I am vermin, a pestiferous being to be eradicated, exterminated, extinguished. For you see, to call someone “vermin” is to embrace the belief of the danger vermin poses to the body.
Pesticide is the only appropriate response to pestilence.
As far as former president and Republican front-runner Donald Trump is concerned, I am not some abstract rhetorical being. I am vermin.
During a two-hour speech on Veterans Day, Trump laid out a vision for an America that has much in common with a genocidal history of annihilating supposed vermin such as me.
Trump told the crowd: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections . . . they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
To be clear, I am no communist, Marxist, fascist, or radical left thug. I embrace an ideology rooted in a gospel that calls for the liberation of all who are heavy-burdened. I seek to live my faith not by professions of belief, like some clanging cymbal, but by praxis, doing what Jesus called disciples to do – feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the alien.
I am vermin because I have a different vision for the United States than the extreme MAGA right. I believe democracy is based on elections, compromises and seeking what is ultimately liberating for all society’s members, especially the voiceless.
Because there are those of us who politically and philosophically refuse to goose step to the MAGA beat, we cease being the loyal opposition and instead become vermin who need to be wiped out – not metaphorically but literally.
Of course, it is difficult to get church-going folk to engage in mass murder. Psychologically, it is challenging to get humans to kill other humans in cold blood, up close and personal and to watch children torn asunder.
So how do we get people to overcome their natural inhibitions? To ignore feelings and participate – actively or complicatedly– in genocidal atrocities?
We do so by portraying those with whom we disagree as less than human. We teach those who cultishly follow authoritarian wannabes to see their “Others” as dangerous predators seeking to destroy America and destroy the American Dream.
Those relegated to pestiferous beings–people like me–must be rooted out by whatever means necessary.
This is not the first time the United States has advocated the fumigation of vermin. When undertaking the genocide of Native Americans, the popular slogan “nits make lice” was used to justify killing indigenous children. Nits, the eggs of lice, had to be eradicated to advance the final solution of the Indian “infestation.”
When U.S. Senators were debating the law that became the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, they justified their support by referring to the Chinese as “vermin,” an “oriental civilization” that threatened the United States and its way of life.
Seeing the Other as vermin was so naturalized, so legitimized, that even renowned humanists like Sam Clemens – better known as Mark Twain – accepted the dehumanization of Others as a point of fact.
In a letter to his mother in 1853 discussing his first impressions of New York City, he complains, “N*****s, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese . . ., to wade through this mass of human vermin, would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.”
Some dismissed Trump’s words as political hyperbole. But history has shown other authoritarian figures characterizing opponents as vermin, leading to deadly results.
What do we make when Trump’s words eerily echo those of another authoritarian figure of the 1930s who said, “This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies.”
We – as a society – are in danger of rushing again toward genocidal acts. The political division is already sparking violence.
At this rate, the question is becoming less “if” but “when.” When will the powder keg upon which our society rests explode into massive violence? When will murdering opponents become the legitimized norm?
Such questions are not some hypothetical musings of an academic pontificating from his ivory tower but of one all too familiar with the institutional and physical violence already existing at the margins of society, of one who carries the scars on his body and psychic inflicted by those who in the past dismissed him as subhuman, as vermin.
So yes, I am afraid. I fear when Trump refers to undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Let’s be clear: In the minds of Trumpites, as one who was an undocumented immigrant for over a decade, I am the vermin poisoning the blood of our country.
When he was president, he lashed out at those who look and sound like me, claiming, “These aren’t people. These are animals.” Since then, we have devolved from animals to vermin.
Trump has already devised a plan for the most extensive round-up of undocumented immigrants – millions of them – and plans to construct camps in which to concentrate them until they are deported. Children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents would be stripped of their citizenship.
How long before naturalized citizens like me, seen as vermin undeserving of fundamental human rights, are also stripped of our citizenship and placed in camps?
And yet, some who call me their friend plan to vote for someone who has a strategy ready for implementation, calling for my eradication.
Maybe they support Trump because they believe he is strong on crime. It was said you could walk the streets of Berlin during the 1930s at three in the morning unmolested (unless, of course, you were a Jew).
Some will vote for him because he will lower taxes (although during his last term, only the uber-rich benefited from tax cuts). But even if true, is the possession of silver slippers of greater value than those dismissed as vermin?
The issue is not Biden’s age (three years older than Trump’s), taxes or so-called liberal policies. The issue is really between maintaining a democracy – regardless of how flawed it is – or creating an authoritarian regime by scapegoating “vermin.”
So here is what you need to decide. You cannot call me your friend and stand with those who seek my demise.
Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
