These People Are Racists

Let's just call it what it is.

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“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!” Trump shouted mid-debate. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats! They’re eating …they’re eating the pets of the people that live there!” 

If you’re not terminally online, this sudden, unprompted rant probably struck you as just another one of the former President’s curious spirals. Harris did her best Jim Halpert face, and her reaction summed up the media’s bemused tone. Moderator Dave Muir stepped in with a rare on-air fact check, noting that ABC News had reached out to officials in Springfield, Ohio and found no such reports. 

However, if you are way too online, you may already know the contours of Trump’s claims. Heck, you might have even had it on your debate bingo card. What is less obvious, at least up close, is that Trump’s remarks were not an outlier. The racist creep in the GOP has dispensed with the dogwhistles. The fringe has successfully shunted the party rightward such that they are now its dead center. Ethnonationalists and Christofascists are not the weird uncles at Thanksgiving anymore. They’re the hosts. You object to labeling all immigrants “savages?” Now you’re the weird uncle. 

Trump and J.D. Vance are racists. It’s not polite to say this. There is some sense among reasonable liberals that we should be above using these words, and that accusing people of racism is a sign of CRT run amok. I’m not denying that some liberals have been a little too quick to slam the “RACISM” button or that some diversity training seminars don’t get a little weird. But Trump and Vance are being racist in how they talk about Haitian immigrants, and there is nothing to be gained by avoiding the truth. Trump and Vance may or may not win the election in November. But their victory over the GOP is complete. What we see in rhetoric around Haitian immigrants is proof.

There has been a sudden and ferocious swell of online vitriol directed against Haitiains — particularly Haitian immigrants in Ohio. The claims that Haitians are stealing and eating the pets of good, hardworking (White) Americans has been spread by Vance and amplified by a group of Christian pastors. These baseless claims have been laced with another, more sinister accusation of murder: a claim that a Haitian immigrant murdered an 11-year-old boy named Aiden Clark. 

The pet stuff is nonsense, of course. There is no credible truth to any of it. The allegation that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets seems to have been started by a Facebook meme.

The original claim came from a Springfield woman named Erika Lee, who wrote the claim on Facebook. She had not actually witnessed any Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets, but heard about it from her friend Kimberly Newton. Newton had also not actually witnessed this, but heard about a missing cat from “an acquaintance of a friend” who had “learned about it from a source that she had.”

“I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” she finally admitted to Newsguard. “I don’t have any proof.”

Ah, well. Nevertheless.

Springfield has experienced an influx of Haitian immigrants, drawn by a low cost of living and good jobs (said one local CEO of his Haitian workers: “I wish I had 30 more.”) And while this large and sudden population growth has led to both economic upturn and its attendant infrastructural growing pains, those growing pains have emphatically not included a sudden uptick and killed and eaten pets. 

At least, that’s if you believe the police and local government. But what if you get all your news from online guys with “Husband, Father, Pastor” in the bio? Well, that’s the beat of journalist and Shepherds for Sale author Meg Basham, and she would like you to know that reports of Haitian immigrant petnappings are totally substantiated by pastor Michael Foster, a man she “know[s] personally and trusts.” Well, there you have it! She trusts Michael Foster and Michael Foster can confirm those pet-eating stories, right? 

“Yes,” Foster tweeted. “The stories about Haitians killing and eating neighborhood cats and ducks from local parks is true.” Did Foster personally witness any of this? Well, no, he doesn’t even live in Springfield or anywhere close. He is actually quoting a different pastor named BJ Newman (who lives about a half hour from Springfield. Close enough I guess). And did Newman actually witness any Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets? Well, no. “I was passing along what locals are telling me,” he said in a follow-up Facebook comment. “I'm not a journalist doing some kind of expose, so feel free to believe the stories or not.” 

Got it. So the story has been confirmed via lengthy telephone game with a guy who can’t actually confirm the story, but we can “feel free to believe the stories or not.” 

