We often invoke George Orwell when discussing the manipulation of language—how governments dull moral perception by renaming violence and narrowing thought. Usually, the critique is that such manipulation is subtle. What is striking about the present moment is that it is not.
Most of us would like to believe we are immune to this—that we would instinctively recoil from language that degrades or dehumanizes. History offers little support for that confidence.
The language used by this administration to describe immigrants, particularly Latinos and other people of color, is neither coded nor restrained. It is explicit, repetitive, and intentionally degrading. From the moment Donald Trump descended an escalator to announce his political career—speaking of rapists and criminals crossing the southern border—race was not a subtext but a premise. His first administration followed accordingly: Muslim bans, crude generalizations, and a governing coalition conspicuously uninterested in diversity or restraint.
In his return to power, the rhetoric has sharpened rather than softened. Haitians are accused of eating pets. Somalis are portrayed as inherently corrupt. Black Americans are described as beneficiaries of unearned indulgence. “Criminal” and “undocumented” are spoken as interchangeable terms, stripped of legal meaning and human complexity.
This is not dog-whistle politics. It is bullhorn politics.
What deserves closer examination is not merely that such language exists, but that it works.
The familiar explanation is manipulation: people are misled, frightened, stirred into compliance by dishonest words. That is part of the story, but not the most unsettling part. The deeper truth is that this language satisfies an appetite. It reassures a segment of the public that their anxieties are justified, their status secure, and their conscience unburdened. It does not merely deceive; it absolves.
Consider what this language allows an ordinary person to do, on an ordinary day, without feeling cruel.
Once absolution is granted, behavior follows.
Americans now feel entitled to demand papers—in parking lots, on sidewalks, in ordinary life. Masked individuals feel authorized to detain, strike, and interrogate others based on accent, appearance, or suspicion. Violence is reframed as “enforcement.” Detention becomes “processing.” Warehouses are renamed “facilities.” Each term performs the same function: it removes moral friction and replaces judgment with procedure.
This is where the danger lies—not in hatred alone, but in normality.
Hannah Arendt warned that the most destructive systems do not rely on monsters, but on ordinary people who cease to think beyond their assigned role. What we are witnessing is not chaos, but administration. People are no longer asking whether someone is truly a criminal, or merely present without permission; whether harm is proportional; or whether authority is being abused. They are asking only whether the task has been authorized. Once that question is sufficient, all others disappear.
It is tempting to express disbelief that “reasonable people” participate in such acts. History offers little comfort there. Reasonable people have always been capable of extraordinary compliance when cruelty is rendered routine and responsibility diffused. Surprise is not a moral defense; it is often a form of denial.
Nor is this simply a story about leaders. Leaders speak, but citizens listen—and act. Language rarely compels participation; it merely permits it, and that is usually enough. Silence does the same. Each person who looks away confirms that the cost of resistance exceeds the cost of complicity. Over time, that calculation reshapes a society.
This is why appeals to the sanctity of life ring hollow when paired with indifference to the lives most affected by these policies. A political culture that insists a woman carry a pregnancy conceived in violence, while tolerating violence against undocumented laborers, is not confused about life. It has simply ranked whose life counts.
The danger, then, is not that language has become distorted. It is that distortion is no longer required.
When people insist that “we won’t have a country anymore” unless neighbors are expelled without due process, they are not repeating a clever lie. They are expressing a belief about belonging and exclusion that language has made socially acceptable to enforce.
At this stage, the threat is no longer secrecy. It is permission.
History is unsparing on this point. Atrocities rarely begin with mass violence. They begin with language that makes lesser violence feel justified, then necessary, then ordinary. Democracies do not collapse in a single gesture. They erode as citizens accept roles they would once have questioned—and discover, too late, that questioning itself has become inconvenient.
To recognize this and treat it as someone else’s problem is itself a choice. The question is no longer whether this language is dangerous. It is whether we have decided that the danger is acceptable.