Are You the "Enemy Within"?
"Immigrants" is code for all politically undesirable people
At an Independence Day event in Iowa, speaking about the passage of his spending bill, the president complained to a crowd that every Democrat in Congress voted against the legislation. “They wouldn’t vote only because they hate Trump, but I hate them, too, you know?” Trump said. “I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”
Hitler once said, “the only stable emotion is hate.” Historian Lawrence Rees writes in his book The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History that Hitler created an “Them and Us” polarization in Germany. He considered Aryans “Us,” and Jews and foreigners and Gypsies and Black people “Them.” And also communists, or anyone else otherwise opposed to the Nazi party.
Rees writes:
It is incredibly easy to manipulate people as to who counts as a Them and who counts as an Us. Germany and Hitler is mostly a lesson in how powerful pseudo-speciation is [that is, deciding that someone belongs to a type of ‘Them’ that is almost a different species from ‘Us'].’
Another word for pseudo-speciation is dehumanization. David Livingstone Smith has made studying dehumanization his life’s work. In a recent essay, Smith quotes the president’s Veterans Day message from 2023:
In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Note the use of the word vermin. David Livingstone Smith points out that Nazis often compared Jews and other members of the “Them” class as vermin.
A month before the 2024 election, the president sat for an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. As reported by The Washington Post, Bartiromo asked the past and future president “whether he was ‘expecting chaos on Election Day,’ then listed what she called ‘outside agitators,’ such as people on the terrorist watch list or migrants who have committed crimes.”
The candidate replied: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics.” He added: “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Of course, since then, the commander-in-chief has dispatched the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles in response to protests sparked by draconian ICE tactics.
Speaking on the subject of the domestic deployment of the military, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country.”
Noem wasn’t talking about illegal immigrants with criminal records—she was referring to members of the “Them” class that the president says he hates and has referred to as “vermin.”
When the administration speaks of illegal immigrants, we now know that he’s talking about all the “vermin” that he regards as un-American. The notorious “makeshift detention center” in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” was ostensibly built to detain illegal immigrants (which is objectionable on its own), but considering the administration’s language, I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that the prison camp is ultimately designed to hold all types of “vermin”—you know, people like you and me.
Perhaps I’ll see you there soon.
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