Alligator Alcatraz and the Fourth of July: Week ending July 4

Introduction

Some of you have been asking if there was no TWIFL last week. There was not. Several of you have asked about Alligator Alcatraz or offered opinions on it.

These things are connected. The moment Alligator Alcatraz was announced--I thought it was a joke--I went out there to look at this "abandoned" (it's not) runway in the Everglades. I found it locked. Turns out, that was unusual.

Two days later, on 22 June 2025, at least 400 protesters gathered across the street from the site, just 41 miles from my house and 30 miles from the edge of the Miami suburbs, heeding the call of activist Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee Tribe member who lives nearby. I was there to document that.

Trying to find an angle to capture not only all that I was seeing, but what the press was seeing and not seeing (or not covering), and also trying to show how much I've come to love alligators (seriously--I was afraid of them the first time I "met" one in February 2024 but have since come to love them after meeting at least 100 over dozens of encounters) I've been back to the site, the surrounding area and the greater everglades at least ten times.

I've "clipped" no fewer than 75 news stories on the topic since it was first announced on 18 June 2025, and, frankly, I've been overwhelmed both with the content, the deluge of stories and the emotional cost. I, along with thousands if not millions of others, love the Everglades. It is immediately obvious when you visit it that it is a precious, sacred, and fragile bit of paradise on Earth.

That's why the protesters against Alligator Alcatraz include hardcore MAGA haters and pure MAGA. That's right, a huge percentage of the protesters against Alligator Alcatraz are MAGA voters. The idea that the "wild" edges of South Florida are filled with liberals from New York (as I've seen them being accused of on social media) is a spit out your coffee and have it still come out your nose funny. No trip to the Everglades, especially along US 41, the road that goes from Little Havana through Naples on to Tampa, leaves you with the impression you're in Liberal City.

Although, to be honest, what you really feel while you're out there (aside from mosquito bites in the summer, if one is honest) is that you've been transformed to a place that doesn't just transcend politics, leaving them behind, but was always above and beyond the affairs of humans. At least humans not as connected to the land as the alligator and the panther (f**k pythons--they're invasive and killing non-human mammals).

Yet, on 1 July 2025, the day the President of the United States inspected the facility (and later elected officials from the other party were denied entry to on "safety concerns"), the same gates where protests defending the Everglades took place, the press choked the life out of the site like a swarm of invasive locusts.

It's an absolute good the press have been covering this so much. Some of the stories I've read have been so disconnected from reality (penned by authors literally in New York or DC) that it's broken my mind. Others have been spot on and have taught me things. But whatever it was on 1-July, it wasn't a good thing. It was awful.

Remember, while the video below shows the press outside the gates of the Alligator Alcatraz, dozens if not hundreds of other members of the media were touring the facility behind the gates with the President of the United States. Its not like these outfits had no access to the site. What they were there for were the protests. Yet, they left absolutely no room for protesters.

Everything else from the last two weeks for me and much of South Florida needs to be seen through that lens.

And, frankly, as multiple pieces in the Herald (from both self-proclaimed conservatives and liberals) this week point out, this misses another major story that hits South Florida hard: anti-immigration actions against huge swaths of the Miami-Dade community, Latinos and Haitians.

So, this post isn't going to be a normal one. There's just too much going on with Alligator Alcatraz alone (and no, I won't even try to scratch the surface). Still, it'll try to end on a positive note (new member of our house--a three legged cat!) and I won't write a short novel, I promise.

Meanwhile, for a well done breakdown in an entertaining manner of what's going on with Alligator Alcatraz and why every Floridian should be made check out this Facebook Reel by The Hughleys:

I've poured dozens of hours into this Alligator Alcatraz business in the last two weeks so, needless to say, I've got more to say on the topic. But that's going to be it for now.

At any rate, there were also protests this week so don't forget to stop by the Protests and Action page on this website.

Finite Disappointment

The Miami Commission Crisis

Again, if you're not from South Florida it's hard to grasp this: the City of Miami is one small part, albeit the most populous, of the Miami-Dade County ecosystem of 34 municipalities. Locally, the Miami mayor is called the "Little Mayor" as in the mayor of a municipality with 487,014 people, rather than the "Big Mayor," who has 2.7 million constituents and wields proportionately more power.

