MAGA star skewered for gleefully promoting ‘official Alligator Alcatraz merch': ‘The banality of evil'

Independent

01-07-2025

Benny Johnson sparked backlash across the political spectrum on Tuesday for the 'unnerving' clip the MAGA podcaster posted to social media in which he enthusiastically promoted the 'official Alligator Alcatraz merch' while asking his followers if they'd 'rock this drip.'
Johnson, the pro-Trump provocateur and serial plagiarist who was also duped into producing content for a Russian propaganda operation, was on hand when Donald Trump visited the new immigration detention facility that is located in the Florida Everglades.
Besides posting a series of video clips hyping up the migrant camp that will now be a centerpiece of the Trump administration's mass deportation program, the right-wing YouTuber tossed several Trump-friendly questions at the president throughout the tour of the facility.
With the president already leaning into the 'concept' of alligators 'eating' escaped detainees on Tuesday, Johnson asked Trump about his previous suggestion in 2018 about putting crocodiles in the Rio Grande River to stop border crossings. 'Is this a dream come true for you, sir?' the right-wing YouTuber added.
While Johnson also teed the president up with queries about 'communist Zohran Mamdani' and whether CNN needed to be prosecuted, he drew perhaps the most attention for showing off the merchandise the Florida Republican Party is currently peddling to promote the detention camp.
'The feds have greenlit Alligator Alcatraz — Florida's gator-guarded, python-patrolled prison for illegal aliens who thought they could game the system,' a fundraising email from the Florida GOP read this week. 'Surrounded by miles of swamp and bloodthirsty wildlife, this ain't no vacation spot. It's a one-way ticket to regret for criminals who'll wish they'd self-deported.'
According to the party's storefront page on the Republican fundraising site WinRed, customers can purchase t-shirts, baseball caps and beer koozies emblazoned with the phrase 'Alligator Alcatraz' and images of the large reptiles patrolling a prison complex.
'Hi guys. I have just been handed official Alligator Alcatraz merch,' Johnson tweeted on Tuesday from outside the facility. 'I repeat, this prison has merch. Things are going insanely well.'
In the clip Johnson shared online, the MAGA memester boasted that his new hat was 'provided to us by the state of Florida' with a broad smile across his face. While continuing to pose in his 'Alligator Alcatraz' baseball cap, Johnson concluded the short video with the following question: 'Would you rock this drip?'
The far-right pundit cheerfully hawking 'prison merch' left a bad taste in many observers' mouths – and not just liberals and progressives.
'There's just something gross about this,' conservative YouTuber Brad Polumbo reacted. 'These are public policy issues with human life at stake. They should be handled with more seriousness than this, even if you support the efforts.'
Drew Holden, the managing editor of conservative think tank American Compass, noted that 'there's something unnerving about this jubilation.' Anti-woke author Nancy Rommelmann, meanwhile, shared that 'this clip will be used in future documentaries about the delight people took in pushing 'the enemy' out of spaces they saw as rightly theirs' and likened it to Lebensraum – the concept that Nazis used to justify territorial expansion.
Many other critics also invoked Nazi Germany and concentration camps while blasting Johnson's exuberant promotion of the detention facility's official clothing line.
'The banality of evil,' literature teacher Scott Barber tweeted, referencing Hannah Arendt's famed book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the Holocaust. Arendt coined the phrase because Eichmann claimed he was merely 'doing his job' and carrying out orders, suggesting that evil is largely perpetrated when immoral acts become normalized over time.
'Begrudgingly, I must shout out 1940s Germany for realizing concentration camp merch would have been a bridge too far,' television writer Noah Garfinkel quipped.
'Showing off my free concentration camp merch. My soul is just out of frame, intact and not bound by dark blood rites to the eternal service of Moloch the Devourer,' Ciaramella snarked.