I’ve thought for a long time that non-white countries such as Haiti that defied the West and won are inevitably subjected to constant interference and economic punishment until they are forced to collapse. Basically, it’s the concept of the “uppity negro” needed to be put back in their “place,” but it’s an entire country. The West has and never will forgive Haiti for successfully giving their French slavers the boot and they must be punished for all time because of it (see the Haiti Independence Debt for starters). I don’t think it’s an accident that Trump chose to demonize Haitians in particular. I think there is a deep antipathy towards Haitians that is baked into our political establishment for the above reasons, along with cartoonish depictions of Voudon/Voodoo. The fact that so many ordinary Americans can easily be persuaded that dark-skinned others are kidnapping and eating their pets doesn’t reflect very well of them.
Even if we put this aside, there’s still the fact that our political discourse refuses to acknowledge that the reason migrants keep showing up is because the West keeps destabilizing their countries of origin. The European migrant crisis is the result of the US invasion of Iraq, coupled with the destruction of Libya. Similarly, most migrants to the US are fleeing the results of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. This is only going to get worse because of climate change. The West wants two things that are mutually incompatible, namely to have these isolated ethnostates, while also desiring imperial plunder to fund an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle.
As for the second Trump shooter, there’s a lot that is still unknown about him at the moment. What I have heard is that Trump wasn’t scheduled to be at the golf course at the time the shooter was there. I think this detail alone will give lots of fuel for speculation. It’s also odd that he lived in Hawaii and didn’t seem to have a job, yet he could somehow afford to travel all the way to Florida and somehow obtained military grade weaponry. Then there’s the Ukraine of it all. If the first shooter seemed like the stereotypical spree killer in his late teens/early twenties, this guy seems (at first glance) like an over the hill oddball. It’s also possible that this shooter really believed that Trump is an existential threat and needed to be taken out once and for all, but failed even more so than the first guy. It’s a strange situation.
I agree with all you’ve said here in the main. I have thoughts about these rumors. But I haven’t yet sketched out an outline of an essay yet and have just been absorbing news reports as this story has moved through several news cycles and evolved. You’re not the first person I’ve come across who has pointed to the latent Vodou suspicion being ginned up as the deep background here. I want to delve into that, definitely — though, I will say that could be an essay in and of itself.
As for a longstanding antipathy against Haiti as a culture, I don’t think that can be directly accessed by the average American. For one, most aren’t given enough history instruction to actually understand the antiquated fears of the old planters who feared the revolutionary Haitians giving their slaves ideas…. But perhaps I simply am giving people too much credit by according them a sense of obliviousness.
As for the guy on Trump’s golf course, I really don’t have much to say, because it’s really a bit of a non-story, at least as far as I’m concerned. I wouldn’t have ever referenced it at all, except that Trump is clearly trying to capitalize on it for political gain. (That’s why I used the term ‘jiu jitsu’ in my title — he’s trying to flip it around so that the blame falls on his opponent, when it is he who is the one who has been stoking — and continues to stoke — violence.) I’ll say that the guy seems to be a disillusioned cult member, which would go toward explaining the germ of his motivation: he might feel that Trump let him down.
Thank you for your reply. While it is true that there isn’t the same kind of antipathy against Haitians as there are against, say the Chinese or Russians, I do think there’s a belief that Haitians are “diseased” and “dirty” even when compared to other migrant groups. You may recall a couple of years ago (maybe during that huge earthquake about ten years ago?) when Pat Robertson claimed that Haitians were being punished for making a pact with the devil to win their revolution. I think that view is more common than we’d like to think among certain white evangelicals, especially since a disturbing number of them also think that slavery is okay, as long as it doesn’t affect them.
Haitians were also one of the first groups to whom HIV appeared in the US, along with IV drug users and gay men. You may have seen footage of the press conference where members of the press and the Reagan administration were laughing about people with HIV, the message being, “When homosexuals, drug users, and/or Haitians die of a horrible mystery illness, it’s hilarious, and definitely not something the rest of us should care about.” The association of Haitians with poverty and HIV is probably what would stick in the mind of someone like Trump, more so than the evangelical devil-based fear mongering. The slander about Haitian migrants stealing pets and eating them (possibly for ritualistic purposes) seems like a mixture of these two racist strands of thought.
