GOP slouches into the Crazy -IMMIGRATION | Trump Firehose of anti-immigrant posts and rhetoric

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Gift link to WSJ explainer off the Haitians eating pets conspiracy that so thoroughly derailed Trump at the debate and surprised a lot of viewers who were unaware of the social media phenomenon:


“… The pet rumors started with a Facebook post, citing the poster’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend,” according to local police.

The original poster didn’t cite firsthand knowledge of an incident, Springfield Police said Monday. The post claimed that a pet cat had been found hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home after being carved up to be eaten. Whether the neighbor exists and the status of any such neighbor’s citizenship is unknown. …

Debate moderator David Muir told Trump that the network had checked with Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck, who said there were no reports of pets being harmed by immigrants.

When again told it wasn’t true, Trump said: “But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.” …”
Sort of like the entertainer who's girlfriend's cousin's brother's balls swelled up after the covid shot.

And him referring to television was great, so he believes everything on television, I guess.
 
Gift link to WSJ explainer off the Haitians eating pets conspiracy that so thoroughly derailed Trump at the debate and surprised a lot of viewers who were unaware of the social media phenomenon:


“… The pet rumors started with a Facebook post, citing the poster’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend,” according to local police.

The original poster didn’t cite firsthand knowledge of an incident, Springfield Police said Monday. The post claimed that a pet cat had been found hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home after being carved up to be eaten. Whether the neighbor exists and the status of any such neighbor’s citizenship is unknown. …

Debate moderator David Muir told Trump that the network had checked with Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck, who said there were no reports of pets being harmed by immigrants.

When again told it wasn’t true, Trump said: “But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.” …”
In all seriousness, who calls their senator when their pet is missing?

Most people go straight to social media to ask the neighbors, or they call animal control.

I guess if you saw someone take the pet, you might call the police.

But I cannot think of a situation where I would call my senator's office.

You know JD, it's weird to make up stories like this.
 
Q and MAGA regularly use “We the people” as a tagline or basis to claim they are an overwhelming majority …




Newsmax knows this of course, but now “We the People” means the debate stage is rigged for Democrats.

He lives by a "Special" code all right.
 
Trump defended his “they’re eating dogs” claims by saying he saw it on tv. I only wish he had said he read it on the internet.
Probably doesn't know how to use the internet, has to pay people to transcribe his words to truth social.
 
In all seriousness, who calls their senator when their pet is missing?

Most people go straight to social media to ask the neighbors, or they call animal control.

I guess if you saw someone take the pet, you might call the police.

But I cannot think of a situation where I would call my senator's office.

You know JD, it's weird to make up stories like this.
My wife interned for a member of Congress one summer. People called claiming all sorts of crazy shit. The difference is sane people know when it’s a nut job calling.
 
Gift Link WaPo: https://wapo.st/4enovAX

“It started with a tragedy, gained momentum online with neo-Nazis and became Donald Trump’s message from the presidential debate stage.

… The perverse assertion that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were stealing and eating residents’ pets got its spark just over a year ago when 11-year-old Aiden Clark died in a bus accident, struck by a Haitian immigrant driving without a license. The incident spurred some Springfield residents to publicly air their grievances against the burgeoning Haitian immigrant population in their community.


But it wasn’t until the weekend that right-wing accounts, including those replete with racial slurs, spread a baseless assertion that Haitian people — who had been granted temporary protective status in the United States following profound unrest and violence in their home country — were abducting and consuming the city’s pets.

The origin of the unfounded claim seems to be a private Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information,” according to NewsGuard, an apolitical fact-checking organization launched in 2018 by journalist Steven Brill and news executive Gordon Crovitz.

A screenshot of a post to the group circulated widely, with an unnamed person claiming that the cat of a friend’s daughter had been hung “from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat,” referring to a house where Haitian immigrants lived. “They have been doing it at snyder park with the ducks and geese, as I was told that last bit by Rangers & police.”

