CROOKS vs. SICKOS vs. UNREPENTANT FASCISTS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ J.D. Vance appeared to admit in a CNN interview that he deliberately spread racist lies about the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. If you watched last week’s presidential debate (or even if you didn’t) then you’re probably aware that former President Trump accused immigrants of “eating the pets of the people who live there.” Vance was the first to bring this nasty rumor from the obscure corners of the internet into mainstream politics, posting about it on Twitter/X, the day before the debate. There was zero evidence of Haitians eating cats in Springfield: Not only did Springfield police say they’d received no reports of cat consumption, but in the following days, the woman who initially spread the story on Facebook acknowledged that she had “no proof” that it happened and said that she’d heard it from “an acquaintance of a friend” who’d heard it from “a source that she had.” (Even the intrepid gumshoe Christopher Rufo, who offered “a $5,000 bounty to anyone who can provide… verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio,” had to settle for a grainy video—allegedly of an African man in Dayton—grilling what might be a cat, but looks more like a chicken, over a year ago.)
“I heard it from a friend who / heard it from a friend who / heard it from another, they’ve been eatin’ some cats” (Graphic: NewsGuard)
But even after the cat claims were thoroughly refuted, Vance has continued to spread them for more than a week, even encouraging followers to “keep the cat memes flowing.” Vance has also doubled down on other bullshit claims, including that migrants were leading to increases in “communicable diseases like HIV and TB” (something the Department of Health says is not true) and claimed that a child was “murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” (In fact, the child was killed in a car accident, the driver was in the country legally, and the child's father has urged Vance, Trump, and other Republicans to stop using his death "as a political tool.")
Since Trump targeted their town on the debate stage, Republican Governor Mike DeWine says that Springfield has received “at least 33” bomb threats, including at two elementary schools, a middle school, and two hospitals. One Haitian woman reports having her car windows bashed in and having her vehicle doused with acid. A squadron of Proud Boys—the fascist militia group that was involved in the January 6 riot—was filmed marching around the town. And the Ku Klux Klan distributed threatening hate mail around the town calling for the “mass deportation” of Haitians. One community organizer told the Haitian Times, “Many families are starting to think of leaving Springfield after last night, and some kids aren’t even going to school because of fear of being attacked.”
Mainstream Republicans have already said almost all of this. The Klan getting involved feels like a hat on a hat… or a hood on a hood, in this case. (Image: Noah Lanard,Mother Jones)
None of this would be happening had Trump and Vance not spread their racist bile in the first place. In Vance’s case, it’s particularly egregious, because the people of Ohio are his constituents. But when confronted by CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance not only accepted zero responsibility but seemed to justify lying in order to drive a media narrative: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” he said. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” After Bash questioned what he’d just said, Vance immediately backpedaled, claiming that he meant that he was “creating the American media focusing on it” and then insisted that it was “disgusting” to suggest he bore any responsibility for the numerous acts of violence in Springfield.
At worst, Vance is consciously lying and is willing to get his own constituents potentially killed in order to scapegoat immigrants. But even at best, he’s willing to believe and recklessly spread whatever racist nonsense comes across his social media feed, even as it risks inciting a pogrom. Materially speaking, there is no difference whether he’s evil or stupid: Innocent people are being targeted with death threats either way. This is one of the lowest, vilest things a presidential candidate has ever done, and that’s up against some stiff competition. And all of this is made even more ominous given the backdrop of Trump’s “mass deportation” pledge. Last week, he promised his supporters that this operation would be a “bloody story.” And this week, his campaign is using the most dehumanizing, Nazi-like rhetoric possible to lay the groundwork for the violence he plans to carry out—calling an entire group of people a horde of animalistic, diseased, “low IQ,” savages. It is beyond indecent, “divisive,” or “extreme” (as Kamala Harris put it during the debate), it is unrepentant fascism.
