MAGA Has No Problem with a Concentration Camp
The United States now has a concentration camp.
I never thought I would ever write a sentence like that.
If you haven’t been living on Pluto for the last month, you know about this stinking pile of Roman Empire-style barbarism currently sunk into the Everglades by the Trump Administration.
A member of our family has an elderly uncle who loves Donald Trump. He listens to Trump’s speeches on the radio. He watches Fox News religiously.
I call him Sluggo, inspired by the old Saturday Night Live short film series, “Mr. Bill.”
Sluggo was generally the meanest villain in the “Mr. Bill “movies. He often literally destroyed Mr. Bill after numerous statements by another character that Sluggo would do no such thing.
I drive my version of Sluggo to his doctor’s appointments. I take him to the local pharmacy to get his diabetes drugs. He has a great deal of trouble walking, let alone driving.
This experience is less than enchanting.
The other week, as I was sitting with him in the office of his endocrinologist, he said, “Biden brought in a lot of bad people,” meaning immigrants. At the time, we were surrounded by four or five people of color.
I said quite loudly, “This is a ridiculous conversation.”
I’m sure that Sluggo got his talking points either directly from Trump himself or Fox News, which is pretty much the same thing.
After the appointment, Sluggo bragged in the car how well his stock funds were doing under Trump. He predicted the stock market would continue to go up. He is very proud to live in a country where Trump is president.
On one hand, we have at the moment a rising stock market, despite the heavy hand of the daily whims of the president’s tariffs and tariff threats, his insults directed at the Fed chairman, an upward trend in inflation rates, ICE raids depleting work forces from Nebraska to Los Angeles, and the bottom virtually dropping out of the tourism industry. Because who would want to visit the United States when the Administration is loudly contemptuous of anyone who isn’t a U.S. citizen and tries every day with all its leverage to destroy our democratic system of government?
On the other hand, we see in Sluggo’s brain a defenestration of every undocumented person or asylum seeker in the country. Since he sees them as awful people, I guess it’s okay to put them in places like Alligator Alcatraz.
I’ve read news reports on what this place is like. Groups of 32 people are confined in open-air cages under tents in south Florida, in the middle of a subtropical wetlands, where alligators and poisonous snakes make their homes.
If you’ve never been to Florida in the summer, I can tell you what it’s like. I lived there for a year in the early 1980s. To walk around outside feels like you’ve been trapped in a nuclear furnace. It’s as if the weather is actively trying to kill you.
Sluggo is practically bursting with joy over Trump’s incredible leadership. Trump has made him richer. And Trump is protecting him too! Because he’s getting rid of all the bad people Biden allowed into the country.
Unsurprisingly, Sluggo himself is hardly a nice guy. Several years ago, he called me to say that he was going to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday by eating fried chicken, chitlins and watermelon.
He once mocked the Catholic saints in a conversation with a very religious neighbor of the senior residence where he lives. The neighbor was so upset he complained to me. I had to tell Sluggo to cut it out.
When a family member suggested to him he should give a little to charity, he told her he didn’t know how to do that.
Sluggo is emblematic of where the Republican Party is today. It’s selfish, sarcastically mean and aggressively blind to the suffering of others. I hear no words of compassion from the Republican members of Congress.
The MAGA bros hated the latest Superman movie, because Superman was kind. Kind is considered woke now.
Aren’t Republicans supposed to be Christians? What I see is that they’re Christian in form, but not content. I guess they believe that Jesus is humanity’s savior, but don’t see themselves as needing to follow the Biblical examples of his empathy.
They all seem to watch Fox TV, or the One America Network (OAN), which offer a series of propaganda entertainments masquerading as news, extolling Trump and the Republican Party. Fox tells them what they want to hear, as opposed, to, you know, the actual facts.
While Sluggo blesses Trump and his little scraping, bowing servant, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for building a concentration camp, I cannot feel anything but pain about this moral stain on our country.
These incarcerated inmates in the Everglades are real people to me. An unknown number of them have applied for political asylum. What’s being done to them is a sick, demented, evil crime that violates every edict about compassion that religion has conceived.
I worked as a New York City elementary school teacher for almost two decades after a career in corporate America. I taught in Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, working with first and second graders and Kindergarten kids too.
My public-school students came from all over the world. Every classroom was a mini-United Nations. We welcomed kids from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, China, St. Lucia, and other places. One student was the product of a Dominican-Yemenite marriage.
The city’s schools made Emma Lazarus’ words on the Statue of Liberty a reality – “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The parents and children did contradict one line of Lazarus. They weren’t tired at all.
