Most political pundits would agree today that George HW Bush's
Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis was what sank the Massachusetts governor's 1988 presidential campaign. Rooted in racism as it was, it ingeniously fed into both right and left wing stereotypes that all black men are criminals and that all Democrats are soft on crime.
It worked because Bush beat Dukakis by a landslide.
Three decades later, Donald Trump used a similar ad, even though 2018 was a midterm year, when he came out with the Luis Bracamontes ad. Bracamontes was a Mexican national who'd been deported but then had slipped back into the country and murdered two California deputies. So, yes, Luis Bracamontes and Willie Horton were two of the worst of the worst. Few if any would disagree with that.
The problem was the wider implication that black and brown people in general ought to be feared. The truth is often unsexy for Republicans and their voters. You could tell them the truth, that most of the fentanyl that comes into this country are from white, American drug dealers. But that doesn't get racists to the polls.
It's far more effective to feed into racial stereotypes that Mexicans are pouring unimpeded over the southern border to take your tax dollars by getting on welfare and food stamps while simultaneously taking away your job that you'd never want, in the first place, such as picking lettuce in Salinas, California.
And that brings us to
Springfield, Ohio. Springfield is a nice little blue collar city, the seat of Clark County, Ohio. It was incorporated as a city in 1850, even though its present population would barely fill Yankee stadium. And that demographic, according to last year's figures, stands at just over 58,000. Its population used to be much larger, peaking at 82,723 in 1960.
But then, the jobs started disappearing under both Democratic and Republican administrations. By last year, Springfield had lost nearly 25,000 citizens because people tend to move to where the jobs are.
And that brings us to the Haitian American population of Springfield.
Even as people were leaving in droves, the jobs slowly started coming back (meaning the Biden administration was doing its job in bringing jobs back to America). The problem was, with the ongoing exodus of the labor force, there weren't enough people to fill those positions.
Around this time, a large influx of Haitian migrants applied for, and got, Temporary Protective Status from the government. When they heard about the unfilled positions in Springfield, they flocked to the small city and hoped they could take part in the community.
Those jobs are now filled. Businesses were saved. The revenue tax base began growing again because many of these Haitian migrants bought homes, which elevated the average cost of houses (a sure economic indicator of a thriving economy). Their children are going to the local schools. In other words, the Haitian American community in Springfield, Ohio is living the American dream. They're helping to save the community they've adopted as their own and the community is saving them.
In short, it's the perfect symbiotic relationship.
And then came Donald Trump and JD Vance.
In an eerie yet almost predictable reprise of the Tulsa Race riots of 1921 that saw the destruction of Black Wall Street, Republicans were looking for anything, any racial wedge, that could possibly make the Biden administration and Kamala Harris in particular look bad. They seized on an ignorant Facebook post made by a woman in Springfield who'd passed along a story about a neighbor's cat that had gone missing and the cat 's owner had feared it had been taken and eaten by Haitians. As it turned out, the cat was found safe and sound in the woman's basement. But by this time, the damage was done.
It got a ton of oxygen from first JD Vance, who said he'd heard the story from his constituents, while adding that it could all turn out to be untrue. Then, during the September 10th debate, Trump amplified it to cartoonish proportions in front of 70,000,000 viewers that "they're eating the dogs, they 're eating the cats." David Muir, one of the ABC moderators, swiftly moved in to put the lie to that but, again, the damage was done.
Just days if not hours after the debate, the bomb threats began pouring in. Republican Governor Mike Dewine said that the city had already received 33 bomb threats that had resulted in the closures of two elementary schools, Wittenberg University, the city hall and forced the cancellation of an annual cultural festival. Dewine also said that several of the threats had come in from one foreign nation, making Springfield's siege international in scope.
Haitian residents report having their windows broken and acid thrown on their cars. Law enforcement is being stretched to its limits investigating bomb threats that, so far, are all hoaxes.
To its credit, the MSM have been confronting Trump and Vance about their lies but the typical response is to pivot and deflect by talking about Kamala Harris and her nonexistent open border policy and how she "
illegally waved a magic wand" and made the Haitians legal, according to Vance.
Harris is the vice president. She did not let in the Haitians. She did not give them temporary protected status. The vice president's power is very limited and they know it.
Yet, while to talking to Dana Bash on CNN, a churlish Vance took the extraordinary position that he was permitted to "create stories" calling to attention a nonexistent problem that the MSM were, understandably, ignoring.
Trump and Vance are two rotten peas in a pod. They're both the ultimate political whores who will say and do anything, regardless of how many innocent victims they create in their naked pursuit for power.
And their naked lies about Springfield's Haitian population is far from an outlier. Before they descended on Springfield, Trump advanced lies about a Venezuelan gang taking over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado and extorting rent money from people. The local authorities have gone public to say it was all a pack of lies.
At around the same time the Springfield lies were getting traction, the Trump campaign began spreading lies about
Charleroi, Pennsylvania because they, too, have a Haitian population. Joe Manning, the city manager, said, “(P)eople on Facebook saying that there’s a government-funded tent city in
the Rite Aid parking lot, that there’s people walking down the street
carrying live chickens."
Facebook has been turned into a shameless breeding ground defaming migrants that does nothing more meaningful than posting advisories casting doubt on its validity. But, as Mark Twain once famously said, "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
Donald Trump and JD Vance are dog shit, plain and simple. They lie about people of color, then admit they lie then double down by saying they give themselves the right to lie. The Otherism to which they inevitably default is not dissimilar to the Nazi lies told about the Jews in the leadup to WWII. It worked there, it works here and is continuing to work.
And as long as there are stupid, willfully ignorant voters, and we will always have them, the truth will never be considered more than a weak competitor to lies and innuendo.
