Lazy Caturday Reads

Happy Caturday!!

By Joan Gillchrest

This week, Trump has truly shown himself to be a fascist. To our everlasting shame as a country, this disgusting man, this convicted criminal–found guilty of rape and 34 counts of business fraud–is still permitted to run for president. If he somehow wins the election in November, he will be able to act with impunity, since the right wing Supreme Court has said that the president cannot be prosecuted for official acts. Thanks to this horrible creature Trump, our democracy hangs in the balance.

Now, as Dakinikat wrote in detail yesterday, Trump has been spreading an insane attack on legal Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city, Springfield, creating a crisis there involving attacks on innocent people and bomb threats that have closed the city hall and two elementary schools on Thursday and Friday.

Trump’s VP candidate J.D. Vance was the first to spread the hateful rumors, and he has continued to do so even after they have been debunked. Vance also called attention to the event that began the anti-Haitian fervor in Springfield–a bus crash that killed a young boy. The bus driver was a Haitian immigrant.

As Daknikat also wrote, Trump has been hanging around with Laura Loomer, a hateful far right activist, and she may also have been a source of the anti-Haitian rumors. (FYI: Here is a very good Guardian article about Loomer) Trump has been taking Loomer with him on his plane to events such as the 9/11 anniversary commemorations in Shanksville, PA, and New York City and the debate with VP Kamala Harris on Tuesday. Loomer reportedly has been staying at Mar-a-Lago for at least the past week.

As you can tell, this is a follow-up to Dakinikat’s excellent Friday post. I want to add a little more background.

An Op-Ed by Lydian Polgreen at The New York Times: Trump Has Crossed a Truly Unacceptable Line.

When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.

But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be nice to be able to have access to so much food, another joked. At the time, this was puzzling and upsetting — I had moved from Kenya, not Ethiopia, to my father’s home state, Minnesota. But the facts didn’t matter. These unkind remarks did the job the bullies hoped they would: They made me feel like an alien, an unwelcome stranger.

We live in even crueler times now, with humanitarian catastrophes unfolding on several continents, but the response of the wealthy world has been to demand tighter borders and higher fences. There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday, a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.

And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the fringe of the MAGA-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by Trump himself.

There is a temptation to treat this as yet another Trump rant, a disgusting lie about immigrants like the ones he uttered as he began his presidential bid in 2015, describing migrants crossing the border with Mexico as rapists and criminals. He’s done it time and again since. He is the master of exaggerated and fabricated claims against the boogeymen, a skill he has used for decades to polarize public opinion and raise his profile and power at the expense of others.

But there is something particularly insidious about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. Food and pets are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined symbols in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about identity and belonging.

What you eat is an instant way to communicate the most basic forms of human connection. There’s a reason American political rituals cluster around cookouts, clambakes and fish fries. The human need for sustenance — food and water to feed the physical body — is universal. But what is also universal is the meaning food carries. Everyone has a personal version of Proust’s madeleines, a food that immediately and ineffably names who you are, where you come from, the culture that made you. Food is a powerful signifier, of both belonging and exclusion.

Below is a gift link, if you want to read the entire article. It’s well worth the time.

At the Atlantic, Isabel Fattal provides a timeline for the spread of the ugly rumors: The Springfield Effect: Trump and Vance spread racist memes that turned into bomb threats and school evacuations.

To say that Donald Trump is reckless with his public comments is about as big an understatement as you could make. But this week, we are watching the real-world effects of that recklessness play out with alarming speed.

Consider the timeline. On Monday, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, mentioned on X the claim—for which there is no verifiable evidence—that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “abducting” and eating pets. Vance was promoting a racist theory that had been circulating in certain corners of the internet in recent days, a manifestation of the anti-Haitian sentiment that has bubbled up in Springfield after roughly 15,000 Haitian migrants arrived in the town over the past few years. MAGA supporters quickly kicked into action, sharingcat memes referencing the pet-eating theory.

