The Short Leap Between Racist Lies and Terrorism
There has been a potential second assassination attempt against Donald Trump. The only shots were fired by the Secret Service and the gunman was apprehended shortly after fleeing. The perpetrator appears to be all over the place politically (supporting Trump, then Tulsi Gabbard, then Vivek Ramaswamy), but unless there are major developments, I will not likely be covering the story again here.
Springfield, OH, the town where Trump and Vance have been falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating pets, has been the victim of terrorist threats every day for the last several days. Schools were evacuated, hospitals were shut down, multiple government offices were closed, and the local university closed after receiving a mass shooting threat, which was followed by a bomb threat.
Both Donald Trump and JD Vance have responded to these threats by doubling down on their racist lies. Trump said there were 20,000 illegal Haitian immigrants there and implied young American girls in the area were being “raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.” Despite decades of lies from the right on this issue, immigrants are less likely to commit all categories of crimes than natural-born US citizens and undocumented immigrants are even less likely than legal immigrants to commit crime. In addition to the Haitian community in Springfield being here legally, there are not 20,000 Haitian immigrants in the entire state of Ohio. The statement that 20,000 illegal Haitian immigrants are raping and killing American in Springfield contains three separate lies.
And those lies are currently driving terror threats against the city.
When Dana Bash this morning asked JD Vance about the connection between his pet-eating lies and the threats, he called her question “disgusting.”
Since my last newsletter, Trump has continued his decades-long attack on immigrants, warning his supporters that immigrants could be taking their homes and posting multiple racist AI-generated memes on his Twitter clone about how if Harris wins, gangs of immigrants will be taking over the area you live in.
Trump is repeating the conspiracy theory that Kamala Harris was cheating during the debate both by having earring audio receivers and by getting the answers in advance. As for the earrings, repeating lines someone is feeding you without hesitation while sounding natural is effectively impossible. As for getting the questions in advance, this seems to come up every time he loses a debate. There are no surprise questions at a debate. They are going to ask about the economy. They will ask about immigration. If you have been convicted of dozens of felonies and incited a failed insurrection they will likely ask you about that.
Moving on from racism, Vance has confirmed that were he vice-president he would not have certified the election on 1/6/2021 and instead would have asked for “alternative” slates of electors so “the country could have the debate.” The country did have a debate over who should be president called an “election” which Joe Biden won.
Reading insider accounts of the Trump administration, you get a clear picture that he has no attention span, is not capable of learning, and lacks even a basic understanding of how government works. He does not understand NATO funding, trade deficits, or even what senators do. He said last week he wanted to eliminate the Department of Education so control of education would be sent back to the states and Senator Ron Johnson would control education in Wisconsin. Senators are federal lawmakers and do not control anything in their respective states.
Several right-wing influencers were coordinating their lies about Kamala Harris’s sex life (echoed by Donald Trump) and were getting paid for their efforts, though the source of the payments is unknown.
As of writing, there are 50 days until the 2024 election.
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