🧩 BND Motif Index · M1854
Less than human
Casting the other side as evil, vermin or not human at all is said to be the first step to violence against it: once people are made less than human, hurting and killing them becomes easy to justify.
🕵️ Theories🗂️ Political violence🗂️ Erasing a people
- 1claim filed under it
- 1right show it came up on
⚠️ A story people tell, not a claim that it's true.
A motif is the shape of a story as its tellers tell it, named the way a folklorist names a tale type, so the same story told about other people, by the other side or in another year lands in the same place. Some of the claims below are true, many are false. Arguing against a story is often a story of its own, its answer (Voter fraud is answered by Voter suppression, Lawfare by No one is above the law), and we file it there; where no answer has a motif yet, the arguments against a story sit with its tellings.
🎙️ Who it came up with
the shows we follow where its claims came up (0 left-leaning, 0 center, 1 right-leaning so far), colored by the show's lean; the bar is how many of its claims each one heard
- right-leaning
- crossover
"Came up on" means one of its claims was heard on the show: told, reported or argued against. We don't yet mark which. Show leans are our own grouping of the shows we transcribe.
🗣️ In so many words
the words that carry it
💬 the tellers' own words: “millions of people... do have this justification in their hearts for political violence” “the more we can paint somebody on the other side of the aisle as so other as to be evil and even not human, the easier it is to justify torturing them”
🧶 Its claims
what's been told in this shape, in our words, by who told it: newest first in each; a claim's dots are the shows it came up on, in their lean's color (point at them for their names)
Told on the left 0
claims heard on left-leaning shows, and no right-leaning one
🦗 No claim heard only on the left so far.
Told on the right 1
claims heard on right-leaning shows, and no left-leaning one
- 2026-11-10 “Political actors dehumanize opponents to make it easier to justify violence or genocide against them.” 2
M1854 · first seen 2026-11-10 · what this is · how the index works