A family story: Just before the beginning of World War II in my ancestral town of Krosno, Poland my great uncle, Inek Trenczer, courted and fell in love with a woman of the town, Malka Fruhman, and they decided to marry. Their plans, however, were abruptly and tragically interrupted when the Nazi German army invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.Inek and Malka, who were both Jewish, understood that they were both at great peril. Ineks Polish army unit was ordered to travel east to regroup and train before advancing on the superior German military. Related Trump is pushing several new big lies that will devastate the country The German Gestapo set up headquarters near Malkas family home. Officials issued orders to find all Jewish residents of the town. Officials also alerted Catholic residents to turn in all Jews, under direct threat of incarceration or death for all violators of the decree.The Jewish civilians of the town, including my Trenczer and Mahler family relatives, tried to escape Nazi troops by first fleeing east, but finding no safety, most either traveled back to their homes or tried to hide in the woods. Some implored their Catholic neighbors for a safe place to hide. Dive deeper every day Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues Subscribe to our Newsletter today Malkas friend promised to shelter her, but, instead, walked one block down their street and alerted the Gestapo where she was hiding. Finding Malka, a Gestapo officer shot her right there on the spot.Malkas fianc, my Trenczer relative, following the Nazi evacuation of Krosno, returned looking for any surviving relatives and friends. When investigating whether Malka was still alive, he learned about the women who betrayed her. With profound grief and contempt as the only remaining emotions in his heart, he quietly walked up to the betrayer and shot a bullet directly into her head.War and loss had killed his own humanity. Surveillance is all about finding and denouncing scapegoatsSurveillance can bedefinedgenerally as the systematic finding, observing, and monitoring of a person, a specific group, or a location used primarily (but not exclusively) by governments for information-gathering, influencing, managing, or as a means of controlling.While democratic societies place restrictions on governmental and private surveillance to ensure reasonable levels of privacy, authoritarian governments rarely limit domestic privacy controls.Denunciation (fromLatindenuntiare, to denounce) is the act of publicly scapegoating a person or group by consigning blame for a perceived offence or for a social problem.Authoritarian statesrequire levels of cooperation from the larger population to successfully carry out their methods of control.Authoritarian officials employ two primary means to prompt this cooperation. Authorities useincentives, through coercion or the promise of rewards, to obtain denunciations from the public. Those who cooperate are termed informers. This was evident in the case of Malkas neighbor. Authorities also gain access to networks as individuals denounce or inform on one another with the promise of amnesty from consequences.A distinction must be made, though, between denunciation by aninformerand justified reporting by a whistleblower, the latter of which is someone who exposes misdeeds by a person, company, or government to avert dangers to the public. McCarthyism: Looks like witches are back in seasonSenator Joe McCarthy talking to closeted Republican operative Roy Cohn at his Army hearings. | Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division The term othering was coined by Nathaniel Mackey (1992) as an action verb that is something people do to turn the other from a noun to a verb. This othering thus minoritizes the other, which does not necessarily refer to numerical status, but, rather, indicates a social ranking within a socially constructed hierarchy.During the late 1930s and throughout the 1950s, some officials within the U.S. government set about to instill fear of communism in the U.S. and abroad.During the Cold War era following World War II, a brash and accusatory Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R) attempted to boost his political career by fomenting fear and paranoia when claiming that communism and communists surreptitiously were subverting the U.S. and its government. McCarthy initiated his radical plan in February 1950 when he provocatively claimed in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia that 205 card-carrying Communists worked for the U.S. State Department. The surveillance of suspected communists in the government increased.In response to McCarthys allegations, Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy testified at a Senate appropriations committee meeting on February 28, 1950. He denied, on one hand, that his department hired communists, but, on the other hand, disclosed that several persons had been fired for being security risks, including 91 homosexuals. As a result, the surveillance of suspected homosexuals in the government increased.These disclosures set off a firestorm. Within one month, Republicans in Congress ordered investigations looking into the extent of the homosexual problem and the infiltration of sexual perverts in government. And the inquisition began. It is important to note that the Soviet government itself criminalized homosexuality under Joseph Stalin and blamed homosexuality on the West as a product of bourgeois decadence. The U.S. countered by blaming homosexuality on a Soviet Communist international godless conspiracy.Even prior to World War II, the House Committee on Un-American Activities(HUAC) was created in 1938 as a means of investigating and exposing suspected communists and communistsupporters in society.Its major attack later was on the Hollywood film industry.Blacklisting of Hollywood writers, actors, producers, directors, and others suspected of communist affiliation began with the committees hearings in October 1947, and it flourished throughout the 1950s. Senator McCarthy conducted witch hunts in an attempt to find and eliminate suspected communists. The Hollywood Ten, a group of distinguished writers and directors, were cited for contempt of Congress for not divulging the names of alleged communists in the film industry. They were jailed for failing to cooperate with the House committee and acting like informers.The individuals, who were persecuted during what is now referred to as the McCarthy Era, had their once prominent careers destroyed.They lost their friends and family on false rumors that spread about them, such as planning to start a revolution and attempting to overthrow the government of the United States.The Trump Administration and its GestapoAn officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement | Shutterstock The authoritarian regime of President Donald J. Trump continues to exercise the weaponry of surveillance and denunciation in its campaign of control.Even before his first term, when he was running to be the Republican partys presidential standard bearer,Trumpannounced that if elected president, he would watch and study whether to increase surveillance on mosques because a lot of talk is going on at the mosques.Continuing during his takeover of the Oval Office, Trumps cries against Islamic jihadist terrorists and illegal aliens as the major threats to our nation and his calls to place U.S. Muslims on a national registry and surveillance to track their movements and the movements of illegal