David’s excellent post details what has been going on in the Springfield Haitian story. There is one aspect, however I would like to focus on, because I think it may be the most important part. Let’s run through, once again, how we got here.
- Springfield, Ohio is a mid-sized town outside of Dayton. Like most medium- and small-sized towns, it has been hurting economically. Several business have opened up there and found themselves in need of labor.
- Word of this reached the Haitian-American immigrant community and about 15-20,000 of them relocated to Springfield seeking work. Contra the claims made by the Republicans, these are not “illegal immigrants” and they were not dumped on the town by Joe Biden. They are legal immigrants with refugee status who relocated there on their own.
- The sudden influx of people has strained city services, especially as some of the immigrants do not speak English. They have appealed to both the state and federal governments for help, previously with little success. Tensions spiked when a Haitian immigrant’s car ran into a school bus, killing a child.
- A Facebook post, since deleted, claimed that a woman’s cat was killed by Haitian immigrants, who were also killing dogs, cats and geese. This claim found its way into bigoted Far Right and Neo-Nazi Twitter accounts.1 It was supported by video of a woman claiming she’d eaten a cat. But this woman is not an immigrant, lives threes hours away from Springfield and apparently has mental health issues. Another picture was swiped from Reddit of a man carrying a dead bird, but the original poster has said this was taken in Columbus and he has no idea if the man was an immigrant. UPDATE: Ohio Wildlife says the geese were hit by a car.
- From there, it became amplified by JD Vance and various Republicans and eventually was uttered by Trump in his debate with Kamala Harris. Trump responded poorly when the moderators told him the story had been debunked and his social media mob called for ABC to lose its license for daring to fact-check him on it.
- Springfield is now being besieged with bomb threats and Right Wing YouTubers desperately trying to find a Haitian eating a family pet so they can claim the story was true all along.
- After all this, Governor Mike Dewine finally got off his ass and started sending help to Springfield. Better late than never, I guess.
To get this out of the way, the behavior of the Republicans and associated social media grifters has been despicable. This is basically a Blood Libel and they are posting this nonsense knowing that it may incite racial violence. But their commitment to demonizing immigrants and proclaiming any utterance from Donald Trump’s lips to be the Mount Sinai Truth is too strong. They are determined to claim this story is true and will continue to claim this story is true for years to come, no matter how often it is debunked.
But the debate over whether the story is true or not misses the bigger problem. This sort of nut-job fringe has always existed. For both parties. The rise of the internet has allowed these whackos to accumulate on its outskirts but they mostly been kept there. What is different now is that, thanks to Elon Musk removing Twitter’s safeguards and thanks to the Republicans’ complete lack of ethics, these stories can go from neo-Nazi liars to the presidential candidate’s mouth in days. The wall between the fringe and the mainstream, which was always weak, has broken. There is literally nothing to stop Far Right liars from simply making things up and having them become reality to one of our two political parties and the 75 million people who vote for them. At no stage in this process is even the most basic fact-checking done.
There has been some attempt to make a moral equivalence between this and the jokes circulating a month ago that JD Vance had sex with a couch. This is a comparison so dim, I can’t believe anyone would make it seriously. The couch thing was an example of “punching up”, making jokes about a wealthy powerful senator who will probably be vice president in a few months and, depending on how well Trump’s blood vessels hold up, might be president in a few years. The Haitian thing is punching down at a minority. Moreover, no one is calling in bomb threats to IKEA because of the couch thing. The Pizzagate thing, with which many of these individuals were previously connected, is illustrative. It was all fun and games until some guy showed up the pizza parlor with a rifle demanding to free the non-existent sex slaves. The moral equivalent from the Left would be more like if Harris started saying that the assassination attempt was staged.
This is alarming as hell. Because there is a lot of other evil stuff bubbling on the fringe right now, an increasing amount of which is finding its way to the mainstream Republican Party. Claims that kids are using litterboxes in schools. Claims that kids are being forced to transition against their will. Claims that public school teachers are “grooming” kids. Conspiracy theories about various national tragedies. Personally, I’ve been seeing an alarming surge in anti-semitism on the Far Right that is slowly working its way inward. Nick Fuentes, who dined with Trump, is a Holocaust denier. Candance Owens, who once hosted a “blexit” event at the White house, is now denying the Holocaust (although she denies the denial). Tucker Carlson, who is doing an insider documentary on the Trump campaign, recently hosted a pseudo-historian who claimed that Hitler was misunderstood and Churchill was the true villain of World War II. How long until this view begins to find its way into the mainstream?
