The Era of Depravity

Depravity, Cruelty and Hatred Have Become America's New Core Values

An OFFICIAL DHS social media meme celebrating the opening of Alligator Alcatraz for detainees. This is a boast, not a critique.

An OFFICIAL SS Totenkopf (Death Head).

July 2, 2025

By Marc Cooper

As Vice-President Vance broke the tie vote in the Senate Tuesday morning that will deprive some 15 million or more of the neediest Americans of health care in order to help finance a massive tax cut for the richest one-tenth of one percent of billionaire plutocrats, President Trump went to the Florida everglades to bless the closest thing he has built to date to a concentration camp.

These two acts bejewel a special era in America, one that began to rise some decades ago but is now quickly reaching full maturity: The Age of American Depravity. I shudder to think what comes next.

You hardly need me to fill you in on the nature and consequences of the cuts in Medicaid and the knock-on effects it will have on Medicare, the ACA and the shut down of nursing homes and rural hospitals. I certainly hope not!

I will give the media a C plus for finally and almost fully explaining its details. After all, cable news had a lot of time to fill as it had live cams on the Senate fossils getting through a day and a night of the so-called vote-a-rama so the broadcast geniuses were forced to fill time with all those boring facts — including the ones from research institutes estimating the cuts will cost some 50,000 unnecessary deaths — not that shocking in a country that has still not memorialized 1.2m COVID deaths and that re-elected the Master Gravedigger.

Instead I am going to focus today on two other grim outcomes and wildly under-reported by the mass media, finalized today and, as a bonus for you, I will begin with some words about our new Alligator Alcatraz down in Florida. This sort of monument to inhuman cruelty is more or less (mostly less) what almost any government might build. But few, if any, would openly praise it as some sort of religious shrine and would not flaunt it.

But our Trump Regime is not like most any other governments. And for MAGA and for way too many ignorant civilians, it might as well be a shrine to our state religion of scorn for the “outsiders” who deserve depravity to the point of torture. So there was Donald Trump Tuesday morn along with a gaggle of sycophant Florida politicians and a compliant media, tramping through the Everglades to boast of what is now being called Alligator Alcatraz, an obscene “camp”, opening on Wednesday, on an abandoned runway in an uninhabitable remote swamp seething with alligators, crocodiles and deadly snakes (no word yet on whether or not ICE will be allowed to stage weekly tournaments of catapulting hot oil and fireballs over the walls.

Wait, there will be no “walls.” Don’t need ‘em. Just take another peek at the meme at the top created by Ice “Klaus” Barbie’s perverse DHS.

This swamp camp will cost a half-billion dollars a year to run and will squeeze in 5000 of the worst of worst gardeners, waiters, carpenters, and grannies in America.

I don’t think calling this a low or medium level concentration camp is over the top. Locking up thousands without any process for an indefinite time in an isolated tent-walled camp surrounded by deadly animals. The ICE meme is a chilly reminder of how the SS adopted the Death Head to top off their Hugo Boss-designed uniforms. And just like Jews found themselves locked up based solely on their religion, our American scapegoats are being held primarily because of their ethnicity.

This image above from the rabidly pro-Trump New York Post describes the interior of Alligator Alcatraz as “bleak.” Um, yeah.

If you think I am exaggerating the meaning of atrocities like Alligator Alcatraz with comparisons to Nazis, here’s a couple of historical facts you should chew on. The Nazis came to power in January 1933 and within two months they opened the first concentration camps by tossing a few thousand communists, socialists, gays and gypsies into them. But their incarceration was mostly temporary and the prisoners were set free after some months or so. There were no death camps per se.

Some four years later, by 1937, the total Nazi concentration camp population was 50,000. As of today, ICE is holding 58,000 detainees in custody. And it wasn’t until the invasion of Poland in 1939, that the Nazis embarked on an initial death campaign, that greatly escalated in 1941 with the “Final Solution.”

I am not suggesting that we are living under a Nazi regime. I am merely pointing out that at this stage, merely 6 months after Trump coming to power, he’s running ahead of Hitler in terms of ethno-based incarceration. Way ahead.

That brings me to what I think is the most under-reported aspect of the BBB now under consideration. The Senate version approved on early Tuesday provides for the following massive and threatening build up in ICE, Border Patrol, and migrant detention camps as outlined by the American Immigration Council:

• $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers, including family detention facilities. This represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget. It is a 62 percent larger budget than the entire federal prison system and could result in daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.

• $29.9 billion toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations, increasing ICE’s annual budget three-fold.

• Caps the number of immigration judges to 800 despite record backlogs in the immigration court system.