And they believed in America. They knew if they came here, they could live in a way generally denied them in their home countries. They could be free to speak their minds to the government, to the press, to their neighbors, and not get arrested. They could practice their religion without fear of being persecuted. If they and their children worked hard, they could get ahead and make a good life for their families.
Here they were, striving mightily to live the American Dream in some of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods.
MAGA hates all of them.
It doesn’t matter if they’re citizens or undocumented, even if they happen to be Christian. They are people of color.
The American Dream that was so attractive to immigrants is now made out to be some kind of old-fashioned sucker’s game according to MAGA. Immigrants are the ones who are conning the “real Americans.” They’re criminals and drug dealers and rapists, poisoning America – these are the mythical “bad people” Biden supposedly let into the country.
Jews are unfortunately well-acquainted with this stream of fantastically imagined invective directed at turning an ordinary group of people into monsters.
I lost more cousins than I can count in World War II. Citizens of Latvia, they were gathered up by the Nazis, put into camps and gassed, because Hitler demonized the Jews as a subhuman “other” who were polluting the purity of Aryan blood.
Trump has done a fine job of following in Hitler’s rhetorical footsteps. Just one statement of his, during the 2024 campaign, that undocumented immigrants from our southern border were “poisoning the blood of our country,” should have set off the loudest of alarm bells in every American’s brain. Yet we elected him anyway.
The opening and operation of this camp brings new meaning to the Trump bumper stickers and flags I see as I travel around my county and state. It’s not a good look. I didn’t think it was possible for this Administration to act more horribly than its first incarnation, from 2017 to 2021, but I see now that I lacked imagination. The Trump MAGA logo now not only embraces new depths of cruelty, but revels in it, takes pride in it.
The rot of moral degeneracy has infected the American body politic so deeply that it’s hard to find any evidence our society will recover its wits. When people who claim to be Christians express admiration and support for Trump’s viciousness and reject Jesus’ message of universal brotherhood and love for anyone but their own little in-group, then we have truly lost our way.
When the current President of the United States at the end of his previous term tried to overthrow the honest results of a clean election, what did his party do? They supported him in his blatant lies and refused to impeach him, allowing him to run for office again.
Now that he’s President again, he’s selling Trump Bibles, cologne, sneakers, guitars and digital tokens to his acolytes, clear and egregious cases of using his office to make a profit, not one person in his political party even raises an eyebrow, let alone says a word of reproach, for fear of offending their dear, unstable leader.
When the President decides that his company will invest heavily in the crypto currency business, essentially a massive con to entice the suckers to buy a product that has no value in the real world, we don’t hear one peep from MAGA. Silence means consent.
When the President of the United States sets up a concentration camp in the Everglades, called Alligator Alcatraz, what did his MAGA supporters do?
They cheered him on. A number of them visited the entrance to the camp to take selfies, as if it was Disneyworld, making a mockery of the real human suffering the Administration is inflicting on people who did nothing wrong but try to come here to seek a better life for themselves and their families.
Florida Republicans are selling tee-shirts featuring a smiling, savage alligator eager to eat an undocumented immigrant, with an American flag bandana wrapped around its thick neck.
Alternatively, you can purchase a beer cozy that shouts, “Make Alligators Great Again – Alligator Alcatraz.”
How do you make alligators great again? Let them eat an immigrant detained in the camp.
GOP donors lined up to grab millions in government money to build the camp, according to a CBS News report, ironically published on July 4th (source: https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/republican-donors-and-floridas-hurricane-know-how-helped-build-alligator-alcatraz-so-quickly/).
For moral clarity, I find myself going back to Rabbi Hillel.
“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary. Now go and study.”
Amnesty International’s website states:
“All people who come to the U.S. seeking safety from dangerous situations in their home countries must have their human rights respected.
“But right now, tens of thousands of asylum seekers are behind bars in ICE detention centers across the U.S. that are plagued with horrific conditions.”
Amnesty International and many other organizations, from the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, the International Rescue Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigrant Justice Center, to the Immigration Justice Campaign, American Immigration Lawyers Association and Global Refuge, are trying to provide detainees with food, medicine, legal help and public advocacy.
These organizations clearly understand Hillel’s simple advice. Yet the Trump Administration and Sluggo’s Republican Party seem incapable of grasping this universal idea.
Here’s another thought attributed to Hillel that I find relevant to how we can respond to Trump’s deranged inhumanity.
“If I am only for myself, what am I?”
