Welcome, Moral High Grounders! Here is the audio version of the newsletter from Friday, September 13, 2024, entitled Trump’s Lies About Haitians Are MAGA’s Sick Racist Version Of JD Vance Couch Jokes.
It’s been an interesting few days since that piece came out Friday. For one thing, conditions on the ground in Springfield, Ohio, are just getting worse and worse as a result of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s blood libel campaign against Haitian migrants. The bomb threats continue, schools and colleges are closing, they even had to cancel their fun CultureFest street fair for people’s safety.
Another interesting thing that happened is that JD Vance admitted out loud that he knows these stories are bullshit, and that if he has to “create stories” to keep people focused on whatever his little fuckface Nazi heart — and Trump’s fuckface Nazi heart — is obsessed with, then so be it.
Which kind of is what I was arguing in this week’s newsletter, two days before he said it. That but one element of this sick MAGA campaign against Haitian migrants — on top of everything else! They’re doing this for a number of reasons, and they’re doing it on purpose — was that I could just tell that for some of them, they were looking at this as a demented, violent kind of payback for the JD Vance couchfucking jokes. Not to minimize how dangerous it is! But just digging through what makes these disturbed assholes tick — like I like to do here at TMHG — and there’s definitely been a sense of viciously angry trolling with a lot of them, and from JD Vance himself, this sort of seething “take that, Democrats” anger bubbling over.
It’s really telling that those people think this is on the same moral level as that.
I’d encourage folks to check out the “A” block from Monday’s Rachel Maddow, because she talked about how with this manufactured outrage created by Trump and Vance, literally inspired by neo-Nazis, they’ve yet again gotten the media and by extension the whole presidential campaign focused on what they want us to focus on, as opposed to a million other things that are hugely important about this presidential race and the dangers Trump and Vance pose to the entire Republic. Trump and Vance have zero problem hurting innocent people in Vance’s own state to keep control of that narrative, and Maddow argues that this xenophobic extremism is exactly what they want to be talking about.
At the end of the piece I mentioned that after the debate, suddenly the cat memes were being posted by Democrats and liberals making fun of Trump for his outburst, and that they suddenly were funny, at least some of them. I would say on second thought that it’s easy to get caught up in moments like that, but the moment for that has passed, because as a number of you noted in the comments, people truly are in danger because of all this.
Rebecca Solnit shared this link where you can donate to support the Haitian community in Springfield, so I encourage all who can to do so! I did.
By the way, this little newsletter is at getting close to 6,000 total subscribers now, in just over three months, which is incredible. I am so amazed and humbled y’all are all here! Please share this newsletter all the places you share things so we can reach more and more people. And if you aren’t a paid subscriber yet, and you want access to these audio versions or other upcoming goodies I roll out, or if you just really want to help me keep the bills paid, please do so! (I’m going to launch a live chat for paid subscribers next week, by the way.) You’ll get an email on how it works when it happens.
One day soon? More posts! More professional podcast that’s not just me yapping! The more people become paying subscribers, the faster all these fun things can happen. To give you an idea of what I’m thinking, somewhere between 10 and 20,000 total subscribers will be where I can really start doing bigger things around here, and start thinking about truly expanding this joint.
Thank you all so much for reading and joining and all the things, I adore you all.
Here is the print edition of this week’s newsletter, for reference:
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