Republicans Are a Party of Blatant Racists – Mother Jones

First, it’s important to note: the origins of these reports, emanating from some of the highest levels of the U.S. government, can seemingly be traced to a single lie. Here’s what happened. A member of a random (extremely obscure) Facebook group discussing local criminal activity in Springfield, Ohio, warned that a friend of their neighbor’s daughter had recently lost her cat, before describing an unsubstantiated trend of Haitians eating cats they’d found on the street. From there, a rumor began claiming that Haitian immigrants were kidnapping and eating cats—a claim that police have since roundly debunked—and quickly spread to the screenshots of some of the far-right’s most prominent figures, including Charlie Kirk, before making its way into the Elon Musk universe. (How no one stopped to question whether to believe a random Facebook post from the friend-in-Canada phone line of “friend of neighbor’s daughter” is beyond me.)

From that point on, it was JD Vance, the most shameful online vice presidential candidate in history — with his long history of smearing Haitian immigrants in his home state — who proved to be the accelerant in mainstreaming the lie within the GOP:

Now, it’s not surprising that Donald Trump’s running mate would seize on a racist lie; such behavior is, in fact, a requirement of the Trump White House. But even after years of Republican loyalty, the party’s gleeful embrace of it is something to behold. Do they really believe that Haitian immigrants roam the streets looking for cats to eat? Of course not. But this is what happens when a party channels its ambitions into outright racism.

It’s worth re-reading an old piece by my colleague Tim Murphy, about how the modern GOP has gone way beyond the whistle and into outright racism:

Our politicians are not whistling racism to win racist votes in a calculated game. They are just racist. And it is best to realize that. After all, the euphemisms politicians use are never just euphemisms. When racist white people talk about “the schools” or “the neighborhood,” they are not standing in for something deeper and more evil: those are the deeper and more evil things, the pillars of structural racism. This speech is not so much coded as loaded.