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I don’t believe the title of this post is the least bit dramatic. It is, unfortunately, simply factual. I’ve included below the full post I wrote in September of last year, after the first and only presidential debate, titled: “Ohio’s Governor On Pet Eating And The Demonizing of Immigrants”. This isn’t where the lies started, or where they will end, but the fact that a post-debate poll found that “A whopping 76 percent of likely voters who currently support former president Trump either believe that Springfield’s Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbor’s pets or reserve the right to scapegoat them in the future…without a shred of evidence and with Republican party officials denouncing these lies as “garbage”, is astounding.
It is also astounding that the current administration and Republican members of Congress continue to claim that “illegal” immigrants receive social safety net money, specifically, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. No, they do not.
Documented immigrants — such as those with permanent status and dual intent temporary visas — pay the payroll taxes that contribute to Social Security and Medicare, according to Tara Watson, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and author of the book “The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear.”
Generally, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Social Security or Medicare benefits, Watson said, but they may pay in to the programs anyway…When asked about Vance’s statement that undocumented workers are draining Medicare and Social Security, HHS spokesperson Renata Miller said: “These claims are false and they serve as a distraction from the health care concerns that everyday Americans care about. CNBC article, October 1, 2024
Just last week in a CNN town hall with both Republican and Democratic members of Congress, Rep.Mike Lawler, (R New York), repeated the claim that illegal immigrants receive Medicaid (specifically referring to the state of New York in the clip below), and neither the two democratic representatives nor the CNN hosts corrected him in real time, or from what I have read, any time after the town hall. This failure to hold elected officials accountable for directly lying to the American people, to the world, is a good part of what is causing the downward spiral of our democracy.
This past February, The New York Times published a fascinating piece discussing how President Trump is using lies and distortion to drive draconian changes to our government. And a few days ago, The Times published a lengthly article detailing why the claims of massive fraud Elon Musk was making about both the Social Security program and unemployment benefits were false, yet both he and President Trump continue to double down on these lies. But what did the voting public expect when President Trump, in a presidential debate no less, (followed by Vice-President Vance and others doubling down at every opportunity) insisted that immigrants were eating dogs, cats and geese in Springfield, Ohio?
And it is this torrent of lies that have paved the way for the Trump administration to ignore a United States Supreme Court order, and also has paved the way for at least some of us to ignore it too.
Ohio's Governor On Pet Eating...And The Demonizing of Immigrants
Humans Know How to Repeat A Pattern
SEP 29, 2024
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After the City of Springfield, Ohio received over thirty bomb threats requiring the evacuation of government buildings and schools, and the cancellation of in-person classes at Wittenberg University, six Ohio lawmakers requested emergency law enforcement funding from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. Photo below, courtesy of The Columbus Dispatch via Liz Dufour, Cincinnati Enquirer
“The national attention crested after Ohio Sen. JD Vance posted claims without evidence about Haitian immigrants abducting and eating dogs and cats on social media. Former president Donald Trump repeated the claims during the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, despite local and state officials saying the claims are false.” Columbus Dispatch, September 26, 2024
No matter how many times the Republican mayor and law enforcement personnel of the City of Springfield, Ohio, the president of Wittenberg University, and even the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, state that there are “no credible reports” whatsoever, of any of the legal, Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, eating people’s pets, or geese roaming in its parks, over half of current supporters of former president Trump still choose to believe the Trump—Vance campaign, rather than their government officials and legitimate news sources. This is not a point for welcome and necessary protest of our government’s policies, nor is it a matter of opinion. There is simply no evidence these statements are true, and the lies are directly causing harm to all in Springfield, and for that matter, to all U.S. cities and communities.
According to a post-presidential debate survey taken by YouGov and reported in a September 17, 2024 article in The Hill:
…22 percent of Trump-backers say they think the debunked lies that have spread about migrants abducting dogs and cats to eat are “definitely true,” while 30 percent said that they are “probably true.” Another 24 percent said they aren’t sure.
A whopping 76 percent of likely voters who currently support former president Trump either believe that Springfield’s Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbor’s pets or reserve the right to scapegoat them in the future…without a shred of evidence and with Republican party officials denouncing these lies as “garbage”
"There's a lot of garbage on the internet and this is a piece of garbage that was simply not true, there's no evidence of this at all," he [Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine] told ABC's "This Week."
Governor DeWine also wrote an Opinion piece for The New York Times detailing his and his wife’s deep connections with the City of Springfield, his trips to Haiti as a Congressman and the City’s nearly 200 years of welcoming and assimilating immigrants, exactly as our country (mostly) has done. Governor DeWine did not, however, decline to support the Trump—Vance ticket as hundreds of his other Republican colleagues have done, but managed to say he was “saddened” by their choice to attack, and then double and triple down on their attacks of Springfield’s Haitian immigrant community.
We are almost entirely a nation of immigrants,1 yet many in our country have demonized and scapegoated each new immigrant group as they tried to assimilate into our country. Now, this fear mongering is amplified through social media, and consequently, more, perhaps otherwise sane people, believe lies. The only antidote to lies is the truth, and that is what our justice system attempts to unveil—the truth through the presentation of facts, and the analysis of those facts by a judge and the peers of the accused.
The Mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, recently stated that the lies perpetrated by former president Trump and Senator Vance have cost the city “hundreds of thousands of dollars”, according to a CNN report published on September 22, mostly due to antagonizers calling in bomb threats and the resulting evacuations of public buildings, schools and even grocery stores. On September 24, , a nonprofit Haitian community group filed criminal charges against both Trump and Vance. Here is what their attorney said:
If anyone else had disrupted public service, made false alarms, and engaged in telecommunications harassment in the manner Trump and Vance did with their relentless and persistent lies—even after the governor and mayor said what they were saying was false, they would’ve been arrested by now," Chandra [ the Haitian group’s attorney] said in a statement Tuesday. "They must be held accountable to the rule of law in the same way any of the rest of us would be.
Let’s hope this lawsuit, if allowed to go forward, brings some measure of accountability to the fear mongers. In the meantime, it can only help to remember the prescient words of Rod Serling, a graduate of historic Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, just 10 minutes south of Springfield. Mr. Serling’s daughter Anne, wrote a book about her father titled: “As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling”, and she posted the following quote on her Facebook page yesterday:
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone."
~Rod Serling
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I’d love to hear your thoughts about the issues raised here, including the continuous lying by public officials, immigration, political campaigns, scapegoating the other, lawsuits…what else? Please leave your comments below.
1 I am embarrassed to relegate these facts to a footnote, but in case you were unaware of our country’s removal and attempted genocide of Native Americans, this brief summary by PBS plus many other primary source accounts might help:
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