Note: My editor’s blog is not reporting, not unbiased and not written in AP-style like my news coverage. There will many opinions, speculations, and interpretations. They are my own.
Red Team
Earlier this month I went to a political meeting in Richmond and found a very angry woman speaking. It was my first impression of the keynote speaker, and her anger just kept escalating.
I stopped listening after she called Democrats demonic. Also, I had to pee really bad, and I was trapped in a corner by a row of chairs and candidates, and I would have had to walk right in front of the pointing, angry lady to get to the bathroom.
Demonic is dehumanizing.
Blue Team
For months now I’ve been watching the Commissioners Court drama unfold. The divide keeps dividing us, the comment section escalates it, and the name-calling flies.
I’ve been watching the word MAGAT get thrown around in the comments a lot. I don’t like it. If you are unfamiliar, it’s a blend of MAGA and maggot, with MAGA being an acronym for Make America Great Again, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.
It’s dehumanizing too.
What Dehumanization Actually Does
Dehumanization isn’t just rudeness. It’s a specific psychological process, and it has a proven track record.
Historically, it works by stripping a group of its human qualities: comparing people to vermin or insects, using state media to cast a minority as a disease or an existential threat, and slowly redrawing the boundaries of who even counts as “one of us.” Once someone falls outside that boundary, the normal obligations of empathy stop applying to them.
That pattern shows up again and again in the historical record.
Nazi propaganda spent years portraying Jews as subhuman before the Holocaust became possible. In Rwanda, radio broadcasts spent months calling the Tutsi minority “cockroaches” before neighbors turned on neighbors with machetes. Colonial powers used the same trick, describing indigenous peoples as closer to animals than to fellow humans, to justify displacement, slavery, and violence.
None of this happened overnight. It happened in stages, and name-calling was always an early one.
Hot Wheels
Which brings me to Jasmine and Donald.
Rep. Crockett, speaking at a Human Rights Campaign dinner, referred to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has used a wheelchair since a tree fell on him in 1984, as “Governor Hot Wheels,” adding that “the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot ass mess.” She later said she was referencing his immigration policy, not his disability. Maybe so. But you don’t reach for a wheelchair pun by accident when you’re already reaching for something cutting to say about a man in a wheelchair.
Making fun of a disability isn’t a policy critique. It’s dehumanizing, and it doesn’t matter whose side does it.
Our President does it often, and to me it is a stain on our country and the office he holds. He’s called Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “the seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota,” an ableist slur that Walz’s own son, who has a nonverbal learning disorder, had to watch his father defend against. Trump called Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker “a big, fat slob” during the White House turkey pardon. He’s taken to calling California Gov. Gavin Newsom “Newscum” and, more recently, “slimy,” while also commenting on Newsom’s dyslexia. He’s called House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries a “low IQ individual” more than once.
None of that is policy disagreement either. It’s the same move as “Hot Wheels”: find the thing a person can’t control or can’t help, and use it as the insult. Disability, intelligence, weight. It’s not persuasion. It’s dehumanization, and it comes from both directions.
The War for the American Mind
Here’s the part that changes how I think about all of this: a lot of the fuel for this fire isn’t even coming from Americans.
Russian disinformation aimed at the U.S. isn’t new. It goes back to Cold War-era “active measures,” like the fabricated 1980s claim that the U.S. government invented HIV. What’s changed is the delivery system. Troll farms like the Internet Research Agency built armies of fake social media accounts whose entire purpose was to amplify whatever argument was already dividing Americans, from race to elections to ideology, and pour gasoline on it. Investigators have also found operations using AI-generated audio and video to impersonate real public figures. The strategy has a name: the “firehose of falsehood,” flooding the zone with so many conflicting stories that people stop trying to figure out what’s true and just pick a side.
China runs a parallel operation. Networks like “Spamouflage” and armies of fake personas pose as ordinary American voters and veterans on X, YouTube, and TikTok, deliberately amplifying the country’s rawest divides, from race to abortion to elections, because a divided America is a weaker one. Some of these networks have gone after private U.S. industries with manufactured “grassroots” protests, and some have doxxed and harassed dissidents living here on American soil.
I’m not saying either party invented its own anger. I’m saying we’re primed, on purpose, by people who don’t live here and don’t wish us well. Every time we call each other demonic or maggots or “Hot Wheels” or “low IQ,” we’re doing free work for someone in St. Petersburg or Beijing who wanted exactly this.
Socrates Had a Point
Socrates, the Athenian philosopher who was executed in 399 BC for “corrupting the young,” believed something that sounds almost naive today: that no one does wrong on purpose. As Plato records it, wrongdoing isn’t a choice between knowing good and choosing evil anyway. It’s a failure of understanding. People act on what they believe is good, and when they act badly, it’s because they’re working from bad information, not because they’re rotten to the core.
I don’t think that’s naive. I think it’s the only way out of where we are. If the woman ranting about demonic Democrats and the commenter typing “MAGAT” both believe, sincerely, that they’re defending something worth defending, and I think most of them do, then the fight isn’t good versus evil. It’s people acting on incomplete, distorted, sometimes foreign-manufactured information, each one certain they’re the one who sees clearly.
Compassion, With Its Eyes Open
Y’all know me I’m going to share my own example. I’ve mostly stayed away from name-calling (one because I’ve known for twenty years I wanted to run for office and want to be a uniter when I do, and two because it is mean), but not always. Once, a wildly erratic driver coming off I-10 created a genuinely unsafe situation, and I called him a chinless fuck. My stepsons heard it and were self-conscious about their own jawlines for months afterward. Name-calling is dangerous and the funny thing is I was much heavier at the time and didn’t have much of a jawline myself in that moment, so it was probably projection. I think a lot of our name-calling is.
Our politics won’t get better until we stop dehumanizing the people on the other side of it. That doesn’t mean pretending the disagreements aren’t real, and it doesn’t mean going soft on cruelty when we see it, from either team. It means holding two things at once: compassion for people who sincerely believe they’re doing the right thing, and clear-eyed knowledge that decades of manufactured misinformation, some of it foreign, some of it homegrown, have been working overtime to make sure we see each other as enemies instead of neighbors.
We can disagree. We probably should, loudly, about things that matter. But we sure as hell don’t have to call each other maggots and demons to do it.
All my love,
All my light,
All my best,
Jess