No Human Being Is Garbage

I will confess, sometimes, if I listen to too much CNN or MSNBC, I am more inclined to defend the Trump administration than I would otherwise be. Of course, there is media bias. Yes, there is pile-on and missing of the point constantly. That’s fact. It’s kept the Media Research Center quite busy for almost four decades now.

I say this because, overnight, I saw people on the right complaining that the media are more concerned about how Donald Trump is talking about terrorists and violence and corruption than actual scandals in Minnesota, evidently involving Somalia and the funding of terrorism. It for the 20 millionth time shows the media are all too happy to overlook what Dem politicians do as long as the Republican — and, yes, Trump in a particular way — is defeated. So I don’t disagree with the point Batya Ungar-Sargon is making in this clip (it’s the only part of the CNN discussion I’ve seen):

At the same time, conservatives also need to be able to say: It is despicable to call human beings “garbage.”

A cabinet secretary also shouldn’t be calling a governor an “idiot” at a televised cabinet meeting. And I’d leave Kristi Noem’s comment about Tim Walz alone, if Trump hadn’t previously (Thursday, defending it on Sunday) insisted Walz is “retarded.”

We don’t talk about people like that.

At least, pro-lifers don’t talk like that about human beings.

We can’t be associated with that kind of talk.

The president of the United States ended his press conference by calling a population of humans “garbage.” On social media, I got pushback: Narco-terrorists are garbage, for instance, I was told. Look, that’s an evil trade with evil people. It’s from the pits of hell. I’ll give you another one: Sex trafficking. There are not words to adequately capture the deplorable evil of sex trafficking of children — of any abuse of children, frankly. There are things going on in our world today — including in our country — that would delight Satan if he could delight in anything.

I think hell is hell in part because there is no delight. Nothing satisfies. Everything is utter use and abuse without the possibility of redemption for all eternity.

And that’s the thing. I’m not (that) naive. I’m not expecting an army of Somali terrorists and men making money off of sex with children (to name one issue at hand and just about the most heinous known to man today) to become Chuck Colsons. But as long as you are a human being on this earth, you’ve got a shot at conversion. And, as long as you are on this earth, yes, we have responsibilities to justice, but also to watch the way we even speak of human life.

It is precisely in thinking that some human life is not human life that abortion is possible in America. That’s how assisted suicide is expanding. We think some human life is not quite human life. When you begin to say human life is “garbage” — one life, or in this most recent case with the president, a population — where does it stop?

And that question needs to be asked about non-innocents, to put it mildly. Okay, so a narco-terrorist is “garbage.” Where does that stop? Is every criminal garbage? Do we include among the criminal “garbage” the 19-year-old who gets himself arrested on purpose, so he has somewhere to eat and sleep and shower because he aged out of the foster-care system and has no one in his life who considers him family or worth anything?

Look, obviously he isn’t a terrorist, but I know someone reading this thinks that 19-year-old is garbage, too.

Is every addict “garbage”? Or does it depend on the drug he is addicted to? Who decides which ones?

I assume alcohol and marijuana get a pass by social drinkers and everyone who experimented in college, so is it only a miserable dependency on fentanyl and heroin that makes you “garbage”? Maybe cocaine, or maybe that’s a little more sophisticated?

I can’t be alone in having too many friends whose children have died of opioid overdoses in recent years. Their children were not and are not “garbage.” The dude on the corner — National Review’s offices are in midtown Manhattan; you probably don’t even have to get as far as a corner — drunk or high and looking for money for food or his next hit or both, is not “garbage.”

I used to walk past the Roosevelt Hotel when it was one of those undocumented-immigrant-processing centers. (It looked so awful just from the outside scene.) There were guys who were clearly up to no good standing outside. I think you’ll believe me when I say it’s been forever and a day since I’ve been catcalled, but that would be a nice thing compared to what I experienced. Let’s just say I learned to walk elsewhere. But I also saw young families. I think most of us who have been in major cities in the last few years have seen mothers trying to sell two-liter bottles of soda or candy, with their child or children besides them, clearly not as props. Don’t dare call them “garbage.”

No human being is “garbage.” Conservatives need to say this. Pro-lifers need to say this. Whatever else is going on. It can all be true — the scandals, the cover-up, the media turning the blind eye. But that does not make it okay for the president of the United States — who some have heralded as the most pro-life president we’ve ever known — to refer to any human life as “garbage.”

Period.

And I haven’t been able to shake the fact that it was the end-of-year, we-can-say-Merry-Christmas-again cabinet meeting where cabinet secretaries seemed to be tripping over one another to adore the president.

You do have to wonder why accomplished adults would subject themselves to the ego-stroking, participating in an The Apprentice: White House-like charade. You’re a cabinet secretary. Have some self-respect.

But more importantly: The way that meeting ending was despicable. You can say Tim Walz’s whole administration is despicable, too, I’m not going to debate you. But words have meaning, and the words Trump is using to describe human beings is right out of the culture of death the administration wants credit for combatting.

We know better. We say we defend human life. We say that life is a gift. Conservatism says we are stewards, necessarily. You simply can’t be a conservative without a sense of stewardship and gratitude and, yes, primarily for life and freedom.

I remember when Trump became the first sitting president to speak at the March for Life in January 2020. I wasn’t happy, because the March for Life was never meant to be a MAGA rally, and I didn’t have to walk far to see that some of the young boys and men there, especially, had leaned into the Trump association. And understandably so. The problem is the March for Life is so much more transcendent, frankly, than that. I wish I made documentaries, because I’d give you a tour of my March for Life experiences over the decades — so joyful, even with Roe being the reason we were gathering for most of those years. Trump said all the appropriate things in that March speech, but when he talked about everyone being made in the image and likeness of God, I think I actually laughed out loud. I wasn’t even thinking of Somali terrorists. I was thinking: You don’t really think Nancy Pelosi was made in the image and likeness of God.

I’d love to be wrong.

I’m grateful, of course — I hope it goes without saying — that Kamala Harris isn’t president — the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic, whose commitment to the evil of abortion knows no limits that I’ve been made aware of. And clearly Walz didn’t deserve a promotion. But we — people who say we want to protect life and build a culture of life and a civilization of love and combat the culture of death — cannot just shrug off the language of what Pope Francis called the “throwaway society.”

One last thing on people who have something wrong with them, as Donald Trump might put it (and I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t have something wrong with them): When he was in Lebanon this week, Pope Leo XIV visited a psychiatric hospital. Forgive me for taking a comment about a Democrat Trump hates so seriously, but that hospital is home for people being cared for by Catholic nuns and others, people who would be cast aside and considered human “garbage” to many. Not worth the time. Useless. And yet they are loved and there is even joy, because that’s what being made in the image and likeness of God is about. There’s stigma when it comes to developmental disabilities and mental illness and addiction here in the United States in 2025. Imagine in the disaster of Lebanon:

Pope Francis used to talk about abortion as akin to hiring a hitman to eliminate your baby. That proverbial hitman obviously is no innocent. So is he “garbage”? Now think carefully on this one: Is the woman, likely scared and desperate, under all kinds of pressures, who may not have ever had sex freely and with any kind of pleasure, “garbage”? Never. Ever.

Just stop.

Don’t start.

No human being is garbage.