Here’s the definition of eliminationism you’ll find at Wikipedia, and in fact this is wording that’s generally agreed upon by academics and analysts:

Eliminationism is the belief that one's political opponents are, in the words of Oklahoma City University School of Law professor Phyllis E. Bernard, "a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation.”

It was largely coined by Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, about the role played by everyday German citizens in the Holocaust, which he described as fueled by “eliminationist antisemitism.” The book describes how, while our primary image of the Holocaust is of mounds of bodies slain by gas in death camps, in reality the largest numbers of Jews and other victims killed by Nazi directive were rounded up and gunned down or immolated en masse and buried in mass graves by ordinary Germans and non-Jewish residents of German-occupied territories.

As Phyllis E. Bernard acutely observes in her study of eliminationist rhetoric, “When Americans encounter this type of discourse in in the United States, we become deaf with denial. We assume that American notions of civilization reach too deeply and broadly to permit the tragic outcomes seen in other nations, such as Germany, which provided the template for more recent tragedies in Rwanda.”

Longtime readers are aware that I wrote a book in 2009 titled The Eliminationists that revolved around the subject, describing how eliminationist rhetoric fueled the radicalization of the American conservative movement, leading us to the path down which Trump is leading the nation even today.

As I explained way back when on my old blog, eliminationism first is expressed in rhetoric, and then that rhetoric inspires action, most of it violent in nature. It’s a rhetorical twofer, expressing both contempt (which inspires the view that the target is beneath the intended audience) and disgust (which inspires the impulse to purify). And it has a history.

Eliminationist rhetoric has very distinct and immediately identifiable traits.

It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself—unfit for participation in its vision of society, and indeed toxic and harmful to the well-being of that society, and thus in need of elimination.

It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches).

It also associates them with disease, depicting them either as diseases outright or as carriers of horrible diseases such as leprosy. We have seen multiple recent examples of this, thanks again to Lou Dobbs.

It also depicts them as “invaders” or their presence as an “invasion.”

A slightly less virulent variation on this is claims that the opponents are traitors (who will “stab us in the back”) or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.

Regardless, any target of eliminationist rhetoric is depicted as a threat to the purity of the community—with clear sexual overtones. They are often depicted as threats to “virtuous white womanhood”—that is, potential rapists. As innately foreign bodies, people who fit the target description are often told to “go back where you came from,” even if in fact they are multigenerational citizens or even Native Americans. And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes," the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

The most important aspect of eliminationism, however, is how it functions, i.e., what it does: It creates permission. And what it creates permission for, ultimately, is the unleashing of our darkest id, our violence. It’s easier to kill something you see as vermin.

Eliminationism is buried pretty deep in the European psyche, closely associated with early Christian notions of filth and purification, which often related to violent means of ridding the world of sources of contamination, including self-flagellation. It also grew out of early Christian beliefs about the world outside of their own, particularly “wild” places full of “savages” who were not always deemed human. Those same beliefs became closely associated with other views about filth and contamination, which were the domain of women.

The most egregious outbreaks of eliminationism in early Europe were the anti-Jewish pogroms that began in about the 12th century and were often associated with returning Crusaders. This later morphed into such phenomena as the various Inquisitions, notably those in Spain, which featured mass killing events known as autos-da-fé.

When Europeans arrived on the American continent, this attitude translated neatly into the genocidal treatment of the indigenous populations there. Indeed, early Spanish invaders used autos-da-fé as a means of imposing “discipline” on Mayan natives. These attitudes deepened and hardened over the ensuing centuries. By the time American settlers engaged in the process of depriving Native Americans of their land holdings over the course of the 19th century, their subhuman status was considered a given.

Thus, when Col. John M. Chivington ordered his men to massacre women and children at Sand Creek in Colorado in 1864, he justified it with the exhortation, “Nits make lice!” An estimated 500 people, all natives, were killed.

