It was a cool November evening that felt like any other in Atlanta. Lavora Celeste Vincent decided she’d head to bed early, hoping to fix her sleep schedule before her semester really kicked off. She closed her blinds and, for no reason in particular, glanced out at the row of student houses.
That’s when the 18-year-old college student, who goes by Celeste, noticed across the street, the bedroom light of the unit facing hers — the one she could usually count on flicking on in the morning, and sometimes off at night — had been dark for weeks.
Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen the student who lived there either. Initially, she explained it away. It was Thanksgiving, then Christmas. Students go home. But months passed, and the woman’s black Honda stayed parked in the driveway.
I came across her TikToks while scrolling. I stopped for the story about her missing neighbour, but it was her voice that made me stay.
Celeste's videos are angry. They are also a plea. Look. Pay attention. Do you see what's going on? Stop normalizing it.
She posts about immigration enforcement, misinformation and what she sees as growing corruption under President Donald Trump’s administration. What surprised me was not just how outspoken she is, but also how articulate.
From George Orwell to the Nuremberg defence to the mechanics of modern media misinformation, she speaks like someone who has spent years paying attention. She has an exceptional grasp on historical events and political systems, and a confidence not expected from someone who cannot yet legally buy a drink.
That voice, she told me, was sharpened inside her own home, where she was raised Christian by die-hard MAGA, Fox News-watching parents. When I asked how she turned out so different from her family, she smirked.
“They tried to teach us Jesus loves everybody, be kind to everyone, turn the other cheek. It’s not like how I turned out is confusing. Everything they taught me to do is what I’m doing,” she said.
Lately, Celeste’s TikToks fixate on ICE.
She names Renee Good and Keith Porter. After Saturday, she names Alex Pretti.
She doesn’t bother with euphemisms.
“They were murdered by terrorists,” she says. “By domestic terrorists supported and funded by the United States government.”
She returns to the personal proof that keeps her awake at night — her neighbour is still missing. Celeste says the woman is of “Hispanic descent.” In the current climate, that detail matters.
After the disappearance, no one on her street seemed close enough to ask where she went. The leasing office told Celeste it couldn’t share tenant information when she reported it. Months later, there is no update.
Celeste began noticing stories online, people’s neighbours vanishing without clear answers. In our interview, she made an unsettling point: what is happening under Trump and ICE is not just politics, it is the early stage of something the world has seen before.
“We saw this in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany,” she said. Celeste kept reaching back to history to make sense of the present. Nazi Germany did not begin with camps. It began with normal life, then new rules, then quiet compliance. With people learning to keep their heads down.
Celeste says fear has reshaped daily life.
Students don’t go out alone, and people carry passports out of fear despite being American citizens. She points to ICE tip lines that “convince neighbours to turn on neighbours.”
“That’s not even rhyming with World War II,” she said. “That is exactly what happened.”
She described how Americans have been “propagandized to believe that the people that don’t openly look like us… they’re different, and that difference is dangerous, and they should be exterminated.”
On TikTok, she asks, “Do you know why Anne Frank hid in an attic? Because they were knocking door to door, looking for them.”
To Celeste, that knock has returned.
“We’re defending Hitler in modern times,” she warns.
Celeste says that many supporters of this administration don’t see opponents as human. If you disagree, “you are subhuman, and therefore it is okay if you are executed in broad daylight.”
Her point echoed in the recent killing of Alex Pretti, an American citizen who tried to film agents detaining a woman. He was pepper-sprayed, tackled and shot numerous times after his concealed but legal handgun had already been taken.
She pointed to something eerily familiar: what happens after someone is taken is a blackout. They vanish, and the public hears nothing.
“The one thing we’ve been told is that they’re in a prison in El Salvador,” supposedly for “the worst of the worst,” Celeste said.
Holocaust survivors were once asked a question that still haunts history books: Why didn’t you do anything?
“The overwhelming answer that you receive is, because I didn’t know,” Celeste said, reminding me that Nuremberg rejected this defence. “Another is that they were too poor and consumed by survival to notice.”
She applied it to America today.
“We are working for a minimum wage that has not increased in decades, while the cost of living has increased 400 per cent,” she said. “Americans that are too deep in economic strife and struggle to be able to do anything but continue to work. They essentially have us cornered.”
Once people are cornered and afraid, they are easily controlled. Silence becomes a survival strategy, and that silence turns to complicity.
Celeste’s warning is that history is not behind us. It’s catching up.
