If a frog is placed in boiling water, it will immediately jump out to save itself. However, if it is placed in cold water and the temperature is gradually increased, the frog will not perceive the danger and will be boiled to death without attempting to escape. This phenomenon, known as "boiled frog syndrome," describes a process of gradual adaptation to change that can have tragic and irreversible consequences. It is a strategy commonly used to explain various social and political phenomena, including the rise of Nazism and its tragic outcome in the form of genocide. It is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that Hitler would have gained the support of German citizens if he had run in the 1933 elections with a political platform that included his plan to exterminate Jews, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other minorities through a sophisticated system of extermination camps and Cameroons. Such a policy would not have found support among the German public. No one, not even those most convinced of the superiority of the Aryan race, would probably have supported a party that upheld such barbarity in its political ideology.

In recent days, following the violent incidents in Torre Pacheco (Murcia), Vox leader Santiago Abascal has once again deployed his harshest rhetoric, calling irregular immigration a plague. In a press conference on July 14, he described the situation as a "genuine plague" nationwide. Other members of his party have demanded mass deportations and refuse to condemn calls by extremist groups to "hunt" migrants. The choice of word is not innocent: plagues are destructive, invasive, impossible to control; they provoke disgust and fear, and must be exterminated. For now, admittedly, Vox doesn't go that far: its platform doesn't literally propose "hunting" or extermination, but rather the immediate and widespread expulsion, even of the children of migrants already born in Spain. But then the words are: when it becomes normal to call a human group a plague, the next step—"hunting" or "extermination"—begins to be considered socially justifiable.