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WHY DO FASCISTS DREAM OF ALLIGATORS?  
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Asher Elbein
July 9, 2025
Defector.com
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_ The real animal is subsumed by the fantasy, in the way that the
real human lives under threat—every man, woman and child under the
gun of a government carried away with its own gleeful cruelty—become
nameless statistics or worse, fodder for photo-ops _

,

 

In June, Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier extolled the
benefits of the concentration camp they were rushing to build in the
wetlands of the Big Cypress Nature Reserve, west of Miami and just
north of the Everglades. The swamp location wasn’t incidental to the
5,000-bed facility, but a plus. "It presents an efficient, low-cost
opportunity to build a temporary detention facility because you don't
need to invest that much in the perimeter," he crowed. "If people get
out, there's not much waiting for them other than alligators and
pythons." 

What happened next was, perhaps, predictable. The Department of
Homeland Security formally named the camp “Alligator Alcatraz,”
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sweaty piece of branding that the rest of the administration picked up
with customary glee. DHS social media posted AI-generated images
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smug-looking alligators wearing ICE baseball caps. Online stores run
by the Florida GOP (and Uthmeier himself) immediately began selling
[[link removed]] “Alligator
Alcatraz”-branded T-shirts and beer koozies. During Trump’s first
term, the _New York Times_ reported
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the president had often fantasized behind closed doors of a moat
beneath his border wall, one that could be filled with snakes and
alligators; when he toured the installation on July 1, he leaned and
swayed and grinned at the sight of chain link cages under tent
awnings, and returned again and again to the reptiles in the
surrounding swamps. “We're going to teach them how to run away from
an alligator,” he rambled in response to a reporter’s question.
“OK, if they escape prison, how to run away, don't run in a straight
line, run like this. And you know what? Your chances go up at about
one percent, okay? That's a good thing.”

It is, as with so much in the second Trump administration, an act of
performative cruelty and malice and money-grubbing dressed up—not
especially convincingly—as expediency. But like so much marsh gas,
the lurid fantasies which drive these people are continually bubbling
up to the surface. American fascism writ large yearns for ethnic
cleansing and the concentration camp; in the south, American white
supremacy yearns for the Alligator. 

Let’s begin with the fact that there are two types of alligators,
and they have very little do with one another. There’s the real
American alligator (_A. mississippiensis_), a large but—as
crocodilians go—rather docile and shy predator of the southern
wetlands, subsisting on everything from fish to deer. Forget that one,
please. We are concerned here with the symbolic one: the Alligator,
Scourge of the Swamp, the monster that dwells in the mire of the
American imagination. This latter form “is most fond of human flesh
as an item of diet,” according to a characteristically breathless
1923 report in the _Oakland Tribune_.
[[link removed]--------] “Hunters
say that while an alligator will risk its safety for a young dog, it
will jeopardize every hope of life for a live baby. And in the matter
of color … black babies, in the estimation of the alligators, are
far more refreshing, as it were, than white ones.”

The idea that alligators and other crocodilians lust for non-white
flesh—to the point where such people can be used as lures to bring
the reptiles under the hunter’s guns—had a global appeal, with the
identities of the babies in question swapped to fit different
circumstances. In 1894, Ohio’s _Mansfield Daily Shield _ran a
lengthy and wretched piece
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an anonymous British former army officer, who claimed that he’d shot
100 crocodiles by repeatedly employing the same "Hindoo infant" as
bait; three years earlier, the _Toronto Daily Mail_ had run a story
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the stolen children of Russian Jews being used to lure in Nile
crocodiles from Egypt. Writers inserted the folktale wholesale into
unrelated incidents, such as a 1908 _Washington Times_ piece
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spiced up an account of Bronx Zoo keepers moving alligators with
allegations that they—“knowing as [the keepers] did their
epicurean fondness for the black man”—lured the reptiles along
with the aid of "plump little Africans."

Whether or not this ever happened is a subject of some debate. The Jim
Crow Museum maintains that it did
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Snopes, kicking the tires on the more prominent stories
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suggests it probably didn’t. Certainly it was something later
Southern writers were eager to laugh off. In 1968, baseball pitcher
Bob Gibson recalled being heckled with “gator bait” stories during
his time in Columbus, Georgia. Clearly stung—and thumbing his
suspenders with every word—the sports editor of Columbus’
newspaper fired back,
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how Gibson could be "naive enough to fall for such a fantastic
tale,” one that had to be “tongue-in-cheek.”

Gibson, of course, wasn’t falling for anything. That this bit of
racist invective was not a literal threat does not mean that it
wasn’t a serious one: It’s hard to laugh off a joke when the
punchline is your disposability. And as folklorist Patricia Turner
writes in her 2002 book _Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies_
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it was a joke that white Southerners simply delighted in making. Among
several too flatly racist to repeat, Turner records one where Lyndon
Baines Johnson’s helicopter stops over in Louisiana to award a medal
for integration to two white men pulling a black man on water skis
through a swamp. After LBJ leaves, the two white men glance at each
other, baffled. “Who in the shit was that?” “I don’t know, but
he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about catching alligators.”  

