Benny Johnson mocked for promoting official 'Alligator Alcatraz' merch: 'Something gross about this'

OCHOPEE, FLORIDA: Benny Johnson found himself in hot water again on Tuesday, July 1, for gleefully hawking merch from Florida’s new migrant detention center dubbed Alligator Alcatraz.

The MAGA influencer sparked backlash across the aisle after dropping an “unnerving” clip on social media, where he excitedly flaunted what he called “official Alligator Alcatraz merch” and asked his followers if they would “rock this drip.”

Donald Trump and that Everglades tour

Benny Johnson was right there when President Donald Trump paid a visit to the brand-new immigration detention facility nestled in the Florida Everglades. The camp served as an appropriate backdrop for Johnson’s MAGA content spree.

He didn’t just film clips hyping up the swamp-side facility — he also played hype man for Trump, tossing the US president a steady stream of softball questions.

With Trump already floating the “concept” of using alligators to chomp down on escapees, Johnson circled back to Trump’s infamous 2018 brainstorm about putting crocodiles in the Rio Grande. “Is this a dream come true for you, sir?” Johnson asked him.

Johnson also pressed Trump on whether CNN should be prosecuted, and also threw in questions about “communist Zohran Mamdani."

MAGA prison merch

The Florida GOP appears to have turned the prison into a branding opportunity. T-shirts, baseball caps, and even beer koozies featuring the phrase “Alligator Alcatraz” and graphics of hulking reptiles slithering around a prison complex are now available on the Republican fundraising platform, WinRed.

“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. “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.”

Unsurprisingly, Johnson was ecstatic about the merch drop. “Hi guys. I have just been handed official Alligator Alcatraz merch,” he posted on X. “I repeat, this prison has merch. Things are going insanely well.”

In the video, Johnson beamed as he showed off his new baseball cap, declaring it was “provided to us by the state of Florida.” With a giant grin, he posed for the camera before asking, “Would you rock this drip?”

Benny Johnson slammed across the aisle

The idea of gleefully modeling merch from a prison facility housing detained migrants didn't quite land, and not just among liberals.

Conservative YouTuber Brad Polumbo wasn’t having it. “There's just something gross about this,” he posted on X. “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.”

Anti-woke author Nancy Rommelmann warned, “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.” She even went as far as invoking Lebensraum, the Nazi concept used to justify territorial expansion.

Drew Holden from the conservative think tank American Compass noted, “There’s something unnerving about this jubilation.”

The references to Nazi Germany didn’t stop there. “The banality of evil,” literature teacher Scott Barber wrote, nodding to Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase based on Adolf Eichmann, one of the Holocaust’s masterminds who insisted he was just “doing his job.”

Television writer Noah Garfinkel offered, “Begrudgingly, I must shout out 1940s Germany for realizing concentration camp merch would have been a bridge too far.”

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