from the we’re-the-baddies dept
Not content material with simply transport individuals to a overseas focus camp, Donald Trump now has his personal, homegrown focus camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the rapidly constructed focus camp within the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously known as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the notorious island jail in San Francisco that Trump is obsessive about and (2) the variety of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place on the planet that has each) that stay in and across the Everglades.
There’s no manner to have a look at what the US authorities is doing right here and never consider it extra as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: rapidly constructed camps in distant areas, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true function, and—most tellingly—officers proudly touring the services whereas discussing plans to construct “a system” of such camps nationwide.
However right here’s the place right now’s American focus camps differ from their Twentieth-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t making an attempt to cover what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re promoting t-shirts celebrating human struggling as if it had been a sports activities workforce or a trip vacation spot.
America authorities is actually promoting branded merchandise to rejoice placing human beings in cages surrounded by harmful predators. This isn’t nearly coverage—it’s about turning cruelty right into a client product. It’s about making the struggling of others into one thing you possibly can put on to personal the libs.
This commodification of human rights violations represents one thing uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Earlier authoritarian regimes a minimum of had the decency to be ashamed of their focus camps. Trump is promoting tickets to the present.
These are the kinds of issues that historical past books (ought to they exist sooner or later) will speak about as one of many many moments of pure evil that some individuals gleefully embraced with out recognizing that individuals organising focus camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”
For what it’s price, Trump did little to dispel the notion that that is a part of his new fascist marketing campaign to imprison anybody who disagrees with him. Throughout the tour, Trump and Noem talked about prosecuting CNN for his or her reporting and for releasing an app that alerts individuals to the place ICE brokers are positioned (each of which might violate the First Modification, if it had been nonetheless a factor anybody believed in).
Trump admitted that he had introduced up this concept as a joke, however his fool advisors ran with it:
“Is that this a dream come true for you, sir” a reporter asks.
“It was meant extra as a joke, however the extra I considered it, the extra I appreciated it… they had been really crocodiles,” Trump stated.
And, apparently, the plan is to construct much more focus camps, identical to Nazi Germany had.
“We’d wish to see them in lots of states. In some unspecified time in the future, they may morph right into a system,” Trump stated on Tuesday.
A “system.” The phrase alternative isn’t unintentional. That is the language of industrial-scale human rights violations, spoken with the identical informal tone you’d use to debate a sequence restaurant enlargement.
In case you’re questioning how a lot it prices to go full Nazi, this one focus camp will price the American taxpayer almost half a billion {dollars} a yr. That cash will come from FEMA, the group that Trump (with an help from former buddy Elon Musk and DOGE) stripped price range from, that means there will likely be even much less to pay for precise emergencies, as a result of all of that cash will likely be used to jail individuals Trump doesn’t like in a swamp.
The Everglades facility will price Florida some $450 million to run for one yr, based on DHS, although a lot of that will likely be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Administration Company (FEMA). Whereas the airstrip is owned by Miami-Dade County, the place officers have seen the plan with skepticism, DeSantis is utilizing his emergency authority to proceed on a decent schedule.
We’re watching the most recent march ahead of American fascism in actual time, full with branded merchandise and gleeful photograph ops. The US authorities is constructing focus camps and promoting t-shirts about it. This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t partisan hysteria. That is what’s really occurring.
Day by day you don’t name this what it’s—fascism—you change into complicit in normalizing it. Each time you deal with this as simply one other political story, you assist them make it routine. They’re counting in your exhaustion, your normalization, your willingness to look away.
The survivors of the Holocaust warned us this might occur once more. They’re largely gone now, however their warnings echo: it begins with camps, it begins with dehumanization, and it begins with good individuals doing nothing whereas evil wraps itself in flags and sells t-shirts.
Historical past is watching.
Filed Beneath: alligator alcatraz, focus camp, detention camp, donald trump, everglades, fascism, florida, kristi noem, ron desantis
