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dehumanization
Responding to Charlie Kirk's Killing With the Wisdom of Our Inner 3 Year Old
Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Sep 17, 2025
Charlie Kirk’s killing last week—and the aftermath of grief and political outrage—are too overwhelming to ignore, even though I couldn’t possibly have anything to say that hasn’t already been said.
The best I can do is wander into the spiritual unknown and perhaps ask an impossible question or two. The first one is this: Are words adequate for the exploration of life and death? I ask this question as a writer. To me, words are virtually magical entities. They give us the means to shape, if not the world itself, at least our comprehension of it... and thus we assume we know what’s going on around us.
For instance, here I am, sitting at my desk, looking out my window on a beautiful, blue-sky afternoon. The leaves on the tree in front of me flutter in the breeze. A woman in a red coat walks through the parking lot, which is mostly empty. Everything is calm. The time is 2:43 pm on a Tuesday. This all seems simple enough, right?
But of course this is nothing more than the surface of this moment—a real-life postcard, you might say. Putting it into words, at least in one sense, limits what I see. I see what is “known,” categorize it all as normal—and move on. If I were 3 years old, I’d still be staring at the tree, perhaps one leaf at a time. I could well be lost in its beauty and complexity.
Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
As I return to the news, I’m suggesting that we bring with us our inner 3 year old. The news of the Kirk assassination is given to us with simple us-vs.-them clarity. He was speaking at an event in Utah. Someone fired a rifle from several hundred feet away. He was hit in the neck. He died.
And then it turns political. Well, it does and it doesn’t. Charlie Kirk was a husband, the father of two young children. No matter where you stand in regard to his right-wing, MAGA politics, the horror of his death—the horror inflicted on his family—is explosive. "No!” screams our inner 3 year old. The nation is stunned.
But almost immediately, things turn political. US President Donald Trump and others instantaneously blame the “radical left” and let their hatred spew. Kirk is now their martyr, and they feel they have permission to make the most of his death politically that they can. Eliminate the left. I can feel the joy oozing from their hatred, which gushes like blood from a bullet wound.
All progressives can do is express shock and grief. Kirk’s murder isn’t “political.” He was a human being! And here’s where words can too easily fail us. This isn’t Side A vs. Side B. This is “We are all one” vs. “We’re great and you’re evil, and we’re comin’ for ya.”
But the divide is infinitely deeper even than that. Charlie Kirk’s murder is international news, but it’s also only one murder out of unknown thousands and thousands every day. Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
Killing requires dehumanization. That’s the nature of war—every war. And the larger the number we kill, the easier the dehumanization becomes. Oh, they’re just “the enemy” or, ho hum, collateral damage. Any questions?
And here’s where language deeply, deeply, deeply fails us. “Left” and “right”—life and death—are simply equal opposites, at least in much of the media coverage of this. Nothing could be further from the truth: Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Here are the words of Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate, speaking at a Jews for Racial and Economic Justice award ceremony the day of Kirk’s killing:
Before I begin, I do want to take a moment to address the horrific political assassination that just occurred today in Utah. Charlie Kirk is dead, yet another victim of gun violence in a nation where what should be a rarity has turned into a plague. It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all...
We hold a common belief in the shared dignity of every person on this planet, and the refusal to draw a line in the sand, as it so often is done, when it comes to Palestinian lives...
We know, because the United Nations tells us, that by the end of the month, millions will be facing starvation, if they are not starving already. This is not accidental. This is not due to a freak blight. This is not because the world now lacks the means to feed the hungry. It is because those decisions made by the Israeli government and by our government here continue to ensure that that is a reality. And if that does not stagger the conscience, what will?
Let me repeat these words: “the shared notion of humanity that’s behind us all.”
Our inner 3 year old knows this. How do we start embracing it politically? Humanity is a collective entity. We can’t kill our enemy without eventually killing ourselves.
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When the Starved Become the Starvers: A Jewish Voice on Gaza
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it—because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors.
Jun 11, 2025
The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they could carry. These images from Gaza pierce through my screen and lodge themselves in a place where other images have lived for decades—the inherited memories of my grandparents' stories, passed down like sacred wounds.
All four of my grandparents fled the Nazi machinery of death. They carried with them fragments of lives destroyed: a photograph here, a recipe there, stories that began with abundance and ended with ash. They spoke of hunger as a weapon, of siege as strategy, of how systematically cutting off food, medicine, and hope could break a people's spirit before breaking their bodies.
