Going Fishing

The wave of terror Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have unleashed upon the Haitian community in Ohio continues to crest. I am by no means the first to observe the similarities between how they are talking about Haitians and how Nazis spoke of Jews at the outset of their rise to power. That's strong language, and yet it is terrifyingly warranted. We are seeing something that is, in fact, not at all unprecedented.

But there is a particular aspect of the racism we're seeing here that particularly resonated with me as a Jew -- the frenetic scouring to find anything and everything that "proves" the conspiracies right, or at least justified. In the Ohio case, this reached a comical (if anything about this could be comical) apex when Christopher Rufo offered a bounty to prove the "Haitians in Springfield are eating cats" conspiracy correct and then started crowing over a video of not-Haitians in Toledo Dayton grilling chicken. But other examples abound (although at least J.D. Vance had the "decency" to admit he was simply making things up). Far, far too many Republicans response to blatant acts of hatred is to cast far and wide for something that makes the hatred feel palatable.

As a reasonably public-facing Jewish professor, I frequently idly wonder if I'll be targeted by some sort of antisemitic attack. Mostly, it doesn't happen. Occasionally, it does; though in my case never in such a fashion that would explode into the public view. But if an "incident" did happen -- someone graffitied my office door, for instance -- I am absolutely sure that a certain cadre of online folk would immediately begin pouring over my collection of writings to find anything they possibly could to explain why I'm a legitimate target. That knowledge -- less that something could happen, and more that if it did I'd be the one scrutinized to hell and back, with the most gimlet eye and uncharitable gaze -- is perhaps what stresses me the most. I do not think I am alone amongst Jews in feeling this way; hyperpoliced at every turn to justify ex post facto a judgment that has been handed down in advance.

By all objective accounts, the Haitian community in Springfield has been a boon to an erstwhile struggling city. But they are not universal saints, any more than anyone else is -- if one places them under a powerful enough lens, one will of course be able to find something or someone butting up against the social compact (though not, I'd wager, stealing and eating pets). No group can maintain a perfect record under that sort of scrutiny. And the knowledge that one is under that microscope is just exhausting. It's exhausting right alongside the more direct anxiety and misery of being directly subjected to acts of hate and bigotry.

The people responsible for this have no shame, so I won't bother to say they should be ashamed. But no good person should feel anything other than contempt for this latest dose of bigotry.

Couch Fucking is not the Same as Cat Eating

Try explaining that headline in 2019!

Despite it featuring in Donald Trump's disastrous debate performance on Tuesday, Republicans appear to be committing to "immigrants are eating your pets!" as a central part of their campaign message. What a wild time to live in.

One thing I've heard in response to this is that "cat eating" is just the GOP version of the "J.D. Vance fucks couches" meme that bounced around the liberal blogosphere a few weeks ago. In either case, the argument went, it was a "humorous" falsehood that speaks to an overall decay in our informational climate, and so if you're uncomfortable with the one, you have no grounds to justify the other.

This comparison seems too cute. For starters, as others have noted, one extremely important difference between the two memes is that nobody is worried about extremists deciding to go out and terrorize Ikea shoppers based on misinformation about sofa sex acts occurring therein. That alone is enough to work as a distinction.

But also, the more fundamental difference is that nobody -- left, right, or center -- ever purported to believe J.D. Vance actually had sex with couches. It was self-conscious absurdism from the get-go. If there was a progressive out there who earnestly, genuinely believed J.D. Vance copulated with a couch, that person would be viewed with contempt by everyone else sharing the meme -- it was not meant to be believed, and there was no effort to make it something that would be believed.

By contrast, conservatives can't quite decide whether they believe the "cat eating" stories are real or not. The neo-Nazis who initially promulgated the claim certainly hoped and expected people would believe it. And Vance himself described the potential truth of the claim in deliberately waffling fashion "It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false" -- a formulation which indicates a comparably strong possibility that these "rumors" are in fact true. Comparing the two "stories" is like saying an Onion article and 2024 election trutherism are both examples of "misinformation".