Yes, I noted the association of AIDS with Haitians in the early days of the epidemic elsewhere, in the comment section of the Washington Post. I plan to expand on that in whatever upcoming essay on this topic I may write.
I may need to delve a bit more into the background, for my own curiosity if nothing else, to discover whether or not today’s average American really has these images at the forefront. I would tend to think — and again my assumption may be mistaken — that the typical American equates Haitian with Black, so the two categories are rather interchangeable. We see this with some of the photos that have come out of this Trump-Vance conspiracy theory, where Black Americans are being identified by MAGA types as Haitian. They’re not making a distinction; and, to them, it may be one without a difference.
The question is just how much violence will we have down the stretch to Election Day and then, what will happen in the aftermath of the election. Things are like this because of Trump’s stink, our press corps is pretty awful, and our political process is controlled by big money. Hold on to your hats! It’s gonna get rough.
I agree. I will say, though, that even if the press were to pivot hard into calling Trump’s statements lies and denouncing what clearly is racism emanating from his mouth, that would do little in terms of affecting the contest come November. There’s simply not enough time for the press to effect a 180 in the minds of the readers and viewers. (A sea change is possible, but it would have to originate in that Trump himself does that pulls everyone up short. And this cat thing hasn’t done that. It would have to be something extraordinary, something that goes to the core myth of his persona.)
I actually think things are quite dire, in terms of short-term violence, because Trump et al. have been building up to this for years — they’ve simply moved into a new phase.
We are all in the same boat and so many of his followers just do not understand what that means for them and for all. Many of them do realize that he is crazy but they have convinced themselves that only the targeted groups are going to be suffering. They don’t get that once the various targeted groups have been “dealt with”, they will be next.
Same with our side when it comes to Israel and our government’s support for the genocide there. When I see what is being done there, my self preservation reflex kicks in hard because I know when actions like this are ignored, it means that if the state wants to cook up a reason, they can wipe out a civilian population and there is no effective opposition. People walking around with signs and holding hands chanting won’t change anything.
We agree 100%. The cult of purity can never be satisfied: there will always be someone who is just outside the norm enough to be considered a deviant. Also, once a group becomes one that persecutes others, that becomes both a method of ensuring compliance as well as a reason for its existence. So it will keep persecuting _some_ group of people, even those of the in-group if and when there are no other targets available.
As for Trump, I have my suspicions about him. On that other platform I mention so often here, it's rather forbidden to speculate without basis, as that leads almost directly to conspiracy theories. But I think that Trump's brush with death when Covid came to visit him left a mark. Covid is a brain disease, something that most people don't realize: about a third of the people who get it suffer neurological symptoms for some time thereafter. We know that Trump was rushed to the hospital when he was sick with Covid because he was in grave condition (almost certainly would have related to oxygen levels). If he had hypoxia (remember him wheezing on the balcony?), that could have affected him neurologically from that point on. Granted, he's been decompensating as a narcissist for some time, he's older, and he has a direct family line to Alzheimer's; but complications from Long Covid could be amplifying what we're seeing. And that's as far as I'll take that speculation for now.
I think a mixture of long COVID, age, and stress has caused Trump’s aging process to accelerate. Being president prematurely ages everyone who holds that office, and Trump wasn’t exactly a spring chicken in 2016. COVID has an extremely damaging effect on the body, and our knowledge of what that entails still seems primitive at the moment. Given Trump’s love of crowds, I’m sure he’s gotten reinfected more times than we know about. Trump is probably also still traumatized from the first assassination attempt, when he was actually hit. Since then, he has seemed more incoherent and less energetic, even by the standards of a man in his late 70s. I feel that if Trump wasn’t so petty and narcissistic that he’d drop out of the race, because he really looks like he’s over it.