In other news…
There was another attempt to assassinate Trump on Sunday. The new suspect—a 58-year-old man named Ryan Wesley Routh—reportedly laid in wait for Trump on his Florida golf course for more than 12 hours, but wasn’t able to actually fire his rifle before the Secret Service shot at him and thwarted the attack before taking him into custody. Like the first failed Trump assassin, Routh’s ideology seems to be a crazy-quilt of totally disparate and conflicting beliefs: According to his social media posts, he voted for Trump in 2016 and Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, then supported a Vivek Ramaswamy-Nikki Haley super-ticket in 2024. His geopolitical views are no clearer: He volunteered with the Ukrainian war effort against Russia, but also expressed a strange admiration for Kim Jong-un. Truly the ultimate median voter. (Associated Press)
Jeremy Kauffman, an activist with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, got a knock on the door from the FBI after his party made—and quickly deleted—a post calling for Kamala Harris to also be targeted for assassination. You just can’t say anything these days, thanks to Woke. (Time)
Screenshots from Twitter/X
When he wasn’t dodging would-be assassins on the golf course, Trump was threatening to punish countries that de-dollarize their trade deals, saying that “[If] You leave the dollar, you’re not doing business with the United States, because we’re going to put 100% tariff on your goods.” (Geopolitical Economy)
Trump also posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” to Truth Social, in all caps, after the pop star endorsed Kamala Harris last week. That’s just childish, and it probably won’t help him with the important “white women” demographic. (Washington Post)
For context, here’s what it would look like if past presidents had posted like Trump:
AROUND THE STATES
❧ New York City police shot four people, including a fellow officer, in the city’s poorest area on Sunday. They were pursuing an alleged turnstile jumper, 37-year-old Derell Mickles, for evading a $2.90 train ticket. The shooting took place in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, where 39 percent of residents live in poverty. Many residents have trouble affording their basic needs, let alone paying for public transit. But as New York has attempted to crack down on fare evaders, the city’s poorest neighborhood—which predictably has the greatest rate of turnstile jumping arrests—has been their top area of focus.
On Sunday, that crackdown turned violent. For the Intercept, New York-based journalist Natasha Lennard summarized the events as follows:
At around 3 p.m. Sunday, at the Sutter Avenue stop in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the man [Mickles] allegedly evaded paying the subway fare. According to reports, two police officers pursued this man up three flights of stairs and confronted him on the station platform. Police say the man pulled out a knife. Both officers opened fire on the man, piercing him with several bullets, while also striking two bystanders; one of the officers was hit with friendly fire. One of the bystanders, a 49-year-old man, is in critical condition in the hospital from a bullet wound to the head.
It’s hard to know exactly what happened—most reporting on the events has quoted from the police. As of now, body cam footage has not yet been released. However, we have reasons to be suspicious of the official version of events. For one thing, the police initially claimed they found Mickles’ knife at the scene, but later said they’d recovered a different knife left by another rider and that an unknown suspect had swiped Mickles’ knife from the scene and remains at large. In a phone interview with Gothamist, a witness said that he “never saw a knife, but I don’t think I saw both of his hands.” Police also claimed that Mickles became agitated as police followed him through the station, allegedly saying, “I'm going to kill you if you don’t stop following me.” Regardless of whether Mickles had a knife or not, it seems that this entire situation could have been avoided had police not insisted on following a man for a fare violation worth less than $3
In a Twitter/X post announcing that an officer was shot in Brownsville, Mayor Eric Adams—a former cop—venerated “these officers… for their bravery,” while not even acknowledging that the shooter was an officer himself. In fact, his wording seemed to imply that Mickles was the shooter. He also did not mention the two other totally innocent bystanders who were injured. This incident is totally emblematic of the Eric Adams approach to criminal justice and policing: seeing a problem of poverty and throwing police at it in hope that it goes away, while ignoring the needless violence and escalation they add to the situation.
This is what happens when youflooda major transit system with a government-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded armed gang coated with official impunity and prone to violent escalation.