By Alice De Miramon

On Tuesday, Vance posted on X that his senatorial office in Ohio had “received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.” Vance acknowledged in his post that these rumors may “turn out to be false” but went on to say: “Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” And he egged on the internet trolls in a subsequent post: “Keep the cat memes flowing.”

Vance was referring to an 11-year-old who was killed when a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus last year. (The driver has since been convicted of involuntary manslaughter.) On Tuesday, the boy’s father spoke out against the politicization of his son’s death. “My son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” Nathan Clark said in remarks before Springfield’s city commission. “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.”

In 2020, the population of Springfield, Ohio, was nearly 60,000. The town had been losing residents because of declining job opportunities, but a recent manufacturing boom has brought in an influx of immigrants, who are mostly Haitian, as Miriam Jordan of The New York Times hasreported. Most of these immigrants are in the U.S. legally; local authorities and employers say that Haitian immigrants have boosted what was once a declining local economy, but such a mass arrival of migrants has also strained government resources.

Trump’s decision to bring up Springfield at the debate—in his now-infamous and bizarre “eating the pets” non sequitur—may have been his attempt to redirect attention to immigration, which he sees as a winning topic for his campaign. But it was also a reminder of his penchant for spreading conspiracy theories and his habit of fueling the fire of racism and hate in America. The days that followed revealed how a rambling Trump comment—with the help of Vance and the pair’s social-media faithful—can generate actual threats of violence.

JD Vance continues to spread disgusting anti-Haitian rumors. Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate: JD Vance now says Haitian immigrants are spreading HIV after bizarre pet-eating claim flops.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Trump’s running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance, made a series of controversial, bigoted, and inflammatory statements during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Vance 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.

During the interview, Vance insisted on the veracity of a discredited conspiracy theory circulating in Springfield that claims Haitian immigrants have been abducting pets for food, a laughable claim Trump made during the debate. Local officials have already said that “no credible evidence” supports these allegations, but Vance continued to push the narrative. “We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground… saying this stuff is happening,” Vance said. When Collins pointed out that officials had found no evidence, Vance responded, “They’ve said they don’t have all the evidence.”

By Marek Brozowski

Collins pressed Vance on his responsibility as a public figure to avoid spreading misinformation. “If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot,” Collins asked. Vance, however, stood firm, responding, “Nobody’s calling my office and saying that they saw Bigfoot. What they’re calling and saying is we are seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats.”

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Trump’s running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance, made a series of controversial, bigoted, and inflammatory statements during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Vance 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.

During the interview, Vance insisted on the veracity of a discredited conspiracy theory circulating in Springfield that claims Haitian immigrants have been abducting pets for food, a laughable claim Trump made during the debate. Local officials have already said that “no credible evidence” supports these allegations, but Vance continued to push the narrative. “We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground… saying this stuff is happening,” Vance said. When Collins pointed out that officials had found no evidence, Vance responded, “They’ve said they don’t have all the evidence.”

Collins pressed Vance on his responsibility as a public figure to avoid spreading misinformation. “If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot,” Collins asked. Vance, however, stood firm, responding, “Nobody’s calling my office and saying that they saw Bigfoot. What they’re calling and saying is we are seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats.”

Wiggins discusses the history of false attacks on Haitian immigrants:

Vance’s comments tap into a broader, troubling pattern of discrimination that Haitian migrants have faced for decades. Historically, U.S. immigration policy has treated Haitians disproportionately, often in ways that are harsher than those directed toward other groups. According to a 2021 U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants report, Haitians have frequently been misclassified as economic immigrants rather than political refugees, even when fleeing violence during authoritarian regimes, stripping them of asylum rights and leading to mass deportations.

One of the most egregious examples of discrimination occurred in the early 1990s, when Haitians attempting to flee their country were subjected to HIV and AIDS screenings by U.S. authorities. Even as the HIV epidemic was waning, Haitians who tested positive for the virus were held to higher standards when seeking asylum. Many were sent to quarantine camps in Guantanamo Bay, where they lived in squalor and were denied proper medical care, the report notes.

