The Human Image of Beasts – How Right-Wing Rhetoric Stages Death

Laura Loomer wasn't making a joke. Her statement was not sarcasm, not exaggeration, but a calculated act of dehumanization. "Alligator lives matter," wrote the far-right commentator on June 30 - and added: "The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now." 65 million. That is how many Latinos live in the United States. It is no coincidence that Loomer chose that number. It is also no coincidence that her phrase "get started now" sounds like a logistical scenario. And it is certainly no coincidence that alligators - those reptilian predators who have long served in the racist popular culture of the American South as symbols of violence, prison, and border control - are now being repurposed as culinary executioners of an ethnic cleansing fantasy. Loomer's statement is a call to murder in X format.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, just look at the reality that precedes these words. In Florida, where one of the most notorious deportation camps was established under Trump’s second term, the facility is nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.” Nestled in the swamps of the Everglades, sealed off, surveilled, controlled by the National Guard and private security firms - a symbol of the new normal of deterrence. The name is no accident. It is political branding. And it fits perfectly with the cynicism with which Loomer not only defends mass deportation but imagines it with relish. In Germany, such a statement would be unthinkable? Hardly. You don’t have to look far to find similar patterns. Alice Weidel, parliamentary group leader of the AfD in the Bundestag, once again complained on July 1 about allegedly uncontrolled air travel entry. "ID? Doesn’t matter!" she writes. And speaks of “hundreds” who arrive “illegally month after month.” It’s the same old codes, the same old staging: migrants as threat, order as a threatened good, the homeland as occupied. And again, it is no coincidence that Weidel chooses airports as her theme. At the center of the right-wing narrative is not just the fear of losing control - it’s about constructing an enemy who is already here, undetected, invisible. And whose mere existence becomes a provocation.

When political language begins turning people into meals, it is no longer about border control. That is when language becomes preparation. That is when rhetoric is no longer debate, but strategy. That is when they are no longer just words. They are preparations. Laura Loomer’s statement does not stand alone. It is emblematic of a global shift in what can be said - and what can be thought. Between Florida and Frankfurt, between Alligator Alcatraz and the AfD’s demand for a “migration turnaround,” there is no ocean. There is a line. It begins with dehumanization - and ends when no one speaks up.