How (Not) To Make Fun of Bigots

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During the last Presidential debate, former president Donald Trump told an egregious, racist lie about Haitian people. Parroting a rumor he heard from his running mate JD Vance, the claim was that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH are “eating the cats and dogs” of Real Americans. This is a classic from the white supremacist playbook: saying that people of another race are more savage / less civilized than us, that their lifestyles are inherently a threat to our way of life, and therefore the members of that race need to be… well, you get it.

The anatomy of this lie is incredibly interesting and is easily worth its own essay. While social media has become synonymous with misinformation, according to this breakdown from misinformation watchdog NewsGuard, the originator of the claim may not have been a social media user at all. Erika Lee, who first posted about the false rumor on Facebook, has even come out and said that she regrets sharing it in the first place (she never thought that spreading a racist lie would actually, you know, hurt people!) Whatever the case, it’s too late now: Springfield schools shut down for several days thanks to bomb threats, KKK fliers are lining the streets, and anti-Haitian violence has reached pogrom levels in Ohio and elsewhere.

Republicans are inciting race riots, which is an escalation (though not much of one) from the rhetoric they’ve been using for years: they wave signs reading “mass deportation now”, repeat the lie that violent crime is on the rise (it’s actually at an all-time low), and mischaracterize “legal immigration” as something incredibly easy to do (it’s not). My take on immigration, by the way, can be summarized as follows:

Perhaps the most alarming piece of this story is not Republicans’ willingness to lie, but rather their willingness to lie and then immediately admit that they lied: in an interview with Dana Bash a few days after the debate, JD Vance admitted that he completely made the story up to get media attention. This mirrors another recent story where Trump claimed that teenagers were literally going off to school and coming home having received bottom surgery, and anti-trans activists responding by saying “Okay, so THAT isn’t happening, but we’re glad he exaggerated because it brought attention to the issue.”

Clearly, there is something to be said about how there is no bottom when it comes to certain politician’s willingness to lie and harm others to accrue power. I’m here, however, to talk about what happened next: people starting making jokes about the situation.