'Trump's Dehumanizing Propaganda' - My Latest Hot Type column for Byline Times
In Saturday's Hot Type column in Byline, I report on how a video released by Trump's 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
Our hosts this month have books stacked floor to ceiling, in every room of their house in the country. They are, of course, brilliant, because in every conversation, regardless of the topic, they say: “So and so wrote a book about that, you should really read it.” And their wisdom spans centuries. In the evening, over a home-cooked meal, candlelight, and a vinyl spinning folk or jazz, I learn.
Walking past one pile of books, stacked on the seat of a bay window in a hallway landing, I grabbed a copy of “The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes.” By the second sentence of the first entry in January, which contained the phrase, “dusky undulations,” I began to wonder if I am actually a writer.
In life, you are only in competition with yourself, a lesson I learned a quarter century ago. Nevertheless, James is a master.
Here is the quote for January 1, from Ivan Turgénieff, 1878:
His sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.—Henry James, 1878
Oh the glory of words on a page! Words on a page! Celebrate them!
I wrote last week how the authoritarians have a distinct advantage in the US, because people stopped reading books. The fastest way to overthrow the grotesques currently in power is to read, and read, and read… and then read some more. Any day now, I will have a report on Keir Giles’ new book, and I will then beg you to read it!
The Bette Dangerous community is more literate than most — our community events are actually a book club, as this Tuesday’s Happy Hour can attest.
But due to the unfolding tragedy of our times, I am forced to turn my pen toward the ugly and the cruel, in my duty to warn against and document the crimes against humanity unfolding in front of our eyes.
I take this duty seriously, which is why I dedicated my Hot Type column in Byline this week to the dehumanizing propaganda video delivered by Trump’s White House.
It is always an honor to do this work with the great team at Byline Times and Byline Supplement, among the last of the independently owned newspapers.
It’s an honor to make the front page and to have a voice in this time, where I can share the wisdom of the scholars and experts, whose words I mine so we can all better understand the implication of current events.
Below, I am cross-posting Saturday’s column. Please share the original report from Byline and thank you as always for your support of the Byline team and my work here.
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
Published originally in the Byline Times and Byline Supplement magazine, June 13, 2026.
“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.”
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As always, I am so grateful to the pool of thinkers who offer their time and expertise to help us wade through the suck and as Dr MacKay said, it’s up to us to fight this evil.
An astute reader left this comment on this latest Hot Type report:
There are opportunities to make this backfire quite spectacularly.
After all, Trump, Musk, RFK Jnr & co don’t look exactly “normal”, do they?
Has the US GOVERNMENT been taken over by aliens? It does always seem that they accuse others of their own crimes...—JS
I like this idea, very much.
Thank you again to those of you who support me here and support our Byline team.
And as Henry James noted:
In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.
Seek and learn! Seek and learn!
Onward and upward.
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