I grew up believing that "Never Again" meant exactly that—never again would any people, anywhere, face the deliberate infliction of starvation and suffering. I believed that we, as Jews, would be the first to recognize the early warning signs, the first to cry out when others faced the machinery of dehumanization.
Today, I am ashamed.
"Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
Not ashamed to be Jewish—that identity remains precious to me, woven as it is with traditions of justice, compassion, and repair of the world. But ashamed that a state claiming to represent Jewish values has chosen hunger as a weapon of war. Ashamed that siege has become a strategy. Ashamed that the descendants of those who cried out, "Let my people go" have become deaf to similar cries in Arabic.
This is not what my grandparents envisioned when they dreamed of a Jewish homeland. They dreamed of safety, yes, but not safety built on others' suffering. They dreamed of dignity, but not dignity that required stripping it from their neighbors. They imagined a place where Jewish children could grow up free from fear, but they never imagined that freedom would come at the cost of Palestinian children growing up with empty stomachs.
The Israel my grandparents hoped for was meant to be a light unto the nations—a place where the lessons of Jewish suffering would translate into Jewish compassion. Instead, we see policies that mirror the very tactics once used against us. We see justifications that echo the language of those who once justified our persecution. We see the slow strangulation of a people that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has studied the ghettos of Warsaw or the camps of Europe.
I know the counterarguments. I know about security concerns, about terrorism, about the complexity of this conflict. I know that Israelis have suffered, that Jewish children have died, that fear runs deep on all sides. But none of this justifies using starvation as a weapon. None of this justifies trapping 2 million people in what amounts to an open-air prison. None of this honors the memory of those who died precisely because the world stood by while their humanity was systematically denied.
The Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—demands that we speak truth even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. It demands that we hold our own people accountable to the highest moral standards, not because we hate them, but because we love them too much to watch them betray their own values.
Being Jewish taught me that moral authority comes not from power, but from how that power is used. It taught me that we have a special obligation to protect the vulnerable precisely because we were once vulnerable ourselves. It taught me that "Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it. They haunt me because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors. They haunt me because I see in Israeli policies the same cold calculation that once sought to break Jewish spirits through systematic deprivation.
This is not Jewish. This is not what our ancestors dreamed when they prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem." This is not what it means to be a people chosen for the hard work of justice.
We can do better. We must do better. The children of Gaza deserve better. The memory of those who perished in the Holocaust demands better. The future of Judaism itself depends on better.
The photographs will keep coming. The question is whether we will keep our eyes open long enough to see ourselves reflected in them, and whether we will have the courage to look away from the mirror and toward the work of repair.
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By Calling More Than Half the Country ‘Scum,’ Trump Is Raising a Bright Red Flag
When political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.
May 27, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump opened Memorial Day in the most disgusting way possible, not by praising our fallen heroes but by attacking Democrats. He wrote on his Nazi-infested social media site on Monday morning:
Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…
When the President of the United States calls members of the oldest political party in the world and a former president “scum,” it’s not just another ugly outburst that embarrasses America before the rest of the world: It’s a warning sign. A bright red flag.
It tells us that something far more sinister than partisan posturing is afoot. Something our media has already decided to overlook in their perpetual effort to normalize the abominable.
This kind of rhetoric isn’t new, and it’s not harmless. History has shown us—again and again—that when political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.
Words matter. In every fascist movement of the 20th century, it started with the words. Before the arrests, before the beatings, before the camps, there were the words.
In a healthy democracy, political disagreements are expected. Even fierce debates over policy and direction are part of the process. But a functioning democracy depends on a shared understanding that both sides, no matter how much they disagree, are legitimate participants in the system.
The moment that idea is tossed aside—when one side starts branding the other not as the loyal opposition but as enemies, traitors, or “scum”—democracy starts to fail.
When a president engages in this kind of language, he’s not just lashing out at critics. He’s explicitly trying to erase the legitimacy of any voice but his own.
This tactic is not original. It’s ripped from the playbooks of authoritarians throughout history.
- Hitler routinely referred to Jews, communists, and democratic socialists as “vermin” and “filth,” conditioning the German public to accept ever-increasing acts of brutality and repression.
- In Rwanda, Hutu leaders called Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio for months before the genocide began.
- In Serbia, Slobodan Milošević labeled political opponents and ethnic minorities as “parasites” and “traitors” before launching ethnic cleansing campaigns.
Language like this isn’t about winning arguments. It’s about destroying opposition.
