Trump Launches America’s Newest Concentration Camp, Complete With Tacky Merch
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
Comments on “Trump Launches America’s Newest Concentration Camp, Complete With Tacky Merch”
So, in a way, “FEMA camps” are now becoming a reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMA_camps_conspiracy_theory
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Like everything else MAGA, it’s magically okay now to the same people who were hiding in the bushes muttering about how Jade Helm was a code for Obama locking them all up in train cars.
I’m surprised that empty walmarts have not been involved somehow, again.
You are not paying attention
History is enjoined from watching. You are forgetting that we now have laws against remembering things we could be ashamed of as a nation.
Though the jury is out yet on whether our proud new kind of U.S. Americans is even capable of shame.
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Please remember the sordid HISTORY of FDR’s WWII concentration camps for innocent Japanese-Americans
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Yes, that was a mistake. But not as bad as the shit the Trump regime is doing. Think…
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Everyone with a conscience do which speaks volumes about those who think this new camp is a great idea. History for them is something you use when it’s convenient, otherwise it should be buried or erased.
Like I’ve been saying for the last 8 years…
And may trump and all his cabinet be placed in this horrid place for the rest of their lives.
How am I and how are others supposed to mentally function, day by day, if we have to keep consuming and acting upon nonstop depressing news, and it is treated as some moral mandate to do so?
I understand the stakes, I understand how bad things are getting. But at a certain point it becomes mentally damaging to be asked to continually consume information, or constantly keep it in the back of our mind, when that info makes us feel like shit.
It would be nice if some of these articles about the dire stakes could end with links that point us to mutual aid organizations, charities, law firms and more that are working to make the country a little less nightmarish. If we’re going to get through this, we can’t keep having news articles end on bitter notes like “history is watching”.
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I agree with you. It’s a daily struggle.
I voted, didn’t matter. I protested, didn’t matter. If protesters actually disturb the peace of the establishment, everybody clutches their pearls and protects the establishment. If I ignore the news, I feel guilty and complacent. If I consume it, I feel horrible and hopeless. A serviceman literally lit himself on FIRE and they made memes about it.
What is the average person supposed to do?
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He wasn’t the first. How many US military personnel who haven’t been raised from a young age to see the Palestinian people as non-human will have to do the same before the Israeli government is finally proscribed as the terrorist organization it is? They’ve been at it since 1954, and yet the US and UK governments embrace Israel as allies instead of proscribing it for its regular attacks against non-Israeli civilians and our interests as we should.
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Doesn’t the average person in America have a gun? According to the constitution they are allowed to have one, to prevent situations arising where the White House is taken over by morally corrupt people while leaving the population helpless to do anything about it. Some people may like to own a gun to use it for self-defence (I don’t, and I think it’s really unwise to keep a gun around your house for such a purpose), but the whole right to bear arms-thing is there for the purpose of defending the constitution, not necessarily yourself.
If there were actual patriots in America, they really should have gotten out their guns to deal with this at the moment a con-man with 34 felony convictions tried to take the office. I fear it is too late for escorting the baddies off the premises at gunpoint now, though I pray someone will prove me wrong. The only alternative would be to use those guns to actually take the baddies out.
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Those things don’t exist. Not in any meaningful way, anyway. You’re still thinking democratically. You’re still thinking that lawyers and charities and nonprofits can actually do anything about the present situation. That’s unbelievably naive. You need to get used to the fact that you’re living in a post-democracy. You cannot use the tools of civilised politics against these people.
You need to think bigger. I’m talking von Stauffenberg bigger. I’m not joking.
And by the way, your attitude of “I know bad things are happening to innocent people but what about my mental health?” is pretty crass. The very, very least you can do is keep yourself aware of the things that are happening. Don’t let them happen in the dark.
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If AC doesn’t look after their mental health, their physical health is likely to suffer and how will they be able to support anyone else? Having insufficient empathy to acknowledge this reality is pretty crass.