One of the things we occasionally talk about is the Trump Cinematic Universe, the alternative reality that many Republicans live in where Kamala Harris is a communist, Trump’s administration had no corruption, the 2020 election was stolen and, now, immigrants are eating pets. This alternate reality is fed from the top but is enabled by a grifter ecosystem that has greased the wheels from Nazi shitposters right into the President’s ear (with whackjob conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer now apparently being Trump’s closest confidant, although maybe her Jewishness will keep the Holocaust deniers at bay for a little while). It is being fed by a vice presidential candidate who seems to revel in this nonsense and, unlike Trump, knows better. Or should.
One of the things I most despised about the old Soviet Union was their war on truth. All information in the USSR was filtered through a series of traps which removed anything that could make the Communist Party look bad and turned any news into a indictment of the West. If you ask me why I so despise this wicked man and his garbage movement, this is why. All politicians lie. But the scale and intensity of untruth from this movement is something we have not seen in generations, harkening back to “white slavery” panics of more than a century ago. It is weaponized against some of the most vulnerable people in our nation. And it’s only going to get worse.
- As David noted, the “End Wokeness” account was responsible for a big surge. End Wokeness, which often post misleading information, is supposedly run by Jack Posobiec. You may read about him here.
“Punching up” has returned.
“It’s okay to do this when *I* do it” doesn’t have moral resonance outside of the ingroup, for some reason.Report
The “punching up”/”punching down” distinction is generally frivolous.
Then again, we didn’t go from shitposts about Vance to Kamala Harris telling 67 million debate viewers that Vance boned a couch, followed by Tim Walz doubling down and saying that Vance also sodomized a divan, with high-profile Democratic think-tankers promising to pay thousands of dollars for video of Vance getting frisky with the upholstery.Report
Followed up by the inevitable backpedaling: “Maybe JD Vance didn’t screw a couch, but we have video of Tom Cotton sitting on a bench!”Report
Do you really think jokes about politicians and couches are equivalent to claiming that a minority is eating pets?
Can we actually just look at the effects of those two lies to figure out if there is a distinction?
There are armed vigilante hate groups that are hard to call anything but Na.zis, even if they call themselves Proud Boys, that have descended on Springfield Ohio, looking for Haitian refugees that have eaten cats.
Absolutely nothing has happened to JD Vance. The lie wasn’t even something that would turn up the rhetoric, it wasn’t the sort of lie that would cause violence to start with.
Moreover, in a hypothetical where the lies were the same… Are the powerful not in a much better position to refute lies then the powerless? JD Vance has a national platform, anytime he wants one. Haitian refugees don’t.
Also, making up lies about a group of people is fundamentally different than making up lies about one person. Lies about entire groups of people, especially lies about the ‘bad behavior’ of groups of people, have been responsible for some of the worst behavior of human beings in human history. Lies about individuals generally only impact individuals.Report
You don’t have to convince me that lying about your opponent is bad, Dave.
I know it’s bad.Report
Trump, Vance, et al. aren’t lying about their opponent.Report
Touche’.Report
Jaybird pompously pontificates from his alleged perch of moral superiority once again.
This is a blood libel, pure and simple. This is not about punching up or punching down. This is about a baseless attack against a community of vulnerable individuals in order to get the worst of the worst out voting in November. The fact that you can’t just say or see that is a tell.Report
Calling it a “tell” suggests an attempt to conceal something we need the tell to see.Report
It’s not moral superiority, Saul. It’s a deliberate communication that *YOUR* moral superiority is not recognized.
You’re down here with me.Report
That’s how sociopaths think.
That everyone is corrupt, everyone is venal, and anyone who says otherwise is smug and hypocritical.
Which is really just a convenient way of excusing their own behavior, the way that poorly developed adolescents will say that everyone does it.