What we're seeing from the right here isn't self-conscious absurdism but rather a sort of empirical edgelording -- dancing around the edge of "do I believe it/am I joking" to try and get the best of all worlds. If the listener is shocked, then they're just messing around; if the listener buys in, well, then they're being totally serious. People often cite Sartre's remarks on the way Nazis like to "play" with words, but the comparison that immediately jumped to my mind is Nelly suggesting to a female friend that he has a "pole in the basement". The shocked "what?" from said friend is met with "I'm just kiddin' ... Unless you're gon' do it." It's not a serious statement, except for those who take it seriously. 

The irony, though, is that precisely because Republicans can't fully commit to "cat eating" being obviously made up, it can't serve the function they want from it -- which is to be the counter to the "Republicans are weird" narrative Democrats have been so effectively impressing upon them (and of which couch fucking was a satirical encapsulation of). They're hoping for "you think we're weird -- well you eat cats!" The problem, though, is that the sort of person who actually thinks (or even is unsure) whether gangs of immigrants are abducting and devouring household pets in Ohio is ... a weird person! That is a weird thing to think, and it comes off as a weird thing to think. When Donald Trump publicly promotes cat-eating conspiracies in a debate, the response isn't "ooh, what a great zinger", it's "what on earth is he babbling about?" If you're not already in the fever swamp, it's a line that just reinforces that Trump is profoundly abnormal. He actually seems to believe too many things that regular Americans, at a gut-level, view as ridiculous.

Today's Republicans may be alarmingly good at stoking hate and fear and xenophobia. But they are very bad at avoiding being weird. Their commitment to spreading absurd nonsense about immigrants eating pets, more than anything else, just accentuates that weirdness.

On the Ohio Primaries (Vance, Mandel, Brown, and Turner)

Ohio's primaries are in the books. The two biggest stories, at least from my vantage, are J.D. Vance defeating Josh Mandel (and some other members of the clown car) for the GOP Senate nomination, and Shontel Brown stomping Nina Turner in their House rematch.

On the first: the choice between Vance and Mandel in the GOP primary has been a constant source of agony for me. Both are I think equally dangerous, and both are I think (sadly) favored to win the general against Democratic nominee Tim Ryan. So the only transient joy I knew I'd get would be that at least one of these sniveling spineless far-right weasel hacks would go down in ignoble primary defeat. But if forced to choose, which one did I most want to see humiliated?

There's an old psychologist's trick in situations like these where you're agonizing over a decision: you're just told an outcome and then measure your gut reaction to the news. On that front, when I first saw the initial returns suggesting Josh Mandel was going to lose, my immediate, uncontrolled, visceral response was elation. Yes, it's a bitter pill that J.D. Vance won. But Mandel is just absolutely loathsome, and has been for years. I joked (and it's barely a joke) that had he been elected, he potentially would have made history as the first Jew to ever be the most antisemitic member of the Senate. There are few people who more deserve crushing humiliation than him, and on a week like this I'll take the joy where I can get it (plus I think that Vance may be a marginally weaker candidate against Tim Ryan).

Which brings us to the Brown/Turner race, which Brown is winning by about 33 points (compared to a 6 point victory in their 2021 special election contest). Rematches like this -- a quick repeat of an close open-seat contest -- very rarely go well for the round one loser (see also: Rashida Tlaib/Brenda Jones), and it was hard to see what Nina Turner's path to victory was here. But then, it was hard to see what Turner's theory was for why Brown should be turned out of office so quickly other than "it is cosmically unfair that I am not in Congress already." The closest thing she has to a concession up on her Twitter is a retweeted rant from Marianne Williamson of all people blaming Turner's defeat on the "Democratic machine" and "abandonment by progressive Congressional leadership". One might think that if both the "machine" and the "progressives" have lined up against you, then you don't have much of a lane in Democratic Party politics. And maybe Turner agrees, since she's apparently now planning to parlay two consecutive losses in congressional races into an independent 2024 presidential run. Ugh ugh ugh. That woman's ego could power Trump Tower.