I am not active on social media but do have an account on Nextdoor, that connects people living in a small geographical area and thus supposedly consists of one’s neighbors. In theory it helps people get to know their neighborhood by sharing information about it. I do not check the feeds that often but occasionally see posts where people report something that they ‘heard’ about and asking if anyone else has too. Some of these posts contain speculations that are bigoted or at least sail close to that line. Sometimes other people call them out on it but often it just disappears into the ether. Some posters seem to see themselves as small-time investigative journalists and deliver ‘scoops’ by being the first to relay some juicy morsel of information, often in the form of a rumor.
Apart from so-called ‘influencers’ who use social media to try to reach huge audiences as part of their business model, most social media users tend to use it largely to communicate with friends, family, and affinity groups of people who share similar interests. This can give a feeling of intimacy, that you are only talking to a small group, and thus one might be more inclined to spread baseless gossip, not realizing that your network is connected to the much larger internet and could, given the right conditions, explode your post into the general public consciousness, if it is picked up and relayed by people with much larger audiences.
That seems to be what happened with the ugly story about Haitians in Springfield, OH eating people’s cats and dogs. The person who first posted a rumor without any evidence on Facebook now regrets what she did.
The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.
Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.
Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported.
Newton told Newsguard that Lee’s Facebook post misstated her story, and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend. Newton could not be reached for comment.
Lee said she had no idea the post would become part of a rumor mill that would spiral into the national consciousness. She has since deleted the Facebook post.
So the whole thing began as a game of telephone where a story is passed from person to person and gets embellished along the way, in this case in a nasty and racist way.
While this person undoubtedly bears some responsibility for spreading a racist rumor, much greater culpability rests with those who have greater media reach who seized on this rumor and spread it to people like Laura Loomer who had the ear of creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance who then repeated it front of huge media audiences and then doubled down even after being informed that there was no credible evidence in support of it. Creepy Trump used it to claim that Haitian immigrants had destroyed the town of Springfield and vowed to deport all of them.
Donald Trump repeated racist claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, on Friday, doubling down on anti-immigrant rhetoric as residents in the town have faced bomb threats and have detailed their fears amid harassment.
“In Springfield, Ohio, 20,000 illegal migrant Haitians have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life. They’ve destroyed the place,” Trump said during a rambling press conference at his golf course in Los Angeles. “People don’t like to talk about it. Even the town doesn’t like to talk about it, because it sounds so bad for the town. They live there … for years it was a great place. Safe. Nice. Now they have 20,000 and I actually heard today it’s 32,000.”
He later added: “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio, large deportations. We’re gonna get these people out. We’re bringing them back to Venezuela,” stating the incorrect country where most of the immigrants are from.
As a consequence, Haitians in that town and elsewhere feel that they have had a target placed on their backs. Already bomb threats have closed city hall and some schools. Any harm that Haitians experience in any way has to be blamed on creepy Trump and weird Vance. People with large audiences have to be extremely circumspect about targeting vulnerable minorities and marginalized groups, since they are helpless against vigilante attacks.
It should also serve as a warning to ordinary people that their social media posts are not limited to just the small circle of readership that they might have thought they were addressing, but have the potential to be seen by a vast number of people who have hateful agendas. Hence they have to be cautious about what they say.
This is working up to a Tulsa-level pogrom.
The purpose for which Trump and Vance are spreading this vile racist lie -- apart from their own racism and sadistic delight in the suffering of others -- is to foreground the topic of immigration (i.e., increase its salience), on which Trump has a big polling advantage over Harris. Simply showing that there is no truth to the rumour will not prevent this happening. However, it may be that the very grossness of the racism will offset the advantage Trump’s team expects to gain -- many people who have racist views do not like to think of themselves as racist. Laura Loomer’s grotesque racist attack on Harris could make this more likely -- Democrats should certainly link the two disgusting outbursts, mentioning them together at every opportunity, along with reminders of Trump’s past racism.
Let’s be clear: the Haitians in Springfield are here legally with full permission from the US Gov’t to live and work there. And they’re taking jobs the Meth-Americans in Springfield refuse to do and paying taxes out of their salaries--taxes the non-working meth-Americans aren’t paying because they don’t work.
Also, do not think for one second that the woman who made up the story supposedly about the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-cousin’s-neighbor’s-uncle’s-mail carrier wasn’t trying to stir up hate and othering against the people who are here legally.
Also, by othering the Haitians, Trump is trying to stir up the racists to other Harris--who isn’t Haitian, but racists don’t care.
Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who writes the daily “Letters from an American” wrote the in this morning’s email, “…this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate.”
It sounds far-fetched just like that. But her reasoning is sound and footnoted. I’ll quote her whole email, including how you can sign up for it. (Except I don’t know how to embed a link.)