Similarly, when California was flooded with settlers in the 1800s, ranchers placed a $100 bounty (a small fortune at the time) on the heads of the remaining bands of Native Americans, which led to a bloodbath in which the most psychopathic killers were richly rewarded. One contemporary account describes the horror:

The guards stole and sometimes literally tore children and half-grown girls from the arms of their white friends or employers, murdering them in view of anyone who was present except when enough men were at home and heavily enough armed to beat them off. "We must kill them big and little," one of the guards is quoted as saying, "nits will be lice."

These attitudes remained intact among American whites well after the genocide of Native Americans was more or less completed in the 1880s. Indeed, after the end of the Civil War, eliminationist racism became much more focused on freed African American slaves—who previously had been viewed as property, and rarely as a threat, except in the context of a slave revolt. That changed dramatically with emancipation.

Most eliminationist rhetoric portrayed blacks as innately criminal and lazy, and black men as an omnipresent rape threat. This threat was used to justify literally thousands of extralegal lynchings between 1880 and 1950, in what became known as “the lynching era.” Lynching was a cornerstone of the legal disenfranchisement of black people after the Civil War in the South, which was better known as “Jim Crow.” The black populace was terrorized into submitting to this disenfranchisement with the threat of being hanged.

Much of this history has been intentionally buried for decades, and white people are shocked to learn about it now as it resurfaces. Most black folks, on the other hand, have been aware of it for years.

Eliminationist rhetoric had a psychosexual component. It described men as “black beasts” and “jungle animals,” and dwelt on black men’s physical features and virility. Black lynchings were unique in that the victims were usually mutilated sexually; on the rarer occasions when whites were lynched, this didn’t happen.

The attitudes underlying this eliminationism were common not just in the South, but throughout the country. This is why the “sundown town” phenomenon was most prominent outside the South. Sundown towns—which had ordinances forbidding black residency after sunset—were explicitly eliminationist in nature.

They often were associated with a racial-cleansing event in which the black neighborhood of a town would be burned out and its residents forced to flee. They called these “race riots.” They reached a peak in 1919, in what was called the “Red Summer.” The largest of these occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, in what had once been an economically prosperous black district. White men dropped incendiary bombs from planes during the assault.

Asians were also targets of eliminationism. First came the Chinese, who were the first to arrive in the West with the railroad crews that crossed the continent. Inevitably they became the targets of nativists, many of them involved in labor unions, who saw them as economic competition. Indeed, the idea to “build that wall” dates back to those days. Asians in general were depicted in nativist propaganda as inhuman, insidious, even demonic. The word “alien” was used commonly to reference them, underscoring the common white view that they constituted a foreign species unfit for commingling.

Asians also experienced how eliminationist rhetoric translated into mass death. White miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, went on a rampage in September 1885, wiping out a Chinese community estimated at 700-900.

Seattle headlines from 1919.

After the passage in 1872 of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which outlawed immigration from China, railroad companies that were still completing lines across the continent decided to recruit labor from Japan to replace the Chinese. By 1900, the numbers of Japanese people became substantial. Unsurprisingly, nativist elements soon seized upon the Japanese immigration just as it had on the Chinese: by demonizing them as “unassimilable,” and demanding the flow be stopped. The immigration was labeled an “invasion,” and the immigrants’ presence a “menace.”

Japanese immigration became known as the “Yellow Peril,” with Japanese immigrant farmers depicted as an insidious invasive horde, plotting the eventual invasion of the Pacific Coast by the Emperor. It was intertwined with the popularity of racial eugenics, stoked by a couple of bestsellers that depicted Asian immigration as the most dire existential threat facing America: The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant, and The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard. (Adam Serwer recently explored the impact of these works on American culture over subsequent generations, notably our own.)

All this agitation translated into legislation and policy, including court rulings that affirmed that Asians were ineligible for naturalization, as well as a host of state laws such as “alien land laws” that were designed to disenfranchise Japanese immigrants. It also produced the Immigration Act of 1924, which was known in the press at the time as the Asian Exclusion Act. It forbade any further immigration of any kind from Japan or anywhere else in Asia. It also formed the basis of much of our current immigration law.

