#dehumanizing language

REPENTANCE ⭑⭒

Characters // Alastair (he/him), Julius (he/him)

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CW: Minor whump, institutional abuse/child abuse, religious setting, beating, dehumanizing language, carewhumper

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The candle on Alastair’s rickety desk in the corner of his room has melted all the way down, the wax drying in a cluster of tear drops hanging off the side of the tarnished wood. Alastair himself is curled up in his bed, pressed against the wall at an awkward angle that will surely make his neck sore later. His blanket is thin and scratchy, hanging loosely off his shoulders.

A knock against the warped door, sharp and loud, wakes him.

Alastair jolts up at the harsh pounding and his eyes are immediately wide with panic. The candle’s melted down. What time is it? He scrambles out of bed, his nightgown wrinkled. He smashes his ankle against the bed post and lets out a squawks in surprise, grimacing at the pain. In one frantic movement, Alastair tugs on his robe and simultaneously flings the door open, panic climbing up his throat.

I've been seeing some peculiar beliefs in leftist spaces recently.

• Nazis are literally subhuman and deserve to die.

• Zionism is a Nazi movement

• All Jews are secretly zionists

To an outside observer, these beliefs can look innocent (I am far too guilty of number 1, honestly) but the problem is a lot of people believe all three. By the transitive property, they believe that all Jews are subhuman and deserve to die. That is a very familiar and terrifying sentiment to us Jews.

🇮🇱 - Children

🇵🇸 - People under 18

🇮🇱 - Civilians

🇵🇸 - Collateral damage

🇮🇱 - Women and children

🇵🇸 - Human shields

🇮🇱 - Hostages

🇵🇸 - Prisoners

🇮🇱 - Killed

🇵🇸 - Died

🇮🇱 - Attacks

Trump’s Dangerous Game: Protection, Provocation, and the Politics of Manufactured Crisis

How Trump’s withdrawal of Harris’s Secret Service protection reveals a broader authoritarian playbook of intimidation, manufactured crises, and selective citizenship.

James B. Greenberg

Sep 01, 2025

The headlines made it sound like another act of petty cruelty. Trump canceled Kamala Harris’s Secret Service protection. Reporters called it vindictive, small-minded, a personal slight. It was all of that — and it was also something much more serious: a calculated gesture in the repertoire of authoritarian power.

To strip someone of protection is not just a bureaucratic decision. It is a symbolic act, a way of withdrawing legitimacy. It signals that a person is no longer inside the circle of civic belonging. In mafia terms, it is the Don leaning back in his chair and saying, “May my friend enjoy good health all his life.” Everyone knows what that means.

What makes this more than personal spite is that Secret Service protection is not a gift, but a statutory safeguard established because threats against national leaders are matters of national security. Biden extended it because of the threat environment. By canceling it, Trump is not just acting out of vindictiveness; he is politicizing a protection designed to be neutral: the kind of institutional capture we see when authoritarians convert state agencies into partisan weapons.

Trump has long painted rhetorical targets on his opponents. With Harris, it’s the deliberate mispronunciation of her name, the constant insinuations of her being foreign, the deployment of racist and sexist tropes. His language doesn’t just demean; it marks her.

He has done the same with migrants: “murderers,” “rapists,” “animals.” With Black communities: “crime-infested.” With opponents: “traitors,” “enemies,” “vermin.” Whole categories of people are cast outside the boundaries of the civic body. Once people are cast out symbolically, physical violence becomes easier to justify.

History shows us where this leads. Dehumanizing language primes action — Hutu leaders calling Tutsis “cockroaches” in Rwanda, Nazi propaganda painting Jews as “rats,” American settlers labeling Indigenous peoples as “savages.” Words redraw the map of who is safe, who can be harmed, who may be eliminated.

Political ecology reminds us that resources are never neutral. Protection, like food or water, is a resource the state allocates. To grant or withdraw it is to determine who matters. Harris’s loss of Secret Service coverage is not just symbolic; it is material. It reshapes her vulnerability, alters the flows of safety and danger, and signals to others what the state values.

The same logic operates in Trump’s approach to cities. When he sent the National Guard into Washington, D.C., he claimed it was to address crime. He later suggested doing the same in 19 other cities with large Black populations, regardless of actual statistics. This was not about crime rates. It was about redrawing urban space as hostile territory.

Fear itself becomes a resource here, rationed and redistributed through uncertainty. When people don’t know whether they will be protected or targeted, they self-police, withdraw, and silence themselves. This is how authoritarian power takes hold not only through force, but through the everyday management of insecurity.

