US elections 2024 - Springfield Confidential: Dishing with Miss Sassy

Artist's conception of Miss Sassy chilling at the day spa (Actually, our kitten Brinca chilling at the day spa). Photo: Peter Costantini

by Peter Costantini (tucson, arizona, us)
Monday, November 04, 2024
Inter Press Service

TUCSON, Arizona, US, Nov 04 (IPS) - A small incident in the mounting mayhem of the 2024 elections crystalized the state of the dark art of politics in these United States. In Springfield, Ohio, a small midwestern industrial city, a woman named Anna Kilgore noticed that her cat, Miss Sassy, had been missing for a few days. Kilgore notified the police that she feared her kitty might have been caught and eaten by the Haitian immigrants who lived next door.

A few days later, Miss Sassy showed up in Kilgore's basement, uneaten. The woman, to her credit, apologized to her neighbors.

But before the prodigal feline's return, false rumors began to circulate in Springfield and online that illegal Haitian immigrants were kidnapping and eating pets. The allegations were denied by the police, the Republican mayor, and the state of Ohio's Republican governor.

Nevertheless, the tall tale was picked up and amplified by social media and right-wing news sources. Over 20 bomb threats were called in to public institutions. The governor stationed state police in schools, some of which were forced to close temporarily, and deployed bomb-sniffing dogs and surveillance cameras around the city. The large Haitian community was terrorized.

The kicker came when ex-President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump repeated the already debunked rumor during his nationally televised debate with Vice President and current Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on September 10.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs," the ex-president said. "The people that came in, 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." U.S. Senator from Ohio and current Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance also continued to recount the falsehood in public appearances. Both Trump and Vance have made racist and xenophobic tropes about Haitians and other immigrants signature themes of their campaign.

Springfield is a formerly deindustrialized factory town that has revived economically and has again attracted numerous manufacturing jobs. But during the period of stagnation, much of the previous working-class population apparently sought work elsewhere.

So when the city's economy boomed again and manufacturing jobs returned, but workers were scarcer, word circulated on the grapevines of immigrants and other job seekers. Over the past four years, an estimated 12 to 15 thousand Haitians have moved to Clark County, of which Springfield is the seat, now making up roughly 10 percent of a county population of 136 thousand.

The City of Springfield itself has a population of a little under 60 thousand. But nobody sent the Haitians, as some of the rumors have suggested; they reportedly came on their own with encouragement from government and businesses.

According to the City web site, "Haitian immigrants are here legally" under temporary programs such as humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status. Regardless of their immigration status, the Haitian community has helped revitalize the local economy and opened 10 new businesses. As with any sudden influx of people, the population increase has sometimes strained educational and medical services and housing. But this is a problem of economic growth, which would likely occur whether or not the newcomers were immigrants.

Despite criticism from across the political spectrum, neither Trump nor Vance has retracted their immigrants-eating-pets story. When challenged, their evidence includes "I read it on the Internet" and "My constituents wrote to me about it". They are also propagating falsehoods that the Haitian immigrants are bringing diseases and crime.

Vance acknowledged backhandedly that he had known all along that the story was false. According to the Wall Street Journal, the city manager had told him that there was no evidence that the rumors were true.

Yet the Senator persisted: "The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," he asserted. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

The vice-presidential candidate also lied about the legal immigration statuses that have allowed most of the Haitians in Springfield to stay in the U.S. temporarily: "Well, if Kamala Harris waves a wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I'm still going to call them an illegal alien."

But Harris had nothing to do with deciding the immigrants' legal status. They would have had to be approved by the Departments of Homeland Security and possibly Justice. And the asylum, TPS and other forms of relief they were granted are legal immigration statuses that have been around since well before the Biden administration.

Beyond Springfield, a key strategy of the Trump – Vance campaign appears to be to repeat and refuse to retract a variety of big and small lies about immigrants that have already been discredited.

At one of his rallies, Trump claimed that In Aurora, Colorado, a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building and swathes of the state. Local police said there were problems in a building where some Venezuelan immigrants live, but that the issues were serious housing code violations, such as lack of heat or running water, not gangs.

After Hurricane Helene, Trump and other Republicans alleged that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had diverted federal disaster relief money to undocumented immigrants. "They stole the FEMA money," he said, "just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season".

FEMA said that Trump's claims were untrue, and that undocumented immigrants are not eligible for cash assistance. Trump managed to piggyback another lie onto his first: undocumented immigrants cannot vote and there is no evidence that the Biden administration has tried to bribe them.