If anything, Turner writes, antebellum and Jim Crow society couldn’t
get enough of the idea that their racial order had, as it were, teeth.
There were popular minstrel songs, like 1899’s "Mammy's Little
Alligator Bait.” There was the merchandising, too, enough so that it
was arguably a commercial phenomenon as much as anything else. A
customer could buy souvenirs like “Coon cards,
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full of (often naked, always caricatured) black children placed in
peril from toothy jaws—and bits of bric-a-brac like the souvenir
spoons or matchboxes or letter openers depicting slavering alligators
closing in on a black baby. All of it is kitsch in its sentimental art
style and camp in its fundamentally theatrical nastiness, a
combination that feels particularly modern: a smile too stretched and
strained to hide the bloodthirst lurking behind it. 

Wikimedia Commons

The entire material culture of gator bait underscores the nature of
the society that produced it: one deeply obsessed with racial
subjugation and violence, and hell-bent on weaponizing the surrounding
landscape to do it. White culture always gave the alligator the upper
hand, drafting it as a symbolic deputy, a scaly slave-taker. “The
alligator,” Turner observed, “is an accomplice in a dual effort to
eradicate—or at least intimidate—the black.”

There are deep veins of irony here, of course. The first is
that—whatever white writers told themselves—black storytellers and
writers never seem to have regarded the alligator with undue terror.
They were dangerous, certainly, but not a particular threat. In fact,
for maroon communities of escaped slaves, the deep alligator-infested
swamp was often a place of refuge
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It was the white settlers arriving in the southeastern woodlands who
saw alligators as particularly fearsome, Turner argues, and sought
frantically to both assuage that terror and displace it. Walking the
post-Confederate South, conservationist John Muir recorded white
Southern men’s tendency to boast of their prowess against
alligators. (Indeed, they still do, sometimes with very funny results
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a society so built on inflicting terror would recruit the symbolism of
the Alligator to their cause is not surprising. That they would come
to believe it was, perhaps, inevitable. 

The concentration camp that has been erected in Ochopee, Florida,
promises to be one of many. The first detainees arrived on Thursday,
July 3,
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same day that the Republican-held legislature delivered Trump $171
billion for his anti-immigration
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including $45 billion to fund more such detention centers, a set of
snapping mouths likely to chew through visitors, residents, and
citizens alike. The man-catchers of the antebellum era are back in
tactical gear, plucking people off the street; the naked infliction of
terror on undesirables is public policy. Gone are the halcyon days of
2020, when organizers pushed
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University of Florida into dropping the “gator bait” cheer,
pointing to the racist imagery associated with the phrase. To hear
Trump and his goons tell it, the Alligator is back. “They have a lot
of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators,”
the president remarked during his visit,
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his gift for stating the subtext. “You don't have to pay them so
much.” Hangers-on like Laura Loomer, meanwhile, were fantasizing
bigger. “Alligator lives matter,” she gloated
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“The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million
meals if we get started now.” (There are, interestingly, at least 65
million Hispanic people in the United States.) 

I would not assume that any of these people know about the history of
“gator bait” or are trying to intentionally invoke it, not because
it would disgust them, but because they do not read. But the streams
of authoritarian and racist thought are, if nothing else, predictable.
The Alligator is on the side of the slave catcher and the overseer
against the black underclass; why not the ICE agent and the
concentration camp guard against the immigrant, the dissident, the
stripped-of-citizenship? The threat is the same: You will be eaten up
and disappear. 

Of course, American alligators—the actual living animals, rather
than the  snapping beasts of the White American imagination—are not
on anyone’s side, particularly. They would much prefer cracking open
a turtle or taking a bird than a person. They rarely attack humans at
all
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and not for want of opportunities. To the extent that they will have
anything to do with their namesake camp, it will likely be dying on
the road that leads to it, hit by an ICE van carrying a new group of
prisoners. 

But the real animal is subsumed by the fantasy, in the way that the
real human lives under threat—every man, woman and child under the
gun of a government carried away with its own gleeful cruelty—become
nameless statistics or worse, fodder for photo-ops. They really all
might as well be figures on a postcard or a matchbox, the prospect of
their pain digested into merchandise. What we are left with is
something characteristically Trumpian: memetic alligators eating
memetic undesirables, leading to a fascist policy where real humans
will be placed into a concentration camp in sight of real alligators.
All of this is in the service of an ugly dream, spoken through
gnashing and lipless teeth, grins as fixed as any you’ll find out in
the swamp, and significantly more malicious. 

Alligator Alcatraz will have a body count sooner rather than later,
and it will be the body count of detention facilities and forced labor
camps the world over. It will come from the brutal heat and rising
water, from mosquitos and epidemics of disease, from neglect and
cruelty and levels of medical and physical and sexual abuse that will
be staggering to contemplate. The people inclined to buy such things
will purchase T-shirts and hats; some enterprising soul may, in the
fullness of time, start offering postcards. All the while, the
alligators will be out there in the water, minding their own business,
generally unconcerned with people. If only we were allowed to take our
chances with them.

_Asher Elbein is a journalist and fiction writer
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places, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific
American, Undark Magazine, Audubon, and Texas Monthly. Also by Asher
Elbein on Defector: The Judgment Of Magneto
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