aliens increased his othering of these groups as the targets of blame for causing the United States major problems. Multi-billionaire Elon Musk through DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) served as an agency head of surveillance by collecting U.S. residents official and sensitive information, activities, associations, and spending habits without their consent.Trump has ordered unidentified and masked (primarily) men, and has substantially increased funding and expanded resources, scope, and number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers throughout the country. They have acted in ways that have contradicted Trumps promise of arresting undocumented immigrants who had committed criminal offenses. ICE officers have, instead, often arrested, detained, and disappeared people who have not committed crimes, and have deported them to foreign authoritarian countries (not of their birth), without due process of law. The U.S.Department of Homeland Security, under Secretary Kristi Noam, has become the Department of Surveillance and Rounding Up or the Department of Gestapo North America. Through I.C.E., it functions as a data collection and enforcement agency to hunt, surveille, arrest, and deport anyone with brown or black skin or who speaks Spanish: whether they are official U.S. citizens, or whether they are undocumented and have never committed any criminal offenses.Though an ICE public tip line has been around for nearly two decades for people to report criminal undocumented immigrants, it has expanded its outreach and scope.To identify the supposed crimes committed by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, German officials instituted a coding system, which included affixing patches of differing colors to the prisoners uniforms: pink triangles for homosexuals, yellow Stars of David for Jews, red triangles for communists, and so on. Nazis used the blue triangle to distinguish prisons who were for emigrants, for example, German citizens who initially had left their homeland after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, but had then returned and were therefore suspected of espionage. The blue triangle was also forced onto the garments of foreign forced laborers, other immigrants to Germany who were not considered Aryan, and onto the so-called stateless.Donald Trump and members of his autocratic regime have imposed a virtual blue triangle onto the bodies of anyone not born in the United States. The regime is currently attempting to strip birthright citizenship status from anyone whose parents were not born there as well.The Trump administration has initiated the equivalent of a surveillance and denunciation website, entitled, Misleading. Biased. Exposed: Media Offender of the Week, on which it purportedly brings attention to what it deems as the biggest offenders of media bias.The sign atop the Washington Post building at night | Shutterstock The week I clicked onto the site, it accused theWashington Postof biased reporting on Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseths order to bomb small boats in the Caribbean:THE OFFENSE: The Washington Posts Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima published an article from two unnamed sources claiming that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a Joint Special Operations commander to kill everybody during an anti-terrorist operation in the Caribbean Sea.THE TRUTH: The Department of War killed 11 narco-terrorists in a coordinated strike designed to kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. This attack was the first in a series of lethal kinetic strikes against Designated Terrorist Organizations. The Washington Post published this unsubstantiated claim in an attempt to discredit the United States warfighters and inflame anti-American sentiment. The administrations representation of itself is highly contentious at best since it has offered no verified proof that the people on the boat were actually transporting illicit drugs, that they were narco-terrorists, that they intended to go to the United States, that they were killed with any due process of law, and that the traditional methods of detaining alleged drug smugglers was by the U.S. Coast Guard through non-lethal means.As in other autocratic regimes, the Trump administration actively recruits ordinary citizens to report actions the state opposes. Denunciation requires an army of informants expected to collaborate in the collection of data and become complicit in state crimes to control criticism.The White House also launched its Media Bias Offender Tip Line, which asks members of the public to submit news stories they believe are biased, with the stated goal of holding the fake news accountable. President Trump issued theexecutive orderRestoring Truth and Sanity to American History. And in a January 21, 2025 federal government memorandum, Initial Guidance Regarding DEIA Executive Orders which repealed former President Joe Bidens order to increase Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.In this anti-DEI climate, a June 9 federal government memo to the National Parks Service (NPS), under Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, ordered signage posted throughout U.S. national parks asking visitors to report (denounce) any information they witness in the parks that in any way depicts the nation or its history in a negative way. The memo also reads in part: All NPS units are required to post signage that will encourage public feedback via QR code and other methods that are viable. The government also directed the National Park Service to conduct a review by mid-July 2025 of all images, descriptions, information, and other materials that could possibly belittle or denigrate the United States. In Trumps directive to Burgum, all Department of Interior websites must not inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape.Some non-governmental organizations often conduct surveillance and denunciation campaigns. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel Jewish civil rights organization, led its Mamdani Monitor effort to scrutinize the language, actions, policies, and appointments of New York City mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani. As the first Muslim and person of South Asian descent elected to lead the nations largest city, which includes a Jewish population of well over 1 million people, Mamdani is also a critic of Israel and the Gaza war.According to ADL Director Jonathan Greenblat, theproject includestracking actions by Mamdanis administration that impact Jewish community safety and security. It also includes establishing a tip line for people to report antisemitic incidents in New York.We must ask ourselves, our governments, and our organizations some critical questions: Are these surveillance and denunciation actions justified for the general public good?Are at least some of them assaults on the publics rights regarding freedom of thought and ideas, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of and from religion, freedom of association, and generally, freedom to criticize?Do at least some of them take the country on the path toward a mafia-style autocratic state, and make those who denounce others complicit in state crimes?As we have seen throughout history, autocrats conduct surveillance campaigns and recruit informants against people who lack power. We the People, however, still retain the power to reverse this trend.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.