A conservative account on X that has 2.9 million followers, End Wokeness, posted in reply the following day: “Springfield is a small town in Ohio. 4 years ago, they had 60k residents. Under Harris and Biden, 20,000 Haitian immigrants were shipped to the town. Now ducks and pets are disappearing.” The post was viewed 4.8 million times and received 69,000 likes in four days.

… Nevertheless, some social media users pointed to a video of a Black woman being arrested for reportedly killing and eating a cat in a driveway. Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong posted the video to X on Aug. 21. After another X user responded by asking if drugs were involved in the incident, Cheong replied on Saturday: “Worse. Haitians.”


That August incident was not filmed in Springfield but Canton, Ohio, and featured a woman who “has no known connection to Haiti or any other foreign country,” according to the Canton Repository newspaper. A representative from the Canton police department wrote in an email that the woman “is a US citizen that was born in Canton, Ohio. We would have no additional comment at this time.”

Another viral post featured a photo of a Black man carrying a dead goose down the street, but that image was also from another part of Ohio and contained no evidence that the man pictured was Haitian, according to the man who took the photo and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to the local Columbus Dispatch. The Washington Post was not able to independently confirm his identity. …”
 
(Cont’d)

“…
One of the first prominent right-wing influencers to interact with the theme retweeted a post Saturday afternoon linking the claim to Vice President Kamala Harris’s supposed policies. Soon a second influencer, Andrew Torba, a Christian nationalist who is the founder and CEO of the far-right social network Gab, posted the link to the Springfield Facebook post. Other influencers began posting about it Sunday, and the first influencer retweeted a post by an account whose social media feed is full of racial slurs. By Monday afternoon before the debate, some 159 right-wing influencers — and 23 Republican politicians, candidates or party officials — had discussed the meme online.

The allegation that Haitians in Springfield were killing waterfowl was spread by the conservative Federalist website, which on Tuesday published a report from the Clark County sheriff’s office showing that a local resident told a police dispatcher in a call that he had witnessed four Haitian migrants, each carrying a goose.

… Long before messages circulated on social media, Springfield city manager Bryan Heck wrote a letter to Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Tim Scott (R.-S.C.). “Springfield, Ohio is facing a significant housing crisis in our community,” Heck wrote, an issue he attributed to what he said was an influx of up to 20,000 Haitians into “a community of just under 60,000 previous residents.” [JD Vance was copied on the letter]

… Republican elected officials at the highest levels of government embraced the memes. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) posted his version, as did Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.), and Arizona’s conservative firebrand and Senate candidate Kari Lake.

… Over the summer, the white-supremacist neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying swastika flags to protest the Haitian population in town. A member of that group attended a city meeting in late August to warn that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in,” he said.


But on Tuesday evening, just hours before the debate, Nathan Clark, the father of the 11-year-old boy whose death last summer heightened anti-immigrant tensions in Springfield, approached the podium at another city meeting to deliver a very different message.

“I wish that my son Aidan Clark was killed by a 60-year-old White man,” he said, noting how “blunt” his words must seem.

“If that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.” Clark, a Democrat, added that “the last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further.”

… Asked for details about the concerns of Vance’s Ohio constituents that the senator had cited, his spokesperson Luke Schroeder responded with a statement demanding Harris apologize for border policies that he said were responsible for the deaths of innocent people.

… Seemingly overnight, the same forums that days ago were preoccupied with an imagined Venezuelan takeover of Colorado shifted to fearmongering about Haitians in Ohio. In these forums, the racism is overt, such as memes of Trump in a suit carrying kittens to safety while being pursued by a mob of shirtless Black men.

… The debunked claims about Haitian refugees aren’t “just nonsense,” Belew warned: “The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they’re doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time.”

There were panics about refugees eating rats in the 1980s. These were quickly followed by hate crimes against refugees, spearheaded by white power activists but employing local communities incited by that rhetoric, she said.

… By Tuesday, the Arizona GOP had erected billboards around the Phoenix area: “EAT LESS KITTENS. Vote Republican!”“
 
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