Last week on Fox News the network worked its audience into a frenzy of paranoia over possible secret Iranian sleeper cells while it celebrated the cruelty of a migrant detention center surrounded by alligators and pythons. As the network focused on fear and sadism it also lauded Donald J. Trump as the daddy of NATO.

As a new detention center in Florida nicknamed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ was announced last week Fox News hosts couldn’t hide their excitement over the prospect of an undocumented immigrant being eaten by a giant reptile or suffocated by a enormous snake.

Folks at Fox News might not have realized they were echoing a dark and sinister past in the American south when Black Americans were once used as actual bait for alligators according to researchers at the Jim Crow Museum.

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