Trump's Newest Dehumanization Push
New rhetoric echoing the worst of the fascist past
I didn’t want to write a Substack today. I really didn’t. I’m tired, and I’ve got too much on my plate. But the debut of the Trump regime’s new Aliens website made it impossible not to write.
As many of you may know, there’s been a lot of press recently about the government declassifying information about UFOs and, supposedly, alien visitations to our planet. That was all hype. There’s no evidence of little green men invading the Earth.
It was all to pave the way for the Trump regime’s newest and vilest dehumanization of another kind of “alien”—not little green men, but brown and black ones.
Of course, this is nothing new. Trump and his lackeys have been indulging in dehumanizing rhetoric for years. But his latest atrocity takes things to a new level, one that Hitler would be immensely proud of.
If you visit the website—as I urge you to do—you will be confronted with the statement, in lurid green letters, “They walk among us.” This immediately conjures up the prototypically dehumanizing image of dangerous subhumans disguising themselves as humans to infiltrate our world.
This is a paradigmatic representation of dehumanized others, who are routinely imagined as outwardly human but inwardly nonhuman entities—in effect, as monsters. We find it in both anti-Black and Nazi antisemitic ideology. The 17th century English cleric Morgan Godwyn reported that apologists for slavery confided to him that “the Negros, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men.” Likewise the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt remarked “Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him who forgets it!”
The website text gets worse. Scrolling down, we are informed:
For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives. They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception — they do not belong here.
Millions arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society. Countless presidents, congressmen, and senior officials knew exactly what was happening. Instead of protecting American citizens, they chose to cover it up and even accelerate the invasion. Until one man finally had the courage to tell the truth. Bold. Unapologetic.Unafraid.
President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.
This is frightening. Every bit as frightening as the propaganda that was churned out by past fascist regimes to justify and motivate genocidal violence.
The dehumanizing language gets even worse. The text reads:
If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.
Notice that “the Alien” is not a human being. “The Alien” is now an “it”—a thing, a non-human. And the tormentors of undocumented immigrants—the ICE thugs—are pictured as benign caretakers, who want only to capture and release the subhuman creature—the invasive species—back into its natural environment.
We know, of course, that abducted (the one unintentionally accurate word) immigrants are sent to all sorts of places that are not their countries of origin. But the logic of dehumanization is impeccable: all “shithole” countries are fungible.
I cannot begin to convey to you how dangerous this is. It’s not just some political bad weather that future elections will dispel. We are locked into a precipitous descent into the worst kind of fascist depravity.
This is moral pestilence. The work to hold back its full implementation requires ALL of us. If you were birthed in this land and if you came to it after birth, it is yours. They cannot do their evil deeds without the people's support. Thank you for writing this.