News Brief: Media Incitement Against Haitian Migrants and J.D. Vance’s Standpoint Theory for Bigoted Dopes
Citations Needed | September 18, 2024 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Oatreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support is incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full length episodes. We will be starting season eight of Citations Needed very, very shortly. So stay tuned for those episodes coming your way.
But in the meantime, Adam, we thought we would do this News Brief because one of the campaigns for president, currently, is inciting violence against immigrants in this country, more so than usual. You know, you would think that alone would be a headline. It’s not. But the pogrom-inciting, anti-Haitian immigrant vile nonsense that is being spread by the Trump campaign, but also now really kind of led by Vice Presidential candidate–gross–J.D. Vance, and we’ve been talking about this a bit, you and I, Adam, but this kind of ongoing blood libel that is being waged through political speeches, through rallies and also directly to the media, is something that we wanted to comment on today.
Adam: Yeah, so there’s a concerted effort by right-wing media of all kinds taking their cues from the Trump-Vance ticket to incite, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say, to incite pogroms or to incite extrajudicial or vigilante violence against Haitians, Haitian immigrants. Which we’ve seen threats, we’ve seen schools close, we’ve seen City Council close. We’ve seen colleges close because of threats, kind of focusing the ire and attention on anti-immigrant animus, on this specific town of Springfield, Ohio. But obviously, every Haitian American, every Haitian immigrant, is subject to violence. And frankly, every Black person is subject to violence, because I don’t think these guys are really making a huge, very kind of discrete and thoughtful ontological distinctions, right? They’re kind of just inciting violence against Black people who are coded as being immigrants or coded as being kind of the other.
And so this has led to the nonstop torrent of headlines in the New York Post about, quote, “Influx of wild-driving Haitian migrants turning streets of Springfield, Ohio, into combat zone.” They had another article: “Exclusive: Post witnesses Haitian motorist making illegal turn in Springfield, Ohio, smashes into mom driving with autistic daughter.” This is just nonstop, on and on and on, Ben Shapiro. Drudge Report. Fox News has been wall to wall on this stuff. The idea is that the town of Springfield, Ohio had an influx of Haitian immigrants, which, by the way, they lobbied for. City officials lobbied for more immigrants because they couldn’t fill jobs. We can sort of debate, you know, whether or not using relatively cheap immigrant labor was the most altruistic motive. But nevertheless, this is something the city asked for, and then they got an influx of immigrants. And obviously Vance and right-wing media saw an opportunity to kind of demagogue this based on this racist myth about eating cats. That’s how it started off, and they pivoted to geese.
Nima: Well, right, exactly. So this was kind of mainstreamed during the September 10 presidential debate when Donald Trump said, live on air, that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating house pets. And then it kind of spread from there, it got mainstreamed, and the threats started pouring in against that community. The lies kind of morphed, as you were saying, Adam, that it became, you know, maybe not cats and dogs, but they’re stealing geese from public parks and that, like–
Adam: I mean, that’s different though. They went from cats to geese, and it’s like, Well, okay, but I don’t, you don’t go to a lake house with your buddies over the weekend and go cat hunting, but people go goose hunting. It’s a thing. Like, I’m not saying that, but then there’s no evidence they even did that either. But they kept moving the goalpost. That’s the point.
Nima: And so yeah, the xenophobia and the racism, which is all kind of balled up here, is grotesquely par for the course. You had people like Christopher Rufo, who’s a far-right, anti-DEI and CRT crusader, offering up on social media channels like a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could send him proof of the eating pets story. Now this is after the claim was made, like the damage is already done. And then it’s like, Oh, well, then I’ll give $5,000 to anyone who can offer–
Adam: To confirm my priors.
Nima: [Laughs] Yeah, right. Exactly, exactly.
Adam: I’ll put a bounty out for some guy to find, some Black guy grilling something somewhere.
Nima: Which obviously incites all sorts of other things to follow. And then we’ve seen J.D. Vance. I want to get around to that piece of garbage, to J.D. Vance, Vice Presidential candidate, continuing to double and triple down on this total disinformation, this total myth, lie, racist bullshit, and yeah, so we’re seeing this also play out then through the media, as you were saying.
Adam: Yeah. Because again, it’s just kind of a, it really showed to a great extent–we don’t want to sort of blame liberals for this, because I think that’s not really accurate, and we want to make sure our target is calibrated correctly. But the liberal response initially was like, Well, let’s sort of just ignore it, or let’s make jokes about it. There’s like, high-profile people making memes about it, and it’s like, Well, okay, but this is actually quite serious. This kind of speech is illegal in a lot of countries, and for good reason. Now, would I trust the US government to make this illegal, would they not just turn around and use it to, like, defend Israel, probably, but, you know, assuming the power structures were different, and the actual people adjudicating this were doing so in good faith, in many societies, you can’t just, like, incite pilgrims against ethnic minorities.
Now, this reminds me, because when we did our episode on demagoguing and incitement against homeless people, an editor would say, Homeless man, you know, attacks woman with a knife, or Homeless man or you know is seen doing this or robbing this.
Nima: Right.
Adam: And I would reach out to the editors, and I’d say, Well, how come you say that the alleged perpetrator is homeless, but you never say when they’re not homeless? You never say, like, Housed person stabs wife, or Housed person commits robbery. By selectively only highlighting the housing status of the person doing the crime, you’re necessarily engaging in selective incitement. And I had at least two editors who responded by saying, You know what? You’re right. It’s just a playbook they were reading from. It’s not something they thought about, because the goal is to make homeless people as a class and as a sort of social status, collectively responsible for the actions of a few people.
Nima: And also, like, kind of undeniable, almost integral part of their identity, right?
Adam: Yeah, well, it’s to incite violence and to incite vigilante violence against a group of people. Because you don’t, again, and you’d say, well, you wouldn’t say, like, Black suspect kills someone, or Black person robs this, or, you know, Latino person runs red light. But they do, and they’re doing it with Haitians right now, right? So any Haitian immigrant who commits any infraction is now being watched by right-wing media. And you see the New York Post saying, you know, Haitian gets into car accidents. Well, there’s thousands of car accidents a day. Why are we highlighting, why is it national news? Why is a New York publication, a New York tabloid and Fox News, highlighting minor traffic accidents in a small town?
Nima: Because it is racist incitement.
Adam: Because it’s racist incitement, it’s the only logical explanation, because you’re not saying white person or native white American, rather, runs into mom with autistic daughter, this kind of salacious–
Nima: Yeah, exactly.
Adam: Grotesque framing.
Nima: Right, of the kind of, you know, barbaric savage and the innocent victims.
Adam: Yeah, it’s, look, it’s, I mean, this is really just Der Stürmer shit. I mean, it’s, they kind of keep the distance, right? They’re not using the N word, but, Goddamnit, they really want to. But they’re doing this sort of heightened, lurid, selective, kind of tabloid press just like Der Stürmer did against Jews in the ’30s. Obviously, the situations are different, but the sort of general framework of tabloid demagoguery and tabloid pogrom promotion and pushing is very similar. And others have, of course, pointed this out.
And the fact that the Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who I obviously fucking hate, we’ve talked about on the show quite a bit, is kind of the worst elements of Trump, but with an added layer of smarm that makes it somehow worse, disingenuous, and I wrote a piece for my Sub stack called “J.D. Vance and the Grim Rise of Rightwing Standpoint Theory,” which details a rhetorical tactic he uses. You know, again, this is someone who emerged and rose to prominence vis-a-vis liberal media, Terry Gross. He was on MSNBC five different times. He was the go-to working, supposed white working class whisperer in 2015, 2016, 2017, and the reason why liberals, liberal media, loved him so much is he trafficked in this kind of Charles Murray, blame white poverty on cultural failings with white people, like they’re sort of axiomatically bigoted, they’re axiomatically backwards. It’s a culture of poverty, right? This is always what he used, this kind of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Charles Murray culture of poverty framework, basically saying that no left economic populism could possibly win these fucking yokels.
Therefore, what Clinton was doing, and the strategy of Clinton was actually the sort of neoliberal orthodoxy at the time was, in fact, good and needed to kind of angle to win over more professional class people. As someone who again worked for a VC, went to Yale. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was reaffirming the priors of rich people, except he switched from rich liberals to rich Republicans. He pivoted from the Daniel Patrick Moynihan mode of classism and racism into this more overt, obviously fascistic racism. But in response to criticism, he does the exact same faux-standpoint epistemology. So I want to play a clip here of Vance defending his position to Dana Bash, and I want you to sort of notice the framework he takes from the onset.
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J.D. Vance: Why have I talked about some of the things that I’ve been talking about? Let me just say this: My constituents have brought approximately a dozen separate concerns to me. Ten of them are verifiable and confirmable, and a couple of them I talk about because my constituents are telling me firsthand that they’re seeing these things. So I have two options, Dana: I can ignore them, which is what the American media has done for years to this community, or I can actually talk about what people are telling me.
[End clip]
Adam: Yeah, so he does this repeatedly, and every time he’s been confronted with this, he says, I’m simply responding to what my constituents are telling me. Well, yeah, but your constituents are fucking email-chain racist idiots. Like, what does that have to do with anything? I mean, you know this idea that somehow we’re supposed to, like, take these alleged 12 constituents, you represent millions of people in Ohio, like, do you listen to all of their crackpot theories? Or, I mean, because, again, he doesn’t want to say, I’m jumping on this because I thought it was politically advantageous to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment to distract from, you know, Trump’s multiple policy failures. Or, just because I enjoy the action, I’m genuinely just racist, right? It’s not even a distraction. I just fucking like picking on immigrants because I’m a dead-eyed psycho who fucking hates Black people and hates immigrants. So if I get both in the same time, it’s a twofer.
He can’t defend it on its merits. And he does this over and over and over again. Now, again, as evil and horrible as Trump is, like, he sort of will just have this alternate reality and he’ll triple down on his lies. But he doesn’t try to, like, act like he’s doing this organic, bottom-up, you know, sort of well, My people, they, you know, there was protests of 10,000 people outside of my office, and I had to respond to this concern. It’s fucking 12 people repeating an email chain like Facebook uncles with a totally baseless story about eating cats. Like, obviously, sort of pogrom material, not sort of something that law enforcement went up to him and mentioned, or supposedly, not even based on his own account, or city officials or public health officials, or, like, I don’t know, animal rights activists.
Nima: No, of course, not.
Adam: Just a bunch of chain emails from a bunch of Facebook uncles. And then he’s all, I’m just representing my constituents.
Nima: But then he’s also clear about the kind of propagandistic cynicism that is driving him, because in that same appearance, he said, “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.” So this idea that even if it’s not true, even if it’s not true, which we know it’s not true, he’s doing it for the benefit of his constituents. He’s doing it for the benefit of the quote, unquote, “American” people, because the damn liberal media, Adam, won’t pay attention to the suffering that is going on because of what you heard in that clip that we played, the invasion, right, the invasion, the infestation, these horrible genocidal terms used against immigrant communities, which, as you said earlier, Adam, especially in Springfield, which was city policy to actually bring more Haitian immigrants in, and that kind of idea of Vance saying, If I have to create stories so that you actually pay attention, then that’s not going to do it, hearkens a little bit back to that infamous Karl Rove quote about, you know, the quote-unquote, “reality-based community,” where he was talking to a member of the press.
And, you know, Karl Rove, who was George W. Bush’s right-hand man said this: “People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” And he adds, like, “…when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
So this idea of you can say whatever the fuck you want and create these new realities that then the media, by virtue of the media frenzy created by a presidential campaign and its candidates, they are creating new realities.
Adam: Well, he’s been doing this smarmy bullshit for years.
Nima: Yeah.
