from the we’re-the-baddies dept
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous island prison in San Francisco that Trump is obsessed with and (2) the number of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place in the world that has both) that live in and around the Everglades.
There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.
But here’s where today’s American concentration camps differ from their 20th-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re selling t-shirts celebrating human suffering as if it were a sports team or a vacation destination.
The United States government is literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. This isn’t just about policy—it’s about turning cruelty into a consumer product. It’s about making the suffering of others into something you can wear to own the libs.
This commodification of human rights violations represents something uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Previous authoritarian regimes at least had the decency to be ashamed of their concentration camps. Trump is selling tickets to the show.
These are the sorts of things that history books (should they exist in the future) will talk about as one of the many moments of pure evil that some people gleefully embraced without recognizing that people setting up concentration camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”
For what it’s worth, Trump did little to dispel the notion that this is part of his new fascist campaign to imprison anyone who disagrees with him. During the tour, Trump and Noem talked about prosecuting CNN for their reporting and for releasing an app that alerts people to where ICE agents are located (both of which would violate the First Amendment, if it were still a thing anyone believed in).
Trump admitted that he had brought up this idea as a joke, but his idiot advisors ran with it:
“Is this a dream come true for you, sir” a reporter asks.
“It was meant more as a joke, but the more I thought of it, the more I liked it… they were actually crocodiles,” Trump said.
And, apparently, the plan is to build a lot more concentration camps, just like Nazi Germany had.
“We’d like to see them in many states. At some point, they might morph into a system,” Trump said on Tuesday.
A “system.” The word choice isn’t accidental. This is the language of industrial-scale human rights violations, spoken with the same casual tone you’d use to discuss a chain restaurant expansion.
In case you’re wondering how much it costs to go full Nazi, this one concentration camp will cost the American taxpayer nearly half a billion dollars a year. That money will come from FEMA, the organization that Trump (with an assist from former friend Elon Musk and DOGE) stripped budget from, meaning there will be even less to pay for actual emergencies, because all of that money will be used to jail people Trump doesn’t like in a swamp.
The Everglades facility will cost Florida some $450 million to run for one year, according to DHS, though much of that will be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). While the airstrip is owned by Miami-Dade County, where officials have viewed the plan with skepticism, DeSantis is using his emergency authority to proceed on a tight schedule.
We are watching the latest march forward of American fascism in real time, complete with branded merchandise and gleeful photo ops. The US government is building concentration camps and selling t-shirts about it. This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t partisan hysteria. This is what’s actually happening.
Every day you don’t call this what it is—fascism—you become complicit in normalizing it. Every time you treat this as just another political story, you help them make it routine. They’re counting on your exhaustion, your normalization, your willingness to look away.
The survivors of the Holocaust warned us this could happen again. They’re mostly gone now, but their warnings echo: it starts with camps, it starts with dehumanization, and it starts with good people doing nothing while evil wraps itself in flags and sells t-shirts.
History is watching.
Filed Under: alligator alcatraz, concentration camp, detention camp, donald trump, everglades, fascism, florida, kristi noem, ron desantis
