Missing the Forest for the Trees on Springfield

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.

1. 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.