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

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Then, the CHUDs came …

“… On Aug. 10, a group wearing ski masks and carrying swastika flags and rifles marched in Springfield. The ADL identified them as Blood Tribe, which it describes as a growing neo-Nazi group claiming to have chapters across the U.S. and Canada.

On Aug. 27, during the routine public-comment portion of the Springfield City Commission meeting, a man identifying himself as a Blood Tribe member said: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” [My note — this bears a strike resemblance to Trump’s recent rhetoric]

Rue, the mayor, interrupted him, saying “You sound threatening to me,” and asking police to peacefully remove him.

And recently, roughly 20 individuals claiming to represent the Proud Boys marched in the town.

Springfield NAACP President Denise Williams said residents are on edge from visits by the groups. “I’m saying to our people near and far to please stand down and don’t approach these guys—they are armed,” she said. “It’s quite dangerous.”

[Then Vance and Trump took it national]

… Blood Tribe took a victory lap for its presence in the town, boasting on Sept. 11, “We are on the ground in Springfield weekly—we even showed up to their City Council Meeting.”

Vance, meanwhile, has continued to defend his claims.

… A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors.

But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement. …

[Meanwhile, even the Vance shift from pet eating to increased disease claims are misleading w/r/t HIV cases and otherwise a lie] …

Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015. The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015. …”
 


Brutal in its simplicity:


City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.

He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck.

I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.

By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.

That night, former President Donald Trump stood on a Philadelphia debate stage and shot the rumor into the stratosphere.

… It was the culmination of a spectacular collision of forces that thrust Springfield into the heart of the U.S. presidential election.

Over the summer, outside neo-Nazi groups—which specialize in exploiting local controversy to foment outrage about migrants—had seized on a local controversy and fanned the narrative of pet-eating Haitians.

Then the Trump campaign blasted those rumors to the world—and kept pushing them even after they were exposed as lies. The Trump campaign continues to run hard at the controversy. Trump last Friday said he planned “large deportations” from Springfield—whose Haitian community is overwhelmingly in the country legally.

Trump campaign surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy plans to host a town hall in Springfield this Thursday. Vance said on Tuesday that Trump would like to visit Springfield, too, at some point.

Attempts to contain the damage in Springfield were quickly overwhelmed despite city leaders’ racing from meeting to meeting trying to stem the tide.

The Ohio state police were called in to protect local children as they returned to school. A security tower with cameras was erected outside City Hall. Thirty-six bomb threats had been logged as of Tuesday evening. …”

More partnering with neo-Nazis, but we have a poster who won’t vote for Harris because she cited a Trump quote about Charlottesville which may not point to Trump being racist-friendly, and not the 100 other examples (such as this one) that show Trump is definitely cozy with the neo-Nazis and racists of the world.
 
Reading articles like the WSJ one above, it's easy to see why the Trump and Vance campaigns are centering their efforts on Springfield. They see it as the perfect town to use to symbolize everything they've been claiming about immigration. In their version, Springfield was a good and decent town that has been "invaded" by a horde of black immigrants from Haiti, in a move that was approved by the Biden Administration - thus "proving" that Democrats are allowing immigrant mobs into the USA to take over small towns and cities everywhere. And now that they're in Springfield they're taking the town over and crime is soaring (it's not) and they're doing wicked things like eating white people's pets (they're not) and stealing from white people (they're not) and overwhelming local hospitals and other facilities.

For Trumpers this is one of their worst nightmares, and it's one that people like Trump and Vance have masterfully played on for years and years. And their hope is that by November they will have convinced whites living in small towns and cities in key Midwestern swing states, as well as Pennsylvania and NC and GA and so on, that this is exactly what will happen to them if the Democrats stay in power. The fact that the Haitians have in many respects turned around a dying town and brought it some life doesn't matter, the fact that they are often doing jobs that local whites aren't willing to do doesn't matter, the fact that the stories of eating pets and soaring crime isn't true doesn't matter. All that matters to the Trump GOP is that they can use Springfield to try and frighten whites all across the country that this is your future unless Trump wins the election. It's ugly, it's extreme nativism at its very worst, it runs contrary to the whole idea that we're a nation of immigrants, it's placing the lives of immigrants in places like Springfield in danger, but they don't care. They have likely decided that this is their best chance to still try and win the election, and they're going to run with it for all its worth.
 
I’m sure JD Vance will agree with Marge here:

Homer: [describes series of awful events in NYC, culminating with falling through a manhole into the city sewer] And that's when the CHUDs came at me.

Marge: Oh, Homer, of course you'll have a bad impression of New York... if you only focus on the pimps and the CHUDs.
 
Reading articles like the WSJ one above, it's easy to see why the Trump and Vance campaigns are centering their efforts on Springfield. They see it as the perfect town to use to symbolize everything they've been claiming about immigration. In their version, Springfield was a good and decent town that has been "invaded" by a horde of black immigrants from Haiti, in a move that was approved by the Biden Administration - thus "proving" that Democrats are allowing immigrant mobs into the USA to take over small towns and cities everywhere. And now that they're in Springfield they're taking the town over and crime is soaring (it's not) and they're doing wicked things like eating white people's pets (they're not) and stealing from white people (they're not) and overwhelming local hospitals and other facilities.

