Hyped Up Hating on Haitians
Trump's Stochastic Terrorism in Action
In case you haven’t noticed, the Republican candidate for President is upset. No doubt he’s seen polls not favorable to his candidacy, and is shocked to his very core that Kamala Harris didn’t leave the debate stage whimpering.
This will, I fear, mean continuous efforts to encourage violence in general and in as many places as possible on his behalf. You can tell by the herds of high profile loyalists rushing to find a media outlet to declare that Democrats need to tone down their rhetoric.
They’re even trying to tie Democrats to an incident on a golf course involving a man with known mental illness issues hidden in the bushes. Although we can assume he had bad intentions, he was caught prior to having any way of acting out his thoughts. The former President was not in a potential line of fire. The only shots fired were from a secret service agent.
This was not that much different from the incident involving someone stalking former President Obama after Donald Trump published his predecessor’s home address.
Clearly, the “attempted assassination” stories are an attempt to stop Democrats from talking about the issues by claiming that any public discussion of Trump’s own unpopular policies and hateful words will gin up violence against him. Why else would Florida Rep. Byron Donalds’ demand that Democrats stop talking about Project 2025 in his denunciation of the golf course incident?
Jonathan Chait’s, Trump is a threat to democracy, and saying so isn’t incitement at New York Magazine makes the right call:
Moderates and liberals, who correctly believe in upholding democratic norms, especially nonviolence, might be tempted to understand these arguments as a species of principle. But the effort to rule criticism of Trump’s authoritarianism as dangerous and out of bounds is not motivated by or related to any defense of democracy or nonviolence. It is a purely cynical attempt to foam the runway for the election of a dangerous man.
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Candidate Trump and his running mate are doing the rhetorical equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, using their campaign’s central fear mongering themes about migrants to incite threats and violence against Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
Almost none of the “facts” they use are true, from the numbers of migrants, to their legal status, to inflammatory delusions about lawlessness. Republican officials in Ohio are now begging the campaign to stop its propaganda; the Governor has ordered state troopers to patrol Springfield as threats promising violence have escalated.
(The media has thoughtlessly repeated some of these untruths, as in the number of “Haitians” claimed to be arriving in Springfield, variously said to be twelve, fifteen, and twenty thousand, is actually the total number of all migrants that have arrived in Clark County, a political subdivision that’s much larger than the city.)
Schools, colleges, hospitals, and even the department of motor vehicles have been shuttered in recent days; the count as of Tuesday morning is 33 anonymous threats.
Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, who also is a Senator from Ohio, has turned into misinformation central in the midst of this hate campaign. When enough officials had denied the original rumors about Haitians eating pets, Vance shifted to claiming that TB and HIV had skyrocketed.
When Vance got cornered by Dana Bash at CNN on Sunday, he defaulted to saying it was ok to make stuff up in his quest to convince voters that the country is a disaster.
From the Cincinnati Enquirer:
"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast," Vance said
To make things potentially worse, candidate Trump has brought up the possibility of a campaign stop in Springfield, a step that would amount to pouring gasoline on a fire.
Republican candidate-turned-Trump surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy has announced that he plans to be there on Thursday for a “town hall” in which he says there will be “open & honest dialogue about mass migration.”
Several things can be true at once, especially in the MAGA world. It’s true that Donald J Trump and his coterie are flinging what’s called dead cats (distracting stories) all around, as they seek to distance themselves from a disastrous debate performance.
So we’re served up with “I hate Taylor Swift” on social media. And his closeness with Laura Loomer (who’s been hanging around for years). And a direct fundraising email saying “he’s safe” after some wingnut was caught hiding in the bushes with a gun. And on, and on.
The last thing the Trump campaign wants is any substantive attention paid to what post-election actions and policies would be. For one, they don’t know what to expect simply because their candidate tends to act on the information provided by the last person who spoke to him. That’s how we ended up with J.D. Vance as a VP candidate instead of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
For another, the very essence of what Trump would do is likely to be wildly unpopular. Deport millions of people, some of them American citizens who are “denaturalized” by politically correct bureaucrats. Jail his opponents. Deregulate healthcare. Ban birth control. You get the picture.
With the dog whistle about Haitians in Springfield. he’s tapped into a far-right racist storyline (by actual Nazis!) that preceded his commentary. His Veep pick was making noises about the subject back in July on the floor of the Senate.