Jefferson said it long ago
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
First?
There are a few Japanese-Americans who would take issue with you calling this the first concentration camp in America.
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Where are you reading that? I only see them calling it the “newest” one.
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“First” was used in the original title/headline (which, therefore, is still included in the URL).
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Ah, gotcha.
The GOP, answering the question (no-wanted to know); what if the nazis ate lead paint and got addicted to social media?
Both the delight in willful ignorance and stupidity, and the crass promotion of cruelty (with merchandise!) makes them far worse than the original nazis were.
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I think that one-dimensional comparisons like “better” or “worse” have stopped making sense. You need to confine yourself to the level of details. Which is rather embarrassing because that was once the domain of raving apologists for the unthinkable.
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HEY! Leave “me” Out of This!
Every Nation eat ts Paint chips it Deserves!
Who had consumer fascism on their bingo card?
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Everybody?
I feel compelled to point out that this is far from the first concentration camp in American history. Joe Arpaio’s tent cities, the immigration detention centers on the border, and the detention of Japanese-Americans during WWII all come to mind. America has a long tradition of locking people up in subhuman conditions for the crime of being not-white.
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And importantly, people and organizations got angry, they pushed back, and won justice for those people in those camps. We’ve done it before. We can do it again. It’s just horrifying that this keeps happening and we need to make fundamental changes to ensure that it never happens, ever again.
Re: Subhuman Conditions
I don’t imagine you have any RESERVATIONS about saying that.
Subjugation of nonwhite peoples is part of this country’s BUSINESS MODEL.
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Hell, even before this country was a country, the British Empire that ran the colonies was more than okay with subjugating Africans into slavery and eradicating the indigenous population of the land that would become the United States. It’s not our business model, it’s our fucking historical heritage. White supremacy is literally one of the founding principles of the country; all the Confederacy did when it split from the Union was make that principle its primary reason to exist.
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Where did you read “first concentration camp”, the article states ‘newest”. It’s the damn headline…
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They updated the headline based on all the feedback. One of the good things about this site is a willingness to correct errors when they are pointed out.
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The headline was changed when it was pointed out. Check the URL.
A new 'Final Solution'
They’re counting on the weather and their defunding of weather-related offices in the government to give them some kind of plausible deniability once a Cat 3 storm hits and everyone not in a cage runs for the hills.
It pains me to think that Trunt or some of the empathy-free shitbags he surrounds himself with might actually be thinking this. (And let’s not forget DeSantis and his thieving twat of a wife who got this going in the first place).
What a time to be alive.
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I’m not sure they would let the guards leave if a hurricane was coming.
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…and just like that, it looks like this is exactly the plan:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-s-alligator-alcatraz-flooded-a-day-after-announcing-facility-is-hurricane-proof/ar-AA1HQuEP?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=ce4fa73f3b83459499152116f4413fa1&ei=85
Didn’t know MAGA stood for making America Germany again.
Or we could go with Make A German Aushwitz
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Germany has learnt a lesson (not least because of the U.S. then). It is kind of shaky in this global atmosphere of renewed nationalism and chauvinism but not anywhere as deep down the rabbit hole as the U.S.
It is not the same Kaiserreich Germany that threw out Trump’s grandfather because of draft dodging.
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Yeah but saying Make America Germany of 1941 Again MAGO1941A doesnt roll off the tongue as nicely.
The first? Even if you for whatever reason arbitrarily exclude the previous ICE concentration camps, there were also the ones used to illegally imprison people of Japanese descent during WWII.
Also, while they did not to my knowledge sell merchandise, the Nazis did plenty of PR for their camps. They had glossy puff pieces about how they were reforming dangerous criminals.
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“Newest”, did you read the article? Or just make the shit up? Hmm.
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As someone else pointed out to me, the original title was “Trump Launches Americas First Concentration Camp”. Look at the URL.
Don’t automatically assume bad faith.
