The White House War on Dignity

Now practices of humiliation are a governing strategy in America.

There is cruelty, and then there is cruelty performed with a smile.

The latter is more complicated to explain to those who haven’t seen it up close. It’s not just about harm. It’s about domination. It’s about spectacle. And increasingly, it’s about pleasure.

This isn’t just schadenfreude — pleasure in others’ misfortune. It’s sadism, plain and deliberate.

The White House isn’t merely enforcing policy. It is orchestrating humiliation.

Deliberately.

Publicly.

Gleefully. With a smile, no less.

Just look at the White House’s pixie-fronted press secretary (video shared here for your reference), beaming as she describes people being snatched off the streets and shipped off without due process. They’re all allegedly just pieces of garbage, you see, criminals, who deserve to be just thrown in a prison (smile).

I haven’t seen this level of cognitive dissonance since a pharmaceutical commercial where they warn your heart might stop, you might grow a third eye, or your penis might fall off, while couples frolic in a wheat field or — for reasons no one has ever explained — take side-by-side baths on a cliff. “Such and such may cause unintended side effects, but consult your doctor after you’re buying this medicine.”

Seriously?

It’s not just propaganda. It’s cheerful, gleeful, and sadistically rewarding propaganda.

And that’s what makes it so vile.

Cruelty, Rendered as Content

In March 2025, the official White House account posted an AI-generated cartoon of a crying woman in handcuffs. The woman, Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, had just been arrested by ICE agents in Texas.

This wasn’t a leaked surveillance photo. It was a government-produced meme — shared from a verified federal account. A private citizen, digitally caricatured and broadcast to millions, as a form of public degradation.

She wasn’t a gang member or violent offender. She had overstayed her visa while raising U.S.-born children. Her case was pending review. None of that mattered. The point wasn’t legality — the point was dominance.

The meme went viral. The replies filled with racist mockery and cheering emojis. And the post stayed up.

This is the new normal: cruelty, not as a side effect, but as a message.

Targeted Humiliation

Basora-Gonzalez is just one example. The administration has systematically embraced humiliation as a form of governance:

• Mass deportations without due process: In February, 238 Venezuelans were deported under the revived Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Immigration judges were bypassed. Detainees were shackled and flown out before lawyers could intervene. Several had pending asylum claims.

• Foreign students detained: International students, particularly from Muslim-majority countries, have been detained at airports, denied entry despite valid visas, and forced to sign voluntary departure papers. In March alone, 67 such cases were recorded by the ACLU.

  

• Funding cuts for unaccompanied minors: The White House ordered the ORR to halt legal aid services for migrant children, citing “efficiency.” Thousands of minors are now facing immigration courts alone, without counsel.

• Mocking foreign leaders: In January 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was publicly blindsided during an Oval Office meeting where Trump and VP Vance mocked his country’s resistance to Russia. Afterward, White House staffers leaked edited footage to conservative outlets showing Zelenskyy looking “weak” and “begging.”

• Greenland diplomatic incident: During a March visit, Vice President J.D. Vance accused Denmark of “underfunding and mismanaging” Greenland, and suggested the U.S. would “step in” if necessary. Danish officials walked out of the briefing. Hours later, the White House reposted Vance’s comments with a thumbs-up emoji.

Each event shares the same signature: calculated disrespect. Not just toward adversaries — but toward the vulnerable, the cooperative, and even America’s own partners.

“Dirtbags?”¹

That was the White House’s word. Not in a private chat, not a slip-up on a hot mic — but in a caption, above photos of real people, some not yet convicted of any crime. “We will continue to make sure these dirtbags are removed from America’s streets and face justice.”

It was a post designed for sharing. For smirking. For high-fives in the replies. It wasn’t just about arrests. It was about branding the accused as disposable — as subhuman. And doing it with the full weight of the federal government. It’s unprecedented in modern American politics. Not even Al Qaeda detainees were described this way in official channels. Not even slaves² were reduced to this kind of meme-ready contempt.

And yet here it is: cruelty as copywriting.

It’s Not Just Policy. It’s Performance.

This isn’t policy enforcement. This is performance art. And the audience isn’t Congress or the courts. It’s the base — the social media echo chambers where cruelty is currency.

Lunatics?³

The administration doesn’t just want results. It wants a reaction.

• When asylum seekers are deported, it’s livestreamed.

• When protesters are arrested, mugshots are leaked.

• When legal scholars object, they’re labeled “traitors” on official channels.

The message is clear: We can do what we want. And we’ll make you watch.

Authoritarianism with a Laugh Track

This isn’t new in history. Regimes have long used humiliation as a tool of power. But this White House has fused it with something modern: virality.

• AI memes.

• TikToks of press briefings.

• Government-verified shitposts.

It’s not just cruelty — it’s content. Packaged for dopamine. Deployed for engagement. Engineered for applause.

And it works.

Every viral deportation, every insult toward NATO, every photo of a sobbing mother being loaded onto a plane — it generates more clout. More clicks. More loyalty.

