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xenophobia
Trump Spews 'More Blood Libel About Immigrants' in Aurora, Colorado
"In our lifetimes, there has never been a president as willing as Trump is to foment hate and violence among his supporters," said one local advocacy group.
Oct 12, 2024
Warnings that Republican nominee Donald Trump poses a fascist threat to U.S. society as a whole—and to the nation's immigrants in particular—grew Friday following his visit to Aurora, Colorado, where he used a rally to spew xenophobic vitriol that even the city's right-wing mayor condemned as lie-filled and dangerous.
Throughout his 80-minute speech, Trump—flanked by posters that read "Occupied America," "Deport Illegals Now," and "End Migrant Crime"—used openly fascistic language to falsely characterize Aurora as "infested" with Venezuelan gang members who came to the United States from "the dungeons of the Third World, from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions."
Aurora, Trump lied, has been "invaded and conquered." Trump pledged that, if elected to another White House term next month, he would invoke the draconian Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged gang members without due process—a plan he dubbed "Operation Aurora." More broadly, Trump has vowed to carry out the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history."
Trump's rhetoric in Aurora—which built on the anti-immigrant lies his campaign has spread about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio—stemmed from conditions in a small number of city apartment complexes that officials, including Republican Mayor Mike Coffman, say right-wing media outlets and politicians have seized upon and warped.
Coffman, who initially helped fuel the xenophobic hysteria, said in a statement following Trump's rally Friday that he "cannot overstate enough that nothing was said today that has not been said before and for which the city has not responded with the facts."
"Again, the reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity in our city—and our state—have been grossly exaggerated and have unfairly hurt the city's identity and sense of safety," said Coffman. "The city and state have not been 'taken over' or 'invaded' or 'occupied' by migrant gangs. The incidents that have occurred in Aurora, a city of 400,000 people, have been limited to a handful of specific apartment complexes, and our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns and will continue to do so."
Sara Loflin, executive director of the advocacy group ProgressNow Colorado, said in a statement Friday that the former president was "only here to continue to lie while barely setting foot in the city of Aurora or even Colorado at a luxury $500-a-night resort."
"Donald Trump depends on these racist falsehoods to intimidate people of color from participating in elections and exercising their right to vote," said Loflin. "In our lifetimes, there has never been a president as willing as Trump is to foment hate and violence among his supporters."
Trump's rally in Aurora came in the wake of reports that retired U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the former president, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump "is a fascist to the core."
"Personally I think it's pretty worrying that the GOP candidate, who attempted to overthrow the republic and whose top general calls him 'a fascist to his core,' is running on a flatly authoritarian campaign of lies and a promise to round people up," MSNBC's Chris Hayes wrote late Friday, citing Milley's comments and Trump's Aurora rally.
"Today," Hayes added, "he went to a city with a Republican mayor who refused to campaign with him to spread more blood libel about immigrants while calling his political opponents 'scum' and internal enemies and promising to use a 1798 law for mass arrests."
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Joe McCarthy Would Appreciate JD Vance's Big Lie—So Would Joseph Goebbels
Vance's shameless lies, and Trump’s too, are deepening the deterioration of American politics.
Sep 19, 2024
“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.
Creating a Vance-like “Story” About Vance
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, Trump, and McCarthyism
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.
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Exposed: The 'Bigoted Conspiracy Caucus' in US Congress
"Invasion and great replacement theory rhetoric, both deeply rooted in white nationalist and antisemitic tropes, are no longer a bug on the Hill, they are a regular feature," said one campaigner.
Aug 02, 2024
Republican U.S. lawmakers who embrace and amplify racist, xenophobic, and antisemitic conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants are helping to stoke deadly politically motivated violence, according to a report published Friday by a coalition of advocacy groups.
The report—titled Bigoted Conspiracy Caucus—"exposes the normalization of xenophobic 'great replacement' and 'invasion' conspiracies within the 118th Congress, documenting their historical roots and widespread promotion by members of Congress."
"The great replacement conspiracy claims Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white Christian Americans with nonwhite immigrants, people of color, or others who they think are inferior and 'easier to control,'" the report states. "Today's versions may generally avoid referencing race and religion explicitly, instead emphasizing culture, immigration status, or political power."