Like a powerful politician and his horde of followers tormenting a hated outgroup- well, that’s just how everyone behaves amirite, and so it is just hypocrisy to think that we all don’t feel the same way.
Except- No, Jaybird, not everyone acts this way. its just Trump and his followers who do it.
And yes, people who slander and libel groups of people ARE morally inferior to the rest of us.Report
I don’t think that everyone is corrupt or venial.
I mean, I don’t think that *I* am corrupt or venial.
I just also don’t recognize your moral authority and don’t see your moral positions as superior to my own.
Now if you think that I am both corrupt and venial, it’s probably pretty insulting to hear that I consider you an equal. I do have to acknowledge that.Report
The moral position we are taking is that it is wrong to slander and libel an entire group of people.
Maybe you don’t see this as superior to your own, but that’s for you to work out.Report
I think you mean “venal.” “Venial” is for minor sins.Report
I don’t think that I’m particularly susceptible to bribery…Report
Maybe you’re a vampire and you meant veinal. Bluh!Report
Or maybe we’re talking about a whole other class of sins and he meant “venereal.”Report
“That’s how sociopaths think.
That everyone is corrupt, everyone is venal, and anyone who says otherwise is smug and hypocritical.”
aren’t you the dude saying that every person who isn’t you is a racist idiot?Report
Loomer’s pretty friendly with Nick Fuentes (there’s recent video of her toasting the “hostile takeover of the Republican Party” with him) and there’s older video of her at an alt-right party trying to pick up a dude there by bragging about her “Ahshkenazi IQ”… so yeah not so sure she’ll really be keeping the Holocaust deniers at bay.Report
Loomer, the shande of the shandes. Even compared to Ben Shapiro.Report
Without commenting on the rest of the post, these sentences seem contradictory. Generally when we say that a town is hurting economically, we mean that it has high unemployment and few job opportunities. Employers having more business than they can find workers for is generally a phenomenon associated with an economic boom.
Based on BLS data, it seems to be doing okay; the unemployment rate is a bit above the national average, but not that bad, and seems inconsistent with employers having a great deal of difficulty filling job openings that don’t require specialized skills. The entire state of Florida has an overall 3.3% unemployment rate.Report
Like many cities/counties in the extended Rust Belt that are the size of Springfield and its surrounding county, population peaked in the 1970 census and has declined in every census since. Wikipedia’s economy summary says the city lost 22,000 industrial jobs in the 1990s as facilities closed or relocated. The usual story in that situation is the population shrinks and gets older as younger workers and people with skills that can find employment elsewhere leave. Springfield seems to have avoided the catastrophic collapse of its tax base that sometimes happens in that situation.Report
Is it an eds-and-meds thing, where an urban center sets up a bunch of medical facilities as well as the technical schools to train the nurses to work in them, the medical schools to teach the doctors to run them, the detox centers to provide the addict-to-sobriety-volunteer pathway to find customers for them, and gets the state and federal governments to pay for all of this (with Medicaid and Medicare)?Report
I think my editing obscured my meaning. It was hurting economically. But in the last few years, some businesses have relocated there, creating, ironically, a labor shortage.Report
Honestly, looking at BLS data from 2021, it didn’t look like much has changed at all since 2021, which is, from what I understand, when this started.
Unemployment has gone down a little, but that’s just how it’s worked everywhere. And the population doesn’t appear to have much changed… If you had shown me the data without telling me what was happening, I would have just assumed it was normal population growth.
… And then I stopped looking at 2021-2024, and looked at 2014-2024.
Seriously, I urge everyone to do that, you will see a town that really was slowly losing its labor force, until it suddenly wasn’t. It dropped from 66,000 to around 63,000. It actually gets down the 61,000 but a chunk of that is covid, which complicates all this, but it was clearly dropping rapidly even before that. And then the refugees came in, and bumped it back up by a couple of thousand.
And unlike what people might expect, unemployment went down, not up, probably because these were a lot of young people.
