Anne Applebaum on the “vermin” trope:

The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin did the same thing, she goes on to say. So did Mao, so did Pol Pot.

It doesn’t just influence the audience, that kind of thing; it also influences the people saying it. Call sets of people “vermin” enough times and you start to think of them as literal vermin.

Normally I wouldn’t write about reactions to my writing: I have opinions and others have them too. But this time, the response of Trump supporters – or rather, people who are going to vote for Trump because he might lower their taxes – interested me, because it reminded me of things I’ve seen in other places.  Other than the usual suspects – posters on 4chan, the website of Russia Today, and Elon Musk – I also got a response from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Under the headline “the fascist meme re-emerges,” the editorial board dismissed my article and others as “hyperbole,” said that there’s nothing to worry about and, tellingly, threw some insults at Joe Biden. A couple of weeks later the historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the Daily Mail, dismissed the whole conversation about “fascism” and then attacked Kamala Harris as undemocratic on the grounds that some people around her have argued for constitutional change. This is a phenomenon that the Poles call symmetrism: whenever something ugly emerges about  someone in your political camp, search immediately for something ugly to say about your opponents, whether or not it is equivalent.

It’s also called lying.

H/t Tim Harris