Donald Trump has flirted with this disgusting sort of rhetoric for years, calling the press “the enemy of the people,” mocking disabled journalists, referring to immigrants as “animals,” and branding his political opponents as “radicals” or “traitors.”
But labeling Democrats—over 45 million American citizens—as “scum” is a different level of escalation. It’s not just name-calling. It’s a signal. A test balloon. A way of seeing how far he can go. And if there’s no consequence, he’ll go further.
What happens when a leader no longer sees himself as the president of all Americans, but only of those who worship him? What happens when one party becomes synonymous with the state, and all others are demonized?
You get systems like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where opposition leaders are jailed, poisoned, or pushed out of windows. You get Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where the ruling party rewrites the constitution to lock in power and crush dissent. You get a country where elections still happen, but they no longer mean anything.
Trump’s use of the word “scum” may seem like just another day in MAGA world, but it is, in fact, part of a much larger and more deliberate strategy. It’s designed to radicalize his base, to cast Democrats not as fellow Americans with different ideas but as dangerous enemies who must be defeated at all costs. It’s designed to terrify Trump’s opponents and paralyze the media.
When you convince people that the opposition is not just wrong but evil, the next logical step is to justify extraordinary actions to stop them, whether that’s purging them from government, throwing them in jail, or inciting paramilitary violence against them.
We’ve already seen where this leads.
January 6, for example, wasn’t some spontaneous tantrum. It was the inevitable result of years of delegitimization and demonization of Democrats. The people who stormed the Capitol sincerely believed they were saving America from “scum” who had stolen the presidency. They were acting on the poisonous lie that only one side has the right to rule and that any electoral outcome that contradicts their will is illegitimate. A lie that came straight from Trump and his morbidly rich neofascist enablers.
This is how democracies die; not all at once, but in a slow, deliberate campaign of character assassination against political rivals, institutions, and the rule of law. It happens when a strongman convinces just enough people that he alone is the embodiment of the nation, and that anyone who opposes him is a threat to the country itself.
And once that belief takes root, atrocities become not just possible, but justified. And, in most cases, inevitable. We’re already seen this in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the Venezuelans who Trump deported to El Salvador and the Asians he deported to Africa, in both cases in defiance of court orders.
From Pinochet throwing small-d democrats he called “subversivos” and “terroristas” out of helicopters over the ocean, to Stalin using the phrase “enemy of the people” (враг народа) to describe democracy advocates, to Mao calling educated people monsters and demons” (牛鬼蛇神) as he killed an estimated 35 million of them, this is an old, old story.
It’s the same type of language that the Klan used for centuries here in America as they embarked on campaigns of terror and murder. And that the paramilitary groups that have largely replaced them in the 21st century continue to use.
It’s also important to note that when Trump calls people who didn’t vote for him “scum,” he’s not just talking about elected officials. He’s talking about more than half the country.
He’s talking about your neighbors, your coworkers, maybe your family members. He’s talking about teachers, nurses, scientists, union workers, veterans; millions of Americans who simply don’t buy into his brand of neofascist grievance politics. He’s trying to turn Americans against each other so he can seize even more power out of the chaos he creates.
This kind of dehumanization also serves a more practical political purpose: It undermines accountability. If Democrats are “scum,” then their investigations into Trump’s corruption are not legitimate. If the media is “fake news,” then any critical reporting is a hoax. If the courts rule against him, they’re “rigged.” It’s a classic authoritarian tactic: Delegitimize all checks on your power and paint yourself as the sole source of truth.
In doing so, Trump is also poisoning the well for any future attempt at national unity or reconciliation.
Once you’ve labeled your opponents as subhuman, how do you work with them? How do you compromise to do what’s best for the country? You don’t.
And that’s exactly the point. He doesn’t want compromise. He wants domination. He wants a political system like in Russia or Hungary, where the only choice is himself.
We can’t afford to normalize this. We can’t laugh it off as Trump being Trump. We can’t wait and hope that someone, somewhere, will step in and draw a line. We have to be that line. We have to call this what it is: a deliberate, dangerous assault on the core of American democracy.
Words matter. In every fascist movement of the 20th century, it started with the words. Before the arrests, before the beatings, before the camps, there were the words. And in every case, those words went unchallenged until it was too late.
It’s not too late now. But we are closer than we’ve ever been. We must push back hard against this dehumanizing rhetoric, demand better from our leaders, and defend the democratic principle that every citizen, no matter their party, is entitled to dignity, voice, and full participation in the political process.
Because once a president gets away with calling fellow Americans “scum,” it’s only a matter of time before he treats them that way.
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