This history of associating Haitians with disease resurfaced during the Trump administration, when Title 42—a public health measure aimed at stopping the spread of communicable diseases—was invoked to justify the expulsion of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

This is a very good article by Henry J. Gomez, Brandy Zadrozny, Allan Smith and Julie Tsirkin at NBC News: How a fringe online claim about immigrants eating pets made its way to the debate stage.

“In Springfield they’re eating dogs,” the former president said, referring to an Ohio city dealing with an influx of Haitian immigrants. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating … the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

The extraordinary moment — the airing of a claim worthy of a chain email while participating in a prime-time presidential debate — probably puzzled most of the 67.1 million people tuned in for Trump’s clash with Vice President Kamala Harris. But the rumor, which has been criticized as perpetuating racist tropes, was already thriving in right-wing corners of the internet and being amplified by those close to Trump, including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

No one involved in Trump’s debate preparations or in a position to speak for his campaign agreed to discuss the strategy on the record or answer questions abouthow it mutated from a fringe obsession to a debate stage sound bite….

While the fallout has been a combination of bafflement and outrage, the makings of the moment are rooted in grievances that have long defined and animated Trump and his followers — and on the platforms where those grievances blossom….

By Catriona-Millar

How the rumor developed and made its way out of the right wing fever swamps:

Blood Tribe, a national neo-Nazi group, was among the early purveyors of the rumor in August, posting about it on Gab and Telegram, social networks popular with extremists. While the group’s leader has taken credit for Trump’s indulgence of the claims, Blood Tribe’s reach is unknown; its accounts on those sites have fewer than 1,000 followers.

Some Blood Tribe members also planned a couple of events in the real world, like a small Aug. 10 march in Springfield protesting Haitian immigration and an appearance at a city commission meeting later that month.

The rumor soon crossed over to mainstream social media, like Facebook and X. NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation, traced the origins to an undated post from a private Facebook group that was shared in a screenshot posted to X on Sept. 5. 

“Remember when my hometown of Springfield Ohio was all over National news for the Haitians?” the user wrote. “I said all the ducks were disappearing from our parks? Well, now it’s your pets.”

Around that time, other social media posts about the rumor sprouted and went viral, some of them based in part on residents’ comments at public hearings. On Sept. 6, there were 1,100 posts on X mentioning Haitians, migrants or immigrants eating pets, cats, dogs and geese, according to PeakMetrics, a research company. The next day there were 9,100 — a 720% increase.

The article says that many social media participants suspected Laura Loomer of passing the rumor on to Trump. Others blamed Vance. Anonymous Trump sources responded:

Loomer and Trump did not speak on the plane ride, a source familiar with the trip said. And a Trump aide noted that Loomer “is not a member of our staff.”

“The president is the most well-read man in America, and he has a pulse on everything that is going on,” the aide added. 

Claire Wang at The Guardian: ‘A very old political trope’: the racist US history behind Trump’s Haitian pet eater claim.

People of Haitian descent say these xenophobic attacks are nothing new for their community, and experts say the “dog eater” trope is a fearmongering tactic white politicians have long deployed against immigrants of color, particularly those of Asian descent.

“The way white Americans have positioned themselves as culturally and morally superior, this is low-hanging fruit to rally xenophobia in a very quick way,” said Anthony Ocampo, a professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

By Joan Gillchrest

Demonizing immigrants through falsehoods about their diet is a political tactic that originated in the late 19th century, during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, said May-lee Chai, author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign published trading cards that featured cartoonish sketches of Chinese men eating rats, and smeared his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as “China’s presidential candidate”, according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History.

“It’s a very old political trope to dehumanize Chinese male immigrants and show them as a threat to white American workers,” Chai said. Chinese workers posed not only a “labor threat” in the restaurant industry but also a “civilization threat”, she added, as one rationale for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would contribute to the “browning of America”.

An urban legend alleging that Chinese restaurants serve dog meat, cat meat or rats dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the US. An editorial from a Mississippi newspaper in 1852, for example, laments that trade with China is “not what it ought to be”, then says, “and besides, the Chinese still eat dog-pie”.

