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Vance's shameless lies, and Trump’s too, are deepening the deterioration of American politics.
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” —from Profile of Hitler created by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US intelligence service during WWII.
Imagine if this piece started with this headline: Vance Urged Routh to Purchase AK-47 Used in Trump Assassination Attempt.
If I were a big-time pundit, that libelous headline would make news. But I’m not a big-time pundit and the headline is untrue, but that’s OK according to the logic J.D. Vance has used to justify his lies about the Haitian citizens of Springfield, Ohio. I would be justified in spreading falsehoods, according to Vance, as long as they served a higher calling. In my case, banning assault rifles.
Vance has admitted he is spreading lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats. But he feels righteous in doing so. Here’s how he put it to Dana Bash on CNN:
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking cat memes. 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.”
Vance, however, ignores how he has directly added to the suffering of the people of Springfield, who have faced a series of bomb threats due to his repeated fabrications. That’s apparently justifiable collateral damage in service to a loftier goal, and fellow Republicans officials have been more than willing to follow along. They keep repeating the big lie that Haitian immigrants are eating American pets, claiming it raises the profile of the immigration issue. That, they believe, is a solid justification for spreading the lie.
Let’s concoct a Vance-like lie, I mean “story,” in the name of banning AK-47s. The “story” is about how Vance met Ryan Wesley Routh and encouraged him to purchase his weapon. To give this lie an air of truth we build upon what Vance said after the recent Georgia school shooting by a 14-year-old using a AR-15-style rifle: “Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them.” Which is a lie. That isn’t Harris’s position.
To make the story more potent we add two embellishments. First, we put into Vance’s mouth something he might have said, though we have no record of him saying it: “The Constitution gives you the right to own an AK-47, and we will not let the Democrats take that right away from you.”
Secondly, we mix in a bit of “some claim” hearsay, the kind Trump/Vance repeatedly use: “Some claim that when Vance defended the purchase of AK-47s, Routh was in the audience.”
So, one real statement from Vance plus two we made up equals a more powerful “story”—one lie perhaps big enough to take off like a “cat meme.” All in the service of our desire to end gun violence in the United States.
Most of us were brought up to know such fiddling with the truth is utterly immoral. But using Vance’s amoral logic, our made-up “story” of Vance and Routh is justified because we want to protect the American people from gun violence.
Vance’s shameless lies, and Trump’s too, are deepening the deterioration of American politics that harkens back to Senator Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting crusade. During the 1950s, lies about Communist Party affiliations were used to destroy the livelihoods of political opponents and enhance the political power of the liars.
But take heart, maybe the tide is turning. Bill Maher recently said, “It’s over for Trump. I just think he’s going to lose.” Maher too sees a Trumpian parallel to McCarthy, whose public support eventually collapsed after it became clear his claims about Communist infiltration were lies. But what Maher failed to mention was that McCarthy went down only after he attacked the Army. At that point, the most popular person in America, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, turned on him, as did most of the elite political establishment, including McCarthy’s fellow Republicans.
Today, however, the Republican elites are still sucking up to Trump, which means more Trump/Vance lies will be disgracefully repeated by their Republican sycophants, large and small.
Fortunately, we’re not yet near the dark days of McCarthyism and much further from Nazi Germany. At least until this November. In the meantime, you’ve got to wonder if Trump, Vance, and the Republican elite have memorized the OSS profile of Hitler, or if they conjured it up again on their own.
The ‘Haitians eat pets’ tale is the latest in a long line of anti-Haitian claims that goes back to the nation's slave revolt nearly 200 years ago—a struggle against slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy.
A crass new iteration of anti-Haitianism has recently received a remarkable amount of attention. This novel form of racism with deep anti-Black roots was even referenced in this week's U.S. presidential debate.
Recently racist and ignorant social media users have circulated the idea that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance greatly boosted the anti-Haitian claim with a post to X stating, “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.”
Vance’s X post had over 11 million views with Donald Trump even referencing the claim in the presidential debate. This despite an absence of any evidence whatsoever. Springfield officials haven’t received any credible reports of Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets.
The ‘Haitians eat pets’ tale is the latest in a long line of anti-Haitian claims. In the early 1980s Haitians were stigmatized as the originators of the HIV virus in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) labeled Haitians as a risk group, which gave rise to “The Four H’s” designation of Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, Heroin addicts, and Haitians. At the time the Canadian Red Cross publicly identified Haitians as a “high-risk” group for AIDS, the only nationality singled out. In 1983 they called on homosexuals and bisexuals with multiple partners, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs and recent immigrants from Haiti to voluntarily stop giving blood. A Canadian government pamphlet, which was distributed in shopping malls, also linked Haitians with AIDS. Again, this was despite a lack of evidence that the incidence of AIDS in Haiti was greater than in the U.S. By 1987 it was lower in Haiti than in the U.S. and other Caribbean nations.
