• “With Trump, a Blatantly Racist Lie Just Reached the Presidential Debate Stage”
The opening minutes of the very first question of the first presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday saw the former president alluding to a racist lie—which has been roundly debunked by law enforcement officials—about Haitian immigrants.
“You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States,” Trump said in response to a question regarding his plans for the economy. “You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns, they’re taking over buildings, they’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country.”
But that was just the mere mention of “Springfield, Ohio,” now shorthand for a virulent conspiracy theory that has swiftly captured the Republican Party in recent days. Later in the debate, Trump unleashed, fully leaning into the blatant racism by repeating the vile lie that immigrants, specifically those from Haiti, in far-flung corners of the US are eating pets.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”
This is a blood-libel level absurdity that no one believes any more than they actually believe that the CEO of Procter & Gamble said “Hail Satan” on Donahue or that Pepsi is made with dead babies. Yes, lots of people claim to believe such things, and they enjoy pretending to believe them. But it’s all pretense and duplicity, as Satanic baby-killerism always is.
Because Trump and J.D. Vance have spent several days repeating this KKK-level racist lie, it has been thoroughly investigated and debunked by reporters everywhere from the local paper in Springfield, to larger Ohio news outlets, national papers, and all the big cable news stations. That reporting revealed Vance’s source for this nonsense — a post on a white-people anti-immigrant Facebook group that said her “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” had warned her that Haitian immigrants were trying to eat her cat.
Again, no one believes this lie. We know this. How can we know? Because after reporters spoke with Springfield law enforcement, the mayor’s office, pet shelters and the local SPCA, confirming that no pets are missing and no one is eating cats in Springfield, none of the people supposedly believing this lie were relieved. They were, instead, angrily disappointed at responsible journalists and fact-checkers who were ruining their game by debunking their racist fantasy.
Trump and Vance’s luridly racist urban legends echo similarly bizarre tall tales that anti-immigrant white Americans claimed and pretended to believe during earlier waves of violent anti-immigration hysteria. Last summer, we talked about the Ursuline Convent Panic and the best-selling fraudulence of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. That discussion is relevant here, again, not just because Trump and Vance are proudly embracing the legacy of the Know Nothings, but because it gets at the way this vicious bearing of false witness is evidence of the liars’ struggling conscience — evidence that they know better, and cannot bear to know what that means about themselves.
Anyway, here are some thoughtful pieces I’ve read about Trump and Vance’s attempt to turn an Ohio town on the upswing into a racist buzzword:
- David DeWitt, “Vance, Yost targeting Haitians in Springfield, Ohio with ignorant fear-mongering disturbs me deeply“
- Joshua P. Hill, “The Lies That Kill“
- Parker Malloy, “Eating Pets and Other Lies: How the Haitian Migrant Hoax Exposes Flaws in Political Reporting“
• Pennsylvania-centric news outlet The Keystone hits the local angle of this national news story: “Berks County native endorses Kamala Harris for president.”
The endorsement from the mega-star has also prompted a lot of good “Swift Voters for Truth” puns, but those only land with people old enough to remember another election 20 years ago.
• The news alert for the word “evangelical” in my RSS feed sometimes gives me some interesting stories: “Las Vegas police arrest pastor with guns, drugs in hotel room.”
David McGee, 61, faces drug and gun-related charges connected to his Aug. 20 arrest at the Strat Hotel Casino & Tower, records said. McGee was the senior pastor at the closed The Bridge Fellowship, outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Though its building shuttered in 2023, the evangelical ministry continues online and through radio programs.
On Aug. 20, drug and counter-terrorism detectives responded to the hotel after McGee reported a piece of property missing, documents said. McGee told police he was visiting Las Vegas from North Carolina and had arrived in a private jet to find his daughter.
So Pastor McGee called the police himself and, after they arrived, he told them that he had a perfectly good explanation for the AR-15, other guns, and stash of fentanyl pills he had there in his hotel room. OK, then.
• Speaking of moral scolds from North Carolina who may have a bit of a glass-houses problem, here’s a thoroughly reported piece from The Assembly: “Ex-Porn Shop Employees Say Mark Robinson Was A Regular. He Denies It.”
In his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson wrote that he committed his life to Jesus in the late 1980s.
“I did not, however, experience a drastic conversion like some do,” wrote Robinson, now the Republican nominee for governor. “My behavior did not immediately reform. They say sin is fun for a season, and I was in that season.”
Robinson didn’t specify how long that season lasted or what sins it entailed. But according to Louis Money, who worked in several of Greensboro’s windowless, 24-hour video-pornography stores, Robinson was a frequent customer in the 1990s and early 2000s. Money, 52, told The Assembly that Robinson came in as often as five nights a week to watch porn videos in a private booth.
Five other men who said they were former employees or customers during this period also told The Assembly that Robinson visited two of these stores: Gents Video & News and I-40 Video & News.
Robinson is a Holocaust-denying, misogynist conspiracy nut but, to his partial credit, all of the porn-sh0p employees and regulars interviewed in this piece fondly recall him as a friendly, generous regular — someone who greeted them cheerfully by name and even sometimes brought pizza to share with staff and others there to enjoy the preview booths. He would be an utter disaster if he’s elected the next governor of North Carolina, but apparently, years ago, he was a pretty good regular customer at Gents.
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