• $46.6 billion into border wall construction—more than three times what the Trump administration spent on the wall in its first term, despite the failure of the wall to improve or contribute in any meaningful way to border management strategy

• A new $10 billion fund to reimburse DHS for costs related to “safeguard[ing] the borders of the United States to protect against the illegal entry of persons or contraband.” This funding is nearly 50 percent of CBP’s FY 2024 budget. However, unlike a normal budget, this funding would provide very few guardrails and little guidance to DHS on how the funds must be used. As a result, this would become a slush fund for CBP to largely use however it determined.

The bill also calls for the hiring of ten thousand more ICE agents. So out will come the windshield scrapers to recruit the rancid scum from barrels and buckets of human discards, provided they are at least 40 lbs. overweight to be a city cop. And a couple of more finer-grained provisions are about to be enacted, as outlined this week by Dan Moynihan:

Trump wants to direct an extraordinary amount of new money for ICE. The spending is so large that it defies easy understanding. For example, ICE will receive a 365% increase in detention, spending $45 billion. For context, this is more than the combined budget for all 50 state prison systems. The current budget for the federal Bureau of Prisons is just over $8.3 billion. The ICE detention budget is larger than the total budget for USAID used to be. The ICE detention budget increase is larger than cuts in education, or for SNAP in the BBB. It is larger than cuts to NIH, CDC and cancer research combined. It is on the scale of the type of supplemental budgets that the US passed when engaged in foreign wars…

…That money hires new ICE officers and creates new ICE camps. It provides the fuel for Trump to fulfill his promise to go after cities run by Democrats, to do what he has done to LA, with less need to rely on the military. The new funding allows Trump to create a Department of Domestic Military Enforcement.

Expect to start seeing very soon, an abundance of masked ICE agents, now Donald Trump’s anonymous private corps of shock troops, showing up in your neighborhood even if you are a Volvo-owning, white middle class professional in a “nice” neighborhood. Who do you think staffs all the consumer service shops and stores and garages and supermarkets you frequent? The hunted.

My younger sister who lives in a solidly midle-class leafy suburb of L.A. in the San Fernando Valley, remarked to me that her surroundings have become a ghost town. Fear of ICE has forced Latino workers to stay inside and now the car washes are closed, the restaurants are scarcely attended, and the big box stores like Home Depot are near empty. Schools are running at low attendance. When she asked me what to do my answer was get used to it and help who you can. And to be careful. She’s olive-skinned and Jewish but I advised her to carry her passport as she could easily be profiled by the ICE goons as a Dangerous Migrant. Indeed, she like the rest of my family, are often addressed first in Spanish by native speakers.

One final point I want to touch on in this post that is being mostly ignored by the media. This week marked the closing of the the U.S. Agency for International Development on top of the earlier cutting of US foreign aid thanks to the sinister Trump-Musk-Rubio mass firings.

It sounds unreal but it is true. Among the 8 million Sudanese in danger of famine, more than 300,000 have died as a direct cut off American aid. It is too painful for me to summarize the massive human toll that the U.S. cut off of funding has already wrought. Suffice it to say hundreds of thousands of deaths in the last five months and literally millions of others projected over the immediate future. It’s an abomination, a betrayal of the poor and the ill by the richest country in the world, an indictment of a tin foil detached media that paid more attention to the grotesque and obscene coverage of the Bezos wedding than to the ongoing devastation of millions caused by a demented, indifferent American president and his pack of loyalist cronies and yes-men.

We don’t live in a fascist society but this is what fascism looks like.

We have several options immediately before us. 1) drink a lot of beer, smoke some dope, and spend a lot of time watching reality shows and ESPN 2) Organize LOCALLY and face to face to both protect immigrants and prepare to defeat all MAGA candidates in the 2026 midterms. Try to come up with positive reform proposals with your neighbors beyond just attacking Trump. And maybe work up the courage to form a small committee, print some flyers and knock on doors to TALK to the neighbors you don’t know 3) Prepare for the real possibility of the mid terms being interrupted even after the voting is done and do not assume that even a Democratic win will fully stop Trump 4) Consider what conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks suggested as a “civic rebellion” and what you and your friends think that really means. I suspect it is eventually going to come down to that last option in any case as there is no institutional path available to dethrone Mad King Don.

One final point: This monstrous bill goes back to the House for final approval in the next few days and it’s going to be a close vote. Might I suggest you do any of the above, like now? And do not debase yourself by going to a July 4th show where they play Lee Greenwood’s dreadful hymn but it might do some good to actually listen to and absorb the stirring lyrics of the national anthem.

The anti-Trump opposition is growing, his polls stink, some Democrats have awakened from their stupor. But Trump is more powerful than ever thanks to his support in the diseased Supreme Court and a Quisling Republican Party, along with 60 million or so walking dead voters. Do not fool yourself.+++