Trump ludicrously claimed that black Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in small Springfield OH. Obvious nonsense. He was mocked. Laughed at.
But he doubled down. Insisted on the same lie on following days. His disgusting VP candidate Vance very publicly repeated the lies. What the hell?
Two things. First, as the insightful authority on autocratic regimes, Ann Applebaum, notes, the first step in establishing an autocratic tyranny is to lie, and all of his supplicants must repeat the lie in order to prove their loyalty. Was this lie any stupider than Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election in a landslide? Of course not. But virtually all elected Republicans repeat that lie ad nauseam. So too, here.
Second, and much more terrifying, Trump is copying Hitler and the Nazis by finding someone to dehumanize to the point of murderous rage. The Nazis pointed to the filthy anti-Jewish lies in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” where the ridiculous lie was that Jews were killing babies and drinking their blood. What incendiary rubbish. Now Trump and MAGA are claiming that black immigrants are killing and eating people’s pets.
Why? To make people afraid, to make people target the innocent, to make people want to be protected from monsters, to make people give all all all their powers to the autocrat who will protect them - from what? from make believe, non-existent monsters. They aren’t monsters. They are people.
