Vance Is The Cultural Heroin He Once Labeled Trump
Jim Greenwood represented Bucks County, the most purple part of Pennsylvania, as a fiscally conservative Republican in the state House, the state Senate and then for 6 terms in Congress. Yesterday, explaining why he’s voting for Kamala, he said of Trump “I observed him to be a man who is not mentally fit for the job… He’s a narcissist, and he’s a pathological liar.”
And it isn’t only Democrats who share those sentiments expressed by Greenwood. New polling from Data For Progress shows that of all the stuff Trump is talking about, the one that most folks are aware of are his false claims about Haitians stealing peoples’ pets and eating them. 79% off voters are aware of the claim. Most voters think that statement is very weird, including Republican voters, 69% of whom say it’s very weird or somewhat weird. Overall, 50% of voters polled say they’re going to cast their ballots for Kamala and just 46% say they’re with Señor T.
First Vance and Loomer and then Trump have been pushing these baseless, incendiary lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating peoples’ dogs and cats. It’s completely invented and there is no basis for the claim— just a flat out racist, fear mongering lie playing on xenophobic stereotypes and tropes that have been used by racists like Vance, Loomer and Trump over the centuries. Statements like these are part of a long history of racist and xenophobic disinformation used to dehumanize immigrant communities and fuel fear. In this case there’s no credible evidence or reports supporting these allegations; they part of a strategy to scapegoat vulnerable groups rather than address real issues and they have serious social consequences— fostering prejudice, discrimination and even violence against immigrant communities.
Yesterday, even as Trump was doubling down and getting more vicious towards Haitian immigrants, Miriam Jordan reported that the Republican mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, said it’s all a bunch of bullshit and that “On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of Springfield City Hall, two schools and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. Mayor Rue said that the threats, which came by email, were a ‘hateful response to immigration in our town. Obviously, the negative response and threats are very sad and hard to handle,’ he said. ‘We want to move forward together, and it just makes it more difficult to do that when we have violent actions and threats.’”
It was Vance who had started this whole mess, trying “to portray the influx of Haitians as a failure of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. ‘It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community,’ Rue said. While the arrival of thousands of Haitian immigrants has strained schools and some government services, most of the Haitians are in the United States legally and many have filled jobs in local industry.”
There are about 1.2 million Haitian immigrants in the U.S., 500,000 of them concentrated in South Florida where they have a reputation for industriousness and kindness. Almost 40% of Florida’s nurses are Haitian immigrants and they are beloved. These ugly statements by Vance— followed by Trump— serve to distract from the substantive policy discussions neither of them wants to talk about. Instead they’re happy fueling anti-immigrant sentiment. In Ohio, around 15,000 Haitian migrants “have filled jobs in manufacturing, distribution and other sectors and [have] been welcomed by many employers.”
Last month, Nazi sympathizers— masked men in matching red shirts, black pants and boots— waved swastika flags as they marched in downtown Springfield near a jazz festival. At least two of the men, who the authorities said were outsiders, carried rifles.
Among the targets of Thursday’s bomb threat was an elementary school that has a large Haitian student body. Apprehension has enveloped the Haitian community in Springfield this week, said Vilés Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center.
Mr. Dorsainvil said that he had fielded many calls from families concerned for their children’s safety.
“People started panicking,” he said. “I tried to help them understand that it’s just politics.”
Vance’s newest tact, now that Republican officials have called the pet-eating statements unfounded is to claim the Haitians are spreading disease, another trope from the earliest xenophobic hate messages and used, at various times, against immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Mexico and against Jews, Catholics and anyone else the xenophobes were trying to target.
Yesterday, Christopher Wiggins reported that Vance went on CNN and “doubled down on debunked claims about Haitian immigrants abducting pets to eat them and falsely linked the migrant community to rising rates of HIV and tuberculosis in Springfield, Ohio. His remarks have since drawn widespread condemnation for their harmful, fear-mongering nature… Vance escalated his claims by linking the supposed arrival of Haitian immigrants to a rise in infectious diseases in Springfield, including HIV and tuberculosis. ‘Communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris’ border policies have done,’ he said, without offering evidence to support his claims… Public health experts have widely discredited the idea that immigrants are driving HIV transmission. This is a crackpot lying and stoking racial hatred after the debate:
The only weird part of this is their choice of Haitian immigrants to target. I would have expected hatemongering against a much larger population. I figured latins, especially after the claims of faux noose lately about gangs taking over apartment buildings ... somewhere. Which was also not true.
from the russian pogroms to germany to rowanda to this shithole... hate is the primary political driver, followed by fear.