This has been the general attitude towards misinformation like this: Make an outrageous claim and then, when pushed on it, throw up your hands and say “well, true or not, it sure is interesting!” We talked about this a few weeks ago. JD Vance basically speedran this whole trajectory on Twitter, showcasing the “Am I wrong? Or am I just right in an unusual and existential way?” defense that has become so popular online. Vance first claimed that reports “show” Haitian immigrants kidnapped and ate people’s pets. When he got fact-checked on that, he admitted that “it's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But then doubled down on his core belief: Haitian immigrants are bad and dangerous. “A child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here!” he fumed. 

That child was 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed when a schoolbus he was riding was in a car accident. The driver of the other car was a Haitian man who was driving without a license. Since then, Trump has posted photos of Aiden Clark on Truth Social and Vance has taken up Aiden’s death as proof that immigrants are ruining America. There’s just one problem with this narrative, which is that Aiden’s parents are literally begging them to stop. 

“This needs to stop now,” Aiden’s father Nathan said in a press conference, his voice quavering with emotion. “My son was not murdered,” he said. “He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti. This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate.”

“[Trump and Vance] can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims that fluffy pets are being ravaged and eaten by community members,” he continued. “But they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio. I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies.”

This moment — so awful, so beautiful, so human, so deeply indicative of the demands a polarized society places on those least responsible for paying the debts — fell on deaf ears. How do you shame the shameless? The “vomit of hate” continued. 

“[Haiti] is hell on earth,” tweeted one retired pastor. “One does not simply transplant 20k Haitians under cover of darkness and place them in Springfield, Ohio without disastrous consequences.” 

“Republicans get the immigration issue only half right by focusing exclusively on illegal immigration,” tweeted Matt Walsh. “But Springfield is being destroyed by a third world invasion. Does it make any difference whether the invasion is ‘legal’ or not?” 

And then there are the endless memes, the AI generated photos of Kamala Harris eating pets, of Trump rescuing ducks, “jokes” about Haitian people eating cats and dogs, goofball racism that prove the deep unseriousness of the claim, that expose the true motives here. If the real concern was compassion for victims, than these people would have listened to Aiden Clark’s father when he said that "Did you know that one of the worst feelings in the world is to not be able to protect your child? Even worse, we can't even protect his memory when he's gone." But the concern is dehumanization. The real concern is replacement theory. 

For decades now, people have been warning the Republican Party about rising racism among its ranks. These warnings fell almost entirely on deaf ears, as GOP leadership — when they weren’t busy being racist themselves — considered racism a useful tool against the Obama family, investing in the social safety net and other enemies of the conservative agenda. So these dogwhistles and social media memers were tolerated and sometimes amplified and then one of them became President and basically reshaped the party leadership to reflect the ugliest bigotries of its worst members. Those it could convert were excommunicated. 

And so we return to Springfield. Haitian immigrants report rising fears of bigotry, harassment and property damage. One woman told the Haitian Times her kids were afraid to go to school. “People are very afraid for their lives,” said another. “Many families are starting to leave Springfield last night and some kids aren’t even going to school because of fear of being attacked.” 

It called to mind what one politician said about Trump’s policies back when he first ran in 2016: “Trump makes people I care about afraid,” this politician said. “Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” 

That politician was J.D. Vance.  

Applecore: A Journey Through Apple’s Top 100 Albums of All Time

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of All Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen.

49: U2 — The Joshua Tree

At some point in the last 20 years, it became uncool to like U2. I mean, maybe it was never cool, I don’t know, but it’s definitely not cool now. Liking U2 is not cool because U2 is not a cool band. They never were. Being cool requires detachment, nonchalance, a casual, effortlessness grace that makes it look like you’re not trying too hard. The Italians call it “sprezzatura,” and U2 doesn’t have it. These guys work hard at everything. It shows. And on Joshua Tree, all the hard work paid off in some of the most rapturous rock and roll of the 80s. 

I use that word “rapturous” deliberately, because there’s no getting away from it here. U2 was a lot of things to a lot of people, and one of those things was being the “non-Christian” band that Christians were allowed to like. “Non-Christian” is sort of a misnomer, because the U2 guys are nothing if they’re not Christian, but they weren’t Christian ™ which meant they were secular and in the 80s and 90s, being secular basically meant you were on the wrong side of a cosmic battle for the soul of all reality. Many of you reading this know exactly I’m talking about.