The city itself has been trying to rehabilitate from its heritage of hate, namely the lynching and “race riots” of the early 20th century. The neo-Nazi group started a campaign against Haitians in early August; its leader was booted out of a city council hearing after making racist comments.
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There are videos of audiences watching the debate breaking out in laughter when Trump raised the subject; it was seen as beyond the pale ridiculous and widely mocked. That mocking may turn into horror, as Haitians nationwide are now worried about attacks. The NBA’s Miami Heat felt obligated to issue a statement opposing manifestations of hate toward Haitians, who make up about 4% of their city.
Some 1.1 million Haitian Americans live in the U.S., about half of whom are immigrants, according to the Census Bureau. Long established in Florida and New York, Haitian immigrants have recently been moving to states like North Carolina and California to pursue work.
If there’s one thing that gets under the GOP candidate’s skin, it’s ridicule, and Trump has doubled down on his lies, including a pledge to deport legal Haitian immigrants to Venezuela. He may have confused Springfield with Aurora, Colorado, a city of 400,000 people recently plagued by the right wing claim about gangs from Venezuela taking over.
Immigrants of all stripes will suffer even more from Trump’s shame after the debate, as he’s a bully who seeks out those he perceives as weaker than himself for punishment. His only talent is attracting attention so he’s going to play this scheme for as long as it’s useful.
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America has a long, sad history of relations with Haiti, starting with an embargo after slaves rose up and threw out the French masters in 1804. We have been taught over and over again that Haiti is an ungovernable cesspool. The US-negotiated reparations from the island to the French slave owners made building a nation’s infrastructure impossible and started a cycle of poverty that exists to this day.
A quick version of this history was recently spelled out by Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars:
"Haiti is Black, and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being Black," Fredrick Douglass remarked when observing the punishment meted out by France and the United States for Haiti's unforgivable act of self-liberation.
That punishment is so enduring and sickening that in this country, the story of the U.S. and Haiti is rarely taught and accordingly rarely remembered. When I learned it, I realized how obscene it was for me and most other "national-security" journalists to have written for so long that Afghanistan was the U.S.' longest overseas war. As you can read in Katz's excellent book about Smedley Butler, in 1915, the U.S Marine Corps occupied Haiti, plundered its national bank on behalf of what is now Citibank, and did not leave until 1934. There they committed the sort of atrocities you might expect from a generation-long counterinsurgency. It was only in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan that it surpassed Haiti for the title of Longest Overseas U.S. War. (Katz’s previous book, The Big Truck That Went By, is about the failure of international aid in Haiti in 2010.)
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Tuesday’s Other News to Think About
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How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak By Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak at The New York Times
In a momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases last term, the court found itself more entangled in presidential politics than at any time since the 2000 election, even as it was contending with its own controversies related to that day. The chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision making.
This account draws on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders, both conservative and liberal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.
The chief justice wrote the majority opinions in all three cases, including an unsigned one in March concluding that the former president could not be barred from election ballots in Colorado.
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In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools by Eli Hager at ProPublica
“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.
They’ve never, until now, been able to build schools expressly on the public dime.
“This breaks through the myth,” said David Pepper, a political writer and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. Pepper said that courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they don’t violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically passes through the conduit of a parent on the way to a religious school.
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Election officials prepare for threats with panic buttons, bulletproof glass by Christina A Cassidy at The Associated Press
Across the country, local election directors are beefing up their security in advance of Election Day on Nov. 5 to keep their workers and polling places safe while also ensuring that ballots and voting procedures won’t be tampered with. Their concern isn’t just theoretical. Election offices and those who run them have been targets of harassment and even death threats since the 2020 presidential election, primarily by people acting on former President Donald Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him through widespread fraud or rigged voting machines.
The focus on security comes as threats of political violence have been on the rise. Trump was the target of a potential assassination attempt over the weekend, just nine weeks after another threat on his life. Federal agents last year fatally shot a Trump supporter who threatened to assassinate President Joe Biden, and the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was severely injured in a hammer attack by a man promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.
In just the last year, a gun was fired at a window of the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, election office, several election offices in five states were sent letters filled with a white powder that in some cases tested positive for the powerful opioid fentanyl, and bogus 911 calls were made to the homes of top state election officials in Georgia, Maine, Michigan and Missouri in a potentially dangerous situation known as swatting.
