Before the First Blow

The video is difficult to watch. In Tavernes de la Valldigna, a town in the province of Valencia in eastern Spain, a young man of Maghrebi origin is pursued by a group through the streets during local festivities. Different people strike him. He falls. The blows continue while he is on the ground. Around them, others watch, follow, shout or record the scene with their phones. Some try to stop what is happening.

Among the voices on the recording, one phrase stands out: “A Marruecos” — “To Morocco.”

The Guardia Civil opened an investigation into a possible racist assault after the recording became public. Local police confirmed that a group of young people had attacked a young man of Arab origin, while published accounts described blows with a glass object, punches and kicks, including while the victim was on the ground. The words heard in the video do not tell us everything about how the confrontation began, and investigators must establish individual responsibility and motive. They do, however, reveal something about the moral universe in which at least part of the violence was taking place: the victim’s presumed origin had become relevant to the aggression.

Another young man, born in Spain to Senegalese parents, suffered a fractured jaw in a separate altercation during the festivities that same night. Reports have treated the incidents as distinct, and the information available does not establish that the second attack had the same racist motive. That distinction matters. If the subject is the dangerous power of language, accuracy cannot become its first casualty.

What happened in Tavernes should not be inflated into a portrait of the whole town, still less of Spain. The municipal government condemned the violence and insisted that it did not represent a diverse community accustomed to people of different backgrounds living together. The video itself shows people trying to protect the victim. Yet neither should the incident be dismissed as merely an inexplicable explosion among a few young people. The words heard during the beating invite a larger question.

Where do the words that accompany violence come from? … and what happens to a society when the language of exclusion is repeated so often that it begins to sound ordinary?

Violence Has a History Before It Becomes Physical

We usually recognize violence when it becomes visible. A fist strikes a face. A shop window is smashed. A mosque, synagogue or church is attacked. Someone is driven from a neighborhood. A refugee shelter is set on fire. A person is killed.

The moral preparation for violence can be much less dramatic. It may consist of thousands of conversations, speeches, posts, jokes, slogans, videos and headlines that gradually teach people whom to fear, whom to blame and whose suffering matters less.

This does not mean that words operate like commands programmed into passive minds. Millions of people hear ugly rhetoric and never assault anyone. Economic insecurity, political polarization, personal histories, group dynamics, alcohol, criminal behavior, ideology and many other factors can contribute to an act of violence. Human beings remain morally responsible for what they choose to do.

The more defensible claim is also the more troubling one. Language can change the environment in which choices are made.

It can make an old prejudice easier to express. It can convince people that many others secretly agree with them. It can transform a human being into a representative of a despised category. It can make humiliation funny, exclusion reasonable and aggression easier to excuse. It can create what might be called a structure of permission.

The progression is not inevitable, yet it is recognizable:

words → categories → moral distance → normalization → social permission → action

Every arrow in that sequence can be interrupted. None guarantees the next step. Still, research from social psychology, political science, economics and the study of mass violence gives serious reason to examine the sequence rather than pretending that public language evaporates as soon as it has been spoken.

When the Unacceptable Becomes Sayable

One of the most revealing discoveries in this field concerns the difference between changing people’s opinions and changing their perception of what they are allowed to say.

Social norms matter because people do not express every thought they possess. Societies establish informal boundaries around behavior. Someone may harbor a racist prejudice while also understanding that expressing it publicly will bring disapproval. The prejudice has not disappeared, but a social norm constrains it.

Research published in the American Economic Review examined what happened in the United States as Donald Trump rose to political prominence. The researchers found that his increased popularity and eventual 2016 election made some people more willing to express xenophobic views publicly. Their experiments suggested that the political change had altered perceptions of social acceptability: an opinion that once carried a greater social cost appeared to carry less.

Another experimental study, published in the British Journal of Political Science, examined explicitly racial and inflammatory communication by political elites. It found what its authors called an “emboldening effect.” Among participants who already possessed stronger prejudices, exposure to inflammatory elite rhetoric made prejudiced behavior seem more socially acceptable. The effect was particularly strong when other political elites appeared to tolerate the rhetoric rather than clearly condemning it.

More recent experimental research in Europe has added an important complication. Anti-immigrant statements made by mainstream politicians can erode norms of tolerance more than similar statements made by political figures already perceived as belonging to the radical right. Status and perceived representativeness matter. When someone who occupies the political mainstream says something, listeners may interpret the statement not merely as one person’s opinion but as evidence that society itself is changing.