But, as a result of the unfounded stigmatization, the country’s significant tourism basically collapsed overnight. Out of fear the virus may transmit through goods, some Haitian exports were even blocked from entering the U.S.
The Haitians are responsible for AIDS allegation still pops up. During an explosion of xenophobia against Haitian migrants in Guyana in 2019, reports focused on HIV/AIDS and Voodoo and in a 2016 radio outburst former Canadian Member of Parliament, André Arthur, labeled Haiti a “sexually deviant” country populated by thieves and prostitutes responsible for HIV/AIDS.
In another example of stigmatizing Haitians over disease, CDC incident manager for the Haiti cholera response, Jordan W. Tappero, blamed Haitian cultural norms for the 2010 cholera outbreak that caused tens of thousands of deaths. He told Associated Press journalist Jonathan Katz that Haitians don’t experience the “shame associated with open defecation.” As was then suspected and later confirmed, cholera was introduced to Haiti by UN forces who followed poor sanitation practices.
Ten months earlier influential U.S. pastor Pat Robertson suggested the terrible January 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas was due to a “deal made with Satan” two centuries earlier. Robertson claimed Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever … And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’” Robertson added, “You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”
Canadian Protestant groups have promoted similar thinking about the August 1791 Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caïman) Vodou ceremony that helped launch the Haitian Revolution. In the book “Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti,” Bertin M. Louis points out that some Haitian Canadian Protestants believe Haiti was consecrated to the devil. Mainstream Canadian voices have repeatedly denigrated voodoo.
After the 2004 US/France/Canada coup the National Post published an editorial headlined “Voodoo is not enough”, arguing for “a coalition of the willing to permanently extract the country from the quagmire. A 1952 Globe and Mail story attempting to be sympathetic to the country began by noting, “Haiti’s principal export is not, as popularly supposed, Zombies.” One of the first books to expose North Americans to the voodoo zombie was Magic Island, a 1929 book by William Buehler Seabrook. The book sensationalized encounters with voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.
Voodoo has been demonized by white supremacist and Christian forces for over two centuries. Important for defeating slavery and securing Haitian independence, the religion offered spiritual/ideological strength to those who revolted against their slave masters in maybe the greatest example of liberation in the history of humanity.
The 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution was simultaneously a struggle against slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy. Defeating the French, British, and Spanish empires, it led to freedom for all people regardless of color, decades before this idea found traction in Europe or North America. The Haitian revolt rippled through the region and compelled the post-French Revolution government in Paris to abolish slavery in its Caribbean colonies. It also spurred London’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
The Haitian Revolution led to the world’s first and only successful large-scale slave revolution. “Arguably,” notes Peter Hallward, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.”
But, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution thousands of photos, articles and books denigrated Haiti, depicting the slaves as barbaric despite the fact 350,000 Africans were killed, versus 75,000 Europeans, over the 13-year revolt. Anti-Haitianism has deep roots.
It’s easy to mock those who claim Haitian immigrants are eating cats. But overt anti-Haitianism is also relayed by ‘sophisticated’ liberals. Their high-minded commentaries calling for foreign tutelage of the country appear regularly in the pages of the Globe and Mail and Boston Globe.
Anti-Haitianism flows out of and reinforces the country’s weakness, which is spurred by imperial domination. Technically “independent” for more than two centuries, outsiders have long shaped Haitian affairs. Through isolation, economic asphyxiation, debt dependence, gunboat diplomacy, occupation, foreign supported dictatorships, structural adjustment programs, “democracy promotion”, coups and rigged elections, Haiti is no stranger to the various forms of foreign political manipulation.
JD Vance’s anti-Haitian musings have deep roots in centuries of anti-Black racism and U.S. imperial ambitions. All those who fail to support real Haitian independence are tainted by this legacy and present-day reality.
The influx of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio is a success story, not a scandal.
When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000.
Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.
Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local tax base—and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.
Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their teeth through empty promises from politicians.
It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing—and infrastructure built to support larger populations—can make it attractive for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize their new communities.
It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started popping up.”
One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the [best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers and wages have surged.
Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.
“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses, and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”
In fact, it was earlier waves of migration—including African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants from abroad—that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier prosperity.
But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.
“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain.”
So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of internet trolls—that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.
“According to interviews with a dozen local, county, and officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports, there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride”—who are about as lovely as they sound.
“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out.
Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering for someone else—like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities like Spingfield in the first place—all to win votes from pathetic white nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.