It’s tempting to see all this as personal animus — Trump’s prejudices, his pettiness, his pandering to a base that thrives on resentment. But authoritarian leaders do not just express personal rage. They cultivate atmospheres.

Withdrawing protection is part of a larger project: to normalize the idea that opponents can be left exposed. Sending troops into cities increases the chance of an incident — another George Floyd, another public execution. Such an event could trigger mass protest. And protest is exactly what Trump hopes for.

This is the Charles Manson “Helter Skelter” playbook: provoke violence, then use the chaos as pretext for more repression. A riot is not a failure of policy — it is the desired outcome, the excuse for declaring martial law.

History offers chilling parallels. Hitler seized on the Reichstag fire to suspend rights and consolidate power. Pinochet stoked economic chaos before the coup in Chile. Modi has used communal riots in India to entrench “law and order” politics. Manufactured crises are not accidents of governance; they are a core authoritarian method. Trump is working from the same script.

When that moment comes, we already know the script. Protesters will be labeled “Antifa.” Critics will be branded “domestic enemies.” The stage has already been set.

Authoritarian takeovers rarely come in a single stroke. They advance step by step, through incremental shifts: delegitimizing opponents, stigmatizing groups, manufacturing crises, and then seizing more power to address the very unrest they created.

Power works by controlling the flow of resources, by deciding who is protected and who is exposed, and by saturating the atmosphere with words that mark people as expendable. Trump is doing all three.

Canceling Harris’s protection was a symbolic act aimed at one person, but it resonates far beyond her. It tells every opponent — elected or not — that safety is conditional, that belonging is fragile, that the state will decide who is worth defending.

That message reverberates through communities already marked as outsiders: migrants, Black neighborhoods, dissenters. It reminds them that the state may not protect them, or may actively target them. It rearranges the ecology of citizenship itself.

Anthropologists describe this as differentiated citizenship: when protection, rights, and dignity are selectively granted to some and withheld from others. Once citizenship becomes stratified in this way, democracy erodes, because the very premise of equal belonging has been hollowed out.

We should not mistake this for bluster. Authoritarian leaders always test boundaries: strip protection here, send troops there, see how much outrage follows. Each test normalizes the next.

The danger is not just that Harris is more vulnerable. The danger is that the country is being prepared for a manufactured crisis — one that will be used to justify emergency powers and suppress opposition. We know this playbook. We’ve seen it in other places. And we are now watching it unfold at home.

The press was right to call Trump’s move vindictive. But stopping there misses the deeper truth. This was not just spite. It was a signal. It was preparation. It was a page torn from the authoritarian manual: create fear, withdraw protection, provoke unrest, seize power.

We ignore the meaning of these gestures at great risk. Crises are not just accidents waiting to happen. In the hands of leaders like Trump, they are weapons waiting to be manufactured.

Suggested Readings

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.London: Routledge, 1966.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976.New York: Picador, 2003.

Heyman, Josiah McC. “State Escalation of Border Enforcement and Migrant Responses: The Political Economy of Fear.” In Engaging the State: Anthropological Approaches to Security, Surveillance, and Control, edited by Brian Campbell and Kevin Lewis O’Neill, 49–72. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has grown more resolute regarding the *Pokemon* themed deportation arrest video it recently posted online after the Pokemon Co. said it has not given permission to use its upbeat theme music and imagery in the video, along with the catchphrase *“Gotta Catch ‘Em All”* in the caption.

The department, in an email response to questions from The Japan Times Friday, did not address using Pokemon in its video, instead giving a one-line comment:

“To arrest them is our real test. To deport them is our cause. To catch them is my real test, to train them is my cause” a line from the original Pokemon theme song, which references protagonist Ash Ketchum’s mission to catch and train mythical monsters.

On Tuesday, the official DHS account posted a video on X and on the White House’s TikTok account using a Pokemon-esque font, interspersed with clips of arrests and mocked-up images made to look like Pokemon trading cards featuring people arrested on alleged crimes, all accompanied by the phrase, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.”

Pokemon said in an email response that the company was aware of the video.

“Our company, the original copyright holder, our subsidiaries, and other related companies were not involved in the creation or posting of the video. We have not granted permission for the use of any intellectual property managed by our company,” it said.

Sakon Kuramoto, managing attorney at Kuramoto International Law Office in Tokyo, said the video may constitute an infringement under U.S. copyright law, which could lay the groundwork for legal action, including seeking an injunction and implementing a takedown notice in order to remove the spread of the images across social media.