Designed To Enact Suffering

Plunging to new lows of "cartoonish cruelty" in our fascist reality show, MAGA just voted for our "most deeply immoral piece of legislation," depriving millions of food and health care as their fuehrer celebrated the launch of a scorched-swamp, mosquito-infested concentration camp - "Let's feed people to alligators!" - to detain millions more for overlooking the paperwork in their search for a better life. And there's merch! Fact: "Snakes in the Everglades got nothin' on the vermin in our government."

The Senate's barely-there approval - fuck Shady Vance - of Trump's heinous 900-page bill represents the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in U.S. history along with the largest cut to Medicaid and food assistance, all in the obscene name of (partly) funding a $975 billion tax break for the already richest 1%. The bill, "a tipping point between normality and fascism," also pours over $170.7 billion into "a campaign of extermination against immigrants that evokes the greatest human rights atrocities of the past," funding the hiring of vastly more Nazi thugs to terrorize, humiliate and put in cages millions of brown people who do much of this country's work.

It will kick about 16 million people off health insurance by cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid, because who needs health insurance. It will throw millions of poor families, veterans, the elderly and disabled off SNAP by cutting $285 billion in food assistance, because who needs food. It will cut funding to rural hospitals, nursing homes, student loans, wind and solar energy - electric bills will soar 30% - costing millions of jobs and adding almost $4 trillion to the national debt, to be paid by our children and grandchildren, one of many excellent reasons it's said to be the most unpopular legislation since passage of the economically disastrous Embargo Act of 1807.

Bernie Sanders calls it, "The most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.” Decrying the GOP's "obsession" with stripping people of health care, Maine Sen. Angus King calls it "disgusting..I have never seen a bill this irresponsible, regressive and downright cruel." To longtime Sen. Chris Murphy, it's "the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress." Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said passage of a bill "cooked up in back rooms, cloaked in fake numbers (that) loots our country (for) the least deserving people you could imagine feels (like) a crime scene...When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”

The bill is so bad the GOP delayed cuts to Medicaid until after the mid-terms, and had to bribe its own members with perks to pass it; Alaska's Lisa Murkowski won the  I Got Mine, Jack award by getting exemptions for her state and then complaining about how bad the bill is. To many, even worse than its craven kowtowing to oligarchs is its grotesque billions bestowed on a brutal, unprecedented white nationalist drive to dehumanize, criminalize and rip apart millions of families deemed undesirable by the color of their skin - and, eventually, likely their political persuasions - by making ICE, America's SS, the highest-funded law enforcement agency in a now-barbaric federal government.

The bill boosts the ranks of roaming Nazi henchmen by nearly 50%, with $8 billion slated to hire 10,000 more over five years (with signing bonuses!). ICE detention will get $45 billion more, a staggering 365% increase; "removal" gets $14.4 billion, a 500% surge; enforcement (see henchmen) almost $30 billion, up threefold, but we definitely can't afford to feed hungry kids. Billions more will build new camps, ramp up flights, double beds to 100,000, and round up more (hungry) terrified kids to meet a goal of 3,000 arrests a day. Of those, despite the absurd, enduring claim of targeting "the worst" violent criminals, maybe 8% have committed crimes; even ICE data shows over 93% are guiltless of anything but crossing the border.

The rabid stalking of migrants has given Republicans "license to be as openly racist as possible." Moving on from pet-eating Haitians, Scott Bessent sneered New York is turning into "Caracas on the Hudson"; on an image of its new mayor Zohran Mamdani eating with his hands, Texas' Brandon Gill, who's evidently never met a burger, sniped, "Civilized people in America don't eat like this - go back to the Third World"; and Trump already threatened to arrest "communist" Mamdani, blathering, "A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally." (Not.) Witless Tommy Tuberville called the residents of sanctuary cities "inner-city rats" we should "send back home"; Paul Krugman, home-grown but Jewish with a bi-racial wife: "We’re all rats now."

Thus do we have once-vibrant Hispanic communities from New York to L.A. now largely shut down, with frightened residents carrying passports to the corner store, keeping their kids inside until dark, or not venturing out at all for fear of abduction by masked gangs. Farmworkers across the country, up to 80% foreign-born and perhaps half undocumented, are also staying home: "If they show up to work, they don’t know if they will ever see their family again." In California, which grows much of our fruit and vegetables, those crops can go bad in one day as farmers struggle to harvest what they've grown. Experts say that many, already barely breaking even, will likely fold.

Meanwhile, ICE's daily atrocities - and the ensuing trauma - go on apace. A 75-year-old Cuban man here for 60 years died in custody, the 13th death this year; Tom Homan shrugged: "People die in ICE custody." Jacked-up stormtroopers assaulted workers at Home Depot and a woman selling tacos, tossing tear gas as they peeled away. They arrested the wrong mother of two as her kids tried to stop them. In Texas, they detained a preschool teacher with her three-year-old outside a courtroom. In L.A., they took a Honduran mother at a hearing with two children, one a six-year-old with leukemia; they've been held in Texas for weeks, the sick boy getting sicker, and she's filed the first lawsuit challenging the carnage.