Eliminationist attitudes about the Japanese were still very much alive 17 years later when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, especially the belief that those Japanese American farmers were secret shock troops for the Emperor, waiting for their signal. These attitudes fueled the hysteria that swept the Pacific Coast after the outbreak of the war with Japan, and eventually led to Japanese Americans’ forced removal and incarceration in concentration camps for the war’s duration.

American eliminationism also played a key role in the development of the fascist agenda in Europe. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, credited the example of the genocide of Native Americans for inspiring his notions of “Lebensraum,” or “living space.” Jim Crow laws pervasive in the American South similarly provided the Nazis with inspiration for the Nuremberg Laws, which functionally disenfranchised all Jews in German society.

Eliminationism became much less popular after the end of World War II, when the reality came home from Europe demonstrating the real-world results of that kind of rhetoric. Nonetheless, it remained an undercurrent in right-wing rhetoric over the years, even as former favorite targets—blacks, Jews, Native Americans, Japanese Americans—gained civil rights protections in the 1950s through the 1970s, sometimes at great cost. It just shifted targets.

The LGBTQ community became a popular target in the 1970s and ‘80s, even as gay rights became a reality. During the 1980s AIDS crisis, it was not uncommon for gay-bashing “Christians” to argue for the forced removal of gays into “quarantine.” There was even a 1986 initiative in California, led by Lyndon LaRouche’s cult, titled Proposition 64, which was intended to enable health officials to do exactly that. Gay-bashing hate crimes became popular with right-wing thugs, too. And of course, laws against hate crimes were targeted by religious-right anti-LGBTQ organizations, and are resisted by them to this day.

In the 1990s, those of us who monitor right-wing extremists observed that many white supremacist groups were shifting their gears to begin recruiting around the issue of immigration in a focused manner. And sure enough, we started hearing the rhetoric.

It was familiar, just like nativist rhetoric directed at waves of immigrants before: They sucked off taxpayers, they took away jobs, they brought crime and diseases, they were part of a plot to destroy white America, they would never fit in as Americans. It melded with the remnants of the 1990s paranoid Patriot/militia movement and emerged as the “Minutemen,” vigilante border-watchers who were going to stop immigrants coming over the border, and the New World Order along with it. They talked about shooting border-crossers.

The Minutemen were fueled by the usual toxic mix of paranoid conspiracy theories and visceral ethnic loathing of Latinos, and eventually crumbled into a pathetic but lethal circus of criminality and epic, Coen-Brothersesque bizarro tragedy. But the movement also clearly activated a strand of white supremacist activism that had not made itself public for many years.

Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy seemed to open the door for mainstream conservatism to become host to extremist ideas. It also inspired an immediate violent backlash, embodied by Jim David Adkisson’s 2008 attack on a liberal church. Adkisson, you’ll recall, left behind a manifesto urging all conservatives to declare literal war on liberals and begin killing them:

Know This if Nothing Else: This Was a Hate Crime: I hate the damned left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country, and these liberals are working together to attack every decent and honorable institution in our nation. They are trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them. … So I decided to do something good for this country. Kill Democrats until the cops kill me. If each decent and patriotic American could vote three times in every election, we still could not stem this tide of liberalism that is destroying America. Liberals are a pest like termites. There are millions of them. Each little bite they take contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather! I would like to encourage other like-minded people to do as I have done. If life is no longer worth living, do not just kill yourself. Do something worthwhile for your country before you go. Kill liberals.

During the Obama years, all these strands came together under the Gadsden banner (previously a Patriot/militia symbol) of the tea party, which became a conduit for far-right extremism and its attendant eliminationism. Obama himself was subjected to a number of smears and paranoid conspiracy theories at the hands of the far right (and Fox News) during his tenure.