This helps explain why the language of leaders deserves particular scrutiny. The issue is not that politicians hypnotize populations. Their power is subtler. They can help redefine the boundaries of the permissible.

Yesterday’s shameful remark can become today’s provocative opinion, tomorrow’s campaign slogan and, eventually, something people repeat without noticing how far the boundary has moved.

From a Person to a Category

The process becomes more dangerous when language stops describing what people do and begins defining what people are.

There is an obvious moral difference between saying that a particular person committed a crime and repeatedly presenting an ethnic, religious or national group through the vocabulary of crime. It is possible to debate immigration levels, border control, integration, terrorism, public security or failures of social policy without turning millions of people into a single threatening organism. Democratic societies need to be able to discuss difficult realities honestly.

The danger begins when individuality disappears.

A neighbor is no longer Ahmed, Fatou, José, Miriam or Abdul. He becomes “a migrant.” She becomes “one of them.” Individual behavior is projected onto an entire population. Complex social questions acquire a permanent suspect.

Language then tends to intensify. Groups are described as flooding, infecting, replacing, invading, contaminating or taking over. The metaphor matters because metaphors tell us what kind of response appears reasonable. If people constitute a “wave,” they must be stopped. If they are an “infection,” they must be contained. If they are an “invasion,” resistance begins to sound like self-defense.

At the furthest end of the process lies dehumanization: treating another person as less fully human, less capable of feeling, less deserving of empathy or less protected by ordinary moral rules. A 2025 meta-analysis bringing together 184 effect sizes found a moderate overall association between dehumanization and aggression, with the association stronger when the dehumanization was explicit.

History supplies terrifying examples, although everyday prejudice should never be casually equated with genocide. European antisemitism portrayed Jews through images of disease and parasitism long before the Holocaust. Propaganda surrounding the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda notoriously used dehumanizing language. Anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar repeatedly presented a vulnerable Muslim minority as alien, dangerous and illegitimate.

The scale of those crimes is exceptional. The psychological lesson is more ordinary: it becomes easier to justify harming people when they have first been moved outside the circle of those whose pain we instinctively recognize as our concern.

The Digital Multiplier

Human beings have spread rumors, hatred and propaganda for centuries. Digital communication did not invent any of them. It altered their speed, reach, persistence and reward structure.

A hateful remark once made in a room might have disappeared with the conversation. A statement made today can be clipped from its context, reposted, translated, turned into a meme, recommended to people who never sought it out, and reproduced by thousands of accounts within hours. Anger itself can become an engagement strategy.

Platforms do not need to intend that result for it to matter. Systems optimized to keep users watching, clicking and reacting naturally have reasons to privilege material that generates strong emotions. Outrage, fear, humiliation and tribal conflict can be extremely efficient at capturing attention.

This creates another important transformation. Repetition can be mistaken for consensus.

A person who encounters the same claim hundreds of times — that migrants are criminals, that Muslims are dangerous, that Jews secretly control institutions, that a minority is destroying the country, that political opponents are traitors — may begin to perceive the claim as socially widespread even when much of the repetition originates from a relatively small number of highly active accounts.

Research in Germany illustrates why the online-offline boundary should not be treated as impermeable. Economists Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz studied anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook and attacks against refugees in German municipalities. They found that periods of intensified anti-refugee activity on social media were associated with more hate crimes in places where Facebook use was higher. Their analysis used disruptions to Facebook and Internet access as part of the effort to distinguish correlation from a causal propagation effect.

Social media did not manufacture every prejudice involved in those attacks. It provided a mechanism through which extreme views could spread, reinforce one another and reach people at scale.

The street and the screen increasingly belong to the same social environment.

Southport: When a False Story Finds a Ready-Made Enemy

Sometimes the movement from words to streets becomes startlingly fast.

On July 29, 2024, three young girls were killed in a knife attack at a children’s dance event in Southport, England. Before reliable information about the suspect had fully circulated, false claims spread online identifying him as a Muslim asylum seeker or recent migrant.

The suspect was in fact born in Britain.

The false story nevertheless entered an already polarized environment. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant agitation accelerated online, and violent disorder spread to towns and cities across the United Kingdom. Mosques were targeted. Hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked. Police officers were assaulted, buildings were damaged and fires were set.