Sunday’s police shooting should be a lesson in why the subway should not be teeming with cops, responding to “crimes” of poverty — like fare evasion and panhandling — with deadly force. Unsurprisingly, the Adams administration has framed the incident within its ongoing, mendacious narrative about rampant subway crime, for whichmore policing is the only answer.
PAST AFFAIRS
In March, after New York announced that it would flood the subway with hundreds more armed police and national guardsmen, Stephen Prager argued that “No City Needs Subway Soldiers.”
In other news…
Speaking of awful New York cops, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban resigned last week—but just three days before stepping down, he issued a new “disciplinary matrix” that reduces penalties for police misconduct, sometimes to nothing more than “training.” The full document can be read here. (The City)
In Florida, four Black socialists from the Uhuru Movement have been convicted on a charge of conspiracy to spread alleged Russian “propaganda,” which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. They intend to appeal, describing the charges as suppression of their right to free speech, and point out that none of the jurors was African American. (Tampa Bay Times)
A federal judge has ruled that election officials in Arkansas can enforce a “wet signature” rule, which requires people to sign their voter registration documents on physical paper and forbids e-signatures. (Arkansas Advocate)
The New York Times’ tech employees are threatening to strike after more than two years of stalled negotiations with management. The New York Times Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 workers overwhelmingly voted to go ahead with a walkout, but did not specify when. Regardless, with election season ramping up, losing its tech employees could turn the paper’s coverage into a buggy disaster. (Semafor)
Get ready for some very weird-looking election needles.
One year after Illinois ended cash bail, statistics show there has been no dramatic increase in crime, as opponents of the policy warned there might be. In fact, both violent and property-related crimes have actually fallen. (Axios)
The National Labor Relations Board has ordered two Starbucks locations in Ithaca, New York to re-open after they were improperly shut down last year to prevent unionization efforts. (Ithaca Voice)
Voters in four states—Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado—will have the opportunity to implement ranked-choice voting via ballot measures in November. Two other states—Montana and Illinois—have ballot measures that introduce 50 percent thresholds for victory and runoff elections. Both of these measures would make elections more representative of people’s actual desires and give third parties a chance to run without immediately being labeled as “spoilers.” (LA Progressive)
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Data shows China leading the world in green energy—and it’s not even close. A strange thing happened on Monday: the New York Times published a reasonable, non-warmongering article about China on its opinion page. In an op-ed called “What Happens if China Stops Trying to Save the World?,” climate journalist David Wallace-Wells lays out everything the country has been doing in recent years to address global warming and curb fossil fuel production, and it’s an impressive record. First off, China completely dominates the booming solar energy field:
In 2023, the world including China installed425 gigawattsof new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate.
It’s not just solar, though. Wallace-Wells also points out that “In 2023, China installed 74 gigawatts of new wind capacity; the rest of the world installed 43 gigawatts, and the United States just 6.” On carbon emissions, the picture is a little murkier, as China is still the world’s single biggest producer of greenhouse gas and relies heavily on coal. But then again, since the U.S. and Europe have outsourced so much manufacturing to China, a significant chunk of those emissions are really ours, just moved geographically. And when you measure by “avoided emissions,” the metric the International Energy Agency uses to calculate a country’s progress on decarbonization, China’s huge investments again outpace the rest of the world:
New wind capacity built in China “avoided” 487 megatons of emissions, according to the I.E.A., while all the wind power elsewhere in the world only cut carbon by 343 megatons. In China, electric cars averted 22 megatons of emissions, more than in the United States (15 megatons), the European Union (14 megatons), Britain (3 megatons) and three times as much as new E.V.s in the rest of the world (7 megatons).
There’s definitely a lot of work still to be done, of course. There are also major issues with forced labor in China’s solar industry, asthe Guardian reportedin 2022. But at least China is making a serious effort to transition to clean power before it’s too late. The same can’t really be said about the United States. On the Democratic side, the country hit record-high oil production and exports under President Biden, who also slapped prohibitively expensive tariffs on Chinese solar panels. (Not for the slave-labor issue, either. That would at least make sense. No, it’s because China has state-subsidized industries, which is apparently “unfair.”) Meanwhile in the GOP, you’ve got Donald Trump, who outright denies that climate change exists and calls it a Chinese hoax. If we’re going to have any chance of beating back global catastrophe, we need to ditch both approaches, and learn something from our counterparts in Beijing.