I think people might be exaggerating the decline that the town was in before all this, which is easy to exaggerate because of covid, but, the future didn’t look good for this place, long term. And now it does. Mostly because it now looks like normal population growth that you would expect from a town, and not slow decline.Report
Looking at the unemployment rate won’t tell you much about the economy of the former industrial towns of the rustbelt, except perhaps during economic downturns, during which they’re less resilient than average (their unemployment rate will tend to drop lower and take longer to recover than the country as a whole). You have to look at population decline (something like 30% since the 70s, in Springfield), the median income (Springfield’s has dropped dramatically since the 90s), the average age of the population since young people leave decaying towns (Springfield’s is significantly older than the national average), etc.
I remember visiting Springfield from the mid-90s, when it already had the look of a dying rust belt town. My sister went to college there in the first years of this century, and the couple times I visited then, it looked even worse. I haven’t been in about 20 years, and apparently after hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, thee downtown area looks and feels nicer than it did even back in the early 90s, but the population is still older, less educated, and poorer than it was, and they’re not bringing in jobs that keep young people there, so the workforce, when they do add jobs, has to come from elsewhere.Report
fWIW, now that more investigation into the claims is going on, it also appears that the size of the migration has been significantly inflated.
it looks like it’s closer to 12,000 and, while legal Haitian migrants make up a large portion of the influx, there are other immigrants as well.
I am doing some digging into this for a OTB article.
I agree on all other pointsReport
I’ve seen 5K. But in this country, who’s majesty allows people credulous enough to believe people are grilling and eating pets the franchise, who needs to actually substantiate anything?Report
Let’s look at messages being passed out in Springfield. The pseudo-Germanic font is a revealing touch: https://x.com/nlanard/status/1835046358488666458
The whole thing is a blood libel from sad and pathetic but dangerous men. I’m only a Long Island born and raised and Baghdad on the Bay residing (((guy))) but I would think a normal politician would be proud of the immigrants revitalizing Springfield. Plus they might bring tasty food but this is just me.Report
I am going to dispute the nut job fringe of both parties always existed comment. There is a Further Left nut job fringe in the United States but they make it clear that they want nothing to do with the Democratic Party and hate it. in fact, most of the Further Left sees the Democratic Party as a bigger threat to what they want rather than the Republicans. It never occurs to them that the People might disagree with them on just about everything. In contrast, the Radical Right has associated with the Republicans since the mid-20th century and waged a very long campaign to slowly take the Republican Party over from the liberal and centrist Republicans of the old Eastern establishment. The nut job fringe of the Right has become the Republican Party.Report
At the moment, we’re getting more political violence from the Right than the Left. This is a relatively new thing because of Trump’s cult.
The next time a city riots, there is a good chance that it will be from a left issue. We’re supposed to pretend that the rioters aren’t holding law and order hostage.
The whole phrase “Sister Souljah moment” was a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment
We’re supposed to pretend that the rioters and the protesters are two distinct groups with nothing to do with each other AND ALSO that the same thing will happen again if the protesters demands aren’t met.Report
Most of the domestic political violence has come front the Right my entire life. Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, and nearly everything under Bush II and Trump.Report
Postdiction.
(While I agree that Ruby Ridge was right-wing violence, I’m pretty sure we’d disagree on what we meant by saying that.)Report
My theory and it is mine, and going to be unpopular, is that maintaining a small l-liberal society always required a certain amount of ideological management. There were somethings that simply could not be said in polite company. Part of the old gatekeeper system in the media was ideological management and making sure the fringes of the Right and the Left stayed marginalized. Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders managed to do this a bit harder than Americans. The Enoch Powells and Jean Marie Le Pens were kept more under control than the George Wallace’s and other fire breathers but even in the United States somethings were beyond the pale. Lee Atwater’s famous quote about the n-word and dog whistles is an example of this.
Maybe there have always been a lot of wackos out there. The mid-20th century small l-liberal consensus could have been more than illusory and the Internet is just revealing how many nut jobs exist. Maybe the mid-20th century media landscape and gate keepers helped maintain a liberal consensus that is now impossible to have.Report
This is what I mean when I keep saying “Censorship is good, actually.”
That as with the paradox of tolerance, in order for everyone to enjoy a liberal society, there have to be boundaries set around actions and speech.
