The Call is Coming from Inside the White House: The disinformative democracy’s guide to rhetorical threat construction and policymaking
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Authors
Jackson Eelbode
Issue Date
2026
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Language
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Abstract
The weight of words has always been apparent to me. Since I was small, I felt an instinctual moral recoil at harsh language directed at marginalized populations, especially so when such speech came from the people closest to me. This intuition—that words have meanings, that bad words do bad things—evolved into a more conscious level of understanding when I realized I was queer. The abstract idea of words having power turned into the concrete experience of people in my own life wielding them against me, my identity, my community. They would insist such language was inconsequential while using it to consequential effect. These were among my first lived encounters with the performative power of language, where saying is a kind of doing.
At the beginning of this year, a few weeks ago at the time of this writing, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued a genocide warning for transgender people in the United States, due in part to the eliminationist rhetoric that has permeated politics under the Trump administration. I am at once vindicated to have been right and terrified at what that could mean. Situated in a politically turbulent time, the trajectory of violence against transgender Americans cannot continue, as eliminationist rhetoric today could one day culminate in tangible elimination. Transgender people, constituting 1% of the U.S. population—a proportion historically resonant of other persecuted and genocided peoples—can indicate, via treatment under federal law, the overall health of democracy in a given state, as treatment of marginalized groups, including the extent to which they are afforded equal protection under the law, is an effective biopolitical measurement in considering the authoritarian characteristics of a government.
This project examines the disinformation campaign against transgender Americans to evaluate its effects on individuals, groups, and democracy itself.