My personal theory has always been that Trump never really expected to win in 2016 and his run was a scam that went completely off the rails. I say this for several reasons. First, if you google something to the effect of “bill clinton encouraged Trump to run,” you’ll find a ton of articles from 2015 that state that Bill Clinton told Trump that he had some good ideas and that he should run for president as a Republican. These sources include the WP, Vanity Fair, and the New York Daily News, among others. To me, this suggests (if true) that the Clintons were trying to rig the race by choosing who they thought would be the most absurd opponent possible and it backfired. Second, Trump and Melania looked absolutely stricken on election night when they learned he had won, as if they had gotten the news that Mar-A-Lago had sunk into the ocean. In other words, not the reaction of someone who’s excited that he’s finally in the position to “make America great again” by being president.
I had heard about Trump’s underwhelming reaction to learning that he had emerged the victor in 2016.
As for the WH prematurely aging its occupants, this is generally held to be true, but others have noted that Trump seemed to have bypassed this malady. If you look at pictures before and after his tenure, he looks remarkably the same. Now, part of that is because he actually has hair plugs, which is why he’s not greying; and that will affect how we observers view his face. But he did not really exert himself in the WH. I have no difficulty in imagining that he felt rather carefree while he was there.
Thank you for your reply. I think the main reason why Trump looks relatively less aged compared to previous presidents is because he was already a senior citizen when he took office. Hence, I think any further physical aging isn’t going to be as obvious compared to Clinton, GWB, or Obama. Trump is also a media personality first and foremost, so he probably cares more about hiding aging than other politicians, as seen by his losing battle against male pattern baldness.
In any case, I think that the Other Site does engage in quite a bit of conspiracy theories. They just aren’t the chemtrails/black helicopters/anti-vaxx sort/litter boxes in public schools variety of conspiracy theories. It’s just taken to be a given that the every single Republican politician, at least at the congressional level, is receiving a check in the mail signed Vladimir V. Putin. Many also believe that those of us with pro-Palestinian beliefs are also getting those sweet, sweet Putin bucks as well. I just saw the rare skeptical poster asking what proof there was that Jill Stein was receiving money from Putin. The reply was that she absolutely did, but the reason why there’s no evidence is because if it existed, the FBI would have known about it. So there’s no actual proof that Stein is receiving money from Putin, but she definitely did because…trust me bro?
I’ve thought for a long time that non-white countries such as Haiti that defied the West and won are inevitably subjected to constant interference and economic punishment until they are forced to collapse. Basically, it’s the concept of the “uppity negro” needed to be put back in their “place,” but it’s an entire country. The West has and never will forgive Haiti for successfully giving their French slavers the boot and they must be punished for all time because of it (see the Haiti Independence Debt for starters). I don’t think it’s an accident that Trump chose to demonize Haitians in particular. I think there is a deep antipathy towards Haitians that is baked into our political establishment for the above reasons, along with cartoonish depictions of Voudon/Voodoo. The fact that so many ordinary Americans can easily be persuaded that dark-skinned others are kidnapping and eating their pets doesn’t reflect very well of them.
Even if we put this aside, there’s still the fact that our political discourse refuses to acknowledge that the reason migrants keep showing up is because the West keeps destabilizing their countries of origin. The European migrant crisis is the result of the US invasion of Iraq, coupled with the destruction of Libya. Similarly, most migrants to the US are fleeing the results of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. This is only going to get worse because of climate change. The West wants two things that are mutually incompatible, namely to have these isolated ethnostates, while also desiring imperial plunder to fund an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle.
As for the second Trump shooter, there’s a lot that is still unknown about him at the moment. What I have heard is that Trump wasn’t scheduled to be at the golf course at the time the shooter was there. I think this detail alone will give lots of fuel for speculation. It’s also odd that he lived in Hawaii and didn’t seem to have a job, yet he could somehow afford to travel all the way to Florida and somehow obtained military grade weaponry. Then there’s the Ukraine of it all. If the first shooter seemed like the stereotypical spree killer in his late teens/early twenties, this guy seems (at first glance) like an over the hill oddball. It’s also possible that this shooter really believed that Trump is an existential threat and needed to be taken out once and for all, but failed even more so than the first guy. It’s a strange situation.
I agree with all you’ve said here in the main. I have thoughts about these rumors. But I haven’t yet sketched out an outline of an essay yet and have just been absorbing news reports as this story has moved through several news cycles and evolved. You’re not the first person I’ve come across who has pointed to the latent Vodou suspicion being ginned up as the deep background here. I want to delve into that, definitely — though, I will say that could be an essay in and of itself.
As for a longstanding antipathy against Haiti as a culture, I don’t think that can be directly accessed by the average American. For one, most aren’t given enough history instruction to actually understand the antiquated fears of the old planters who feared the revolutionary Haitians giving their slaves ideas…. But perhaps I simply am giving people too much credit by according them a sense of obliviousness.
As for the guy on Trump’s golf course, I really don’t have much to say, because it’s really a bit of a non-story, at least as far as I’m concerned. I wouldn’t have ever referenced it at all, except that Trump is clearly trying to capitalize on it for political gain. (That’s why I used the term ‘jiu jitsu’ in my title — he’s trying to flip it around so that the blame falls on his opponent, when it is he who is the one who has been stoking — and continues to stoke — violence.) I’ll say that the guy seems to be a disillusioned cult member, which would go toward explaining the germ of his motivation: he might feel that Trump let him down.
Thank you for your reply. While it is true that there isn’t the same kind of antipathy against Haitians as there are against, say the Chinese or Russians, I do think there’s a belief that Haitians are “diseased” and “dirty” even when compared to other migrant groups. You may recall a couple of years ago (maybe during that huge earthquake about ten years ago?) when Pat Robertson claimed that Haitians were being punished for making a pact with the devil to win their revolution. I think that view is more common than we’d like to think among certain white evangelicals, especially since a disturbing number of them also think that slavery is okay, as long as it doesn’t affect them.
Haitians were also one of the first groups to whom HIV appeared in the US, along with IV drug users and gay men. You may have seen footage of the press conference where members of the press and the Reagan administration were laughing about people with HIV, the message being, “When homosexuals, drug users, and/or Haitians die of a horrible mystery illness, it’s hilarious, and definitely not something the rest of us should care about.” The association of Haitians with poverty and HIV is probably what would stick in the mind of someone like Trump, more so than the evangelical devil-based fear mongering. The slander about Haitian migrants stealing pets and eating them (possibly for ritualistic purposes) seems like a mixture of these two racist strands of thought.
Yes, I noted the association of AIDS with Haitians in the early days of the epidemic elsewhere, in the comment section of the Washington Post. I plan to expand on that in whatever upcoming essay on this topic I may write.
I may need to delve a bit more into the background, for my own curiosity if nothing else, to discover whether or not today’s average American really has these images at the forefront. I would tend to think — and again my assumption may be mistaken — that the typical American equates Haitian with Black, so the two categories are rather interchangeable. We see this with some of the photos that have come out of this Trump-Vance conspiracy theory, where Black Americans are being identified by MAGA types as Haitian. They’re not making a distinction; and, to them, it may be one without a difference.
The question is just how much violence will we have down the stretch to Election Day and then, what will happen in the aftermath of the election. Things are like this because of Trump’s stink, our press corps is pretty awful, and our political process is controlled by big money. Hold on to your hats! It’s gonna get rough.
I agree. I will say, though, that even if the press were to pivot hard into calling Trump’s statements lies and denouncing what clearly is racism emanating from his mouth, that would do little in terms of affecting the contest come November. There’s simply not enough time for the press to effect a 180 in the minds of the readers and viewers. (A sea change is possible, but it would have to originate in that Trump himself does that pulls everyone up short. And this cat thing hasn’t done that. It would have to be something extraordinary, something that goes to the core myth of his persona.)
I actually think things are quite dire, in terms of short-term violence, because Trump et al. have been building up to this for years — they’ve simply moved into a new phase.
We are all in the same boat and so many of his followers just do not understand what that means for them and for all. Many of them do realize that he is crazy but they have convinced themselves that only the targeted groups are going to be suffering. They don’t get that once the various targeted groups have been “dealt with”, they will be next.
Same with our side when it comes to Israel and our government’s support for the genocide there. When I see what is being done there, my self preservation reflex kicks in hard because I know when actions like this are ignored, it means that if the state wants to cook up a reason, they can wipe out a civilian population and there is no effective opposition. People walking around with signs and holding hands chanting won’t change anything.
We are all in the same boat. Dire indeed.
We agree 100%. The cult of purity can never be satisfied: there will always be someone who is just outside the norm enough to be considered a deviant. Also, once a group becomes one that persecutes others, that becomes both a method of ensuring compliance as well as a reason for its existence. So it will keep persecuting _some_ group of people, even those of the in-group if and when there are no other targets available.
As for Trump, I have my suspicions about him. On that other platform I mention so often here, it's rather forbidden to speculate without basis, as that leads almost directly to conspiracy theories. But I think that Trump's brush with death when Covid came to visit him left a mark. Covid is a brain disease, something that most people don't realize: about a third of the people who get it suffer neurological symptoms for some time thereafter. We know that Trump was rushed to the hospital when he was sick with Covid because he was in grave condition (almost certainly would have related to oxygen levels). If he had hypoxia (remember him wheezing on the balcony?), that could have affected him neurologically from that point on. Granted, he's been decompensating as a narcissist for some time, he's older, and he has a direct family line to Alzheimer's; but complications from Long Covid could be amplifying what we're seeing. And that's as far as I'll take that speculation for now.
I think a mixture of long COVID, age, and stress has caused Trump’s aging process to accelerate. Being president prematurely ages everyone who holds that office, and Trump wasn’t exactly a spring chicken in 2016. COVID has an extremely damaging effect on the body, and our knowledge of what that entails still seems primitive at the moment. Given Trump’s love of crowds, I’m sure he’s gotten reinfected more times than we know about. Trump is probably also still traumatized from the first assassination attempt, when he was actually hit. Since then, he has seemed more incoherent and less energetic, even by the standards of a man in his late 70s. I feel that if Trump wasn’t so petty and narcissistic that he’d drop out of the race, because he really looks like he’s over it.
My personal theory has always been that Trump never really expected to win in 2016 and his run was a scam that went completely off the rails. I say this for several reasons. First, if you google something to the effect of “bill clinton encouraged Trump to run,” you’ll find a ton of articles from 2015 that state that Bill Clinton told Trump that he had some good ideas and that he should run for president as a Republican. These sources include the WP, Vanity Fair, and the New York Daily News, among others. To me, this suggests (if true) that the Clintons were trying to rig the race by choosing who they thought would be the most absurd opponent possible and it backfired. Second, Trump and Melania looked absolutely stricken on election night when they learned he had won, as if they had gotten the news that Mar-A-Lago had sunk into the ocean. In other words, not the reaction of someone who’s excited that he’s finally in the position to “make America great again” by being president.
I had heard about Trump’s underwhelming reaction to learning that he had emerged the victor in 2016.
As for the WH prematurely aging its occupants, this is generally held to be true, but others have noted that Trump seemed to have bypassed this malady. If you look at pictures before and after his tenure, he looks remarkably the same. Now, part of that is because he actually has hair plugs, which is why he’s not greying; and that will affect how we observers view his face. But he did not really exert himself in the WH. I have no difficulty in imagining that he felt rather carefree while he was there.
Thank you for your reply. I think the main reason why Trump looks relatively less aged compared to previous presidents is because he was already a senior citizen when he took office. Hence, I think any further physical aging isn’t going to be as obvious compared to Clinton, GWB, or Obama. Trump is also a media personality first and foremost, so he probably cares more about hiding aging than other politicians, as seen by his losing battle against male pattern baldness.
In any case, I think that the Other Site does engage in quite a bit of conspiracy theories. They just aren’t the chemtrails/black helicopters/anti-vaxx sort/litter boxes in public schools variety of conspiracy theories. It’s just taken to be a given that the every single Republican politician, at least at the congressional level, is receiving a check in the mail signed Vladimir V. Putin. Many also believe that those of us with pro-Palestinian beliefs are also getting those sweet, sweet Putin bucks as well. I just saw the rare skeptical poster asking what proof there was that Jill Stein was receiving money from Putin. The reply was that she absolutely did, but the reason why there’s no evidence is because if it existed, the FBI would have known about it. So there’s no actual proof that Stein is receiving money from Putin, but she definitely did because…trust me bro?