Hot Type: 'They Walk Among Us' — Trump's Dehumanizing Propaganda
Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how a truly shocking official video released by the Trump White House conflates undocumented workers with ‘aliens’ – a horrifying new twist on an old fascist playbook
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“We are locked into a precipitous descent into the worst kind of fascist depravity.” Professor David Livingstone Smith, Philosopher and writer on Dehumanization
I apologized in advance as I sent the new White House ‘Alien’ video to a group of thinkers I’ve come to rely on as I do this work. I generally don’t spread Donald Trump’s vicious propaganda, and I view US Government websites now as I view .ru sites – with caution.
But when intellectual historian Dr Marci Shore sent the video to me, I understood the urgency to get out ahead of it and warn viewers of the dehumanizing strategy being launched by the White House in plain sight.
Here is a sampling of the horror-wording from the video, which mimics the style of vintage SciFi:
“For 60 years, the US 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.”
“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,” wrote David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine.
Smith’s work focuses on dehumanization, particularly in relation to race and genocide. He told Byline Times he sees this latest push from the White House as “every bit as frightening as the propaganda that was churned out by past fascist regimes to justify and motivate genocidal violence.”
Clearly, the push by Trump’s Government to “declassify” information about UFOs and aliens is part of an operation to conflate immigrants who are being targeted by the regime with alien life forms.
“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,” said Smith, who has warned of Trump using the Nazi playbook since 2015.
“It feels like the postmodern internet version of Mein Kampf: playing on Unheimlichkeit, fears of aliens slyly disguising themselves as humans, hiding among us,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Times.
“During the Great Terror, Stalin also liked to talk about ‘enemies of the people masking themselves.’ There’s nothing subtle about the fearmongering and the dehumanization here — including the use of the impersonal pronoun ‘it.’ It’s so over-the-top as to be absurd — and yet somehow here we are, this is an official White House website.”
A prominent theme from the video — written in horror green lettering — reads: “They walk among us.”
“This immediately conjures up the prototypically dehumanizing image of dangerous subhumans disguising themselves as humans to infiltrate our world,” said Smith. “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!’”
And the dehumanizing money shot can be found in these final words from the video:
“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.”
As Shore and Smith noted, the ‘alien’ is now an “it” — a subhuman.
“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,” explained Smith.
Craig Unger, America’s premiere investigative reporter on all things Trump-Russia and Trump-Epstein-Russia, told Byline Tmes : “‘Dehumanizing’ is precisely the right word and that it is deliberately dehumanizing with the intention of making you see immigrants as other than human, it’s offensive on so many levels. I just watched the site after reading Paul Krugman’s column in which he reports that one of the great problems with funding social security is that the Government has kicked out so many immigrants, who were gainfully employed taxpayers, who were paying into social security but who are now gone.”
For a decade, Trump’s rise in America was often misdiagnosed as a clown show, but the cruelty of his actions and words cannot be misconstrued anymore – he is normalizing genocidal rhetoric as he ‘disappears’ our neighbors.
“There is no arguing with the fascism of the Trump regime,” political philosopher Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Times. “There’s no point in talking about how immigrants and refugees built the United States. It’s useless to demonstrate that the ‘othering’ of a group of people is inhuman and un-American… Immigrants and refugees are not alien to the American body politic – Trump and the MAGA cultists are.”
Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler told Byline Times that the “‘Alien’ Hollywood-style colors and fonts are intentionally deployed to conjure a sense of extraterrestrial life forms that attack Earth. The dehumanizing submessage is quite obvious.”
But he pointed out how the design reminds him “of the early Internet days, conspiracy theory websites and ‘tinfoil hat’ news pages, which were always very anti-Government.” He noted the style is commonly associated with “a small far-right populist opposition party in Europe,” and how he sees it as fundamentally designed to create further polarization in US society, with the storytelling element thwarting the ability to have “fact-based, objective discussion.”
In other words, as with the QAnon conspiracy, it’s a psychological operation designed to break reality. That the ‘Alien’ operation is being run on the American people from the highest office in the United States shows a “degraded” White House culture, according to religious scholar Dr Matthew Taylor, author of the forthcoming book Defying Tyrants.
“This reeks of the sort of casually cruel, mirthless humor that has become standard in right-wing propaganda,” he said. “Put simply, the White House is legendarily a realm of sobriety and consequential decision making. That it could be weaponized as a platform for this sort of xenophobic trolling signals just how degraded the internal culture of the second Trump presidency has become.”
David Livingstone Smith, who has written three books on dehumanization, is sounding a global alarm: “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.”
Michael MacKay said the video makes clear the following mandate: “The only task of people of good conscience is to fight the evil of the Trump regime and all its nefarious works.”
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly on Byline Times Substack. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries.
Excellent article. It is very noticeable how Trump and his mouthpieces have been falling back on historic tropes in their dehumanising portrayals of anyone who disagrees with them, and to avoid responsibility themselves for the deteriorating economic situation.
And the dehumanising actions of the Trump regime follow decades of dehumanising behaviour by Israeli regimes. No wonder they are in lock step. Or make that goose step.