Trump has also spearheaded a national Republican campaign that falsely claims, as in the FEMA story, that undocumented immigrants are voting illegally in large numbers. The idea has been thoroughly discredited. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told me that non-citizen voting is "at best vanishingly rare" and "is not an issue that has or will impact any election. That is a conspiracy theory and a mythology that is not true."

It has long been illegal for non-citizens to vote, and everyone who registers to vote has to swear on penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen 18 years old or older. But the Republican fearmongering is getting steadily louder. Republican legislatures are passing bills prohibiting what's already prohibited, and some GOP politicians are calling all immigrants, even naturalized citizens who can legally vote, "illegals".

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has offered no evidence that non-citizen voting is a problem. But he declared at a press conference, "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections."

In the mendacity derby, Trump, Vance and Johnson are shoo-ins for win, place and show.

I was curious how Miss Sassy felt about all the brouhaha, but her publicist was not taking my calls. I suspected the famous feline might have tired of her celebrity and gone dark. Still, since Vance admitted that he made up fictional stories to get the attention of the media, I decided to do the same for my interview with Miss Sassy. But unlike Vance, I will not lie about it – I'll tell you what's true and what I'm making up.

So here is an intuitive transcript of my imaginary interview with Miss Sassy. My comments are in parentheses.

Miss Sassy

I'm glad you asked that. I'm called Miss Sassy because I'm very outspoken and sometimes even impudent.

I hope you won't think I'm species-ist, but honestly, you can't get good human help anymore. You've probably heard the saying: "Dogs have masters, cats have staff." Well, my staff in our house in Springfield, Ohio, is well-meaning, but ... let's just say she's not one of the sharpest claws on the paws. (If you live with cats, you know they think like this.)

Despite what those crazy-ass MAGAheads are saying, when I wandered over to check out the Haitians next door, they were really nice to me. Dahling, it was like a day spa with a three-star restaurant. They gave my paws a pedicure, massaged my back and haunches, scratched my chin, and broke out the catnip. Then they poured me out the juice from the cans of tuna fish they opened for tuna salad.

Another day they made a Haitian dish they called lambi, some kind of seafood in a butter sauce, and they let me try it. It was to die for. (Completely invented. But I have lived in Haiti and I believe that Haitians generally love their pets. And I have had delectable lambi on an idyllic beach in Saint-Louis-du-Sud.)

So no, they didn't try to eat me. Au contraire: they fed me some pretty tasty stuff. When I found out what my human accused them of, I got so mad that I peed on her favorite chair. (Can't confirm this, but it sounds intuitive.)

As you may have heard, my human retracted her story when I showed up healthy and rested. She explained that that she found me in the basement of our house after a couple of days, acknowledged that the Haitian neighbors did not eat me, and apologized to them. So I forgave her. (Most of this has been widely reported, although forgiveness is hard to verify.)

What I don't understand about some humans is how they can keep on repeating the same lie about the neighbors eating me when they know it's not true. Yes, I'm talking about that politician who carries an orange-haired rodent around on his head – oh, sorry, I mean the combover - and that baby-faced guy who looks and sounds like his intern. Agent Orange, as the filmmaker Spike Lee calls him, repeated the lies about me and Springfield on TV during a national debate. What's even harder to fathom is why a lot of people still believe them. Arrogant humans like to say they're the most intelligent species. Well, these days, the evidence is scarce. (The rodent part is false. But it's just insult comedy, and as Puerto Ricans know, the ex-president is a big fan.)

But hold on, I do have a theory about that. Nowadays everyone's talking about Artificial Intelligence. And being a very intelligent cat, I've gotten curious about AI too. My human thinks I'm just walking on the keyboard of her computer and tries to shoo me off, and sometimes I type things like "xdr54tttttthjn" just to keep her in the dark. But actually I'm doing research and downloading articles nonstop. (Take everything about AI with a grain of salt.)

Now here's the theory that I'm working on: I think Trump and Vance and the Republicans have come up with a new mutant form of Artificial Intelligence that I call Artificial Stupidity. AI tries to teach machines to talk like humans. AS teaches humans to talk like machines. (Of course this is made up, but doesn't it explain a lot?)

Maybe you've noticed that the whole MAGA crowd, and their wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, are constantly parroting the same keywords and talking points and memes. They all sound like they've been programmed to be mindless automatons.