It would be simplistic to attribute all of that violence to a single false post. Existing political grievances, organized networks, hostility toward immigration and people already willing to engage in violence were all part of the picture. The importance of Southport lies precisely in showing how misinformation can activate a target that public rhetoric has already made available.

A horrific crime occurred. Before the identity and background of the perpetrator were securely known, a social script supplied the rest: migrant, Muslim, outsider, threat.

The factual correction came later. The violence had already begun.

When Governments Choose Their Vocabulary

The responsibility attached to language grows with the power of the speaker.

A private citizen with a few acquaintances and the government of a major state do not possess equivalent megaphones. Presidents, ministers and public agencies do more than participate in conversation. Their words can establish categories, signal priorities and tell citizens what kind of reality their government believes it is confronting.

Immigration enforcement in the United States under President Donald Trump provides a current example of the tension.

The Trump administration argues that stronger immigration enforcement is necessary to uphold the law, control the border and protect communities from dangerous offenders. Official White House and Department of Homeland Security communications have repeatedly promoted ICE operations by highlighting people convicted or accused of murder, sexual crimes, gang activity and other serious offenses. The phrase “worst of the worst” has become a recurring part of that official presentation, accompanied at times by terms such as “violent thugs,” “sexual predators” and other highly charged descriptions.

A government is entitled to describe serious crimes seriously, and people who commit violent offenses do not cease to be responsible because they are migrants. The problem for public language arises when the repeated association between immigration status and extreme criminality becomes the dominant frame through which a much larger population is perceived.

The enforcement reality extends beyond the population evoked by the slogan. Independent analysis of ICE data has found that large numbers of people in immigration detention have no criminal conviction on record. Reuters reported that, as enforcement intensified under the second Trump administration, arrests of noncriminal undocumented immigrants rose sharply and tens of thousands of people without criminal records were being held in ICE detention.

Those facts do not resolve the political debate over deportation or immigration law. They reveal why language matters to it.

If the public is repeatedly shown murderers and rapists under a label attached to a vast class of migrants, while enforcement simultaneously reaches people without criminal convictions, the rhetorical category can become broader than the conduct used to justify it. The question is no longer simply whether governments may deport people legally subject to removal. The question becomes what happens socially when millions of people are understood through a vocabulary built around the most frightening members of the group.

Law enforcement can be firm without requiring collective moral suspicion. A state can enforce borders while preserving the distinction between a legal status and a human identity.

That distinction is easy to lose once political communication discovers the mobilizing power of fear.

From Ordinary Prejudice to Organized Persecution

The most extreme historical cases require caution. A racist assault in a European town, a social media riot and a campaign of ethnic persecution are not morally or historically interchangeable.

They belong in the same discussion only because the extreme cases expose mechanisms that are often harder to see at smaller scales.

Myanmar provides one of the clearest warnings. The United Nations Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar analyzed 43 Facebook pages operating during the 2017 mass violence against the Rohingya. Investigators identified more than 10,000 posts they considered hate speech and found evidence that seemingly unrelated pages formed a coordinated network with clear ties to the Myanmar military.

The campaign did not create Myanmar’s ethnic and religious tensions from nothing. It operated within longstanding discrimination and conflict. Its significance lies in showing what can happen when dehumanizing narratives, institutional power and communication systems reinforce one another during a period of violence.

The United Nations has repeatedly treated hate speech and dehumanizing propaganda as warning signs for atrocity crimes. The historical record includes the Holocaust, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and persecution of the Rohingya. In such cases, language was not merely commentary accompanying violence. It helped construct categories of people whose exclusion or destruction could be portrayed as necessary, defensive or even virtuous.

Most societies will never approach such extremes. That is precisely why the lesson should be learned before they do.

Not Every Offensive Statement Is Hate Speech

A serious defense of human dignity also requires a serious defense of intellectual and political freedom.

Not every rude statement is hate speech. Not every criticism of immigration policy is racist. Not every criticism of a religion is religious hatred. Not every discussion of crime is an attack on an ethnic minority. Calling every uncomfortable disagreement “violence” can impoverish public debate and eventually weaken the credibility of efforts to confront genuine dehumanization.

The Council of Europe’s European Commission against Racism and Intolerance acknowledges both sides of this problem. It warns that hate speech can promote or justify hatred, discrimination and violence, while also insisting that restrictions must respect freedom of expression and must not become instruments for suppressing political opposition, minority voices or criticism of governments and religions.

