When I first heard about murder hornets entering the United States, I assumed they were coming over our southern border, like everything else. Murder hornets sounded tropical. As it happens, though, they were leaking in across the Canadian border, from Vancouver, B.C., where they also don’t belong. They belong in east Asia, mostly.

Their proper name is Asian Giant Hornet, but that is an insufficiently inflammatory name for the modern media world. And now that we have all gotten familiar with the insect, we have to start calling it something other than Asian, because Asians are already being persecuted for too many things. Not by sensible people, but there are a lot of assholes out there and a lot of people profiting from stirring them up. Like a hornet’s nest.

The hornets are dangerous sometimes, and can kill a man if he’s allergic, or if he is gang-stung, just the kind of thing you’d expect from an illegal immigrant insect. Anyway, now he’s the Northern Giant Hornet. Although, since we’ve recently been informed we should be leery of Canadians, the “northern” bit probably doesn’t shine him up as much as one would like. It’s hard to keep up with the metastasis of prejudice.

Recently, the hornet has been declared eradicated in North America, which is cool.

That was because of a lot of good field work. Residents were educated to look for the hornets, and traps were set. They’re easy to spot. They’re huge—almost two inches long, for starters, plus the vertex is enlarged and the shape of the apex of the aedeagus is distinct. Really, just go with the two inches. They’re right up there with the rape aphids and felonious flies and the click-beetles of doom. We don’t want them.

They prefer a forest environment, and can be identified by the scraping sounds of hornet butt through the leafage. If tiny suitcases escape from its cargo section, that is considered diagnostic. So someone found one in a trap, hung a transmitter locator over its main fuselage with dental floss, and followed it back to its nest. Where they found several more stuck on the tarmac when the flight crew timed out. They killed them all and it’s been two years since anyone has found one in Washington.

It’s like polio, which had gotten down to a few dozen cases in the 1970’s and was weeks away from being eradicated but it kept blinking back on, and now that we know how horrible vaccines are, things are looking real bad again. Thing about murder hornets, you let one in and the whole damn family follows, because they lack that sense of rugged individualism that keeps Americans proud and free and utterly deprived of good health care.

The American spirit in all its forms was evident in the postscript to this tale. The last hornet nest, eradicated, was returned to the owner of the property it was on, per his request, and he advertised it for sale. A beekeeper bought it and donated it to the state entomology team to study.

Still, it’s a hopeful sign that our murder hornet scare is a thing to put in our rearview mirror. Or it could have been. Sadly, word on the street now is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to reintroduce them, having learned that a paste of their crushed abdomens applied to the skull draws out brain worms.