That said, Miami is certainly important, as all three stories in Finite Disappointment show. The first one, three of the City of Miami's five commissioners voted to move the 2025 election to 2026, thereby artificially and, according to the Florida Attorney General, illegally extended their terms by a year, including at least one who is term limited out. Rather than vetoing this, the Little Mayor signed onto it setting up a legal battle. The Miami Herald has more. The Herald also has a provocative piece by a person who filed to run for Mayor and is now hung out to dry, by former Miami city manager Emilio González, who is suing the city over this.

Miami was home to ancient people, now it appears to be burying evidence of that...illegally

As is the case in most major cities in the United States, the locations of those cities often is on top of previous settlements by indigenous peoples. These settlements can go back several thousand years. Two years ago, while making space for a new luxury condo (the clause that begins so many scandals here), an ancient settlement and burial site was discovered. Archeologists swooped in. Now it appears the developer is just building over it with the city's blessing. As a historian you know this breaks me. The full story by Andres Viglucci is worth a read.

What the actual...?

When you study history in Florida you begin to realize that few cities, or counties really, are more significant to the ebb and flow of the history of the United States for the last 125 years, even the history of the world, than Miami. So many divergent groups converge here, basically every country and every territory in the Americas has a significant presence in Miami-Dade County.

If you walk down the streets of Miami and poll people about where they are from you won't go an hour without meeting someone from Colombia. Which is, by the way, fantastic, Colombia brings its own flavor to the region. So, it's of some note when the President of Colombia, President Gustavo Petro, and 30 members of the Colombian legislature accuse the United States of conspiring to assassinate him.

The story in the photo and here talks about "two Florida congressmen" were implicated. But those members of US Congress are all from Miami-Dade County and include the former "Big Mayor" of Miami Dade County, Carlos Antonio Gimenez. It also includes my House member, Maria Elvira Salazar, the one just to our north, Mario Diaz-Balart and former West Miami Commissioner, former US Senator from Florida and current Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

To suggest President Petro is an honest person and that these accusations would definitely survive serious scrutiny stretches credulity. But, if nothing else, the country of Colombia is formally pointing a finger at not as much the United States as it is the United States through Miami-Dade County.

Please read the story by Salome Beyer Velez and Jim Glade as I can't possibly begin to understand its full implications much less convey a worthy assessment of it.

Historic Interlude

When I come up with the topic for the historic interlude my first stop is usually the book I've mentioned many times, This Day in Florida History by Andrew K. Frank, J. Hendry Miller and Tarah Luke published by the University Press of Florida. As the name suggests, it has 365 daily entries for one thing that happened each day of a year.

From there, my method is to usually either pick one of the seven options from that week and expound, or to turn somewhere else if nothing interests me there.

This week, due to time constraints, I've elected to just drop the entry for July 1st in here whole and say, this seemed interesting to me and I wanted to share. This also gives an opportunity for people to see the source I rely on most.

On July 1, 1965, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, better known as the Johns Committee, finally disbanded. Named after its first chairman, Charley Johns, the committee spent nearly ten years conducting a wide ranging investigation into supposedly subversive academic activities, civil rights groups, and suspected communist organizations as well as a crusade against homosexuals in state government and public education. Created during hte paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy era, the committee relentlessly harassed groups that were alien to the Pork Chop Gang legislators of conservative, rural North Florida. They published the so-called Purple Pamphlet about homosexuality that included so much graphic terminology and photographs of sexual activity that the committee was threatened with legal action.

FOR FURTHER READING: Judith Poucher, State of Defiance: Challenging the Johns Committee's Assault on Civil Liberties (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

The "For further reading" is in the original text and while it points to a book by the same publishing company, that is not always the case with these. For the national version of this story I cannot recommend enough The Lavender Scare: the Cold War persecution of gays and lesbians in the federal government by David K. Johnson, University of Chicago Press.

Infinite Hope

Unfortunately, this will be short and not have a photo, because she's still decompressing after having been in the shelter since January, but we adopted a sweet little kitty named Jasmine last week. She's missing an ear, is blind in one eye and is missing a paw, but she gets around fine and will sneak snuggles when she thinks the dog isn't around. We suspect her missing parts are due to, in fact, a dog, though we don't know. She seems better around him than he is around her. You see, Bear is convinced he's a runt and he has to act tough around new creatures, even moments before he plays with him.

Obviously, Jasmine doesn't need that right now so we're keeping them apart. More on that to follow.

Bear the History Hound finds this week because he's too busy trying to find Jasmine to tell her he's big and tough and her nine pounds shouldn't mess with his one hundred pounds.