The right wing turned the inhumane Alligator Alcatraz prison into a meme

The Alligator Alcatraz, has been constantly built from Florida, $ 225 million and count the detention of immigrants in the Everglades, is both a de facto concentration camp and a meme on the right. The most ardent supporters of President Donald Trump are willing to excuse – or are in some cases reveling – allegations of inhuman treatment in the establishment: worms in food, flooded floors of fecal water, fluorescent lights left for 24 hours a day, and no air conditioning at night despite incessant humidity of the south of southern Florida.

For them, the whole is a big joke, the fodder for the memes that activate the base as they turn off the majority of Americans from the Draconian immigration application of Trump.

Laura Loomer, a close confidant of Trump, was dizzy for the prospect of sweetening potential evacuations in the act. “The good news is that alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now,” she posted on X. (the figure does not refer to the estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the country but to the whole Latin American population of the United States. Jurassic And boasted of obtaining an official Alcatraz Merch alligator during his visit. (Before his turn to the right, and before he was dismissed from Buzzfeed for plagiarism, Johnson also compared the Arab Spring to Jurassic. It is not known if he has seen other films.) A republican member of the Congress also sells Alligator Alcatraz MERCH to finance his re -election campaign. There are more merch on Etsy. Obviously, there is also a Shitcoin.

The memes and the merch are more than a rich Rick diagram for enterprising nativists, although Grift is obviously part of the Maga equation. In his second term, Trump transformed the application of immigration into spectator sport. Far -right influencers like Chaya Raichik, better known as Libs of Tiktok, were invited to rise with immigration and customs application (ICE). The secretary of the Ministry of Internal Security, Kristi Noem, transformed his position into a kind of cowboy cop cosplay, often appearing in public in a bullet-proof vest or a hat of ten gallons (or sometimes both). The official account of the White House X publishes images of “deportation asmr” and ghibli studio from migrants in tears in the handcuffs.

There is a real joy. To borrow from Adam Serwer, cruelty is the point, but there is more than that. During the conservative political action conference this year, vice-president JD Vance said the voters had given Trump a mandate on the application of immigration; Trump won the popular vote in part because the public demanded mass deportations. It is true that before the 2024 elections, most of the voters expressed their disapproval with the border policy of President Joe Biden and seemed open to a harder approach to immigration. But Trump – and the Zoomers probably leading the social media of the White House – did not realize that public opinion is no longer for immigration, or they just don’t care.

Trump seems even less indebted to public opinion in his second mandate than in his first. Since January, he has exercised deeply unpopular policies, prices for completely elimination of the federal government, so tirelessly that he has even lost the support of his own base. A half year after Trump’s second term, it is clear that the voters agreed with some of his proposals in abstract terms – they elected it because he promised to “do something for immigration” and to “manage the government as a business” – but do not like how these policies took place in practice.

A piece of republican voters turned against the prices and the Elon Musk government’s efficiency department. Other Trump supporters have seen their friends, parents and spouses targeted by ice since the president’s return to the post. A naturalized citizen who voted for Trump was even arrested by ice agents while he was driving at work; He now believes that the ice racly profiling the Latinos. He told a local news station that he had voted for Trump because he was aiming for “criminals, not all the Hispanics, Spanish-Look-Alike”. Trump’s approval rating on immigration is now down to 41%, the lowest since the start of his second term. Voters may have trusted Trump to get out of the country’s “criminals”, but they did not necessarily expect his administration to target non-citizens (and some citizens too), deploy the National Guard to arrest immigrants and repress the demonstrators in Los Angeles, or disappear hundreds of people in a Salvado megaprison.

In an article on X, the White House Advisor Stephen Miller justified Sic La Garde Nationale on the demonstrators saying that “America voted for mass deportations”. Recent surveys suggest that Americans are no longer in Trump’s immigration program. Rather than responding to this change in the feeling of voters, the administration seems to double its all or nothing approach to the application of immigration and its joyful representations of these online draconian policies. The memes create a kind of alternative reality, a virtual universe in which everyone is still on the Trump train and all Americans are delighted with the prospect of nourishing immigrants with alligators. This echo room benefits from – and is amplified by – algorithmic silos. Your average voter can find out more about Alligator Alcatraz in the news, but they don’t necessarily see the selfies of the Benny Johnson concentration camp. The memes are group signaling; They generate a feeling of belonging to Trump’s most ardent supporters while undressing them to the cruelty of this new era. The memes are the disjointed policy of polls and demagoguery without democracy, a sign that the White House – either by imprudence, or something well worse – does not care about the elections.