Who Will Be Our Simon Wiesenthal?

People who are unfit for humane judgment and treatment have been handed unchecked power over human lives.

Some of us have been slow to fully accept this fact. Some dismissed concerns about the Trump Administration as hyperbole or entirely political (yes, even Jon Stewart minimized non-Trump voter concerns in February 2025.) Some who found Trump policies odious still rejected the idea that the intent was harm. And still others, self included, felt that we were being spared the worst possible outcome because of the incompetence of Trump and his Cabinet and advisors.

It is now clear, however, that incompetence combined with depraved indifference to human life, is not a near-miss; it is a worst-case scenario come true. And, in fact, the incompetent and depraved people in the White House are undeniably competent (perhaps even geniuses) at one thing: finding, speaking to, and collecting the most depraved people who live among us.

That’s why they suddenly seem to be everywhere. The genius is in the unprecedented success Donald Trump has had in coaxing the depraved to shed their disguises as good and decent members of our communities. They trust that he will make it safe for them to live as their true selves, never understanding that their safety depends entirely (and I mean ENTIRELY) on the goodness and the decency of the people who are not depraved.

Many of these individuals have existed in a state of perpetual grievance and were, for the first time, welcomed into the fold. They were seen. They were told they had value. But those who, until now, had been less successful in hiding their depravity, found themselves underemployed and unable to participate in the “American Dream.”

Stephen Miller, whose childhood will be studied as closely as Hitler’s for clues to his moral perversion and sadism, recognized this at once, because he is one of them (albeit far more privileged). He understood at once that to realize his self-hating vision of widespread ethnic cleansing as a means to settle scores, he had a population of (mostly) men who would gladly become his functionaries of violence in exchange for a vending-machine sheriff’s badge and a firearm.

As a result, we have an armed militia of the depraved, who are also untrained and unfit, willingly performing acts of depravity. They’ve accepted and continued in employment requiring them to forcibly remove parents from children, to kidnap children from schools, to brutally assault bystanders who object, to spew hateful words at silent witnesses, to disappear immigrants as well as American citizens, and to murder people.

These “agents” are not surprised by what they’ve been asked to do. They were drawn to the ask. They were drawn to a job that authorizes them, even requires them, to terrorize their neighbors, from immigrant day laborers to priests and war veterans. Because they are depraved.

I keep using this word not only because it is an accurate description of a person who would willingly harm innocent human beings, but also because it challenges the assertion that these agents are “family men” and “the good guys” and “just doing their job” and “just earning a paycheck.”

Non-depraved people are also family men, good guys, just doing a job, and just earning a paycheck, but they are not enacting violence on their neighbors.

And depraved people can also love their family, attend church, and grocery shop.

I also keep using the word depraved because these agents, disguise of decency shed in favor of masks and bullet-proof vests, are betting on a false promise of immunity, a poor attempt at anonymity, and a belief that time will soften judgment. For most of them, the idea of a reckoning or a time of post-hoc accountability hasn’t occurred to them. If it has, they believe they can launder their depravity as obedience. If they have, they believe Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem that they will be “protected.”

You and I know they won’t be. Depraved bureaucrats are always cowards, terrified of the kind of pain they inflict on others. So they flee. And that’s what they will do when the time comes (and it’s coming).

The men and women of ICE truly believe their names will never appear in the moral ledger, let alone be spoken out loud.

That’s where I start thinking about Simon Wiesenthal. A Holocaust survivor, Wiesenthal understood something that few of us have the mental and emotional discipline to even think about: “later” still maters, even when “now” feels hopeless.

Within weeks of the liberation of Mauthausen, where he was starving in a death block before the camp was liberated by the Americans in May 1945, Wiesenthal had already drawn up a list of names of Nazi guards, Gestapo officers, camp commandants, and other war criminals, and handed it over to the Americans.

Though he weighed only 90 pounds when Mauthausen was liberated, Wiesenthal accompanied American officers carrying out arrests (as an interpreter), despite his frailty. While he worked for the OSS (former name for CIA) for about a year, he continued his effort to collect information on Nazi guards and other perpetrators of the Holocaust, and later founded the Jewish Documentation Center created expressly to gather information for future war crimes trials. He helped collect more than 3,000 depositions from Holocaust survivors.

But the US was losing interest in holding Nazis to account. So he took matters into his own hands. I won’t go into his famous pursuit of Eichmann (architect of the Holocaust), Stangl (police officer and commandant), and Braunsteiner (a guard who liked kicking her victims to death).

What I will say is that Wiesenthal was someone who, despite witnessing unimaginable acts of brutality, violence, and depravity, was still able, in that moment, to understand that regimes rely on time, distance, and paperwork to wash the blood from their hands. Even as he was dying in Mauthausen concentration camp, he had a blueprint for accountability that he knew might take years to build. He knew that history would eventually send someone to ask the war criminal his name, but only if the criminal’s crimes were documented.

Many people working for ICE are counting on political amnesty through normalization. They believe that the X ecosystem reflects a reality of acceptance and celebration of their efforts when, in fact, it is a fabricated environment populated by paid content creators and reflects no reality at all.

They’ve likely been told that future narratives will frame their work as “controversial but legal.” They think that they will be able to slip back into the community, don their disguises once again, and live among us, consequence-free.

They will be right only if we don’t pick up Wiesenthal’s blueprint for accountability in this moment, in the middle of our grief and rage and hopelessness, and begin the work of documenting the names of the anonymous and the acts of the depraved.

ICE agents have been led to believe that masks and this regime will protect them. We’ve already seen that’s a lie; just this week Kristi Noem revealed the identity of the ICE agent who murdered Renee Good (Jonathan Ross) by telling a room full of reporters of his involvement in a previous highly publicized incident.

So yes, names will exist, if we document them.

Records will exist, if we search for them, if patriots in the administration leak them, and if we preserve them.

And memory will not be as short as these people hope, so long as we arfe able to think of “later” while we are in the midst of “now.”