As you have no doubt heard, the Republican Party of the United States of America has taken to engaging in human trafficking for political stunts. They tricked Venezuelan asylum seekers into taking a flight to Martha’s Vineyard, without warning anyone there that they were about to need to take care of a bunch of refugees. This was apparently done under the belief that the people of that island would freak out at the presence of scary brown people, and their hypocrisy would be exposed. Mano Singham did a good breakdown of the history of this sort of tactic, most infamously the “freedom rides” during the Jim Crow era, so you should check that out, but you know I couldn’t resist posting the Some More News take on this story:
This follows on the theme of fascists seeing humans as disposable tools.
As has been said a lot lately about the rightwing, “The cruelty is the point”. They were desperately trying to spin this story into a huge outrage-fueling thing, but it boils down to, “residents care for human traffic victims and state brings them to another town actually equipped to handle their needs because the town has cared for other groups of migrants successfully.”
Cory was right–this story is now disappearing down the memory hole of the right.
As I write this, Hurricane Ian is tearing up Florida, and we can all expect DeSantis to start wailing that the federal gov’t needs to step in and rebuild his state for him. Maybe he shouldn’t have spent all that money trafficking people?