When Your TDS Takes You to a Refugee Camp

But for the fact that liberals who vote take them seriously and cater to them, I would actually feel quite sorry for the people who have been driven so far around the bend that they willingly put themselves into a foreign minimum security prison packed with refugees around the world, just because they fear living in Donald Trump’s America. 

“Ter Apel is not a prison, but it looks a little bit like one”

Best Zillow posting ever

— Sir biggybadblanket, PhD MD (@biggybadblanket) January 21, 2026

When celebrities ostentatiously leave the United States to enjoy their millions in comfort, posting their disdain for ugly Americans and Bad Orange Man, it is simultaneously funny and mildly annoying. Funny because…well, it’s funny that somebody is so proud of acting like an ass, and annoying because the media and our liberal neighbors believe that this is an act of courage that should be admired. 

It’s sort of like how you have to roll your eyes at a celebrity nattering on about inequality as they get an Oscar or something. Get real, gazillionaire. 

But when a person of modest means goes so far around the bend that they fly off to the Netherlands to “escape” the hellscape that the United States has become and winds up in a refugee camp—not some cushy refugee hotel, as America has for its asylum seekers, but an actual refugee camp that amounts to a minimum security prison because the Dutch don’t do the hotel thing—you have to feel a bit sorry for them. 

Mental illness like that is no joke. Laughing at them is in the same moral category as calling a genuinely developmentally disabled person a “retard;” it is cruel. Unfortunately, while mental illness like this is treatable, too many people in the cultural elite actually celebrate these people as stunning and brave. What they are, in fact, is in need of serious psychological and probably psychiatric help. 

er Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.

When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world.

Some, like the Eritreans and Somalis, are fleeing war; the Syrians insist it remains unsafe for them to return home after the fall of Assad. But in the last year they have been joined by a curious new cohort: a bunch of Americans, who say they have feared for their lives ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Their presence has surprised many of the camp’s residents. “My dream is to go to America or the UK. America for me is the paradise,” said Usama, a 21-year-old Libyan-Algerian hanging around the main gate. “You can work, you can make a million if you have a good idea. Why they come here?”

It is a fair question. Last year, 76 Americans claimed asylum in the Netherlands, according to the Dutch asylum and immigration ministry, up from nine in 2024. Unlike the UK, the Netherlands does not rent out hotels or houses for asylum seekers, instead housing them in fenced-off camps, officially called reception centres, dotted around the country.

Many of the American refugees, like Jane-Michelle Arc, a 47-year-old software engineer from San Francisco, are transgender. In April last year she flew into Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and, sobbing, asked a customs officer how to claim asylum. “And they laughed because: what’s this big dumb American doing here asking about asylum? And then they realised I was serious.”

Liberals in America may be shocked to discover that the Dutch are not as kind to refugees as Americans. They are not cruel, exactly, although most Northern European countries have become very hardened to the reality that refugees do not, in fact, make the tapestry of Dutch society brighter and more lovely. They are a big problem, actually, and more than just a burden, but an actual threat to society when brought in in large numbers. That’s why they are doing whatever they can to expel them as fast as they legally can. 

In the Netherlands, refugees are put in refugee camps, although they are allowed to leave during the day, as often happens in American jails with non-violent offenders. Similar to work release, their movement is restricted, and their schedules are regimented to an extent, but they have limited freedom. But they are not free to add their diversity to increase the strength of society, because few there believe anymore that “diversity is our strength.” 

The customs officer gave her a train ticket to Ter Apel and told to report to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND). The first few days were hard, holed up in a 2 metre-square room covered with graffiti and what she feared were body fluids on the walls. In some ways she was lucky to be indoors: at least once in recent years the camp has been so overcrowded that new arrivals have had to sleep in tents outside.

Ter Apel is not a prison, but it looks a little bit like one, surrounded by fences, with guards on every gate. Residents are free to come and go but must be in their rooms each morning for a bed check. After their first few days in the central reception area, asylum seekers are dispersed to different low-rise blocks, where they are given a small food allowance so they can cook their own meals.

For Arc, that meant being transferred to what she calls “the queer block”, rather like a student halls of residence where all the LGBT asylum seekers are placed. There, she insists, sharing meals in the communal kitchens and over cigarettes outside, she found common ground.

Activists in America would, of course, freak out if refugees were treated like that here. In fact, celebrities who screech about how hideous America is would point to situations like this as evidence. But the reality is, the people who escape America to the Netherlands to find sanctuary wind up in camps, and sometimes are left outside in tents when the camp gets crowded. 

Ah, irony. 

I feel for Arc, not because I agree with him, but because he genuinely believed his life was in danger in the United States, because people don’t want boys in girls’ sports or children to be sterilized and mutilated. For all the talk of “trans joy,” quite the opposite is the truth; people like Arc are so mentally fragile that they see threats everywhere. In reality, if you use the victimization numbers that trans-activists promote so heavily, there is no demographic with a lower rate of victimization by violence than trans people, and almost every trans person murdered was engaged in sex work. 

Trans software engineers are not hunted in the streets. Yet Arc apparently believes that the President, who counts Caitlin Jenner as a buddy, wants him dead. 

Arc knows how that might sound. “I hear a lot of people saying: ‘You are an idiot. You came here from America.’ People will tell me: ‘Did you think about moving to California?’ And then I say: ‘Well, I lived in San Francisco’ and then they go: ‘Oh, that’s a heaven for gay people.’ But it’s different for trans people, particularly for trans women, to the extent that my experience in San Francisco, robot taxis aside, was indistinguishable from [that of] the people that I knew from Libya and Iran and Morocco and Algeria.”

Trans men are also unsafe in the US, according to Ashe Wilde, another American who has been living in Ter Apel since the end of October. He transitioned in 2019 and anti-trans hate has only grown since then, he said, particularly with the return of Trump, who was re-elected using the attack ad: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.”

Oh, FFS. Grow a pair. 

My friends and I have endured decades of being called Nazis, and had a president ranting about what a danger to the country we are. Our heroes are assassinated as the left literally celebrates, the newspapers and TV commentators call us the most vile names and a threat to America, and now, in Minneapolis, conservatives are literally accosted in the streets. 

You know what we do in response? We vote. Because that is what sane people do. 

Pravda and Democrat politicians are inducing this mental illness, not a culture that hunts down trans people in SAN FRANCISCO for God’s sake. But sure enough, a trans software engineer there “escapes” to the Netherlands, lives in a camp surrounded by guards, and considers himself lucky to be there. 

Every left-winger who stokes this kind of fear is partially responsible for the damage they are doing. Arc needs a psychiatrist, not asylum in a country that clearly would prefer he leave. 

Shame on them.

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