After bomb threats today, officials had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, and move the students to a different location. They had to close a middle school altogether. This is the second day bomb threats have closed schools and public buildings after MAGA Republicans have spread the lie that Haitian immigrants there have been eating white people’s pets. Haitian immigrants, who were welcomed to Springfield by officials eager to revitalize the city and who are there legally, say they are afraid.
Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo today explained where the lie had come from and how it had spread. More than two months ago, they wrote, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s vice presidential running mate, began to speak about Springfield at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to tie rising housing prices to immigrants. The next day, at the National Conservatism conference, Vance accused “illegals” of overwhelming the city.
On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city. Right-wing social media posters pushed the story, usually with “witnesses” to events in the city coming from elsewhere.
In late August, posting in a private Facebook group, a resident said they had heard that Haitian immigrants had butchered a neighbor’s cat for food. Vance reposted that rumor to attack Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, on whom he is trying to hang undocumented immigration although it was Trump who convinced Republicans to kill a strong bipartisan border bill this spring. Springfield police and the city manager told news outlets there was no truth to the rumors.
Nonetheless, on September 10, Vance told his people to “keep the cat memes flowing,” even though—or perhaps because—the rumors were putting people in his own state in danger.
Trump repeated the lie at the presidential debate that night, claiming, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Today, President Joe Biden demanded Trump stop his attacks on Haitian-Americans, but Trump doubled down, promising to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield if he is elected, although they are here legally.
The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate.
Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration.
Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.
In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”
That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.
McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate.
McConnell became Senate majority leader in 2015 when voters gave Republicans control of the Senate, and when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. McConnell’s justification for this unprecedented obstruction was that Obama’s March nomination was too close to an election, but the underlying reason for the 2016 delay was at least in part his recognition that hopes of pushing the Supreme Court to the right, especially on the issue of abortion, were likely to get evangelical voters to the polls.
Trump won in 2016, and Republicans got control of the Senate. In 2017, when Democrats tried to filibuster Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s long-empty seat, then–majority leader McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. The end of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees meant that McConnell could push through Trump’s nominees Brett Kavanaugh, with just 50 votes, and Amy Coney Barrett, with just 52 (in late October 2020, with voting for the next president already underway).
Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.
Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion.
Controlling the country through the courts was the plan behind stacking the courts with Republican nominees and weaponizing the filibuster to stop Democrats from passing legislation. In March 2024, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that McConnell “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
When he took office, President Joe Biden went to work putting his own mark on the federal judiciary. Almost two thirds of his appointees are women, and 62% are people of color. He appointed the first Black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court. But now, Republicans are hoping to retake the Senate to make sure that those appointments will stop, along with any more legislation. Their right-wing appointees to the courts will take the business of lawmaking out of the hands of American majorities.
Republican leaders are throwing everything they’ve got at the Senate races in Montana and Ohio, where they hope they can pick up the seat they need to take control of the Senate.
Attacks on immigrants in Ohio might move that needle.
In 1890, Republicans faced a similar problem. They had lost the popular vote in 1888, although they installed Republican president Benjamin Harrison in office through the Electoral College, and knew the Democrats would soon far outnumber their own voters. So they set out to guarantee that they could never lose the Senate, which should enable them to kill popular Democratic legislation.
But they misjudged the electorate, and in the 1890 midterm election, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats by a margin of two to one, and control of the Senate came down to a single seat, that of a senator from South Dakota. In those days, state legislatures chose their state’s senators, and shortly after it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on that South Dakota seat, U.S. Army troops went to South Dakota to rally voters by putting down an “Indian uprising” in which no people had died and no property had been damaged.
Fueled on false stories of “savages” who were attacking white settlers, the inexperienced soldiers were the ones who pulled the triggers to kill more than 250 Lakotas on December 29, but the Wounded Knee Massacre started in Washington, D.C.
To subscribe:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=esl1t&next=https%3A%2F%2Fheathercoxrichardson.substack.com%2Fp%2Fseptember-13-2024&utm_medium=email
I didn’t include the footnotes.
Methodical or madness?
Thesis from Vox: The twisted political logic behind Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrant
Republicans know exactly what they’re doing.
by Eric Levitz”
Adumbrative extracts, markups elided:
Even if you believe every awful thing these clowns say they’re still not saying so much as a “maybe you shouldn’t do that” about bomb threats to a place where the majority of the children targeted are not even the ones they say they want to target. Is this the kind of pinpoint accuracy anyone wants in the commander in chief of the world’s strongest military?
If he were allowed to handle a military operation this way he’d try to bomb Mexico and end up blowing up a small town in Maine instead. And if the residents complained about it he’d keep bombing them because he’d literally think his petty grievance over his lies being called out is more important than the lives of other Americans.
Trump thinks that Haiti is in Venezuela.
Heidi Neimeth @ #4 reposted an email essay by Heather Cox Richardson. The essay was also posted here:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-13-2024
At the bottom are the notes that Heidi said she didn’t post. There are 20+ URL links, mostly to news websites, and one book citation.