Finally, 56 days before November 5, America has reached the xenophobic “OMG dark-skinned immigrants are killing and eating all our pets!” stage of the presidential election. As we do.
At least that is what this recent email from the Donald Trump campaign tells us, and would Donald Trump lie to us? (Yes. Vividly and repeatedly.) The email informs us that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, have been decapitating ducks and hunting geese and other livestock, which they then have been eating. There is also an accusation that Haitians are kidnapping family pets and turning them into meals. In fact, to hear the wingnuts tell it across social media the last few days, the entire town of Springfield is now basically one giant cesspool of voodoo and animal carcasses currently being eaten by Haitian immigrants.
Why Springfield? Over the last few years, the city has seen a massive influx of Haitian immigrants. By some estimates, 20,000 Haitians have settled in the area, most of them since the pandemic. The city only had about 58,000 residents as of the last census in 2020. This has activated the xenophobic instincts of the locals who would like to ignore the fact that many of these Haitians are here legally, employed, paying taxes, and generally contributing to the well-being of the community.
Now, because you read Wonkette, and also because you are not a raging lunatic (probably), you have already guessed that this whole blow-up about immigrants decapitating and eating Huey, Dewey and Louie is a bunch of bullshit that has been knocked down by authorities.
The rumor seems to have started with a genuinely terrible story out of Canton, Ohio, which is 170 miles across the state from Springfield. Last month, a woman in Canton was arrested for killing and eating a cat. And live-streaming it on Facebook, which continues to be the absolute worst. The woman is not Haitian, or apparently an immigrant from anywhere. She is Black, though, which probably helped trigger the lunatics.
So this story got out into the right-wing mediasphere, where the wingers melded it with a video from a Springfield city commission meeting in August of a man accusing the local Haitians of cutting the heads off ducks in the park and eating them. (Needless to say, there is no evidence local Haitians were doing this.)
Some of the worst people on the Internet, the ones who nonetheless have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, spread it around. Pinch-tool faced bigot Charlie Kirk started yammering about it on his podcast, adding the detail that “the duck pond in a local park is being picked clean.”
While he was at it, Kirk also claimed that a traffic accident caused by a Haitian driver that killed a kid on his school bus last year — a flashpoint of anger in the community — was being celebrated by the Biden and Harris White House, which celebrates all deaths caused by undocumented migrants, because they bring America “one step closer to the Great Replacement.”
Now the panic about the Haitians in Springfield has reached the Trump presidential campaign, which is probably way Too Online to begin with. In addition to that email, on Monday vice-presidential candidate and sentient tube of cookie dough JD Vance tweeted that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” because if there is racism and xenophobia to be mined anywhere, JD Vance will go after it like a dweeby weirdo mining for Bitcoin. Which, in all fairness, he has probably done, the weirdo.
Maybe someone could just buy all the wingers an old Nintendo and a copy of Duck Hunt so they’ll leave the rest of us alone.
OPEN THREAD!
[Trump campaign email / New York Times]
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