The usual objections are things like “who decides” on these boundaries. But those same objections can be said about any of the other widely accepted boundaries on speech.Report
You’re forgetting Russia. We’ve had the resources of a hostile state trying to fund extremism and political/social instability. Everything from internet troll farms to funding politicians.
We know that they’ve been doing this, we’re not sure how much money or impact it’s had. My expectation is this is a bigger part in all this than we like to think.
From Russia’s point of view, they’ve been at war with us for more than a decade. They (correctly) view their system as being hostile to ours. For example the basic concepts of clean government and clean elections are serious problems for an authoritarian state.Report
AfD, National Front/Rally, Brothers of Italy, Law and Justice, and plenty others seem to be doing fine without a 1st Amendment, and in spite of plenty of laws criminalizing various types of speech. They aren’t quite the same force in the UK but Nigel Farage seems to be able to force similar kinds of sentiments into the national agenda. As I understand it his efforts were instrumental in Brexit.
To me it’s those who think all of our problems will be solved by passing a law and throwing a few of the more egregious people in jail that are being delusional. They’re out there and there’s no authority to appeal to or technocratic bureaucracy that’s going to come save us.Report
There’s another difference.
“JD Vance schtupped a couch once” was a joke. A well-drafted, Onion-at-its-best quality satire in its original form (a parody of a page from Vance’s novel) but it’s never been anything but a joke and everyone has known that all along. No one seriously believed it at any point in time.
I guess I shouldn’t say “no one,” I don’t know that one way or another. But no one in the public forum, even the Democratic candidates using the joke as a laugh line, even pretends it’s real.
And certainly it stains Vance’s dignity a bit that the joke has lingered as long as it has. But he’s the only one who’s been hurt by it, and then only his dignity.
Trump said “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” and he was as serious as a heart attack about it. He went on for sixty seconds of screen time and argued with the debate moderators that he had good reason to believe it was true and the journalists’ sources were lying to cover it up. And since then there have been efforts made to validate the lie.
What’s more, it’s had real world consequences, as noted in the OP. Ones which it is plain to see have the potential to erupt into violence and thank the Gods that they haven’t yet.Report
I thinknis is a much better articulation of the distinction than that ofyen-simplistic “punching up vs. down” distinction.Report
You pretended that “York, PA is a hotbed of racism.”
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/02/hate-and-extremist-groups-emboldened-across-pa-last-year.html
Not a single mention of York, PA. If you’d bothered to actually check your columnists, you’d have tossed the article.
This site is publishing libelious garbage. Not insulting politicians (that’s all fair), but insulting tourist destinations by calling them racist.Report
But wouldn’t you say that it’s important sometimes to tell a story that might not be entirely true, just to draw attention to a genuine problem, and that anyway you can hardly blame someone for getting so excited about an actual problem that they got caught up in the moment and didn’t 100% check every single solitary little syllable that came out of their mouth? Don’t you careabout racism?Report
Like this guy?Report
Or this guy!Report
Huh? What are you even talking about?Report
It’s not just a shift from fringe to core – it’s a belief that lying to gain media attention is a required action:
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-claims-haitian-migrants-petsReport
There is a thread which connects the rightwing violence Lee mentioned yesterday (Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge etc), the Flight 93 manifesto, Vance’s comments, and the immunity decision of John Roberts.
The militia members like those at Ruby Ridge and the author of the Flight 93 manifesto both state openly that they are in a war with the goal of total conquest.
In their telling, the stakes are either total victory over liberalism, or existential annihilation. This justifies any act, whether it is shooting cops or blowing up a building and murdering the hundreds of civilians inside.
Vance continues this theme using the existential stakes to justify lying and inciting violence and murder of an entire group of people he considers a threat.
And Roberts is doing his part to erect a legal framework to shield the rightwing from any legal limits on power so they can prosecute the war against the threat.
The obvious question is, what is the “threat”? What is happening that justifies such existential, total war?
The threat of course is liberalism which gives their hated outgroup equality with them. These revolutionaries aren’t claiming any sort of oppression or injustice. Their list of grievances really just boil down to the lack of ability to enforce their preferred state of affairs on the rest of us whether we consent or not.Report