Staff & Interns: Condemn Alligator Alcatraz, Don’t Celebrate Human Suffering

This message is to Congressional staff and interns. I don’t think you got into politics because you thought America needed an Alligator Alcatraz. I don’t think your vision of a better world is one in which people sell merch celebrating human suffering and government cruelty. I don’t think that’s why you’re here. America is building concentration camps on the fly in the most inhospitable places on earth. This will be the foundation of your lifelong legacy. But is that what you want? I can’t believe it is. My generation did a lot of bad things and left your generation to clean up the mess. There is no law to address the injuries we caused you. And I think you can do better than we did. Donald Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have gleefully toured the concentration camp in Florida. Gleefully. The thing that separates free people from Nazis is this: when free people have to make tough choices that will cause human suffering, they don’t party and sell t-shirts to celebrate. Plans to potentially expand this hellscape into a nationwide system of camps as though it’s a restaurant franchise is the beginning of an atrocity. Perhaps the most immoral part of this plot is how they’re cashing in on human suffering. The Trump regime is not trying to hide what they are doing; they are actively merchandising it. They are literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. Until now authoritarian regimes have hidden these sorts of actions from public scrutiny. It was how they tacitly acknowledged that their own actions evicted them from the boundary of humanity, from the fellowship of what was commonly thought of as “human”. This administration celebrates—and sells—what history’s most corrupt leaders have always tried to hide. Is this the world you were hoping to create when you were a freshman in polysci? And to pay for this, we’re stripping hundreds of millions in funds from FEMA. We’re making people who are suffering from actual emergencies pay to jail people Trump doesn’t like in a swamp. Good people are doing nothing while evil people sell t-shirts. Unlike successful authoritarians, Trump has never enjoyed a single moment of majority support. You have a chance to make a difference, no matter how small, to resist his siren call of cruelty. If you choose to resist, there are people out here ready to support you. The future is open to you. But history is forever.