I don't know about you, but I wasn't going to be satisfied with the national dialogue over the presence of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio until someone checked in from the Field Of Love. Personally, I think she might have been better off this week vibing Hurricane Francine away from Louisiana. From Marianne Williamson's Xwitter account:
“Continuing to dump on Trump because of the ‘eating cats’ issue will create blowback on Nov. 5. Haitian voodoo is in fact real, and to dismiss the story out-of-hand rather than listen to the citizens of Springfield, Ohio confirms in the minds of many voters the stereotype of Democrats as smug elite jerks who think they’re too smart to listen to anyone outside their own silo.”
First of all, the word is spelled Vodou and it is always capitalized, as it is the proper name of a religion. Second, the dog-eating fable did not come from "the people of Springfield, Ohio." It came originally from a game of Facebook telephone among some local cranks. It hit the national scene through the auspices of the likes of Charlie Kirk. That got it onto Fox News and, shortly thereafter, Republican vice-presidential candidate J. Divan Vance took it wide. The top of the ticket deployed it during his debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, and he was still pitching it during a Thursday night event in Arizona.
Meanwhile, all the actual people in the actual town of Springfield want to do is to get on with their lives and get things back to something like normal. On Thursday, several city buildings, including City Hall and several local schools, were evacuated due to bomb threats. From The New York Times:
“We are hurting,” the mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, said in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday. The tensions over the growing Haitian population in Springfield exploded this week after former President Donald J. Trump used the presidential debate to spread debunked rumors that Haitians were stealing pets and eating them. On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of Springfield City Hall, two schools and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility.
Mayor Rue said that the threats, which came by email, were a “hateful response to immigration in our town.” “Obviously, the negative response and threats are very sad and hard to handle,” he said. “We want to move forward together, and it just makes it more difficult to do that when we have violent actions and threats.”
Most of the Haitians in Springfield are there because local manufacturers invited them to come and work there. Somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 Haitians now live there, and most of them are in this country legally. Naturally, some city services have been under stress as the population of Springfield grew by a third, and that has brought out the residents of the local nut farms.
Springfield’s mayor, Mr. Rue, said that he had received a spate of menacing phone calls. Last month, Nazi sympathizers — masked men in matching red shirts, black pants and boots — waved swastika flags as they marched in downtown Springfield near a jazz festival. At least two of the men, who the authorities said were outsiders, carried rifles.
Among the targets of Thursday’s bomb threat was an elementary school that has a large Haitian student body. Apprehension has enveloped the Haitian community in Springfield this week, said Vilés Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Community Health and Support Center. Mr. Dorsainvil said that he had fielded many calls from families concerned for their children’s safety. “People started panicking,” he said. “I tried to help them understand that it’s just politics.”
All due respect to M. Dorsainvil, but this is not "just politics." This is anti-immigrant violence of a kind that has befouled American history ever since the country's founding. That an angry ignoramus like the current Republican presidential nominee, and a soulless lump of pure ambition like his running mate, would resort to it puts them on the historical chain with convent-burners, lynchers, and Jew-hating mobs. It puts them on a through-line with the Know Nothings, the Silver Shirts, the Klan, and every other group that organized itself for the purpose of pulling up behind them the ladder their parents and grandparents climbed. At the Constitutional Convention, when restrictive immigration policies were proposed, both James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin waged successful campaigns to keep them out of the new Constitution. Franklin wrote:
When foreigners after looking about for some other Country in which they can obtain more happiness, give a preference to ours, it is a proof of attachment which ought to excite our confidence and affection.
That's "just politics," both in the sense of being merely politics, and in the sense of a politics that is just.
