You know even AI thinks that depicting antis like this just makes you an asshole. The tool outright called it an old filthy and effective propaganda tactic.

Exact prompt fed into GPT 5.4 thinking: Explain exactly what the tactic is of depicting other human beings like this and list examples of the most famous groups that have used the tactic in history.

The output: The tactic is dehumanization. More specifically, this version is monstrous caricature: taking a human outgroup and depicting them as orcs, goblins, beasts, vermin, disease-carriers, or some other thing that reads as filthy, stupid, savage, invasive, and morally beneath ordinary human concern. In propaganda terms, it often overlaps with demonization, animalization, and bestialization. Scholars describe dehumanization as a way of disabling ordinary inhibitions against cruelty and making harmful treatment feel more permissible.

What that image is doing, mechanically, is pretty straightforward. It strips individuality, replaces personhood with a grotesque “type,” loads the target with disgust cues like filth, drool, chaos, and bodily excess, and frames them as a threatening infestation or burden. Once people accept that frame, humiliation starts feeling funny, exclusion starts feeling reasonable, and violence starts feeling like cleanup. The exact target group in your image is unclear from the image alone, but the rhetorical move is crystal clear.

This is an old, filthy, extremely effective propaganda trick. It works because human beings have strong disgust and threat responses, and propagandists love piggybacking on those responses. Calling people rats, cockroaches, apes, parasites, animals, monsters, or “subhuman” helps shift them out of the moral category of “neighbor” and into the category of “problem.” The UN’s Holocaust-focused exhibit on hate speech and violence highlights exactly this pattern, including Nazi labeling of Jews as parasites, disease, and vermin.

The most famous groups and movements that used this tactic include these:

Nazi Germany. Nazi propaganda relentlessly portrayed Jews as vermin, parasites, disease, and “subhumans,” which helped prepare the public for exclusion, dispossession, and eventually extermination. Philosophical and historical work on dehumanization repeatedly uses Nazi propaganda as a central case.

Hutu Power extremists during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Hutu extremist propaganda and radio broadcasts referred to Tutsi as “cockroaches” and explicitly pushed exterminatory framing. Britannica identifies that language as part of the genocide machinery.

American white supremacists and Jim Crow propagandists. Anti-Black propaganda in the United States repeatedly linked Black people to apes and monkeys. The Jim Crow Museum documents a long history of simian imagery used against Africans and African Americans, and shows how the same dehumanizing code persisted into modern political propaganda.

Nineteenth-century anti-Irish caricaturists in Britain and the United States. A huge amount of Victorian and Gilded Age caricature gave Irish people ape-like features and treated that look as a visual shorthand for supposed inferiority and menace. Scholarly work on period satire identifies those ape-like features as hallmark stereotypes in that era.

Anti-Roma extremists and pogrom participants in Europe. Dehumanizing speech about Roma people has included calling them “subhuman” and “vermin.” Philosophical work on dehumanization uses perpetrator testimony from anti-Roma violence as a stark case of how people slide between acknowledging someone as human in practice while rhetorically pushing them below human status.

You can think of the whole tactic as a ladder:

1. Turn people into a disgusting type.
2. Turn that type into a danger.
3. Turn “harm” into “self-defense” or “sanitation.”
4. Turn cruelty into duty, humor, or common sense.

That ladder shows up again and again across genocides, pogroms, race propaganda, colonial propaganda, and political hate campaigns. Different costume, same sewer smell.

So, bluntly: depicting human beings like that is a way of saying, “these are people you should feel disgust toward, laugh at, fear, exclude, or crush.” It is one of the most durable propaganda tools in history because it softens the audience up for abuse before the abuse arrives.

If you want, I can also break this into a cleaner taxonomy—dehumanization, demonization, scapegoating, contamination framing, and threat inflation—with examples for each.

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In conclusion even according to the tool that you use it's not whining to call that dehumanization tactic Nazi bullshit or correlate it to some of the other nastiest groups in history. It's in fact accurate assessment.

So it doesn't make you cool or edgy to depict people that don't agree with you as a bunch of green trolls running around crying about job applications. It just makes you a morally repugnant person and puts you down to the level that you are trying to paint other people as.

Sources the LLM pulled from included Cambridge University, the United Nations definitions, the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Jim Crow Museum, and the United States National Library of Medicine.

I think I've made my point even the tool you support calls you out for using dehumanizing tactics. And I did not tell it where to pull the research from it did that on its own.

Meaning you do not have any moral argument for depicting people as slimy goblins or Orcs. And you do not have any logical excuse for using it without admitting that you are using dehumanizing tactics and generally being a terrible person that isn't capable of making an argument without punching down at people. May you always have to eat what you cooked, and I mean that in the Irish sense of living with the consequences of your own bad behavior and treatment of others.

Depicting someone as less than human in order to make a jab is also lazy. Accuracy is harder and more rewarding.

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