In other news…
Daniel Santiago, a humanitarian activist from New Jersey, says the Israeli military shot him in the leg during a peaceful protest in the West Bank town of Beita—the same place where the IDF killed Turkish American activist Aysenur Eygi on September 6 (see our coverage in Friday’s briefing). How long will the Biden/Harris administration allow its citizens to be attacked like this with no consequence? (CBS)
Alberto Fujimori has died at the age of 86. The former president of Peru was convicted of human rights abuses in 2009, mainly for ordering anti-communist death squads to torture and execute dozens of his own citizens. Bizarrely, the international press has chosen to describe him as merely “controversial,” and to emphasize the fact that his remaining supporters came out to mourn him. (Associated Press)
Animal rights advocates in Argentina are calling for the release of Kshamenk the orca, who’s been kept in an aquarium in Buenos Aires since 1992, and shows signs of poor mental health from his long captivity. They also want a “Kshamenk Law” to ban SeaWorld-style shows featuring marine mammals. (ABC)
Aerial footage of Kshamenk’s tank, taken in 2023. (Image: UrgentSeas via Instagram)
After being freed from prison, labor leader Chhim Sithar vows to continue leading a strike against Cambodia’s largest casino chain. She was arrested in 2022 after leading a demonstration with hundreds of workers who’d been unjustly fired during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is the longest continuous labor action going on in Cambodia. (Associated Press)
Sir Keir Starmer—who, remember, is supposed to be a British Labour Party politician—is now taking advice from far-right Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni on how to achieve a “dramatic reduction” in immigration. That doesn’t sound good. (Al Jazeera)
The Daily Starmer with his new mentor. (Image: 10 Downing Street via Flickr)
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian has been in office for seven weeks now, and he’s finally formed a cabinet. Pezeshkian has compromised on his original plans to put women and members of religious minorities in key roles, appointing just one female minister—the second since the country’s Islamic revolution in 1978—and no minorities. More promisingly, though, he’s appointed Abbas Araghchi—a key figure in the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States—as Minister of Foreign Affairs, which may reflect a desire for renewed diplomacy. (Al Jazeera)
The U.S. State Department has issued a statement urging Rojava—the majority-Kurdish autonomous region in northern Syria, run along revolutionary principles of “democratic confederalism,” feminism, and socialism—not to hold elections. Department spokesperson Matthew Miller claimed that the “necessary conditions” for “free, fair, transparent, and inclusive elections” hadn’t been met—but considering that U.S. ally Turkey previously threatened military action against Rojava if it holds a vote, it’s fair to suspect there was some pressure from Ankara involved in this decision. (Rudaw)
LIZARD FACT OF THE WEEK
Leaf chameleons are the tiniest reptiles on Earth!
This week, scientists in Madagascar announced that they’d found something exciting: an entirely new lizard. A leaf chameleon, to be specific, with the scientific name Brookesia nofy—and a very tiny one, with the average individual measuring “around 33 millimetres long.” (For our non-metric-using U.S. readers, that’s about 1.29 inches from tip to tail.) It’s the first time a leaf chameleon has been discovered in Madagascar’s coastal rainforests, and New Scientist magazine speculates this species has only survived “because the forest patch where it is found is part of a private reserve run by a hotel,” and has been protected from deforestation.
It’s not the smallest reptile in the world, though. That’s the closely-related Brookesia nana, also a leaf chameleon from Madagascar. It was discovered last year, and the average adult measures just 13.5 millimeters, or roughly half an inch! Really, it’s incredible that anyone spotted them at all.
Unlike their larger cousin the Panther Chameleon, these don’t really change color.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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