Commentary
MAGA has embraced dehumanization as a political strategy
In the absence of empirically grounded arguments, a series of tropes are being used, which keep having their profound effect even after the news is disproved.
If someone made up a story that a dog ate a Haitian refugee in Springfield, Ohio, it would certainly not have made it all the way to the presidential debate stage. But the fake news that Donald Trump chose to air to the whole nation originated from a post by someone saying she had heard her neighbor’s missing cat had been cooked and eaten by a Haitian immigrant.
When Trump brought it up at the debate, the alleged culinary predilections of the illegal barbarians (Black people) for the pets belonging to “us,” the civilized (whites) also summoned up righteous anger in vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who started posting about the supposed issue. A self-styled champion of the virtues of the white working class in the Midwest, Vance has been the butt of many jokes on social media; some weeks ago, the news that he had admitted to having sex with a couch (later debunked) went viral. After being confronted with the facts and having to admit that the cat story was fake, Vance nonetheless doubled down on asking American “patriots” to keep spreading memes with Trump saving cats and turned to reminding Haitians of their historical faults. As per the reactionary right's playbook, he claimed they were harming the local native-born population: spreading HIV, clogging up the health care system, ruining the schools, causing car accidents, engaging in violent crime.
Haiti has become known as the stereotypical hellhole where everything has collapsed torn apart by gang violence, chained to its past of colonial depredation (including two decades of U.S. occupation), the island is an easy target for every exercise in dehumanizing tropes.
In 1994, a younger Joe Biden showed his more cynical realpolitik streak, comparing Haiti and Bosnia in terms of American interest and possible intervention and saying that “If Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean, or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interests.”
One must also recall the “shithole countries,” an epithet reserved by President Trump for the countries of the Global South, and the lynchpin of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) worldview: it is hard to be surprised at the televised debate offering further forms of reductionist brutality and cheap Orientalism. Trump had to shift into reverse gear when asked if he thought it appropriate to bring up Kamala Harris’s racial identity, an issue he’d gone headlong into before when he publicly commented on biracial Harris supposedly only “becoming Black” recently.
The moment of peak comedy in the debate was when Trump, boasting of his great gifts as a man of peace, told a story of how he had protected American forces in Afghanistan: namely, by outright threatening to bomb the home of “Abdul,” the “head of the Taliban” (and still so nowadays, Trump claimed). While the difficult-to-identify “Abdul” was kept on a tight leash by such threats in Trump’s story, actual Emir Hibatullah Akhundzada can sleep easy.
And that’s also because, under the narrow focus of the TV cameras, the whole tragedy of Afghanistan was reduced to the issue of who was responsible for the deaths of the U.S. soldiers killed at the Kabul airport: not a word about the country today, nor about the Afghan women, whom we solemnly pledged not to abandon.
Users of X might have come across a post about the (alleged) results of an intelligence test conducted by the Danish government on its military, claiming that the worst results were found in recruits with names like Mohammed or Abdul. Mother Jones magazine has documented the fact that Elon Musk (176 million followers), after obsessively announcing the imminent outbreak civil war in the United Kingdom, is now amplifying certain data in a distorted manner: apparent data-driven analyses presented to justify, supposedly in the name of science and freedom of expression, arguments about the biological superiority of people of white European descent. The owner of X didn’t miss an opportunity to post on Haiti too: after he’d long opposed the dissemination of content taken from other social media on his platform, Musk made an exception, posting a TikTok video in which a U.S. citizen of Haitian descent told stories about the extreme living conditions of Haitians and the fact that voodoo was still practiced there.
Why insist on this bestiary of dogs, cats and zombies? The pattern is clear: identifying a vulnerable group, banging the drum against them, painting a picture of such low levels of humanity that they hardly still qualify as human and preparing for the deportation of the undesirables. It is a recurring mobilization operation: in the absence of empirically grounded arguments, a series of tropes are being used, which keep having their profound effect even after the news is disproved. The media does a fact check on the specific allegation, finding it groundless, but MAGA leaders keep referencing the episode or news story, with some variations, until the media stops fact-checking, deeming the debunking to be no longer news. For another example, during the televised debate, Trump claimed that Latin American countries were allegedly emptying their prisons and pushing all their criminals to go to the United States.
Literary critic Lionel Trilling said years ago that the reactionary American has no ideas, but plenty of “irritable mental gestures.” Interviewed in The New Republic, Matthew Sheffield – a former conservative, now podcaster on Flux – described the end goal: a long series of lies are stacked up to give shape to an ideology that says everything must be overturned and white Christian billionaires put in charge. White supremacism, invoking the specter of social disorder and working hard on dehumanization, is preparing the spectacle that would make the creed come true: “the largest deportation in history.”
Originally published at on 2024-09-14