For Trumpers this is one of their worst nightmares, and it's one that people like Trump and Vance have masterfully played on for years and years. And their hope is that by November they will have convinced whites living in small towns and cities in key Midwestern swing states, as well as Pennsylvania and NC and GA and so on, that this is exactly what will happen to them if the Democrats stay in power. The fact that the Haitians have in many respects turned around a dying town and brought it some life doesn't matter, the fact that they are often doing jobs that local whites aren't willing to do doesn't matter, the fact that the stories of eating pets and soaring crime isn't true doesn't matter. All that matters to the Trump GOP is that they can use Springfield to try and frighten whites all across the country that this is your future unless Trump wins the election. It's ugly, it's extreme nativism at its very worst, it runs contrary to the whole idea that we're a nation of immigrants, it's placing the lives of immigrants in places like Springfield in danger, but they don't care. They have likely decided that this is their best chance to still try and win the election, and they're going to run with it for all its worth.
Agree, but the problem for Trump is it doesn’t appear anyone outside the base is believing a word of it. That could change, but this seems to be doing more harm than good among the people he’ll need to win the election.
 
As an aside of the main issue, The Simpsons have an incredible opportunity to be relevant to the national discourse again, possibly (probably?) for the last time, if they were to use the coincidence of this happening in and to a town named Springfield and run with it early in their new season.
 
As an aside of the main issue, The Simpsons have an incredible opportunity to be relevant to the national discourse again, possibly (probably?) for the last time, if they were to use the coincidence of this happening in and to a town named Springfield and run with it early in their new season.
It would depend on how long it takes episodes to be made. South Park famously makes their tv episodes in roughly a week, whereas other shows like family guy take nearly a year for a single episode.
 
It would depend on how long it takes episodes to be made. South Park famously makes their tv episodes in roughly a week, whereas other shows like family guy take nearly a year for a single episode.
The last I read about The Simpsons, they often are working on a decent number of episodes at a time and so the process is quite drawn out for most episodes, but they have the ability to make significant changes until about 2 weeks before an episode would air and small changes can happen within the week before airing.

If that's still true, they'd have plenty of time to get an episode out for October (as the season premiere is September 29th with the episode already being known) before the election.

Of course, the largest obstacle is probably that The Simpsons are on Fox. I can't imagine that the Murdochs would be terribly happy with The Simpsons lampooning the situation the way it deserves.
 
Trump has demonstrated particular disdain for Haitians for a while …


“… He [Trump] insisted one afternoon in 2017 that immigrants from Haiti should not be let into the United States, shocking his chief of staff, secretary of state, homeland security secretary and others gathered in the Oval Office by declaring that people from the beleaguered nation “all have AIDS.”

Now, as he runs for a second term, Mr. Trump is once again denigrating Haitians, part of a pattern that goes back years and appears to have its roots in the early 1980s, when the Centers for Disease Control stigmatized Haitians as a particular threat in the spread of AIDS, driving years of panic about the newly discovered disease.

Mr. Trump, a self-described germophobe, has persisted in that debunked belief even though it was formally abandoned by the C.D.C. nearly four decades ago.

… “We have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem,” the former president told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, in October 2021. “Many of those people will probably have AIDS, and they’re coming into our country. And we don’t do anything about it.”


“Wait a minute,” he lectured them in an Oval Office meeting. “Why do we want people from Haiti here?” He said that Haiti was among a series of “shithole countries” whose people had little to offer. Can’t we just leave Haiti out, he asked the lawmakers. The legislation never passed and Mr. Trump worked to make it harder for Haitians to immigrate.

His administration canceled temporary protected status, a program that seeks to provide refuge to people fleeing violence and natural disasters, for tens of thousands of Haitians. And his officials stopped providing temporary work visas for Haitians just before the end of the president’s term.

… In 1982, the C.D.C. warned that the unknown disease was causing cancer and death in four main categories of people that came to be known as the “four H’s”: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users and Haitians. The agency noted that a cluster of recent immigrants from Haiti had contracted the disease, along with the other groups.

… In fact, health officials say about 2 percent of Haiti’s population — or about 180,000 people — has H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. That is a higher percentage than in the United States, but far lower than in many African countries. There is little evidence that many of those infected are immigrating to the United States. …”
 
“… On Wednesday night on Long Island, Trump yet again went after the Haitian community in Springfield. Trump said he would visit the town as he continued to make false claims about the migrants in the city.

“How about in Springfield, Ohio, they had 32,000 – this is a little beautiful town, no crime, no problem – 32,000 illegal immigrants come into the town,” Trump said. “So they almost double their population in a period of a few weeks. Can you believe it? And you know what? They’ve got to get much tougher. I’m going to go there in the next two weeks. I’m going to Springfield.”

“You may never see me again, but that’s okay,” he added. “‘Whatever happened to Trump? Well, he never got out of Springfield.’”

… “So the mayor of Springfield, and I think he’s a very nice person,” Trump continued. “But instead of saying we’re getting them all out ... he says, very simply, ‘we’re hiring teachers to teach them English.’”

“Could you believe it? ‘We are hiring interpreters.’ So when they go to school and take the place of our children in school, we have an interpreter. Each one will have a private interpreter. What the hell is wrong with our country?” he asked.


… The former president said on Wednesday night, “We’re getting them out of our country. They came in illegally. They’re destroying our country. We’re getting them out. They’re going to be brought back to the country from which they came.”

… Meanwhile, Vance doubled down on Wednesday on calling the Haitian migrants in Springfield “illegal” even as they’re here legally.


“The media loves to say that the Haitian migrants hundreds of thousands of them, by the way, 20,000 in Springfield, but hundreds of thousands of them all across the country, they are here legally,” Vance said. “And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs, mass parole, and temporary protective status ... to wave a wand and to say, ‘We’re not going to deport those people here.’”

He added: “Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. And illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.” …”

 
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