UPDATED: The Monster of the Week

It's the same monster every week.

There is little more predictable than SWATting and bomb threats against the right wing’s monster of the week. MAGA has a new one since the presidential debate, and the threats have already arrived. This “monster” is a barbaric mass of seething black and brown skinned immigrants from Haiti overrunning Springfield, Ohio looking for pets to steal and eat. Unsurprisingly to anyone with critical thinking skills (save one, I guess? but we’ll get to that) this monster does not exist.

However Trump and J.D. Vance have each insisted that it does, or at the very least Trump has asserted it does and Vance has asserted that his followers should act as if it does, whether it does or not. As a natural and predictable result, the Springfield News-Sun is reporting that bomb threats are closing public facilities throughout the town.

Springfield City Hall was evacuated around 8:30 a.m. Thursday following a bomb threat “to multiple facilities throughout Springfield,” according to a city statement released Thursday morning.

Drivers license bureaus in Clark County were also closed Thursday morning in relation to the threats, […] And parents of students at one Springfield school said they were told to pick up their children.

The News-Sun’s headline, unfortunately, is almost as bad as one could get without going full Radio/TV Mille Collines:

Springfield City Hall, school, others hit by threats tied to Haitian issue

The problem with this wording is that there is no Haitian issue. There is an issue with racist white people screaming “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!”

The fault, dear News-Sun, is not in our immigrants, but in ourselves. This is a problem with America’s racism, not the peoples of the rest of the world.

I don’t wish to pretend that fifty years ago the News-Sun would have written a better headline, because WHOOO-BOY! we had some racism going on then, too. The Boston Globe, for one, printed quotes from racist whites opposed to integration as uncritically as you can imagine. The framing then was frequently “the problems of bussing,” or “the problems of integration.” But, spoiler alert, pulling every string and messing up everything was racism all along.

Over on Wonkette you’ll see Rebecca Schoenkopf’s most recent article Moderating the Moderators in which she tells the story of her son’s brief encounter with a MAGA professor (of critical thinking, of all things!) upset that the moderators “ganged up” with Kamala Harris in attacking Trump. While the professor herself did not detail which of the moderators’ actions riled the prof, Schoenkopf argues that there was very little moderator pushback at all, compared to what might have been reasonable:

The moderators didn’t fact-check Donald Trump on his 33 (plus) lies. They didn’t say, “Mr. Trump, inflation under Joe Biden is not the highest it’s ever been, you were alive in the ‘70s. Remember? The cocaine?”

Instead, the moderators focussed on the delusional and harmful fantasies made up whole-cloth that Trump originated or passed on:

DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community —

Returning to Schoenkopf:

And why did David Muir say that? Because immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not eating dogs, they’re not eating cats, they’re not eating the pets. And that very day, JD Vance had said it doesn’t matter if the rumor that they are is false, people should keep spreading it.

There is a more reasonable and rational interpretation of this pushback than the thesis that moderators were ganging up with Harris to attack Trump. Recent history has given news organizations 787,000,000 reasons not to allow dangerous fantasies to be broadcast unrebutted on their air. Lie about inflation to make Kamala Harris seem worse than she is? That’s not going to end up in a billion dollar lawsuit. But if you lie about the immigrant residents of Springfield, we know as sure as sundown that there will be consequences. Bomb threats are just the most predictable (thanks to Libs of TikTok). What happens when a major news station broadcasts racist lies and the result is an anti-immigrant, racist mass shooting? It’s not implausible that when people are harmed by the obvious defamation broadcast on a network’s air that this fucking around may be followed by a period of finding out.

If you’re not a professor of critical thinking, the reasonable assumption is that the moderators did not wish to find out. Unfortunately, given that Trump and Vance have adopted the stance “can’t stop, won’t stop,” we may all find out in the most horrible way possible: when the smoking gun comes in the form of a smoking gun.

And when that happens, what will you be able to say to yourself? Did you fight the monster of the week?

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I just found this article in The Haitian Times that details more of the impacts on the community — this time speaking with actual Haitian immigrants and not merely town officials:

Aside from the anxiety caused by Tuesday night’s debate, the woman also said her cars have been vandalized twice in the middle of the night. She woke up one morning to broken windows and another to acid thrown on the vehicle.

“I’m going to have to move because this area is no longer good for me,” she said. “I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart. I’m anxious and scared.”

Later in the article:

Sophia Pierrelus, a community activist, said families have been calling her to share that they are scared all morning.

People are very afraid for their lives,” Pierrelus said. “Many families are starting to leave Springfield last night and some kids aren’t even going to school because of fear of being attacked.”

The whole article is excellent. You should give The Haitian Times your clicks on this one.

Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!