A healthy democracy needs room for forceful disagreement.

People must be able to argue that immigration should increase or decrease; that integration policies are working or failing; that a government is too permissive or too coercive; that a religion contains ideas they reject; that a political movement is dangerous; that crime is rising or falling; and that particular policies have unintended consequences.

The line worth defending is not between pleasant and unpleasant speech. It lies between criticizing ideas, behavior and policy on one side and stripping human beings of their individuality and equal dignity on the other.

We can say that a policy is disastrous without saying that the people affected by it are vermin. We can prosecute a criminal without treating everyone who shares his nationality as potentially criminal. We can control a border without teaching a population to despise those standing on the other side.

Why Leaders, Influencers and Journalists Carry a Heavier Burden

Freedom of speech does not mean equality of influence.

The mayor of a small town, the president of a country, a television host with millions of viewers and an influencer followed by adolescents all exercise different kinds of authority, but each possesses something most citizens do not: the ability to normalize language at scale.

That creates responsibility even where it creates no legal liability.

Political language can be especially powerful because leaders are interpreted as signals about the group. Their followers may hear more than a policy position. They may hear information about what “people like us” are now allowed to say, whom “we” should distrust and which social restraints no longer deserve obedience.

Influencers add a different mechanism. They often speak with the intimacy of friendship while operating at the scale of mass media. Irony, memes and “just joking” can make prejudice easier to circulate because the speaker can move between seriousness and denial. A slur can be presented as comedy, then repeated as a slogan, then defended as provocation, while its underlying category becomes more familiar with each repetition.

Journalism faces its own temptation. Outrage attracts attention, and algorithms reward attention. A headline that accurately describes a complicated reality often travels less efficiently than one that identifies a villainous group. Repetition of inflammatory rhetoric, even for the purpose of criticizing it, can sometimes amplify the very language under examination.

The ethical challenge is therefore not silence. It is precision.

Name the person who committed the act. Describe the evidence. Distinguish the individual from the group. Supply proportions and context. Avoid making nationality or religion relevant when it is not. Report genuine social problems without offering whole populations as explanatory shortcuts.

Accuracy is not political correctness. It is one of the protections against collective blame.

The Crowd Is Part of the Story

There is another element in the Tavernes recording that deserves attention: the people surrounding the violence.

Some watch. Some record. Some shout. Some appear to encourage. Others protest and eventually intervene.

This matters because social norms are not created only by presidents and celebrities. They are recreated in small groups every day.

The person who laughs at the racist joke communicates something. So does the person who refuses to laugh. The friend who tells an aggressor to stop changes the immediate moral environment. The teacher who challenges a dehumanizing stereotype, the parent who corrects a child, the sports coach who refuses a slur and the religious leader who rejects contempt all help establish the boundaries of belonging.

The experimental research on political rhetoric contains a hopeful lesson alongside the warning. Condemnation by other authoritative figures can reinforce social norms against prejudice. Silence can be interpreted as permission; opposition can signal that the boundary still exists.

This is not an argument for endless moral policing of ordinary conversation. It is a reminder that culture is built through repetition from below as well as from above.

Violence may be committed by a minority. The environment in which that minority decides what is permissible is created by many more people.

Breaking the Chain

If words can prepare the ground for violence, different words and different actions can make that ground less fertile.

The answer cannot consist only of criminal law. Explicit incitement to violence may properly enter the legal realm according to each country’s constitutional and human rights framework, but most of the process described here takes place before that threshold. Democratic societies cannot prosecute their way into fraternity.

Education matters because people can learn how propaganda works, how statistics can be manipulated, how emotionally charged content exploits attention and how false information spreads. Media literacy is therefore not merely a technical skill. It can become a form of civic self-defense.

Political leadership matters because leaders can refuse the false choice between honesty and dignity. Governments can speak clearly about security, immigration, integration or crime without constructing ethnic scapegoats. Opposition parties can criticize policies without demonizing voters. Religious communities can defend their beliefs without treating other believers as enemies.

Technology companies also have responsibilities because architecture affects behavior. Systems that recommend content, reward engagement and build audiences are not neutral pipes through which society simply passes. Design choices influence which voices become visible and which emotional responses receive amplification.

Personal encounter may be the most underestimated defense of all.

Hatred thrives on abstraction. It is easier to despise “migrants” than the coworker who shares lunch with us, easier to fear “Muslims” than the family whose children attend school with ours, easier to mock “the homeless” than the person whose name we know.