Alligator Alcatraz?
More like Alligator Auschwitz!
(Everyone in Alcatraz was convicted in a court of law, with due process. This camp has none of that, no convicted criminals, no legal recourse or lawyers for the interred. Which makes this way more like Auschwitz.)
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I was gonna say that.
FloridaGOP using the expression “one-way ticket” with regard to being sent to Alligator Alcatraz gives me the impression that using “extermination camp” instead of “concentration camp” wouldn’t exactly be hyperbolic.
FloridaGOP using the expression “one-way ticket” with regard to being sent to Alligator Alcatraz gives me the impression that using “extermination camp” instead of “concentration camp” wouldn’t exactly be hyperbolic.
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It’s coming right up to a wink and a nod about how this is the last thing they will need to fix all problems. Like some kind of Final Solution or something.
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I…think that’s kind of implied by “concentration camp”?
Like, sure, there are concentration camps that aren’t extermination camps. But the phrase is most commonly associated with places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
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I’ll admit that in common usage it’s pretty much a distinction without a difference… but given the lack of complaints by Trump supporters about everyone else’s use of the term “concentration camp,” it’s more than a little creepy that they might be thinking of it as an acceptable euphemism for what they’re really after.
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I was just about to say this.
I’m sure someone in the administration (maybe DOGE) will say it’s quicker and cheaper to kill the people in the camp instead of shipping them off to another country.
Plus, the polticians could claim they “lost” the person in the “bureaucracy” instead of arguing with a court that the deportation plane already took off and they can’t get the person back.
But let’s keep people distracted with tacky merchandise and this week’s tariffs so no one questions what’s actually going on in the camp.
Trump, DeSantis & a bunch more of their ilk… excellent future candidates for residency here… till the gators & crocs get hungry…
The Atlantic: Sometimes a Camp is a Camp.
Are we the baddies?
That Webb/Mitchell/etc “Are we the baddies?” sketch points at an essential truth: individual humans can always rationalize their cruelty. It deserves to be spread widely (along with the homeopathy one).
Thus will these 21c concentration camps be lauded as a good thing and any contrary reports dismissed as fake news.
He knew who he was speaking to
There was a reason Elon was so confident in throwing not just one but two nazi salutes on stage in front of a huge crowd: He knew his audience, and he understood that to an overwhelming majority of them he was referencing a group and time period that they admired and wanted the US to copy.
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He might have known his audience in the room, but judging by Tesla’s sales and stock performance he didn’t have a very clear picture of the audience outside it.
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Given your enthusiastic support for recording and reporting what you deem undesirable activity that opposes this kind of thing in several previous instances, you would be among that audience.
At least you’re happy you’re getting what you wanted.
I can’t help but wonder…
Is the reason the immediate comparison is to Nazi’s because its the more popular known human rights violation?
or is it because people don’t want to realize this is not a party thing but an America thing. After all, FDR (that darling of the left) is the one that did internment camps.
Not the First
Someone at techdirt didn’t pass 8’th grade history class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans
Lots of argument of “Internment” vs “Concentration” camps. 100,000 people gathered up sent to camps, with no reasonable expectation of when they would be released, based soloey on their race. Sure, we didn’t gas 90,000 of them, but thousands still died as a result.
Don’t worry everyone, you just need to hold your signs up HARDER this time and you’ll save democracy!
Maybe even make a list of all the people including their full names and addresses who attend these events so you can show them how serious you are! That’ll show them!
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Guess who are more useless: A person protesting publicly holding up a sign or an anonymous whiny ass complaining on the internet about the person holding up a sign?
You just keep complaining HARDER, I’m sure you’ll make no difference at all.
Utah has decided that they want to join the immigration detention scheme. They are proud to announce the plans for
Prairie Dog Alcatraz.
Our prairie dogs are as vicious as alligators. Upset them and they can squeak ferociously and nibble your toes.
Every Founding Father was either an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant.