We have two presidents implicated in connected dehumanizing legal architectures, with one writing hagiography about the other.

In short, as a historian, here’s a scientific measurement of the Bush Presidential message: