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GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance, his fanboy Donald Trump Jr., and other Republicans are trying to turn their outrageous lies about Springfield, OH, into a new and truly ridiculous line of attack on the media and Democrats.
Here is a very brief summary of how we got to this point, even though most readers will likely be familiar with the background of TrumpLyingAboutLegalHaitianMigrantsStealingAndEatingPetsGate.
Springfield was a community in decline until a large number of legal Haitian migrants moved there and helped revive the economy by filling open jobs.
Naturally, increasing the population of the city by about 25 percent resulted in some challenges. Coming from a poor country like Haiti, the newcomers were often in poor health and/or lacked vaccination. In addition, many of them were driving cars for the first time.
This not only taxed the health care system but also made the city’s roads less safe.
Still, by the accounts of city and state officials (not including Vance), this was overall a positive development.
And then Donald Trump happened.
The former president and his running mate spread a bunch of lies about Springfield.
Specifically, they falsely referred to the Haitians as “illegal immigrants” and spouted a bunch of nonsense about them stealing and eating pets.
With the spotlight on Springfield, this community received the wrong type of attention.
For example, various institutions, such as two elementary schools and city hall, received bomb threats; the far-right Proud Boys marched in the city’s streets; and the Ku Klux Klan distributed fliers.
Knowing all of this, who do you think is to blame for what has been happening to this community?
If you said: “The demagogues who spread all those lies,” then you are correct.
However, the very same people who are responsible for this mess are now trying to blame the media for it.
Their “evidence:” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has been supportive of the city and dismissive of the lies some of his fellow Republicans told about it, said that the vast majority, though not all, of the nearly three dozen bomb threats (that fortunately turned out to be hoaxes but nevertheless caused evacuations throughout Springfield) came from abroad.
To professional right-wing liars like Vance, “the vast majority” immediately became “all.”
And this, they believe, somehow clears them of any wrongdoing.
First of all, some of the threats came from within the US, so saying anything else is yet another lie.
In addition, to buy this nonsense, you’d have to believe that some country, probably one that rhymes with “Prussia,” would have randomly started making bomb threats against a small city in a red state.
Oh, and you have to gloss over the presence of racist groups like the Proud Boys and the KKK in Springfield.
That makes zero sense.
However, since it seems impossible for MAGA Republicans to apologize for anything, they are still trying to make this work.
“For the last few days, Springfield has been experiencing an unbelievable number, something like 35, 40 bomb threats,” said Vance, one of the men primarily responsible for spreading the pet-eating lie that led to all of this in the first place.
The American media has been caught laundering verified foreign disinformation to smear me and President Trump and it's disgusting. pic.twitter.com/PXqCrdqt7P
— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 17, 2024
He then falsely claimed that DeWine said “every single one of those bomb threats was a hoax, and all of those bomb threats came from foreign countries.”
Finally, Vance whined about the media blaming him and Trump for having caused these bomb threats.
In other words, he is lamenting that the media said something that is obviously true: No Trump lies = no bomb threats, no KKK fliers, no Proud Boys
It doesn’t matter where they come from.
And it’s not as though Russian President Vladimir Putin just woke up one day and said: “You know what, for no reasons whatsoever, today I want my disinformation team to call some elementary school in a small US city. Let’s randomly pick Springfield.”
With a daring leap of logic that we cannot even try to duplicate (nor pretend to understand), Vance claims that this amounts to the media “laundering foreign disinformation.”
What?
What is he talking about???
He is the one spreading misinformation. The bomb threats were real. None of this would have happened without the Trump/Vance lies.
Here is the craziest part of Vance’s remarks.
“Their message in talking about these bomb threats, and in lying to the American people that they came from me and Donald Trump, what they are doing is trying to shut all of us up,” he said.
Again: What is he talking about???
Nobody accused him of picking up the phone and calling in the bomb threats himself (although, would that really surprise anybody at this point?).
And, while it would be desirable for the presidential and vice presidential candidates of a major party to stop lying so much, nobody is trying to shut them up. The media is merely pointing out that lies are lies.
We know that Vance himself put out this clip of his speech (as though he accomplished some goal with this nonsense), but everybody should watch it and marvel at this brazen attempt at gaslighting (by the way, us telling you to watch his speech is the opposite of “shutting him up”).
The worst part of all of this is that it will work on way too many voters… because Republicans have been conditioned to revel in victimhood.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often funny analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