And so, because it's still not enough cruelty for these ghouls, to Alligator Auschwitz, a steamy, "sadistic one-stop deportation shop" of tents filled with cages of bunk beds soon thronged with humans in a predator-replete swamp, a "concentration camp without the culpability of execution chambers" pitilessly "designed to enact suffering,” and help sick racists feel good about their whiteness. Set on a disused "shit-hole airstrip" in Florida's vast Everglades, the "bloodcurdlingly-monikered," built-in-8-days "Alligator Alcatraz” is surrounded by swampland brimming with alligators and Burmese pythons in a flood-prone, bug-plagued area where summer temps routinely top 100 degrees, rendering it "a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian."

Tents in an environmentally treasured nature preserve often hit by floods, tropical storms and hurricanes at a time the regime has decimated the agency that warns about those events, operated by a likewise-decimated FEMA and commanded by haphazardly- deputized, wildly ill-qualified members of the National Guard serving as "deportation judges" - what could possibly go wrong? Set to cost almost half a billion dollars a year - but no, we really can't afford to feed hungry children - the barbed-wire re-invention of World War ll Japanese Internment Camps, with a fresh touch of El Salvador's CECOT, evidently fulfills Republicans' most fervent wet dream: To feed immigrants to animals.

On Tuesday, touring this "beyond horrifying" showcase of ruthlessness - initial intake 1,000, ultimately 5,000 - the cartoon villains who created it proudly paraded in: Nazi Barbie, Stephen Goebbels, Ron DeFascist and Trump with a botched make-up line that made him look like The Joker. He delightedly handed the floor to "our superstar," the sociopathic Miller, who praised the use of "novel legal and diplomatic tools," along with building death camps and letting ICE goons rampage through terrorized communities, to "deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border," at least on the repulsive planet he inhabits, and we wish he'd go back to.

On her foul planet, replicating her photo-op before CECOT's shaved-head detainees in her illegal $50,000 Rolex, ICE Barbie is still somehow celebrating her imaginary "going after murderers and rapists and traffickers." Tuesday she even added an alleged cannibal they'd put on a plane home who "started to eat himself," arguing he was "the kind of deranged individuals on our streets (that) we're trying to get out of our country because they are so deranged, they don't belong here." Hmm. Ever hard-core, she's also busy menacing one patriot for a nifty ICE Block app: "This sure looks like obstruction of justice - if you obstruct our brave law enforcement, we will hunt you down."

Just before her visit, her "reptile-run Gestapo" shared an AI-generated Alligator Alcatraz image featuring smirking alligators in ICE caps; Noem giddily posted, "Coming soon!" Americans recoiled. "Have you ever wondered what it would have looked like if Hitler's SS had social media?" asked one. Many suggested putting the people who built the atrocity in it; others decried MAGA's dehumanized trolling about concentration camps: "History is repeating - just with better branding." One: "Posting memes that boast about the manner in which people will die if they try to escape the undoubtedly inhumane conditions that will become the norm in a facility (gives) major "Alligator Auschwitz" vibes."

The visit came exactly a year after SCOTUS declared Trump above the law. Standing before cages in a dumb Gulf of America cap, the eternal victim sneered "Biden wanted me in here, that son of a bitch," but "it didn't work out that way." He called Noem "elegant" and "an unbelievable horse person" (umm) before happily noting "they have a lot of cops in the form of alligators" to "keep people where they’re supposed to be." He praised his grotesque cohorts - “It’s really government working together, I'm proud of them" - made zigzag moves with his pudgy hands - "We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator" - and opined, "A little controversial, but I couldn’t care less.”

A dead-eyed, servile DeSantis outlined the task - "intake, process, then deport" - and hailed the camp about to hold human beings who did nothing wrong: "This is as secure as it gets." He added, “This is a model, but we need other states to step up." Meanwhile, his state's party of zombies is so into it they're selling depraved merch - t-shirts, drink cozies - for "Florida’s gator-guarded prison for illegal aliens...It's a one-way ticket to regret." One appalled observer: "That's some Idi Amin stuff right there." Much like Trump on Fox, extolling his latest grotesquerie and airily explaining on potential migrant escapes, "They'll just get eaten by wildlife. I guess that's the concept."

There's more. Amidst performative acts of political intimidation, he's mused, "We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time...many born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too" - maybe including Musk: "We'll have to take a look." He's selling $249 perfume, "a rallying cry in a bottle...They're all about winning, strength and success." He's musing about nationwide alligator-themed camps: "They might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time,” citing facilities to "handle (some) of the most vicious people on the planet." Observers: "Consider the Alligator Alcatraz gear on sale (before) deciding who are the most vicious people on the planet."

And he's losing what's left of his putrid mind. Asked about a timeline for detainees, he raved: "In Florida? I'm going to spend a lot. This is my home state. I love it." He "fixed up the little Oval Office, I make it - it's like a diamond," he has "a nice little cottage to stay at," he pays lots of fictional taxes, everyone in New York is leaving. "I'll be here as much as I can," he ended. "Very nice question." Lawrence O'Donnell on "the banality of their cruelty," the "utter emptiness of his mind," notably on the virtually ignored day USAID ends, with its expected millions of deaths, its "worldwide campaign of cruelty in their name." Others: "But her emails. I didn't like her laugh. Biden was too old." Now here we are: "A more loathsome fuck never walked the earth."

And on Wednesday, Alligator Alcatraz already began flooding.