The Associated press reports on this white politician running for the U.S. Congress:

The Republican nominee for a New Mexico congressional seat suggested during a radio interview that the United States could place land mines along the Mexican border to secure the international boundary. …. mine the border, install barbed wire and post signs directing would-be border jumpers to cross legally at designated checkpoints.

He later said he was reporting on a suggestion he had heard on the campaign. Yet, his comment did not get national attention and did not alienate Republican voters, as he won the Republican nomination. This radical-right stuff is getting so far out, it takes one’s breath away. Over at Dailykos, Jake McIntyre comments:

Anti-personnel land mines are arbitrary, frighteningly random dealers of death condemned by the vast majority of nations. (A total of 156 countries have signed the Ottawa Treaty completely banning their use, although the US is, sadly, not one of them.) Land mines kill children as surely as criminals, Americans as surely as Mexicans; they lay in place for decades, long after their deployment is forgotten… Asking for land mines to be placed in the ground of your own state? … It strikes me as a conscious decision to turn one’s back on civilization….

Evidently, some in the white radical-right community have framed Mexican workers and families in such extremist terms as “not human” that they do not consider killing them—women, children, and men—a significant human, ethical, and moral problem. Almost daily the media are now filled with chilling authoritarian or militaristic commentary that is all too close to what was going on in Germany just prior to, and during, the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. It does not take much these days to frighten some (influential and other) whites over into this kind of hyper-hostile targeting of some human beings as no longer human.