“Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.”

David Livingstone Smith

With the rare exception of the sociopathic personality, or the somewhat less rare sociopathic excursions of our normally healthy personalities, we are creatures of conscience. We like to believe that we are doing the right thing, and we are troubled to believe that we might be feeling or behaving in a way that is evil or wrong. Reality shows us though that conscience seems to misfire regularly, and that while it keeps us from psychopathic chaos, it has flaws. We are influenced by our conscience, but also by our desires; and while we regularly bend our desires to conform to our conscience, we almost as often bend our conscience to appease our desires. We desire to hate and annihilate those who oppose us, but we understand they have the same rights as we do, created equal, human beings, not just beasts on two legs; and as humans, they should be treated with humanity. So how can we hate, delegitimize, and destroy those who our conscience would say by virtue of their humanity should be loved on some level, and treated with respect despite differences? First, we dehumanize.

When people, and not just white people, wanted to be able to own other people as slaves, those other people needed to be classified as sub-human to make the idea conscionable. A vocabulary developed that removed the enslaved from the the humanity of the group that enslaved them. Normal rules of ethics would not apply, slaves were property, not people. They would not be afforded human dignities like freedom, marriage, family, learning, any more than the other livestock. The masters could not afford an image of humanity to shine on their darkened conscience.

Again, with the eugenics movement here in the US, whole groups of people had their humanity diminished from their racially “superior” overseers, where “science” delved into the dark paths of the idea of elimination of “inferior” races or genetic disability. Nazi Germany went further into darkness by implementing the idea. Again, vocabulary was instrumental. Those destined for the gas chambers had to be dehumanized by the words they were called, and the ways they were treated, so they would be seen as less than human, and their elimination less than murder.

Likewise in every genocide, those doomed to extermination are first dehumanized, usually accompanied by twisted vocabulary. Hutus in Rwanda warned their children of the Tutsi “cockroaches” before the genocide there. Similar circumstances occurred in Cambodia and Yugoslavia, and now again in Iraq and Syria. When we needed to justify our own national genocide, we first needed to dehumanize what had always been referred to as a baby, by relabeling with the cold clinical terms of “fetus”, or “tissue”.

Political resistance is as American as apple pie. Conflict is consistent with the idea of a nation governed by checks and balances. Yet pitchforks and sledgehammers can hardly be considered checks and balances. Possibly the most egregious intolerance in our country is the intolerance of the left for any dissenting opinions. Boycotts are organized because a member of the board of LL Bean contributed to the Trump campaign. Conservative speakers are banished from college campuses under threats of violence. A blind tenor needs to pull out of performing at the inauguration because of the fear of threatened retribution. People are intimidated, belittled, vilified, and assaulted on the basis of how they cast their ballot, and the left seriously believe that they are taking the high ground. How can it be justified? First, they dehumanize.

The process crystalized with Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comments. The message could not have been clearer if she had called us cockroaches. Trump supporters could be viewed as deplorable, unredeemable… sub-human. As such, normal rules of decency and civility did not apply; these were not people the left disagreed with, these were not really people at all, they were monsters, and they needed to be vanquished. Now that Trump has prevailed, the monsters are in charge, and as such normal rules of democracy do not apply, rules of humanity do not apply. Sic semper tyrannis!

Fortunately, few among us are as devoted to our darkness as John Wilkes Booth. The over the top rhetoric, a tirade by Meryl Streep, and a few women marching on Washington are pretty much the extent of the insurgency. Of course there’s always the crazies inspired by the irresponsible. The guy who killed a UPS driver in a Wal-Mart parking lot because he thought he was Donald Trump. The youths in Chicago who kidnapped the kid in a three-for of dehumanization; he was a whitey retard who voted Trump. Cops are depicted as pigs to make them seem inhuman. A President is painted as a deviant, a Russian plant, a megolamaniac, a fascist… illegitimate. The demonization of Trump and those who support him will likely lead to more such atrocities. Dehumanization regularly is linked to projection, as we project the motives we see in ourselves to our nemeses. That which the left warned would come from the right with a Trump defeat, we can now fully expect to see from the left with the Trump victory.

One thing Trump has shown us, is that we no longer need buy into the left’s bulsh*t. We are not deplorable. We are not irredeemable. We are not powerless. We are not the minority. We have the ball; we do not need to play defense. We should assert our humanity, reject the attempts to take it from us, recognize and cherish our authentic value as Americans. The left must be informed that we will no longer be bullied by their elitist demonization. It is a time for restoration and repair, though not for revenge. We cannot become the evil we stand against. The human condition is common to us all, and those living in glass houses should not throw stones. Those who have walked in human skin for more than a few years should have compassion for even our adversaries. How do we forgive those who would have us silenced and neutered? How do we bridge the gap with people who think us fools, haters and monsters? First, we humanize them…