Honestly, it started sooner I think, or more to the point, it’s had this sort of tendency lurking in the background for it’s whole history to lesser and greater extents, the last few decades until the current one just being something of a lower period that makes this stand out by contrast.

After all, these aren’t exactly the first concentration camps built in or by the United States, the country has a history with forced labor and institutionalized racial supremacy so severe that the country literally split itself apart over it at one point, and it’s founding and expansion to it’s current borders involved the genocide of those already living on the land in question.

The silver lining to all this I guess, if you can call it that, is that this history and the fact we even had something of a relative lul in all this, implies that as bleak as things look, the racism, nativism, and disenfranchisement can be squashed down again, because it’s been done here before.