Mentions J. D. Vance

Thomas is the single best commentator on the theology that drives these people.

Where does this end? Who is at risk? Anyone who stands in the way of the MAGA vision of purging the nation. “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Stephen Miller lied about Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week: “This was the right person sent to the right place.” Who cares what the law says: To the MAGA ideologues, Garcia is outside the boundaries of “real America,” he does not – and must never – belong to the Volk, the “real” people. This is a core tenet of the vision that animates the Trumpist Right. “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” JD Vance proclaimed last September, when he was trying to incite a pogrom against the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio based on vile lies and conspiracy theories he was instrumental in propagating. He knew the people he was targeting were in the United States legally. Yet for blood-and-soil nationalists like Miller and Vance, there is a “Higher Truth” that overrides all else: The “homeland” is under siege, overrun with enemies who “poison the blood.” The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional.

The MAGA rage won’t be confined to migrants either. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. It’s never far from “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” to “the enemy within.” In the MAGA imagination, America is simultaneously threatened by outsiders and by insidiously subversive forces on the inside. The “enemy within” – those Un-American forces of radical leftism and “globalist” elites – are as acutely dangerous as the invaders from without. In order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make America Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be subjugated and purged. That is the core promise of Trumpism as a political project.

This is how the attempts to detain, deport, and disappear foreign nationals are directly connected to both the escalating attacks on universities as well as the assault on state institutions and the civil service. To the Trumpist Right, all of these institutions have been taken over by the “globalist” enemy within, they function as power centers for the “woke” elites, they fund and propagate their campaign to subvert and weaken the nation.

JD Vance brought all of that pathological hatred of Haitians to bear when he accused Haitian immigrants, whom he considers a threat, of eating cats (the same cats he also considers a threat to white birth rates). The racists who participate in the anti-immigrant online mobs do the same. Not everybody who is piling on is aware of the deep and disgusting history of racism toward Haitians: After all, many online MAGAs have an aversion to knowing things about the other peoples of the world. But they know enough (that Haitians are Black and vulnerable in this country) to derive glee from participating in cruelty.

It hurts, of course. It always hurts when you are reminded of just how many white folks hate your people. It always stings to see a few other Black people or other supposed allies join in the denigration. I think the insult that Haitians are eating pets is doubled for me because I know for a fact that white Americans care more about their family pets than they do about Haitian immigrants being threatened and harassed right now. If all of Haiti were a nature preserve for cats and dogs, it would be protected at all costs. Since it is a home for free Black folks, its people are treated like dogs.

But being hurt and being defeated are two different things. White folks have been trying to strangle Haiti and Haitians into submission for over 200 years, and yet we are still here. What I can laugh about is this: The white supremacist forces multicultural America is trying to defeat in this election are forces little ol’ Haitians defeated literal centuries ago. America is still trying to get at our level.

We are currently getting a terrifying preview of what all this would look like in practice. Trump has never shied away from admitting – from promising – that his mass deportation “will be a bloody story.” And the leaders on the Right are currently doing their best to ensure that there will be blood long before the election.

On September 9, J.D. Vance used his social media to rail against “Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” He added: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

[…]

Over the next few days, Vance kept doubling down. On September 10, he claimed a child had been murdered by “a Haitian immigrant who had no right to be here.” The senator from Ohio did not care that the child’s parents begged him to stop using their boy, who was killed in a car accident, to demonize immigrants.

[…]

This vile propaganda has had its desired effect. Already on September 12, City Hall, schools, and the DMV in Springfield had to be evacuated because of bomb threats from people raging against the Haitian immigrants. Acts of vandalism against the Haitian community followed. More threats against elementary and middle schools as well as against public officials on September 13. On September 14 and 15, hospitals had to be evacuated – so did universities, as someone threatened to shoot members of the Haitian community on campus. Ohio State Troopers now sweep every building in every school in Springfield Ohio, every morning before the start of classes, looking for explosives, because the bomb threats keep coming. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis are marching through town – the Proud Boys, and a group called Blood Tribe. Life in Springfield, Ohio upended. All based on a lie.

Quick question, hotshot: Which political party in the U. S. is more likely to believe gender is fluid? If you think it’s the Democrats, the guys more closely associated with LGBTQ+ rights, you’d be incorrect. More and more, Republicans are claiming that gender identity is not just fluid but so incredibly fragile that even hearing about the possibility of non-cis identities existing poses a serious risk to children.

Case in point: J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, two whole adult male senators, who apparently believe that by asking a test question about gender on the U. S. census the government might infect teens with the notion that trans existence is possible, thereby destabilizing their entire reality… or something.