‘Ghoul’ is a political insult with real bite

Why “Ghoul” Has Become a Sharp Political Epithet

Earthguardiansonline.com – As Election Day on November 3 approaches, one old horror-story word is appearing with new force in political arguments: “ghoul.” The term has become a pointed way to accuse a public figure of exploiting suffering, lacking empathy or treating human pain as an opportunity.

Republican Ohio gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy became the latest target after a campaign advertisement featured the estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton. The woman’s husband had been charged with raping Acton when she was a child. Andrew Weinstein, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations, wrote on Bluesky that Ramaswamy was “an absolute ghoul.” Pennsylvania Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, the Democratic Party vice chair, delivered a similarly blunt judgment on X: “Vivek is a ghoul.”

The insult is not confined to one candidate, party or issue. In recent weeks, critics have used it against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in response to his plan to livestream a firing squad execution. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also been called a ghoul after his address to the United Nations General Assembly.

Republicans have used the word as well. Earlier this year, a Republican strategist described former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee as a “soulless ghoul” over a social-media post made after a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The Trump White House used the same language last year against a journalist who said Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fled a medical emergency in the Oval Office. It also branded a writer questioning the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, DC, a “sick, disgusting ghoul.”

A charge of inhumanity

Calling someone a ghoul does more than suggest bad judgment. It casts the target as someone fundamentally monstrous: a person believed to feed on distress rather than respond to it with restraint or compassion.

“It’s in a sense a dehumanization tactic,” said Fielding Montgomery, a researcher and author of “Horror Framing and the General Election.”

“It’s that they are a monster … that they are particularly taking advantage of people or preying on people.”

That explanation helps account for the term’s political appeal. “Ghoul” compresses a complicated moral accusation into one image. It suggests not simply that an opponent is wrong, but that they have crossed a boundary of ordinary human decency. Its use is especially likely when a dispute involves violence, illness, death, grief or personal trauma.

From Arab folklore to Western horror

The word’s path into English began far from modern campaigns. “Ghoul” is connected to the French goule and the Arabic ġūl, itself linked to the Arabic verb ġāla, meaning “to seize.” The figure emerged from pre-Islamic Arab traditions and occupied an unsettling, changeable place in folklore.

Ahmed Al-Rawi wrote in a 2009 article that the ghoul inspired both fear and fascination in Arab storytelling. Such beings were believed to transform their appearances, and their essential nature was not always fixed. They have been imagined as devils, genies, enchantresses of genies, devilish genies and spirits.

Many folktales portrayed ghouls as ugly female predators roaming the desert and luring travelers off their paths. The creature was dangerous not only because it attacked, but because it deceived. That association with disguise and predation still shadows the word when it is used as a contemporary insult.

The Western image of the ghoul changed significantly in the early 18th century. Antoine Galland, an orientalist translating One Thousand and One Nights into French, gave the monster characteristics that were not present in the original Arabic material. Most memorably, his version tied ghouls to grave-robbing and the consumption of human flesh.

That portrayal helped establish the cemetery-haunting cannibal familiar to Western audiences. Later European versions of stories from One Thousand and One Nights repeated the motif. In “The Story of King Yunan and Duban the Sage,” for example, a prince encounters a being that initially takes the form of a beautiful woman before revealing itself as a grotesque cannibalistic creature.

The ghoul’s literary afterlife

Gothic writers embraced the ghoul as a symbol of dread and corruption. It appeared in William Beckford’s 1786 novel Vathek and in Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour.” Edgar Allan Poe invoked the creature in his 1849 poem “The Bells,” presenting ghouls as beings outside familiar categories of gender, animality and humanity.

By the 19th century, the term had also begun to move beyond literal monsters. It could describe people thought to relish calamity, disgrace or another person’s ruin. William Makepeace Thackeray used the figurative sense in his 1854 novel The Newcomes, writing of:

“Ghouls feasting on the fresh corpse of a reputation.”

That figurative meaning is the one that dominates public debate today. The accusation is aimed at behavior seen as callous, opportunistic or predatory, rather than at any supernatural quality.

Horror fiction continued to reshape the creature. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 story “Pickman’s Model” depicted ghouls as underground beings with “dog-like features,” as Rehan Hyder wrote in The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. In Lovecraft’s later novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Richard Pickman returns as a ghoul, reflecting the unsettling possibility that a human might decline into something less than human.

A word built for political conflict

Its long history makes “ghoul” unusually potent in political rhetoric. The word draws on ancient tales of deception, graveyards, cannibalism and transformation, while its modern figurative meaning focuses on perceived indifference to suffering. It is a moral verdict delivered in the vocabulary of horror.

That power also makes the term a severe one. Political language often thrives on memorable insults, but describing someone as a ghoul leaves little room for disagreement without moral condemnation. The speaker is not merely challenging a policy, advertisement or public statement; the speaker is arguing that the conduct reveals an appetite for harm or exploitation.

With campaigns entering their final stretch and public debates intensifying, the word’s return is a reminder that the language of monsters remains useful to people trying to define the limits of acceptable political behavior.