The cruelty isn’t just the point.

It’s the product.

What Kind of Country Laughs Like This?

This isn’t a disagreement over policy. Reasonable people can debate immigration reform or foreign policy.

But reasonable people don’t produce cartoons of crying women in handcuffs. Reasonable people don’t strip children of legal aid. Reasonable people don’t humiliate allied heads of state on camera and then post it for likes.

This is something else.

This is the giddiness of unchecked power — the pleasure taken in domination — turned into a governing ethos.

And it’s growing.

A state that governs by humiliation soon forgets how to govern any other way. And a people who cheer for suffering will demand ever more of it.

We are on that road, maybe already too far down it.

The thing about cruelty is that once it makes you feel powerful, it’s hard to stop.

And right now, the White House has no intention of stopping.

It’s giddy, bordering on the sadistic.

1. You might think such statements would violate U.S. law. In theory, the American legal system is built on the presumption of innocence.

In practice, it’s built on spectacle.

When someone is charged with a crime — not convicted, just charged — the protections under the Constitution remain in place. They have the right to due process, the right to an attorney, the right against self-incrimination. But there is no right not to be humiliated.

And in America, humiliation isn’t just allowed. Sometimes, it’s choreographed.

Take the perp walk — that slow, deliberate parade of an accused person in handcuffs, flanked by law enforcement, usually past a line of reporters. It’s not legally required. It’s not procedurally necessary. But it’s often arranged — sometimes deliberately leaked — to satisfy the public’s thirst for visual justice. The Supreme Court hasn’t outlawed the practice. Lower courts have occasionally criticized it. But no clear precedent bars it.

And mugshots? Booking photos are often released within hours, sometimes minutes, of arrest. Local jurisdictions differ — some states have passed laws limiting mugshots' release for nonviolent offenders or people not yet convicted. But in most places, if you're arrested, your face becomes public property.

Even without a trial, your name can be dragged across headlines, your image splashed across social media, your reputation shredded.

Legally speaking, the government is generally protected. Under the First Amendment, the press can publish public records. And under qualified immunity, officials are shielded from most lawsuits — unless the humiliation is so extreme and gratuitous that it shocks the conscience.

That’s a high bar. And it rarely holds.

But there is a limit. The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment — under the Eighth Amendment — but that only applies after conviction. Before that? It’s a gray zone.

If an official acts purely to shame, retaliate, or mock someone who hasn’t been convicted, there might be grounds for a civil rights case under Section 1983. But it’s rare. You have to prove that the humiliation wasn’t incidental — that it was intentional and served no legitimate government interest.

In other words, if you’re arrested in America, your dignity is negotiable.

And in an era where mugshots go viral, where arrest footage is edited for likes, where AI-generated memes mock accused individuals before trial — the gap between justice and humiliation is shrinking.

So can the government humiliate you for being charged?

Not explicitly. Not officially. But routinely? Absolutely.

That’s not law. That’s practice. And practice, in the American system, often becomes precedent — not in the courtroom, but in the court of public opinion.

2. Even during the height of slavery, the official language of the U.S. government was devoid of openly dehumanizing terms like “dirtbags.”

• Slavery was justified through legal codes, economic language, and paternalism, not coarse invective.

• Enslaved people were described as “property,” “laborers,” or “dependents” in legal documents — which is horrifying, but still couched in the bureaucratic language of ownership, not public ridicule.

• Even the Three-Fifths Compromise in the Constitution used clinical abstraction — not name-calling.

Slavery was brutal and dehumanizing by design, but the language was coded, legalistic, and systemic — not performatively cruel in the modern, meme-ready sense. You’d be hard-pressed to find an official government circular calling enslaved people the 1800s equivalent of “dirtbags.”

3. Respectfully — the Secretary of State’s statements about immigration law are either deliberately misleading or display a level of incompetence that borders on constitutional malpractice.

(And Senators? Let’s talk about that vote: 99 to zero. That’s how many of you confirmed this man. Ninety-nine to motherfucking zero. Not one Democrat — not a single one — could find a red flag? Not a flaw? You acquiescing, spineless garbage heap of a body. Shame on the lot of you.)

Let’s be clear:

Immigrants cannot have their visas revoked at any time, for any reason, at the whim of some Cuban ignorant assclown who lucked into being Secretary of State.
We have laws.
We have procedures.
We have due process.
We have requirements for notice and access to legal counsel — especially when someone is accused of a crime.

And even if — if — the law had been stated correctly (it wasn’t), what kind of Cabinet-level official calls foreign visa holders “lunatics” in an official press briefing?

We haven’t seen this kind of language from the executive branch in decades.
Not even from Lyndon Johnson — a man whose racism was matched only by his political cunning.
LBJ — one of the most privately racist presidents in modern U.S. history — never used official White House channels to insult individuals.
He passed civil rights legislation.
He expanded the Great Society.

He didn’t call immigrants “lunatics.”

But here we are.