Adam: Every single horrible policy he has, every anti-immigrant, every you know, carceral opinion, every paranoid anti-China conspiracy theory, he always frames it as, he’s actually doing that because he’s defending the sort of mystical working class. Again, never mind the fact that he has a horrible labor record, right? Never mind the fact that Trump is pushing openly now for the biggest corporate tax cuts in human history, the previous one being his first one he did in 2017, you know. Set all that aside. In June of 2021 he said, “Remain In Mexico is one of the smartest immigration policies of the last 30 years. A president who cares about his own people dying of fentanyl doesn’t do this,” in reference to Biden supposedly getting rid of Remain In Mexico, although he ended up not doing it.
And I said at the time, I said, “JD Vance’s senate run and inevitable presidential run is just going to be variations of ‘this extremely racist opinion I have? I only have it because I care so much about the poor whites.’” It has been his shtick for years. And it is, again, this fake standpoint theory, this fake standpoint epistemology, this, like, I only arrive at these opinions that care about the supposed, you know, the sort of working man, the working man of rural Ohio. And again, zero grade from AFL-CIO, zero grade from labor unions. He supported some token stuff around train regulation after East Palestine, right? Sort of these box-checking things he does. And there’s, what makes it so grating and annoying is that, and this is something we talk about a lot on the show, is that nobody wants to do ideology. Nobody wants to defend the policy in its own terms, it’s, Well, the people have spoken to me, and I’m merely their representative. And it’s so grating and bad faith, because then you can’t really counter it.
And what the media ought to do, right, when he comes on these shows there, goes on PBS or or MSNBC and says, Well, my constituents emailed me. He’s exploiting a kind of vulnerability in liberal discourse, which is this kind of deference to the supposed people.
Nima: Mm-hmm.
Adam: Because nobody can just say, well, who gives a fuck what Cletus emailed you? What difference does it make? What are you talking about? What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? You have millions of people in your state, presumably thousands, maybe hundreds, email you every day. Why are you picking this one but not the others? Also, Haitian migrants are your constituents. Why do they not count, right? Instead of saying that, like, Who gives a fuck what a bunch of you know, chain email, Facebook uncles sent you? They go, Oh, well, yeah, okay. Well, I guess they were really concerned about this, so therefore it must be serious, and we got to stop doing this.
Nima: Well, I guess he has to respond to the people, right?
Adam: This faux-populism, this faux-standpoint theory, it’s so smarmy and it’s so gross, and it’s like, and liberal media is just not equipped to really respond to it. Because what they ought to have said, and eventually, they kind of did this, Well, police reports say this, but by then you’re already on day three or four, when you really should have said, Yeah, but you know, you’re just handpicking the constituents who affirm your priors, you’re not responding to some plebiscite. This is just, this is just the thing you care about, so you hand-selected those supposedly, which we don’t even know if they were real, by the way, this just, we’re just taking that for granted.
It’s a more sophisticated form of MAGA, because, again, Vance went up the ranks of liberalism. He’s a Yale-educated lawyer. He knows the sort of discourse around liberalism. It’s what gave him his media career. And he knows how to use that kind of like, smol beans. And he does this, he kind of shrugs and says, and says, Look, this is just what my constituents tell me. And it’s like, Oh, God, this is so much worse than Trumpism. It’s so much worse because it’s smarmy, right? It’s sort of Trumpism, but smarmy and squishy and sort of cynical and cowardly, and this is the bullshit we’re gonna have to deal with when, you know, when this guy invariably runs for president again. And I think it’s important that liberals kind of update their playbook to sort of not take these assertions of populist demands at face value, because they’re fake. He just listened, again, to the extent to which we even know these people existed, he just listened to these racist Facebook uncles because they agree with him. So like, it’s a fatuous framing anyway.
Nima: So therefore they become the people, right? They stand in for all of the people.
Adam: Yeah, it’s such bullshit. It’s fake. I’m sorry.
Nima: Well, we wanted to get a little bit of discourse on J.D. Vance and the attack on Haitian immigrants, by way of his defense of the attack on America. So thank you all for listening to this. Citations Needed News Brief. We will be back very, very soon with season eight of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for that. Those are coming your way shortly, but until then, of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and if you are not already a supporter of the show, please consider becoming one. It really does help us out. We are 100% listener funded, and you can do that through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. But until next time, thank you all for listening. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.
