Source: The Washington Post / Getty

The MAGA world just doesn’t get it. They either don’t understand or simply don’t care (actually, it’s definitely the latter) that their brand of “addressing the immigration crisis” is effectively hate speech and it does more than just offend Black and brown migrants and U.S. citizens of various nationalities — it puts a target on their backs.

Donald Trump stood up on a nationally televised presidential debate stage and repeated the same racist, dangerous lies about the community of Haitians who live in Ohio under protected status. Then he expanded the lie to cover all undocumented immigrants, saying they were  abducting cats and dogs and eating them in Ohio.

That vulgarity was followed by his running mate J.D. Vance, Sen. Ted Cruz and others spreading it via social media. In other words, Trump wasn’t just lying. He was essentially rallying white nationalist troops and goading them into committing hate crimes. Yes, Trump did hand meme-makers across the internet a smorgasbord of comedic fodder. But he also put Haitian migrants and Haitian Americans at risk.

From Reuters:

Haitian community leaders across the U.S. said the Republican candidate’s remarks about immigrants eating household pets during his debate with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris could put lives at risk and further inflame tensions in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of recent Haitian arrivals have boosted the local economy but also strained the safety net.

“We have to be careful where we go,” said Viles Dorsainvil, 38, who says the Haitian community center he heads in Springfield has received threatening phone calls. The hostility has prompted one friend working at an Amazon warehouse to consider leaving, he said.
“He said that things are getting out of hand now; the way people are treating us, making bad comments about us,” Dorsainvil said.
See, the thing about MAGA supporters is — they’re white. (Well, mostly.) As much as white conservatives are crying their perpetually aggrieved Caucasian tears over what they perceive as rampant anti-white discrimination in a country that is more than 60% white with a government makeup that is overwhelmingly and disproportionately white, they really don’t know what it’s like to have their whole race held under the gun for what a few members of said race did, or, in this case, absolutely did not do.
It doesn’t matter that — as ABC debate moderator David Muir correctly pointed out to the dismay of MAGA minions across the nation — the city planners in Springfield said there’s no evidence or credible reports supporting Team Trump’s lie.
The  Springfield Police Department and the state’s Republican governor  also confirmed it was completely untrue.
But Trump, Vance and right-wing pundits across media still got to be dismissive, trivial, obtuse and insufferably white as they played a semantics game trying to justify their racist and xenophobic idiocy because they know whiteness will remain unaffected by it. They both figuratively and literally have no skin in the game.
After the debate, Vance erroneously doubled down on his false claim, saying,
“First of all, city officials have not said it’s not true. They said they don’t have all the evidence,” he claimed with nothing to back it up.
He added that there are “both firsthand and secondhand reports saying this stuff is happening,” which we would all have to take at face value since he keeps repeating that claim without being able to produce a single person who has given a “firsthand” or “secondhand” report of witnessing the actions Vance and Trump continue to lie about.

Source: Bill Clark / Getty

Vance’s campaign tried to defend the initial tweet by saying that the candidate received “a high volume” of messages from concerned citizens. But again, there’s no proof. No emails, texts or voice messages to back up that statement either. Of course Trump’s “evidence” was that he heard it on TV. But that didn’t stop MAGA-verse. They started sharing a video of a woman being arrested for allegedly eating a cat.
Just a couple of issues besides innocent until proven guilty protections. The woman, 27-year-old Alexis Ferrell, was born in Ohio. She’s American. But let’s just say for the sake of argument that Ferrell was an undocumented migrant from Haiti. She’s still just one person, so how exactly would that justify condemning all Haitian migrants whether they’re undocumented or not?

Tulsa, 1921 Source: Greenwood Cultural Center / Getty

A painful and critical reminder

The Tulsa race massacre of 1921, which was about subpar whites unable to face their failures–or the successes of the Black community–used the an unsubstantiated accusation about a single Black man who was accused of sexually assaulting a single white woman. Even if the Black man was guilty, which he likely wasn’t, the white mob decided all Black people in Tulsa — including women, children and elderly people who clearly had nothing to do with the alleged assault — needed to die.
At least for right now, a white mob might not be able to get away with lynching an entire Black town, but the energy is the same. In 2024, white people who hate Black and brown migrants and baselessly fear being replaced by them want to attack everyone who is a migrant, while giving a pass to Trump, who has used the labor of undocumented people for years.
Trump and his supporters keep lying about surges in immigrant crime that don’t exist, and  Trump keeps comparing migrants to Hannibal Lecter and calling them “animals” who are “not human” while his campaign shares racist images of Black migrants to scare white America.
It might not be Tulsa — but it’s the same brand of violent and propaganda-reliant white supremacy at work.
But, you know — MAGA! 
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