Encounter does not solve every political disagreement. It makes dehumanization harder.

A Catholic and Vincentian Perspective: Recovering the Person

Christianity approaches this question from a starting point more radical than civility. Human dignity does not depend on citizenship, usefulness, innocence, sympathy, ethnicity, religion or legal status. It comes before all of them.

Pope Francis devoted striking passages of Fratelli Tutti to the aggression of contemporary communication. He warned of hostility, insults, abuse, defamation and verbal violence spreading through digital networks, and observed that statements once considered socially disgraceful could increasingly be made with impunity, including by political figures. His concern was not etiquette. It was fraternity: what happens to a society when communication stops treating the other person as someone with whom a common world must still be built.

The 2024 declaration Dignitas Infinita made the connection with migrants especially explicit. It warned that societies may never openly deny that migrants are human beings while nevertheless behaving as though they were less worthy, less important and less human. The contradiction is devastating precisely because it can coexist with respectable language about human rights.

Pope Leo XIV has continued this emphasis. During his 2026 visit to Spain, speaking with migrants and organizations working with them in the Canary Islands, he repeatedly insisted that migrants are not files, numbers or problems to be managed but persons possessing an inviolable dignity. He also acknowledged the responsibilities of migrants toward the communities that receive them and the right of societies to establish laws and structures for migration. The Christian response therefore does not require pretending that migration has no political, cultural or practical difficulties. It requires that none of those difficulties erase the person.

That perspective has a particularly Vincentian resonance.

The Vincentian tradition repeatedly brings faith down from abstraction to encounter. Service is not primarily directed toward a category called “the poor.” It is directed toward concrete women, men and children whose histories must be heard and whose dignity must be recognized. The poor person is not raw material for an ideology, a charitable project or a political argument.

That makes the Vincentian response to dehumanizing language more demanding than simply avoiding racial insults.

It asks us to notice when speech turns people into problems. It asks whether statistics still contain faces. It asks whether our political loyalties have become strong enough to make contempt acceptable when directed at the “right” target. It asks Christians whether they can speak of Christ present in the vulnerable on Sunday while repeating language that humiliates those same people during the week.

It also requires encounter across disagreement. A Vincentian response should not begin by imagining that everyone concerned about immigration is xenophobic, everyone demanding stronger borders lacks compassion, or everyone defending migrants favors unrestricted migration. Reducing political opponents to caricatures would reproduce the same mechanism the Gospel calls us to resist.

The alternative is harder: truth without humiliation, disagreement without dehumanization, security without contempt, welcome without naivety, responsibility without scapegoating.

Pope Leo has called for an “evangelical language” that avoids humiliating and antagonistic words while remaining clear and frank. That may be one of the most countercultural tasks Christians can undertake in a political environment that increasingly treats cruelty as authenticity.

Returning to Tavernes

The street in Tavernes brings the argument back to its simplest form.

A young man is being beaten. Someone invokes Morocco.

At that instant, nationality or presumed origin is no longer an abstract subject of political debate. It has entered the moral logic of the violence. The person on the ground has become, at least in the words surrounding him, a representative of somewhere else: someone who can be told where he supposedly belongs while blows are falling.

Other people in the same scene make another choice. They tell the attackers to stop. One person eventually places herself between the victim and an aggressor.

Both reactions are part of the story.

They remind us why language matters without becoming destiny. Human beings can absorb a climate, repeat its slogans and act upon its prejudices. They can also reject it. A crowd can become an audience for cruelty, or someone inside that crowd can redraw the boundary and say: not this, not here, not to him.

The first punch matters. So do the thousands of words that came before it.

A society should therefore pay attention long before blood is visible: when jokes begin assigning whole peoples a lesser place; when politicians discover that humiliation earns applause; when influencers learn that contempt generates clicks; when algorithms repeatedly place fear in front of the frightened; when “they” becomes one of the most powerful words in public life.

The question is not whether every ugly word will produce an act of violence. Most will not.

The more urgent question is what kind of society we are constructing when certain people must live surrounded by words that continually describe them as threats, invaders, criminals or strangers who do not belong.

Long before violence reaches the street, a community decides — word by word — who remains inside its circle of concern.

Christian faith gives that circle no ethnic border.

The person standing before us is still our neighbor …and the person lying on the ground is still our brother.

Javier F. Chento