"Invasion conspiracies describe immigrants as 'invaders' who pose an existential threat to American 'culture,' or 'traditions,' and implicitly call for hate-fueled attacks to counter this imagined threat," the publication continues.
The report details how "invasion" rhetoric "has metastasized and spread within the 118th Congress," and how "it is not only immigration hardliners" who are engaging in it.
"As of publication, the 118th Congress has held more than 30 congressional hearings where bigoted conspiracies of cultural replacement or an invasion were espoused" and dozens of "immigration hardliners, far-right figures, and members of SPLC-designated anti-immigrant hate groups were called to testify, the paper notes, referring to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which designates and monitors hate groups.
"In total, there have been 1,411 unique social media posts from official congressional accounts promoting the same bigoted conspiracies," the report's authors wrote.
Examples cited in the report include Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) producing an ominous video titled " Alien Invasion" and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) publishing an xenophobic opinion piece in his official capacity on the far-right new website Daily Caller, which in 2017 published a video encouraging running over protesters with cars. This, just months before James Fields, a neo-Nazi supporter of former President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant policies, used his car to murder civil rights activist Heather Heyer at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The report details how right-wing lawmakers also engage in "coded versions of replacement-style ideas," including by "warning of supposed nefarious plots to import a new voting bloc of immigrants as well as intentionally importing a number so large it will change the demographics in favor of the Democrats, who are often alleged to be behind the scheme."
For example, House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) appeared on Fox News and asserted that President Joe Biden "is more concerned about future votes for his party than he is the security of the American people." Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) declared on social media that Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas "have spent nearly four years working to systematically replace the American people."
The report shows that "this rhetoric has gone beyond posting and public comments and has shown up in official legislation."
Examples include Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) introducing the " No Tax Dollars for the United Nations' Immigration Invasion Act," which would ban the federal government from funding crucial U.N. refugee and migrant agencies that the U.S. has backed with bipartisan support for over 70 years, and Rep. Jodey Arrington's (R-Texas) resolution to invoke the Constitution's invasion clause to give states "sovereign power to repel an invasion." Arrington's proposal is backed by at least 50 GOP colleagues.
Lawmakers' "great replacement" and "invasion" rhetoric has had deadly consequences. The report highlights the massacres in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso. The mass shooting in Texas—in which another white supremacist Trump supporter gunned down dozens of mostly Latino people in a Walmart after penning a manifesto citing the great replacement theory—took place five years ago Saturday.
The report argues that anti-immigrant rhetoric threatens democracy by adding "fuel to election deniers' claims that elections cannot be trusted because the ballot box is polluted with fraudulent undocumented immigrant votes." When given false legitimacy by lawmakers, this erodes "public trust in elections and gives justification for overturning unfavorable results."
"The 'great replacement' and 'invasion' conspiracies are a danger to individuals, communities, and democracy itself."
The eight groups that produced the report are: America's Voice, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Help Refugees & Asylum-Seekers (HIAS), Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Presente.org, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Western States Center.
"The 'great replacement' and 'invasion' conspiracies are a danger to individuals, communities, and democracy itself," Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, Washington director of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, said in a statement Friday. "These lies have inspired violence and mass murder in places such as El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo."
"But instead of calling out and marginalizing these reckless falsehoods, far too many members of Congress have instead amplified them and brought them into the mainstream for their own cynical gain," he added. "It is long past time to hold these elected officials accountable for their recklessness. American Jews will not be silent in the face of this threat not only to our safety, but to the safety of so many communities in our broader American family."
HIAS vice president of U.S. policy and advocacy Naomi Steinberg said that "invasion and great replacement theory rhetoric, both deeply rooted in white nationalist and antisemitic tropes, are no longer a bug on the Hill, they are a regular feature."
"It is incumbent upon all of us to speak up to denounce this language every time we hear it and to insist upon good faith, fact-based debates about how to address immigration challenges in the U.S.," she added, "rather than the dangerous hate-slinging that has taken over the immigration debate in the halls of Congress and on campaign trails around the country."
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