Here's my hypothesis: AI uses large language models to teach neural networks how to learn. AS uses yuge wordsalad models – starting with all the speeches and tweets of Beloved Leader – to inject anti-social venom that bypasses the frontal lobe, hijacks the amygdala, and teaches the MAGA faithful whom to hate and how. It sends a symphony of racist and sexist dog whistles into their vulnerable brains.

As it takes over their minds, AS seems to incubate a form of emotional vulnerability called Big Daddy Syndrome. It's a condition that most dictators, demagogues and cult leaders know how to manipulate. Whatever the problem, Big Daddy's answer is "Don't worry your dependent little head about this. I'm the only one who can take care of it for you. I have a concept of a policy. Just leave it to me."

Please excuse the New Age pop psychology, but would you believe I used to talk with Sigmund Freud's ghost about problems like this? He told me, "This is a classic case of psychological displacement in two dimensions. The subjects are substituting Big Daddy for a missing or abusive father figure. And they're attacking immigrants who have done nothing to harm them to displace the bosses or billionaires or politicians who have actually been hurting them."

To assert Big Daddy's dominance over his followers, Trump cultivates a brash rhetorical style. The late-night TV satirist Stephen Colbert compared it to a leaf blower. I think of Big Daddy spraying disinformation and bigotry all around him as a sort of senile tom cat obsessively marking his territory. Then Vance follows up, trying to spin everything and make excuses, like the poor clown in the circus parade sweeping up after the elephants.

But really, how do you know when Trump is lying? Here's the tell just watch his lips. If they move, he's probably lying. (Badabing badaboom)

I think it might have been Trump's advisor Steve Bannon who said, "Before Truth can put on her shoes, my lies have gone halfway around the world. But, truth be told, the proceeds from my lies are in an attaché case full of unmarked bills in a bank in the Cayman Islands, and I'm on my second mojito." (This is a total fabrication. Although in fact Bannon was convicted and serving time for embezzling a million bucks, but Trump pardoned him and got him out of jail.)

OK, so it's clear that Trump is an inveterate liar. But is it really fair to call him a fascist? Well, at least two retired generals and a former Defense Secretary who had worked for Trump, and some of the most respected academic experts on fascism have all said publicly that they consider him a fascist. Many of his ex-cabinet members and advisors have chimed in that he is a dangerous authoritarian. The ex-President replied that he was "the opposite of a Nazi", whatever that is, and called Harris "fascist" in return. His rhetorical strategy has been reduced to the old playground taunt, "I'm rubber, you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you." (See a recent front page of the New York Times.)

As you can see, I don't understand why MAGA people can't see through Trump. But I also don't think most of them are bad or stupid. After all, my human may wear a Trump T-shirt, but I know she's got a good heart. The problem is, a lot of them are what are being called "low-information" voters, meaning they don't pay much attention to any news at all, and only take in random snatches of what's actually going on. Then they vote without having much idea of whom or what they are voting for. (You did not hear this first here.)

Look, there's no shame in being ignorant – we're all ignorant about many things. And it surely takes a strong stomach to follow politics. But then Big Daddy comes along selling his snake oil about who's responsible for all your problems, and the answer is always: it's the f___ing immigrants. Not coincidentally, immigrants are mostly Brown and Black people like our neighbors.

Then, when Trump serves you a steaming bowl of bile, you slurp it all up and wash it down with an ivermectin chaser, and then maybe act it out in a fantasy state of confusion or fear or hate. But dawg, the truth is that you're hurting real flesh-and-blood people like the Haitians, and shaming the rest of us, too. (About four out of five immigrants to the U.S. come from Latin America, Asia or Africa.)

P.T. Barnum, of Barnum and Bailey Circus fame, supposedly said: "There's a sucker born every minute." In J.D. Vance, Trump has brought in young grifter talent who's a little smoother at scamming people. That's why I call him J.D. Barnum, and he seems to have revved the production line up to a sucker every second. (There is no evidence that Barnum said this, but it's usually attributed to him.)

Just imagine what your children and grandchildren will think of you if they learn you were one of the poor schlemiels who fell for Trump's and Vance's toxic hogwash. Do yourself and all of us a big favor: pull your head out of your hindquarters and just say no to the lies of Don the Con and J.D. Barnum.

~ ~ ~

At this point, Miss Sassy's cell phone rang, and she's like "Sorry, I have to take this." It sounded like it might have been Oprah. Then without taking leave, she sashayed back down the stairs into the basement.