The most oddly enduring of these was the “birther” theories about his Hawaiian birth certificate, which was patently baseless and racist. Beyond the racism, there was always an undercurrent of eliminationism to the delegitimization underlying the whole enterprise: It made Obama into The Other, a Not American, an Alien. So when Patriot protesters gathered outside the White House, they demanded his hanging: “Hang the lying traitor!”

And the most prominent promoter of the claims that Obama’s birth certificate had been faked was Donald J. Trump. It became the basis of his political career. Trump also declared himself the leader of the tea party movement. Over time, that was what he became.

In the meantime, the far right kept escalating its hatred of immigrants by reviving Minuteman-style vigilante groups on the southern U.S. border. Militia/Patriots also became increasingly involved in conspiracy-fueled resistance to Muslims and to refugee programs.

That was the environment in which Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, and immediately set an overtly eliminationist tone—describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals—from the outset. It never ceased.

Throughout the campaign, the same kind of eliminationist rhetoric was directed at Muslim immigrants generally, as he talked about imposing a ban on immigration from Muslim nations. He also indulged in harsh rhetoric against refugees, warning that he intended to “send them back!”

There was an unstated eliminationist element to Trump’s demand to imprison Hillary Clinton, accompanied by “Lock Her Up!” chants, with its implication that liberals could be imprisoned on his say-so, for their politics alone. It also had a chillingly fanatic quality to it.

The apotheosis of Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric, however, was his regular reading of the poem “The Snake,” which depicts a “silly woman” who revives a dying viper (immigrants) only to be bitten by it in the end. It’s a classic depiction of humans as toxic vermin. Trump repeated his narration of the poem at almost every stop he made on the campaign trail in 2016.

Trump’s eliminationism has never stopped since he won the election, either. In addition to an anti-immigrant policy, he has notoriously used eliminationist rhetoric throughout his presidency, including the well-noted incident in which he sneered at “shithole nations.” Then there was the time he notoriously sent out a tweet describing immigrants as “infesting” the country, as though they were lice and their nits. Last fall, as the November elections approached, he began escalating the rhetoric to include mainstream liberals and Democrats, whom he attacked as an “angry left-wing mob,” and saying that “they've become, frankly, too dangerous to govern. They've gone wacko.”

Along similar lines, but more intensely, he began ratcheting up the fear around immigration issues by making the approach of a caravan of would-be asylum-seekers from Central America into a national security crisis. It wasn’t just Trump, either: Eliminationist rhetoric about the caravan spread everywhere, and not just on Lou Dobbs’s notorious fearmongering programs on Fox Business. It was the No. 1 story on Fox News. On Trump’s favorite show, Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade talked about the caravan as a disease vector.

Trump’s own fearmongering over the caravan and Latino refugees, also classically eliminationist—calling them “invaders” and calling out American troops—has been received ecstatically by extremists on the radical right. Unsurprisingly, it was precisely this heightened hysteria over the caravan that spurred the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter in October 2018, in no small part because of the latent anti-Semitism of the right’s immigrant fearmongering, especially their George Soros fetish.

This is called scripted terrorism: The person with the megaphone announces the script, identifying the targets for elimination to the followers, who then act out the violence that has been scripted for them. Trump has been writing the scripts, and the unhinged elements among his followers have been carrying them out. Nowhere is that more evident than in the case of the #MAGAbomber, who sent out pipe bombs to people and to entities such as CNN, every one of them identified explicitly by Trump as targets.

So far, the tactic has worked for Trump. His recent attacks on the four congresswomen has in fact produced a flood of death threats against them—and appear to be connected as well with a rising tide of threats against members of Congress generally. Well after the 2018 election, and its resounding Democratic victory, Trump has continued the escalation of this rhetoric, doubling down every time he has been challenged.

This is a dangerous time for America. Remember that the historic purpose of eliminationist rhetoric, even the jokes, is always the same: giving permission. Permission for what hides in the darkest corners of the American psyche to emerge. The man who holds the power of the presidency is now opening the gates.