Chinese people may have been the first immigrant group to be widely profiled as “dog eaters”, but the slur was soon directed at other Asian communities, said Robert Ku, author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.

At the 1904 world’s fair in St. Louis, organizers reportedly forced the Indigenous Igorot people from the Philippines to butcher and eat dogs for entertainment – an event that cemented the stereotype against Filipinos.By the late 20th century, Ku said, groups including Koreans, Filipinos and Cambodians became “principally stereotyped as dog eaters”.

More recently, in 2016, the Oregon county commissioner and US Senate hopeful Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting“ dogs and cats for food. And last May, a false claim that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California served dog meat caused months of harassment and eventual closure of the business.

It’s not surprising that these claims have extended to other non-white immigrant groups.

At The Nation, Elie Mystal writes: White People Have Never Forgiven Haitians for Claiming Their Freedom.

I could tell you that the only ”evidence” for the baseless Republican claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, comes from an American-born woman charged with animal cruelty in Canton, Ohio. I could tell you that the Haitian immigrant community living in Ohio is made up largely of people who are in the country legally, under temporary protected status visas. I could tell you that Haitian immigrants, like those in all immigrant communities, are generally hard-working people who pay their taxes and commit fewer crimes, per capita, than native-born citizens.

But I can also tell you that none of these facts matter one jot to vile and racist Republicans like JD Vance and Donald Trump, who spread lies and misinformation about immigrants. The people pushing these falsehoods long ago abandoned any tether to facts or reality. The very online, white-wing MAGA movement has found another group of dark-skinned people to hurt. Today, it’s Haitians; yesterday it was Venezuelans, and tomorrow it will be some other group of Black or brown people.

By Marek Brozowski

The goal—their only goal—is to hurt people. It’s their kink. Hurting people of color titillates and excites them. It makes them feel powerful and important. When these small people see reports that Haitians in Springfield are afraid to send their children to school; when they read about the damage being done to immigrants’ property, it makes them feel strong. Imagine being able to contribute to a lynch mob raised against largely defenseless people from the comfort of your own home, simply by sharing a cat meme. That kind of power is intoxicating to some people, and what you see online is the real, honest thrill a racist experiences whenever they find someone to menace.

I hate to give these people the satisfaction of being hurt by them. I hate to acknowledge their lies and insults, and I’d like to pretend that I can’t even hear them. As a New Yorker of Haitian descent, I’d like to tell these people “Kou langett manman ou!” (which loosely translates to: “Have an inappropriate relationship with yourself, followed by your mother, posthaste”) and go about my day.

But the pain racist Republicans and their cult spokespeople are causing is too real to laugh away. It’s too familiar to ignore. And it’s entirely too consistent with how this country has always treated Haitians to pretend that it isn’t all happening again.

Haitians committed the greatest sin possible in the modern world: We took our freedom back from the white man. Haiti is the birthplace of the only successful slave-led revolt in the “New” or “Western” world. Like everywhere else in this hemisphere, enslaved Haitians asked for their freedom, agitated for it, and were willing to negotiate terms with the enslavers for their emancipation. Unlike everywhere else, when those negotiations and political dealings resulted in nothing more than the continuation of permanent chattel slavery, Haitians stopped talking and started rebelling—and by 1804 had liberated themselves from their suddenly-not-so-superior captors.

White people have never forgiven us for being free. The French demanded “reparations” from the Haitians for taking their property—that property being the formerly enslaved Haitians themselves—as the price for their freedom. And the Americans, under the presidency of inveterate slaver Thomas Jefferson, refused to recognize Haiti or its independence, and imposed a trade embargo on the fledgling nation. Remember that the next time someone calls Jefferson a lover of liberty: That man didn’t just enslave and rape Africans brought here against their will; he tried his best to snuff out the embers of freedom burning on his doorstep.

Please read the rest at The Nation.

One last excerpt from a piece by Eric Levitz at Vox: Republicans know exactly what they’re doing. The twisted political logic behind Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrants.