I generally tend to bristle when I hear Democrat-leaning friends say things like "Republicans are racist" or "Trump is racist", because 99% of the time the evidence for that is super weak or slanted. But in this instance, I'm pretty appalled at how gross (and frankly, un-American) these comments are.
Your comment is probably more important than it initially looks, too. Because the sort of "racism" you're talking about is the tendency to view people only as avatars of whatever ethnic group the surrounding culture conceptualizes, rather than whether you favor or disfavor any of those groups. (The concepts change with time; in 1900 Swedes weren't considered "white" in the US.) As Noah says, that's quite common across history, but it's also un-American.
"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.''
Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close."
So of course Haitians are good enough: anyone can be good enough, and it's infuriating to me we need to explain it to these so called patriots spewing lies and racist bile
Thanks, Noah, as a child of Haitian immigrants and a proud (though sometimes frustrated) American, this means more to me than almost anything you’ve ever written.
Well, almost.. that essay about rabbits with a bit about your moral philosophy was up there as well :-)
The question is whether there is any selection process for immigrants from Haiti, or if it’s immigration for anyone who wants to go. It’s impossible to honestly write such a post without mentioning the catastrophe that unfiltered immigration has been for Europe, ranging from daily stabbing incidents to the return of neo-Nazi elements to power.
Emigration is its own selection process, since it requires initiative and risk tolerance. But like I said in the post, our immigration from Haiti is far less selective than from most countries.
Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans go through a special immigration process, the terms of which are outlined here: https://www.uscis.gov/CHNV
The gist is that the programme makes it much easier to come. It also gives you a considerably cheaper and safer option than getting to the southern border and trying to claim asylum there, or getting in a boat and trying to make it to Florida. But there are a number of conditions, including, most importantly, that:
1. The intake is limited to 30,000 applicants a month;
2. Applicants have to have a sponsor in the US who is lawfully resident and can financially support them;
3. Applicants cannot fail a background screening, and cannot have tried to illegally enter the US before.
The deterrence effect this has on irregular crossings, either by land or sea, should be obvious. Immigrants from these countries have reasonable odds of making it into the US in a way that doesn't put them at serious risk and/or financially ruin them. In return, they have to avoid crossing over.
I think one of the problems we have in Europe is not doing this sort of thing enough. Similar programmes on a large enough scale to make it worth peoples' while, but a small enough one to ensure the influx doesn't overwhelm us, would be ideal. Having sponsors also makes it easier to find one's feet in their new country, and eventually find work and integrate more successfully.
Thank you, that is good info. Is there a reason we don’t have this type of process in place for immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, etc.? Seems like it would help. I assume this may be part of immigration reform legislation that has never happened. I think we need to find a way to eliminate the noise and let our government figure out a way to improve the system. There are legislators from both sides that are much more informed on the real issues than the rest of us who are stuck in the political firestorm.
No worries! I don't know exactly but as far as I can tell it's probably because this is relatively new. The Venezuelan part came in 2022 and the other three countries were added in 2023. Despite that, the mechanism to do it - humanitarian parole - has been around for a while since it's part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Carter Administration used it in the 1970s for refugees from Indochina, for instance.
A more limited version of parole is already in place for the countries you mentioned. It allows adults who are already in the US to bring their children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
So it sounds like there’s no selection process here and no qualifications are required. In this regard, the U.S. is shifting to the European immigration model, and the results will be similar.
What do you mean by "selection process"? Practically speaking, it would be almost impossible to "select" people from these countries based on their occupations or qualifications because of the difficulty recognising and verifying those. How on earth do you tell if someone who says they're a doctor in Port-au-Prince is actually capable of practicing medicine in the US?
If you don't have systems like the one the Americans have set up here, they will just try to come via the border or by sea anyways, which is what they were doing before. It is also, incidentally, what they are doing in Europe. At least this way you can control numbers and do some basic screening.
There are several ways that people can qualify to receive an immigrant visa to the United States. The only one that does not need to be applied for ahead of time is asylum status, which is the method most commonly used on the southern border.
I obtained the following information using Bing Copilot. It does not appear to list the guest worker program in used in Springfield, Ohio, which is clearly a temporary rather than a permanent visa
--There are several ways to qualify for an immigration visa to the United States. Here are some of the main categories:
1. **Family-Based Immigration**: You can apply if you have a close family member who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. This includes spouses, children, parents, and siblings³.
2. **Employment-Based Immigration**: You can qualify through a job offer from a U.S. employer. There are different categories based on your skills, education, and job type².
3. **Diversity Visa Lottery**: Each year, the U.S. government runs a lottery program that grants visas to individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.¹.
4. **Refugee or Asylum Status**: If you are fleeing persecution or have a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, you may qualify for refugee or asylum status¹.
5. **Special Immigrant Categories**: This includes certain religious workers, employees of U.S. foreign service posts, and other special categories².
6. **Investment-Based Immigration**: If you invest a significant amount of money in a U.S. business, you may qualify for an investor visa².
This is just ridiculous. There is no unfiltered immigration in Europe, there are no 'daily stabbing incidents' and the rise of neo-nazi's is more due to unaddressed grievances that are skillfully redirected to immigration.
I am Dutch, and yes, there are a ton of racist Dutch people. I don't think we are inherently racist (what does that even mean). But most racism I see is not so much directed to recent immigrants, but more to the second/third generation descendants from immigrantd in the 60's, 70's and 80's. These people are Dutch so anti-immigration is not going to help much to solve that problem.
Most of the current immigration is from Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, and is very much demand-driven, just like in Springfield, Ohio. There are tons of jobs that the Dutch are not willing to do anymore, so unless you are happy to force Dutch people to work in abbotoirs and greenhouses we are better off figuring out how to make it work instead of trying to stop it.
It's ironic that you say this mockingly, because all the woke people are busy with from morning till night is finding excuses for the violence and brutality of cruel individuals (though only if they aren't of European or Jewish descent).
I’m not defending whoever you think is woke. I’m saying that you are blaming your own neo nazism on immigrants. (Maybe you aren’t a new Nazi. But you are still blaming the neo Nazi sentiment that someone has on immigrants, who really aren’t trying to inflame that stuff in any way.)
You do have to bite the bullet regarding immigration, particularly immigration of non-elite people. In the late 1800s there really was a great influx of poor, poor-ish, and less-educated people, and the major US cities had large slums, inter-ethnic conflict, crime, the rise of reactionary anti-immigrant politics, etc. But it also was the time the US grew into a world power, based on the labor of those immigrants in our factories. And three generations on their descendants are a large fraction of the solid middle class.
In regard to Europe, it's clearly been rough. OTOH, immigration will prevent its population from collapsing over the next couple of generations. And seriously, how bad are a few stabbings per day over some hundreds of millions of people? I mean, compare with the number of people killed in traffic accidents.
If road accidents were to lead to a collapse of the country's political ability to function altogether, as happened recently in France and might happen in Germany, I would support at least lowering the maximum speed limit to 80 km/h.
We need to do immigration on an individual basis, on the basis of merit, meaning mainly people who contribute the most economic ally, but with political asylum a kind of merit aiming to undermine the oppressive regime.
OTOH, the legal theory is that asylum is an individual right based on being persecuted in particular ways. Interestingly, "the government treats everybody in the country horribly" is *not* grounds for asylum. It definitely isn't based on our political desire to undermine the regime of the country they came from. Of course, you're welcome to lobby Congress to change the law...
The real story here is the lack of trust in the news crews.
The media are acting like these claims are obviously false. I don’t accept them as true at face value either, but the American commentariat insisting they must be a racist lie makes their "investigation" of said claims suspect.
Let's say for a moment that the PBS reporter really had found a large collection of illegal Haitian immigrants who admitted to stealing dugs and eating them. Would the reporter have told the story? I don't think so, and I have good reason to doubt it. The major press outlets have been very upfront that they make no attempt to cover anything Donald Trump says or does honestly. Trump is a "danger to democracy" and a "racist" who should not be platformed. They are open that the need to build a narrative to hurt Trump is more important than the need to tell the truth. Objectivity has taken a back seat to ideology. WaPo and NYT and CNN have been very upfront about this for years.
The PBS crew in Springfield way well be telling the truth. Or they could be lying through their teeth because... Orange Man Bad. There is no way to know. So those who doubt their veracity are not being conspiratorial; they're taking when the press has said about itself and its role in this election and applying it.
House pets in many countries (Africa, SE Asia, China, and yes, Haiti) get stolen and cooked. This happens throughout the world. If you’re going to welcome global diversity, you will get global diversity. And that includes practices that you find abhorrent. Does that means it's happening in Springfield? No. But it's certainly not inconceivable to think it might be, and I don't for a moment trust the press to tell me whether it is. Because... Orange Man said it, so it must be false. Even if it's not.
Have you ever watched local news? If someone was kidnapping and eating the pets of their neighbors, local news would be *alllll* over that, no matter who was involved. (Except maybe if it was one of their major local advertisers.)
It's why I propose banishing the phrase "conspiracy theory" from the discourse.
Calling it theory, either a hypothesis or a body of knowledge of ideas about a subject (either proven like germ theory or disproven like phlogiston theory), gives it a respect it doesn't deserve.
It's more accurately conspiracy fantasy, like the narrative genre. A hypothesis that's unprovable or disprovable must be withdrawn. Conspiracy fantasists never do that, instead believing that ideas contrary to their theory is evidence of a plot and they must dig deeper.
If the gatekeepers were as powerful as you claim, we wouldn't have heard about the allegations in the first place. Instead we have because the people making them directly communicated them through X, a social media platform with a large reach owned by someone who very clearly believes Orange Man Good.
The people making these allegations had the opportunity to back them up through actual, tangible evidence. But they didn't. On the contrary, many of them submitted as proof a video of an American woman who had nothing to do with Haiti being arrested for killing and eating a cat in a totally different part of Ohio.
On the contrary, I think the belief that there are shadowy "gatekeepers" who don't want you to know the "real truth" is actually much more sinister. It's a common tactic that cults use to isolate people, cutting them off from their other friends and family members by creating a parallel reality and distancing them from the mainstream. I'm especially sceptical of JD Vance doing it, since he literally wrote a book about how the people he's now trying to court votes from and claim representation for are a bunch of rubes.
I don't think they're "shadowy" at all. The shadowy time ran from about 1990-2016. After that, the press was completely open about their desire to manage narrative instead of tell the truth.
You mentioned Twitter (I refuse to call it X). Imagine for a moment if Twitter was still owned by the Left-wing uniparty. Would you ever know about this? (I know, you think it's fake anyway, but would it really be better if the entire media establishment moved in lockstep with no opposition at all? Or do you really believe that any non-liberal narrative is "misinformation"?) Consider the number of things that have gone from from "kooky conspiracy theory" to "well everyone knows that" in the last 7 years (COVID lab leak, Hunter's laptop, Biden bribery, vaccine side-effects, masks don't work, masks do work, Biden dementia, etc...) Is it really so hard to believe that Haitians might be eating pets in Springfield? And if they were, the press wouldn't tell you? I once personally witnessed an Italian boy snag 2 pigeons from St. Mark's Square in Venice, snap their necks, and walk off with them. These things happen with some regularity. Poor, hungry people will do what's necessary.
I agree with you 100% that there is no video evidence at this point. However, J.D. Vance stated yesterday on CNN that he has had dozens of calls to his office (before any of this erupted publicly) making these claims. Maybe he's making that up. Maybe those people are mistaken. Maybe they're racists who just hate Haitians. I don't know. And neither do you. There was a time you and I could rely on an objective press to tell us the truth about whether it was real. We no longer can. And the reason we can't isn't because of Elon Musk and Twitter. It's because those very news organizations have openly abandoned any pretense of objective truth-seeking.
Okay first things first when was Twitter "owned" by the left wing uniparty? It's been proven over time that right wing and controversial talking points get amplified on Twitter. Just because under Dorsey they were more left wing, doesn't mean they were owned by the left wing uniparty.
Also to pretend that Fox News, NewsMax and OAN don't have more viewers than what you would consider liberal news on TV is ignorance at best. Additionally, you do realize half of the stuff you mentioned is not "well everyone knows that now" right? Additionally, saying that people dismiss any any non-liberal narrative as misinformation is a such a reductive statement.
1 - Covid lab leak still hasn't been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The whole point was that MSM and real journalists didn't want to accuse another country of a lab leak without knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that it actually happened
2 - Hunter's laptop was never dismissed as it didn't exist. The only thing was that the chain of custody had been broken so bad and
3 - Joe Biden still hasn't been bribed. It has been proven that Hunter was unethical and was trying to trade bribes, but I still don't see anything where Joe Biden accepted bribes.
4 - Vaccine side effects? When have people ever said that vaccines don't have side effects? The main difference between liberals and conservatives on this issue was the fact that conservative media kept pushing that vaccines were unsafe and that the side effects outweighed the benefits of the vaccines.
5 - Masks do work on limiting transmission of viruses that is proven. I don't remember a lot of back and forth on this outside of conservatives saying that they don't work as well, etc. I love the fact that you are upset that politicians and health officials who were trying to figure out a once in a generation pandemic didn't get everything right immediately though.
6 - Biden having dementia, we still don't have enough to make a clinical diagnosis but to pretend that conservative people online weren't doctoring videos to make Biden look worse is bad faith. That is why people on the left side were ignoring the signs.
Going back to your point about "is it really so hard to believe that Haitians might be eating pets in Springfield?" I mean the idea that someone may believe something isn't the issue, the issue is whether it should be said and shared as true when people know it isn't, especially when it falls back on familiar racist and xenophobic tropes. Even if 1 Haitian person ate a pet in Ohio, I still wouldn't phrase it as representative of an entire group. That is the issue with these types of misinformation. And the idea that local news wouldn't report on it or mainstream media wouldn't report on it if it was a trend is just naive.
Additionally, your personal, anecdotal experience of seeing animal cruelty happen in Venice still does not mean that these things happen with regularity. Additionally, you have no idea if that kid at those pigeons do you? Your statement of poor people do what's necessary is interesting for one.... Maybe people will do unsavory things depending on their environment, but I've been really poor and never thought of stealing or eating someone's pet. It sounds like you are making an excuse for why people would repeat and believe such a racist piece of misinformation.
JD Vance is a known liar, and at this point it doesn't matter if is telling the truth or not. Why would these people call his office and not the police? The idea that you'd rather believe we can't trust anyone instead of the simple truth that sometimes people are a holes who make things up is part of the problem. News Media does exist to make money, but lets be real Trump continues to sell papers and clicks for the ad revenue. There was never a time in US history when the news media didn't have somewhat of a bias or an angle. News Organizations are made up of imperfect people, but most of those people still want to do their job to the best of their ability. I think we should bring the fairness doctrine back regarding news media personally, however you have a lot of right wing talking points here in your comment for someone who seems like they are trying to come off as a well intentioned moderate...
PhillyT: "Just because under Dorsey they were more left wing,"
Stop right there. That's a false dichotomy, and you're unintentionally conceding that rightwing framing is correct. All ideas can be coded as leftwing and rightwing, and any idea not explicitly coded as rightwing is leftwing. These are the only two possibilities.
Twitter at its peak had something like a half-billion unique tweets daily, encompassing everything: politics, news, cute kid and animal photos, dril, porn, spam, anime, advertising, etc. So much of tweet content wasn't political and doesn't fit the dichotomy. Twitter would be "more leftwing" if every tweet has a political intent behind it, and that if any tweet wasn't explicitly rightwing it could only be leftwing.
Twitter, after the $44 billion Nazi bar remodel, is explicitly rightwing because Musk himself boosts the signal of far right personalities and had the algorithm changed to favor far right content in a way that pre-Musk Twitter was less heavy-handed about it.
The fact that Twitter carried a bunch of cat memes doesn't matter. The fact that it is the dominant news aggregator, source for reporters, and disseminator of political information in the 21st century does. Thus if it has a left-wing or right-wing (and I agree that those terms are increasingly hard to define) bias in limiting information is extremely important.
The town square should not be owned by anyone. Or at least access to it should not be restricted by anyone. On that basis, and regardless of his personal politics, Musk has been a vast improvement over Dorsey. He is far less willing to limit political speech in the domain he controls; J.S. Mill (the uber-liberal) would be proud.
BV: "The fact that it is the dominant news aggregator, source for reporters, and disseminator of political information in the 21st century does."
Twitter was never the dominant news aggregator. That was, and is, Facebook by multiples. The news engagement on Facebook, owing to the world's largest network, had at least 8x the traffic the same item got on Twitter. Twitter was No. 2 on social media against Facebook, but fell to No. 3 when it came to web portals and aggregators like Google News, Apple News, the Bing and Yahoo front pages and the like.
BV: "Thus if it has a left-wing or right-wing (and I agree that those terms are increasingly hard to define) bias in limiting information is extremely important."
If you're the kind of thinker who like the Frankfurt School critical theorists believe that ideology is embedded in everything, then you'd be able to assign a political tag to all social media content.
If you go to Twitter's peak, when 500 million tweets were transmitted in a 24-hour period, you want to take the time to sift through all -- or even a random sample -- 500M tweets and label them as leftwing or rightwing? How would you classify ads, which might be like 20% of all traffic? How would you classify information bots, like the ones run by the USGS and NWS that monitor earthquakes and weather disasters? A lot of Twitter is also just a lot of inconsequential chatter, like a person writing to friends "hungry rn gonna go get a burger lol". Where does that fall?
Social media is very much an example of "one person's toilet water is another's drinking water." There's so much going on that other than the platform and its branding, there's no coherence to the content. It's the same water, though.
BV: "The town square should not be owned by anyone."
Social media platforms have trust and safety teams for the same reason beaches have lifeguards.
Well you can maybe trust the police department in the town that said it wasn't happening? You do realize that people had common knowledge this piece of misinformation was false before he said it during the debate right?
And you know, police keep documentation of service calls, arrests and incident reports.
Because dangerously too many in modern culture believes conspiratorial intent behind every fact, the absence of evidence indicates evidence of a cover-up.
But I trusted the public health people who told me not to wear masks.
Then I trusted the public health people who insisted I wear a mask.
I trusted the 51 intelligence officers who told me Hunter's laptop was fake.
I trusted the police dept of Aurora, CO when who insisted there weren't Venezuelan gangs largely running several major apartments buildings... when it turns out the dept not only knew there were Venezuelan gangs infesting those exact apartment buildings but had informed their officers to not to go there alone for exactly that reason.
This is why our ruling clas has no credibility with a huge percentage of the population -- they've lied for years.
Narrative enforcement has become more important than truth. That applies whether it's a senior editor at the NYT, a Georgetown professor, a Army Col, or the police chief of a major city. If you're even a minor elite in America, you may not even go near the shibboleths of our society. So if events might call "diversity is a strength" into question, those events must not be noticed or talked about. And if those events become obvious to ignore, they must be praised.
Let's say there was a video tomorrow that showed a group of Hattian immigrants slaughtering a dozen dogs and cats and eating them. Our media class would do an about face in less than 4 hours from "it's racist to say that Hattians are eating pets" to "it's racist to criticize Hattians for eating unwanted animals".
On a side note. The 51 intelligence officers never said the laptop was fake. The letter they signed if you read it actually says they believed the contents of the laptop could be part of a larger Russian Disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the election. And they even emphasized that they had no knowledge of it was true. The issue was that Republicans at the time were trying to make Hunter Biden's corruption his fathers issues and Politico published a story with the misleading headline, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say," though the body of the story did not support that wording. Instead, the story's lede accurately quoted the letter's words: "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. You are either being very reductive about the entire event or just trying to get a talking point in and missing all nuance.
Regarding face masks, there is a pretty good timeline and article here about how the communication around Face Masks went down and how within a month the CDC basically changed their guidance. Which is good if you consider the fact that as they learned more about the virus, they changed their guidance. That's what we as humans should do when presented with new information.
Just keep moving those goal posts, and keep using the most extreme examples as a reason the whole system is terrible, thus you have to believe the worst about people and our society.
The problem with this theory is that not only do you have to accept that the left-wing news is covering it up, you also have to accept that the right-wing news is too stupid and incompetent to uncover it themselves. I don't particularly trust PBS's selective coverage either, but at some point, someone would have to come up with some kind of evidence at all.
Agreed. My problem is with people who reflexively say "that's just Trump so it must be a lie" or "PBS said they didn't see it so it must not be happening".
As I said, I question whether it's real too. It just sounds like something made up or incredibly rare. However... I was also told (by all the same people) that a Venezuelan gang taking over several apartment buildings in Aurora, CO was a lie. It turns out it's 80% true. And I've seen a lot of that over the last 8 years.
Thank you for writing this, and for laying out the evidence so well. It’s easy for rumor and pseudoscience to spread, especially when it comes to the topic of differences between populations of human beings.
Ironically, intelligent people seem equally vulnerable to misinformation as anybody else. It upsets me to see people who pride themselves in rationality being taken in by ancient rhetorical tricks, but I suppose it’s part of human nature. People who find themselves believing this garbage need to be guided away from it by the rest of us.
JD Vance is a chronically online person of right wing echo chambers that he probably thinks are funny, and its clear that people like him and Donald Trump are willing to engage in casual racism and "othering" if they think it will help fuel the fires of hate, fear and anti-immigration sentiment that they can capitalize on. It's bad faith all the way down.
The reason Noah even had to write the original title sentence and this post is because we have political leaders who are crowd sourcing policy positions and talking points from racists online and they care more about performing on social media than they do about actually solving problems and being true leaders. Falling back on old racist tropes and stereotypes is one of the most disgusting things that political leaders can do, but its clear that this type of behavior is not punishing them enough in the polls or electorally to have them change their behavior.
Kamala Harris in her own words, on video: bragging about pushing for taxpayer funded trannie surgeries for inmates while she was AG of CA (a sanctuary state).
But because Trump noticed, it can't be happening. And if you insist it is happening, you're a racist and a danger to democracy.
Instead of the press complaining about so many Americans believing absurd conspiracy theories on Twitter, perhaps they should ask WHY so many Americans believe randos on Twitter over PBS Newshour and CNN journalists. Of course, that would require introspection... easier just to call those people stupid and racist.
> Kamala Harris in her own words, on video: bragging about pushing for taxpayer funded trannie surgeries for inmates while she was AG of CA (a sanctuary state).
You are telling on yourself here huh. Trannie surgeries for inmates? Talk about casual use of a slur.... It's almost like you didn't even listen to the video, where is she bragging? Additionally, she wasn't AG of CA during this time, the first transgender surgery of an inmate was in 2022 in America mate. And yeah she is supportive of providing care to people who are in prison. While she was AG of CA, she actually didn't support giving funds to inmates who may have wanted or needed surgery. You can say you don't support gender affirming care which is clear from your other comments, but to make it seem like she is bragging about forcing inmates to become transgender, or forcing to state to pay for it, like she is some cackling evil maniac is just bad faith.
Again, what Trump said vs what is actually happening is 2 different things. He said the following “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison, this is a radical left liberal that would do this.”. Again making it seem like Harris is some evil prison doctor looking for test subjects and turning all illegal aliens into transgender individuals.
Leave it to Trump and people like you to take a tiniest nugget of truth, run it into the ground and make it a way bigger issue until it is misconstrued to the point of being absurd. Because Harris supports all inmates, legal citizen or otherwise getting medical care if they are a transgender individual, that must mean she wants to force all of them to do surgery! The reason why people say it isn't happening is because what Trump said isn't happening.
Historically, a lot of the humans throughout history are always more willing to believe their vibe or feeling vs data or facts. Why is it so surprising that people on social media believe memes or what they are told instead of looking into things to confirm when the algorithm literally pushes engagement at all costs and your news feed is a customized silo? Maybe if people don't want to be called stupid or racist, maybe they should stop saying stupid or racist things? Snark aside, social media is not real life, and people say a lot of things online that they'd never say in real life, because they are more concerned about winning than being right.
When I find the candidate saying EXACTLY what Trump claims she said, your answer is to attack me as a bigot and question both my integrity and intelligence. Which, if you read the comment, is exactly what I said you liberals do when confronted with evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions of the world. You are proving my point perfectly. Keep digging.
When the Harris/Walz campaign came up with the "weird" attack, this is what they're talking about. The modern Right is way too Online. Most people are normies and are therefore unaware of the various micro-controvseries that Too Online people themselves are into.
Thank you for the informative article. I wasn't aware of most of this. But this statement caught my eye:
"Rightists would have us believe that this poverty and violence is due to characteristics — cultural and/or innate — of the Haitian people themselves."
I don't think it's innate, but how on earth could it be anything but cultural?? Individuals should be judged individually, and I am open to the idea that immigrants self- select very differently from the general population, but you're acting as if society-wide problems just randomly pop up without any relation to the people in the society. That's not how the world works!
What rightists believe is that this culture is immutably tied to Haitian people, and that when they come to America, they bring that culture with them instead of adopting American culture.
Cultural explanations for this stuff tend to be nebulous, though, and often quickly fall over when you compare different results amongst people with similar cultural backgrounds.
As one example, I've often heard cultural explanations for the violence that engulfed Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the state parts of it are in now - the classic Balkan Ghosts thesis. But then how did Slovenia almost entirely avoid it, and why did things turn out way better in Croatia than in Bosnia? It's not like they speak massively different languages, adhere to very different traditions, or have little shared history. Instead, the more plausible explanation is their specific historic circumstances.
Similarly, why did things go so badly in Haiti while other former slavery-based plantation societies, including the one right next door, have better outcomes? Why is Costa Rica in a much better spot than El Salvador or Nicaragua? Why is Argentina a basket-case and Uruguay one of the nicest places to live in South America?
The problem with culture as an explanation is that it turns historical or institutional contingencies, which are beyond the control of anyone in a society, into immutable characteristics. What specific differences between Haitian culture and that of anyone else in the Caribbean would lead it to be like this, in a way that's transferable to individuals? Or between Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans, or Slovenes and Croats?
Tracing the routes of history through culture can get very complicated, as you note. But that doesn't mean that *right now* the culture and the societal outcomes are completely unrelated. It's hard to think of anything that could be more closely related.
But how "culture" influences your behaviour depends on the context people are in. As an example, I used to live in a part of London where lots of Turks and Kurds, as well as Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, lived side-by-side. In their countries of origin, these people probably would have avoided each other at best, and fought each other at worst.
They were still culturally Turks, Kurds, and Greeks - they often spoke their families' native languages at home and kept following local religions and customs. But how they behaved with each other in the UK, where everyone was a minority and more or less on the same footing, was totally different. Similarly, we can tell from the life outcomes of Haitian immigrants and their descendants in the US that they probably behave totally differently when they live in a functioning state that isn't rife with paranoia and fear.
Sometimes people from diaspora communities do bring grievances with them. Maybe these people also self-selected for open-mindedness because they were willing to move to a completely different country. But I still think it shows to go that people from the same culture can behave very differently in different settings.
I used to feel the same way: any group of people could be successful, capitalist, liberal, tolerant people like we are. People are blank slates. Cultural explanations are racist. Then my country spent 20 years trying to export democracy and liberal values to the Middle East. Now I'm a little more realistic about culture.
Culture is real and important, but people also assimilate rapidly to new cultures, especially to American culture. That's the piece that rightists deny.
It depends on what you call "cultural". Much of the trouble in Haiti seems to come from the fact that it never had a consolidated "state", only occasional strongmen. So in a collective sense, the trouble with Haiti is due to "the culture of Haiti", meaning the collection of institutions that exist in Haiti. But that's not a property that is inherent in individual Haitians, and probably doesn't even stick to them when they move to a place that more-or-less has rule of law.
I've learned in sociology that the concept of "culture" does a lot of heavy lifting, and when arguments get to the point of having to pound the dictionary, the concept itself serves as a motte and bailey.
"There were a number of trademark Trump moments, such as when he declared that Harris 'wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison'."
I think most of us are just sick of these incredibly niche, irrelevant issues being elevated to the level of national significance. It’s basically just embarrassing and it’s part of the reason that the GOP keeps losing winnable elections.
When men are stealing women's sports scholarships, it's not niche.
When 8 year olds are telling their parents their blue-haired teacher taught them there are 9 genders, it's not niche.
When school boards become battlegrounds over whether gay pornography should be stocked in school libraries, it's not niche.
When healthy 14 year olds are slicing off their boobs and the ruling class is celebrating it as a triumph of liberation, it's not niche.
And when people (mostly girls) who have been abused and mutilated by the medical profession are now speaking out and trying to reclaim their lives, it's not niche.
I have 3 daughters. This sort of thing matters to me. And I vote based on it. And most of the other parents on that PITT substack do too. You are probably 1-2 degrees away from a family that has been destroyed by gender ideology; you just don't realize it.
Matthew, all of this is available and provable if you choose to look. Lia Thomas wasn't someone's conspiracy theory. Riley Gaines is a real person. So is Andy Ngo. Why are you choosing not to look? You're insulting the intelligence of others while choosing to retain your own ignorance of reality.
The whole point is that he choosing to look, and getting exhausted with your desire to extrapolate something that may or may not have happened to 5 or 6 people in America, to the other 333 million people in America.
Let's be clear. We're a nation of 333 million people. You're focused on like, 5 or 6 of those people where the facts of their situation are already shaky to begin with (3rd or 4th hand information, from unreliable 3rd or 4th hand sources) and trying to extrapolate it into a nationwide issue. Stop, and focus on the policies that actually matter. You'll feel better when you do! I'd recommend a start with noahpinion.blog and then work your way to https://kamalaharris.com/issues !
I don't even know what to say to this. If you really think it affects "5 or 6 people", clearly you haven't bothered to look.
There are hundreds of detransitioners that have criticized there former doctors.
Dozens of lawsuits against them. Dozens of athletes braving abuse and criticism over this issue.
I get that Noah's an economist and this is an econ blog. But there's more to life than tax policy and making money. Read When Harry Became Sally or The Case Against the Sexual Revolution or Irreversible Damage. Go read Riley Gaines -- one of the bravest young women in America as far as I'm concerned. There are lots of people taking huge professional and personal risks to try and get the truth out on this issue. Respect them enough to at least consider whether they might be right.
So we shouldn't provide people in prison healthcare? The actual details of what she said, are actually way more nuanced and niche than Trump making it sound like "wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison". Trump was arguing in bad faith, made a stupid comment, and also tried to hit the trifecta of anti-lgbtq sentiments, anti-immigration and weak on crime dog whistles. As usual with a lot of these conservative culture war statements, they have a nugget of truth and then the rest is a strawman argument. Similar to the cat litter in schools stuff all over again. You clearly didn't even read the CNN article you sent over in detail.
That is literally not what I said, and you conveniently didn't even read my entire reply.
What Trump said is still not happening... This is what Trump said mate according to your quote... "he declared that Harris 'wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison'."
So where is the support that Harris wants to do transgender operations on illegal immigrants? You are arguing in bad faith, and are trying to pretend that you are being the logical one.
Well, yeah. Medical care falls into elective and medically necessary. We don't to liposuction on inmates just because they say they want it. We don't do elective plastic surgery on inmates. So why would we pay to slice off their dicks or their boobs? This doesn't seem like rocket science.
Can you provide an example of inmates getting elective surgeries that they don't need? Especially when it comes to gender reassignment surgery? And not just one or two niche examples, please show this happening at scale and is a topic that we should even be taking seriously. Of all the things that America is facing, this doesn't even crack the top 50. Prisoners in America don't really get cosmetic or elective surgeries anymore just because they want them and haven't since the 90's. You are literally creating a strawman argument before looking up to see what is actually happening in reality.
You don’t do any surgery on someone just because they “say they want it”. You always need to go through a process of conversations between the patient and medical professionals. We absolutely should do bariatric surgery on prisoners if they are having significant health issues that could be improved (though gastric bypass is more likely to be helpful than liposuction). It’s unlikely that a prisoner is going to be at the phase of gender transition where it’s really clear that surgery will benefit them, but they haven’t already done it, precisely at the moment that they’re in prison (particularly if this is immigrant detention you’re talking about, where people don’t tend to spend years at a time) so it costs us almost nothing to make clear that we will do whatever care is medically relevant.
What is the actual medical difference between "a prisoner is going to be at the phase of gender transition where it’s really clear that surgery will benefit them" and "just because they say they want it"?
You say these decisions are made with "consultations of medical professionals". You mean the same medical professionals who have a track record of handing out cross-sex hormones to teenagers (and in some cases surgically mutilating them) essentially on demand? What kind of consultation can validate the difference between "I want my dick sliced off" and "I will have better self esteem and mental health if my dick is sliced off"? These are the same thing, just sanitized by academic language.
The idea that "we don't slice the private parts off of people in prison at taxpayer expense" ought not be controversial.
The same kind of consultation that goes into getting weight loss medication or assisted suicide or an abortion. All of these have significant burdens of proof, even if they’re not as high as you’d like.
What’s with Trump and Vance’s obsession with cats? Or Trump’s Hannibal Lecter fascination? They really have an opportunity here to tie these memes into one pretty package:
Haitian immigrants are feeding the babies that are being executed at birth to their kids because they believe this will help their kids transition to another gender and make them want to read banned books.
Thank for the book recommendation of A Midwestern Mosaic. I’m going to order a copy before it is banned.
When I worked in the Tulsa Covid-19 POD that vaccinated 2,000/day, the team of 100 Tulsa County Health employees and volunteer nurses, physicians, and Oklahoma Medical Reserve Corps was lead by a Haitian-American, Felix. He did a fantastic job, leading early morning team meetings, keeping morale high, and solving daily logistics problems. He stood beside me when a woman showed up at the entrance with a handgun tucked in the back of her jeans. He calmly explained guns weren’t allowed in County buildings. For a minute, we didn’t know what was going to happen. She complied and returned the gun to her car, then checked in for her appointment to be vaccinated. That’s leadership. Can you imagine if someone started shooting into a snaking line of hundreds of people?
Hannibal Lecter comes from Trump not being able to comprehend that asylum can have two meanings: one being an institution for the insane and the other being a refuge.
Trump, having watched "Silence of the Lambs", remembered that dungeon Hannibal Lecter was confined to. An insane asylum. He hears that immigrants coming to the U.S. are asylum seekers, an actual category for coming to the U.S. for fleeing war, political persecution, etc. Trump thinks that Venezuela and other nations have emptied their mental asylums and come to the U.S. to be locked up in American mental institutions on the American taxpayers' dime.
Hannibal Lecter -> cannibal in insane asylum -> asylum seekers -> cannibalistic lunatics coming to the U.S. to be institutionalized in insane asylums.
As a Haitian, thank you, Noah.
I generally tend to bristle when I hear Democrat-leaning friends say things like "Republicans are racist" or "Trump is racist", because 99% of the time the evidence for that is super weak or slanted. But in this instance, I'm pretty appalled at how gross (and frankly, un-American) these comments are.
Your comment is probably more important than it initially looks, too. Because the sort of "racism" you're talking about is the tendency to view people only as avatars of whatever ethnic group the surrounding culture conceptualizes, rather than whether you favor or disfavor any of those groups. (The concepts change with time; in 1900 Swedes weren't considered "white" in the US.) As Noah says, that's quite common across history, but it's also un-American.
I largely think of Reagan:
"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.''
Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close."
So of course Haitians are good enough: anyone can be good enough, and it's infuriating to me we need to explain it to these so called patriots spewing lies and racist bile
Thanks, Noah, as a child of Haitian immigrants and a proud (though sometimes frustrated) American, this means more to me than almost anything you’ve ever written.
Well, almost.. that essay about rabbits with a bit about your moral philosophy was up there as well :-)
The question is whether there is any selection process for immigrants from Haiti, or if it’s immigration for anyone who wants to go. It’s impossible to honestly write such a post without mentioning the catastrophe that unfiltered immigration has been for Europe, ranging from daily stabbing incidents to the return of neo-Nazi elements to power.
Emigration is its own selection process, since it requires initiative and risk tolerance. But like I said in the post, our immigration from Haiti is far less selective than from most countries.
And yet Haitians still do fine in America!!!
Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans go through a special immigration process, the terms of which are outlined here: https://www.uscis.gov/CHNV
The gist is that the programme makes it much easier to come. It also gives you a considerably cheaper and safer option than getting to the southern border and trying to claim asylum there, or getting in a boat and trying to make it to Florida. But there are a number of conditions, including, most importantly, that:
1. The intake is limited to 30,000 applicants a month;
2. Applicants have to have a sponsor in the US who is lawfully resident and can financially support them;
3. Applicants cannot fail a background screening, and cannot have tried to illegally enter the US before.
The deterrence effect this has on irregular crossings, either by land or sea, should be obvious. Immigrants from these countries have reasonable odds of making it into the US in a way that doesn't put them at serious risk and/or financially ruin them. In return, they have to avoid crossing over.
I think one of the problems we have in Europe is not doing this sort of thing enough. Similar programmes on a large enough scale to make it worth peoples' while, but a small enough one to ensure the influx doesn't overwhelm us, would be ideal. Having sponsors also makes it easier to find one's feet in their new country, and eventually find work and integrate more successfully.
Thank you, that is good info. Is there a reason we don’t have this type of process in place for immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, etc.? Seems like it would help. I assume this may be part of immigration reform legislation that has never happened. I think we need to find a way to eliminate the noise and let our government figure out a way to improve the system. There are legislators from both sides that are much more informed on the real issues than the rest of us who are stuck in the political firestorm.
No worries! I don't know exactly but as far as I can tell it's probably because this is relatively new. The Venezuelan part came in 2022 and the other three countries were added in 2023. Despite that, the mechanism to do it - humanitarian parole - has been around for a while since it's part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Carter Administration used it in the 1970s for refugees from Indochina, for instance.
A more limited version of parole is already in place for the countries you mentioned. It allows adults who are already in the US to bring their children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
So it sounds like there’s no selection process here and no qualifications are required. In this regard, the U.S. is shifting to the European immigration model, and the results will be similar.
What do you mean by "selection process"? Practically speaking, it would be almost impossible to "select" people from these countries based on their occupations or qualifications because of the difficulty recognising and verifying those. How on earth do you tell if someone who says they're a doctor in Port-au-Prince is actually capable of practicing medicine in the US?
If you don't have systems like the one the Americans have set up here, they will just try to come via the border or by sea anyways, which is what they were doing before. It is also, incidentally, what they are doing in Europe. At least this way you can control numbers and do some basic screening.
There are several ways that people can qualify to receive an immigrant visa to the United States. The only one that does not need to be applied for ahead of time is asylum status, which is the method most commonly used on the southern border.
I obtained the following information using Bing Copilot. It does not appear to list the guest worker program in used in Springfield, Ohio, which is clearly a temporary rather than a permanent visa
--There are several ways to qualify for an immigration visa to the United States. Here are some of the main categories:
1. **Family-Based Immigration**: You can apply if you have a close family member who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. This includes spouses, children, parents, and siblings³.
2. **Employment-Based Immigration**: You can qualify through a job offer from a U.S. employer. There are different categories based on your skills, education, and job type².
3. **Diversity Visa Lottery**: Each year, the U.S. government runs a lottery program that grants visas to individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.¹.
4. **Refugee or Asylum Status**: If you are fleeing persecution or have a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, you may qualify for refugee or asylum status¹.
5. **Special Immigrant Categories**: This includes certain religious workers, employees of U.S. foreign service posts, and other special categories².
6. **Investment-Based Immigration**: If you invest a significant amount of money in a U.S. business, you may qualify for an investor visa².
(1) Green Card Eligibility Categories | USCIS. https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility-categories.
(2) How to Apply for a Green Card - USCIS. https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/how-to-apply-for-a-green-card.
(3) Permanent Resident (Green) Card and immigrant visas. https://www.usa.gov/green-card-permanent-resident-immigrant-visa.
(4) How to Apply for a Green Card - USCIS. https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/how-to-apply-for-a-green-card.
(5) Permanent Resident (Green) Card and immigrant visas. https://www.usa.gov/green-card-permanent-resident-immigrant-visa.
This is just ridiculous. There is no unfiltered immigration in Europe, there are no 'daily stabbing incidents' and the rise of neo-nazi's is more due to unaddressed grievances that are skillfully redirected to immigration.
I see, so the Swedish and Dutch people are inherently racist. Interesting, in the 1980s they weren't known as racists.
I am Dutch, and yes, there are a ton of racist Dutch people. I don't think we are inherently racist (what does that even mean). But most racism I see is not so much directed to recent immigrants, but more to the second/third generation descendants from immigrantd in the 60's, 70's and 80's. These people are Dutch so anti-immigration is not going to help much to solve that problem.
Most of the current immigration is from Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, and is very much demand-driven, just like in Springfield, Ohio. There are tons of jobs that the Dutch are not willing to do anymore, so unless you are happy to force Dutch people to work in abbotoirs and greenhouses we are better off figuring out how to make it work instead of trying to stop it.
“Oh no, we have to stop you immigrants, because you immigrants are turning me, a good human being, into a Nazi! It’s all your fault!”
It's ironic that you say this mockingly, because all the woke people are busy with from morning till night is finding excuses for the violence and brutality of cruel individuals (though only if they aren't of European or Jewish descent).
I’m not defending whoever you think is woke. I’m saying that you are blaming your own neo nazism on immigrants. (Maybe you aren’t a new Nazi. But you are still blaming the neo Nazi sentiment that someone has on immigrants, who really aren’t trying to inflame that stuff in any way.)
You do have to bite the bullet regarding immigration, particularly immigration of non-elite people. In the late 1800s there really was a great influx of poor, poor-ish, and less-educated people, and the major US cities had large slums, inter-ethnic conflict, crime, the rise of reactionary anti-immigrant politics, etc. But it also was the time the US grew into a world power, based on the labor of those immigrants in our factories. And three generations on their descendants are a large fraction of the solid middle class.
In regard to Europe, it's clearly been rough. OTOH, immigration will prevent its population from collapsing over the next couple of generations. And seriously, how bad are a few stabbings per day over some hundreds of millions of people? I mean, compare with the number of people killed in traffic accidents.
If road accidents were to lead to a collapse of the country's political ability to function altogether, as happened recently in France and might happen in Germany, I would support at least lowering the maximum speed limit to 80 km/h.
Bret Devereaux, a historian of ancient Rome, lays out in immense detail that the United States has *never* conceptualized itself as an ethnic group -- https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/
We need to do immigration on an individual basis, on the basis of merit, meaning mainly people who contribute the most economic ally, but with political asylum a kind of merit aiming to undermine the oppressive regime.
That's true.
OTOH, the legal theory is that asylum is an individual right based on being persecuted in particular ways. Interestingly, "the government treats everybody in the country horribly" is *not* grounds for asylum. It definitely isn't based on our political desire to undermine the regime of the country they came from. Of course, you're welcome to lobby Congress to change the law...
The real story here is the lack of trust in the news crews.
The media are acting like these claims are obviously false. I don’t accept them as true at face value either, but the American commentariat insisting they must be a racist lie makes their "investigation" of said claims suspect.
Let's say for a moment that the PBS reporter really had found a large collection of illegal Haitian immigrants who admitted to stealing dugs and eating them. Would the reporter have told the story? I don't think so, and I have good reason to doubt it. The major press outlets have been very upfront that they make no attempt to cover anything Donald Trump says or does honestly. Trump is a "danger to democracy" and a "racist" who should not be platformed. They are open that the need to build a narrative to hurt Trump is more important than the need to tell the truth. Objectivity has taken a back seat to ideology. WaPo and NYT and CNN have been very upfront about this for years.
The PBS crew in Springfield way well be telling the truth. Or they could be lying through their teeth because... Orange Man Bad. There is no way to know. So those who doubt their veracity are not being conspiratorial; they're taking when the press has said about itself and its role in this election and applying it.
House pets in many countries (Africa, SE Asia, China, and yes, Haiti) get stolen and cooked. This happens throughout the world. If you’re going to welcome global diversity, you will get global diversity. And that includes practices that you find abhorrent. Does that means it's happening in Springfield? No. But it's certainly not inconceivable to think it might be, and I don't for a moment trust the press to tell me whether it is. Because... Orange Man said it, so it must be false. Even if it's not.
Have you ever watched local news? If someone was kidnapping and eating the pets of their neighbors, local news would be *alllll* over that, no matter who was involved. (Except maybe if it was one of their major local advertisers.)
Yeah, rightists just deny any news story that doesn't fit their fever dreams.
It's why I propose banishing the phrase "conspiracy theory" from the discourse.
Calling it theory, either a hypothesis or a body of knowledge of ideas about a subject (either proven like germ theory or disproven like phlogiston theory), gives it a respect it doesn't deserve.
It's more accurately conspiracy fantasy, like the narrative genre. A hypothesis that's unprovable or disprovable must be withdrawn. Conspiracy fantasists never do that, instead believing that ideas contrary to their theory is evidence of a plot and they must dig deeper.
If the gatekeepers were as powerful as you claim, we wouldn't have heard about the allegations in the first place. Instead we have because the people making them directly communicated them through X, a social media platform with a large reach owned by someone who very clearly believes Orange Man Good.
The people making these allegations had the opportunity to back them up through actual, tangible evidence. But they didn't. On the contrary, many of them submitted as proof a video of an American woman who had nothing to do with Haiti being arrested for killing and eating a cat in a totally different part of Ohio.
On the contrary, I think the belief that there are shadowy "gatekeepers" who don't want you to know the "real truth" is actually much more sinister. It's a common tactic that cults use to isolate people, cutting them off from their other friends and family members by creating a parallel reality and distancing them from the mainstream. I'm especially sceptical of JD Vance doing it, since he literally wrote a book about how the people he's now trying to court votes from and claim representation for are a bunch of rubes.
I don't think they're "shadowy" at all. The shadowy time ran from about 1990-2016. After that, the press was completely open about their desire to manage narrative instead of tell the truth.
You mentioned Twitter (I refuse to call it X). Imagine for a moment if Twitter was still owned by the Left-wing uniparty. Would you ever know about this? (I know, you think it's fake anyway, but would it really be better if the entire media establishment moved in lockstep with no opposition at all? Or do you really believe that any non-liberal narrative is "misinformation"?) Consider the number of things that have gone from from "kooky conspiracy theory" to "well everyone knows that" in the last 7 years (COVID lab leak, Hunter's laptop, Biden bribery, vaccine side-effects, masks don't work, masks do work, Biden dementia, etc...) Is it really so hard to believe that Haitians might be eating pets in Springfield? And if they were, the press wouldn't tell you? I once personally witnessed an Italian boy snag 2 pigeons from St. Mark's Square in Venice, snap their necks, and walk off with them. These things happen with some regularity. Poor, hungry people will do what's necessary.
I agree with you 100% that there is no video evidence at this point. However, J.D. Vance stated yesterday on CNN that he has had dozens of calls to his office (before any of this erupted publicly) making these claims. Maybe he's making that up. Maybe those people are mistaken. Maybe they're racists who just hate Haitians. I don't know. And neither do you. There was a time you and I could rely on an objective press to tell us the truth about whether it was real. We no longer can. And the reason we can't isn't because of Elon Musk and Twitter. It's because those very news organizations have openly abandoned any pretense of objective truth-seeking.
Okay first things first when was Twitter "owned" by the left wing uniparty? It's been proven over time that right wing and controversial talking points get amplified on Twitter. Just because under Dorsey they were more left wing, doesn't mean they were owned by the left wing uniparty.
Also to pretend that Fox News, NewsMax and OAN don't have more viewers than what you would consider liberal news on TV is ignorance at best. Additionally, you do realize half of the stuff you mentioned is not "well everyone knows that now" right? Additionally, saying that people dismiss any any non-liberal narrative as misinformation is a such a reductive statement.
1 - Covid lab leak still hasn't been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The whole point was that MSM and real journalists didn't want to accuse another country of a lab leak without knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that it actually happened
2 - Hunter's laptop was never dismissed as it didn't exist. The only thing was that the chain of custody had been broken so bad and
3 - Joe Biden still hasn't been bribed. It has been proven that Hunter was unethical and was trying to trade bribes, but I still don't see anything where Joe Biden accepted bribes.
4 - Vaccine side effects? When have people ever said that vaccines don't have side effects? The main difference between liberals and conservatives on this issue was the fact that conservative media kept pushing that vaccines were unsafe and that the side effects outweighed the benefits of the vaccines.
5 - Masks do work on limiting transmission of viruses that is proven. I don't remember a lot of back and forth on this outside of conservatives saying that they don't work as well, etc. I love the fact that you are upset that politicians and health officials who were trying to figure out a once in a generation pandemic didn't get everything right immediately though.
6 - Biden having dementia, we still don't have enough to make a clinical diagnosis but to pretend that conservative people online weren't doctoring videos to make Biden look worse is bad faith. That is why people on the left side were ignoring the signs.
Going back to your point about "is it really so hard to believe that Haitians might be eating pets in Springfield?" I mean the idea that someone may believe something isn't the issue, the issue is whether it should be said and shared as true when people know it isn't, especially when it falls back on familiar racist and xenophobic tropes. Even if 1 Haitian person ate a pet in Ohio, I still wouldn't phrase it as representative of an entire group. That is the issue with these types of misinformation. And the idea that local news wouldn't report on it or mainstream media wouldn't report on it if it was a trend is just naive.
Additionally, your personal, anecdotal experience of seeing animal cruelty happen in Venice still does not mean that these things happen with regularity. Additionally, you have no idea if that kid at those pigeons do you? Your statement of poor people do what's necessary is interesting for one.... Maybe people will do unsavory things depending on their environment, but I've been really poor and never thought of stealing or eating someone's pet. It sounds like you are making an excuse for why people would repeat and believe such a racist piece of misinformation.
JD Vance is a known liar, and at this point it doesn't matter if is telling the truth or not. Why would these people call his office and not the police? The idea that you'd rather believe we can't trust anyone instead of the simple truth that sometimes people are a holes who make things up is part of the problem. News Media does exist to make money, but lets be real Trump continues to sell papers and clicks for the ad revenue. There was never a time in US history when the news media didn't have somewhat of a bias or an angle. News Organizations are made up of imperfect people, but most of those people still want to do their job to the best of their ability. I think we should bring the fairness doctrine back regarding news media personally, however you have a lot of right wing talking points here in your comment for someone who seems like they are trying to come off as a well intentioned moderate...
PhillyT: "Just because under Dorsey they were more left wing,"
Stop right there. That's a false dichotomy, and you're unintentionally conceding that rightwing framing is correct. All ideas can be coded as leftwing and rightwing, and any idea not explicitly coded as rightwing is leftwing. These are the only two possibilities.
Twitter at its peak had something like a half-billion unique tweets daily, encompassing everything: politics, news, cute kid and animal photos, dril, porn, spam, anime, advertising, etc. So much of tweet content wasn't political and doesn't fit the dichotomy. Twitter would be "more leftwing" if every tweet has a political intent behind it, and that if any tweet wasn't explicitly rightwing it could only be leftwing.
Twitter, after the $44 billion Nazi bar remodel, is explicitly rightwing because Musk himself boosts the signal of far right personalities and had the algorithm changed to favor far right content in a way that pre-Musk Twitter was less heavy-handed about it.
The fact that Twitter carried a bunch of cat memes doesn't matter. The fact that it is the dominant news aggregator, source for reporters, and disseminator of political information in the 21st century does. Thus if it has a left-wing or right-wing (and I agree that those terms are increasingly hard to define) bias in limiting information is extremely important.
The town square should not be owned by anyone. Or at least access to it should not be restricted by anyone. On that basis, and regardless of his personal politics, Musk has been a vast improvement over Dorsey. He is far less willing to limit political speech in the domain he controls; J.S. Mill (the uber-liberal) would be proud.
BV: "The fact that it is the dominant news aggregator, source for reporters, and disseminator of political information in the 21st century does."
Twitter was never the dominant news aggregator. That was, and is, Facebook by multiples. The news engagement on Facebook, owing to the world's largest network, had at least 8x the traffic the same item got on Twitter. Twitter was No. 2 on social media against Facebook, but fell to No. 3 when it came to web portals and aggregators like Google News, Apple News, the Bing and Yahoo front pages and the like.
BV: "Thus if it has a left-wing or right-wing (and I agree that those terms are increasingly hard to define) bias in limiting information is extremely important."
If you're the kind of thinker who like the Frankfurt School critical theorists believe that ideology is embedded in everything, then you'd be able to assign a political tag to all social media content.
If you go to Twitter's peak, when 500 million tweets were transmitted in a 24-hour period, you want to take the time to sift through all -- or even a random sample -- 500M tweets and label them as leftwing or rightwing? How would you classify ads, which might be like 20% of all traffic? How would you classify information bots, like the ones run by the USGS and NWS that monitor earthquakes and weather disasters? A lot of Twitter is also just a lot of inconsequential chatter, like a person writing to friends "hungry rn gonna go get a burger lol". Where does that fall?
Social media is very much an example of "one person's toilet water is another's drinking water." There's so much going on that other than the platform and its branding, there's no coherence to the content. It's the same water, though.
BV: "The town square should not be owned by anyone."
Social media platforms have trust and safety teams for the same reason beaches have lifeguards.
Well you can maybe trust the police department in the town that said it wasn't happening? You do realize that people had common knowledge this piece of misinformation was false before he said it during the debate right?
And you know, police keep documentation of service calls, arrests and incident reports.
Because dangerously too many in modern culture believes conspiratorial intent behind every fact, the absence of evidence indicates evidence of a cover-up.
And it's a good thing they do, since without that we would never know that the Aurora, CO story was actually real.
I wish I could.
But I trusted the public health people who told me not to wear masks.
Then I trusted the public health people who insisted I wear a mask.
I trusted the 51 intelligence officers who told me Hunter's laptop was fake.
I trusted the police dept of Aurora, CO when who insisted there weren't Venezuelan gangs largely running several major apartments buildings... when it turns out the dept not only knew there were Venezuelan gangs infesting those exact apartment buildings but had informed their officers to not to go there alone for exactly that reason.
This is why our ruling clas has no credibility with a huge percentage of the population -- they've lied for years.
Narrative enforcement has become more important than truth. That applies whether it's a senior editor at the NYT, a Georgetown professor, a Army Col, or the police chief of a major city. If you're even a minor elite in America, you may not even go near the shibboleths of our society. So if events might call "diversity is a strength" into question, those events must not be noticed or talked about. And if those events become obvious to ignore, they must be praised.
Let's say there was a video tomorrow that showed a group of Hattian immigrants slaughtering a dozen dogs and cats and eating them. Our media class would do an about face in less than 4 hours from "it's racist to say that Hattians are eating pets" to "it's racist to criticize Hattians for eating unwanted animals".
It's not happening! And it's good that it is!
On a side note. The 51 intelligence officers never said the laptop was fake. The letter they signed if you read it actually says they believed the contents of the laptop could be part of a larger Russian Disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the election. And they even emphasized that they had no knowledge of it was true. The issue was that Republicans at the time were trying to make Hunter Biden's corruption his fathers issues and Politico published a story with the misleading headline, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say," though the body of the story did not support that wording. Instead, the story's lede accurately quoted the letter's words: "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. You are either being very reductive about the entire event or just trying to get a talking point in and missing all nuance.
Regarding face masks, there is a pretty good timeline and article here about how the communication around Face Masks went down and how within a month the CDC basically changed their guidance. Which is good if you consider the fact that as they learned more about the virus, they changed their guidance. That's what we as humans should do when presented with new information.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trump-right-that-fauci-discouraged-wearing-masks/
Just keep moving those goal posts, and keep using the most extreme examples as a reason the whole system is terrible, thus you have to believe the worst about people and our society.
The problem with this theory is that not only do you have to accept that the left-wing news is covering it up, you also have to accept that the right-wing news is too stupid and incompetent to uncover it themselves. I don't particularly trust PBS's selective coverage either, but at some point, someone would have to come up with some kind of evidence at all.
Agreed. My problem is with people who reflexively say "that's just Trump so it must be a lie" or "PBS said they didn't see it so it must not be happening".
As I said, I question whether it's real too. It just sounds like something made up or incredibly rare. However... I was also told (by all the same people) that a Venezuelan gang taking over several apartment buildings in Aurora, CO was a lie. It turns out it's 80% true. And I've seen a lot of that over the last 8 years.
Thank you for writing this, and for laying out the evidence so well. It’s easy for rumor and pseudoscience to spread, especially when it comes to the topic of differences between populations of human beings.
Ironically, intelligent people seem equally vulnerable to misinformation as anybody else. It upsets me to see people who pride themselves in rationality being taken in by ancient rhetorical tricks, but I suppose it’s part of human nature. People who find themselves believing this garbage need to be guided away from it by the rest of us.
JD Vance is a chronically online person of right wing echo chambers that he probably thinks are funny, and its clear that people like him and Donald Trump are willing to engage in casual racism and "othering" if they think it will help fuel the fires of hate, fear and anti-immigration sentiment that they can capitalize on. It's bad faith all the way down.
The reason Noah even had to write the original title sentence and this post is because we have political leaders who are crowd sourcing policy positions and talking points from racists online and they care more about performing on social media than they do about actually solving problems and being true leaders. Falling back on old racist tropes and stereotypes is one of the most disgusting things that political leaders can do, but its clear that this type of behavior is not punishing them enough in the polls or electorally to have them change their behavior.
https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1818481182238990447
Kamala Harris in her own words, on video: bragging about pushing for taxpayer funded trannie surgeries for inmates while she was AG of CA (a sanctuary state).
But because Trump noticed, it can't be happening. And if you insist it is happening, you're a racist and a danger to democracy.
Instead of the press complaining about so many Americans believing absurd conspiracy theories on Twitter, perhaps they should ask WHY so many Americans believe randos on Twitter over PBS Newshour and CNN journalists. Of course, that would require introspection... easier just to call those people stupid and racist.
> Kamala Harris in her own words, on video: bragging about pushing for taxpayer funded trannie surgeries for inmates while she was AG of CA (a sanctuary state).
You are telling on yourself here huh. Trannie surgeries for inmates? Talk about casual use of a slur.... It's almost like you didn't even listen to the video, where is she bragging? Additionally, she wasn't AG of CA during this time, the first transgender surgery of an inmate was in 2022 in America mate. And yeah she is supportive of providing care to people who are in prison. While she was AG of CA, she actually didn't support giving funds to inmates who may have wanted or needed surgery. You can say you don't support gender affirming care which is clear from your other comments, but to make it seem like she is bragging about forcing inmates to become transgender, or forcing to state to pay for it, like she is some cackling evil maniac is just bad faith.
Again, what Trump said vs what is actually happening is 2 different things. He said the following “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison, this is a radical left liberal that would do this.”. Again making it seem like Harris is some evil prison doctor looking for test subjects and turning all illegal aliens into transgender individuals.
Leave it to Trump and people like you to take a tiniest nugget of truth, run it into the ground and make it a way bigger issue until it is misconstrued to the point of being absurd. Because Harris supports all inmates, legal citizen or otherwise getting medical care if they are a transgender individual, that must mean she wants to force all of them to do surgery! The reason why people say it isn't happening is because what Trump said isn't happening.
Historically, a lot of the humans throughout history are always more willing to believe their vibe or feeling vs data or facts. Why is it so surprising that people on social media believe memes or what they are told instead of looking into things to confirm when the algorithm literally pushes engagement at all costs and your news feed is a customized silo? Maybe if people don't want to be called stupid or racist, maybe they should stop saying stupid or racist things? Snark aside, social media is not real life, and people say a lot of things online that they'd never say in real life, because they are more concerned about winning than being right.
When I find the candidate saying EXACTLY what Trump claims she said, your answer is to attack me as a bigot and question both my integrity and intelligence. Which, if you read the comment, is exactly what I said you liberals do when confronted with evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions of the world. You are proving my point perfectly. Keep digging.
Amen
When the Harris/Walz campaign came up with the "weird" attack, this is what they're talking about. The modern Right is way too Online. Most people are normies and are therefore unaware of the various micro-controvseries that Too Online people themselves are into.
Thank you for the informative article. I wasn't aware of most of this. But this statement caught my eye:
"Rightists would have us believe that this poverty and violence is due to characteristics — cultural and/or innate — of the Haitian people themselves."
I don't think it's innate, but how on earth could it be anything but cultural?? Individuals should be judged individually, and I am open to the idea that immigrants self- select very differently from the general population, but you're acting as if society-wide problems just randomly pop up without any relation to the people in the society. That's not how the world works!
What rightists believe is that this culture is immutably tied to Haitian people, and that when they come to America, they bring that culture with them instead of adopting American culture.
Cultural explanations for this stuff tend to be nebulous, though, and often quickly fall over when you compare different results amongst people with similar cultural backgrounds.
As one example, I've often heard cultural explanations for the violence that engulfed Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the state parts of it are in now - the classic Balkan Ghosts thesis. But then how did Slovenia almost entirely avoid it, and why did things turn out way better in Croatia than in Bosnia? It's not like they speak massively different languages, adhere to very different traditions, or have little shared history. Instead, the more plausible explanation is their specific historic circumstances.
Similarly, why did things go so badly in Haiti while other former slavery-based plantation societies, including the one right next door, have better outcomes? Why is Costa Rica in a much better spot than El Salvador or Nicaragua? Why is Argentina a basket-case and Uruguay one of the nicest places to live in South America?
The problem with culture as an explanation is that it turns historical or institutional contingencies, which are beyond the control of anyone in a society, into immutable characteristics. What specific differences between Haitian culture and that of anyone else in the Caribbean would lead it to be like this, in a way that's transferable to individuals? Or between Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans, or Slovenes and Croats?
Tracing the routes of history through culture can get very complicated, as you note. But that doesn't mean that *right now* the culture and the societal outcomes are completely unrelated. It's hard to think of anything that could be more closely related.
But how "culture" influences your behaviour depends on the context people are in. As an example, I used to live in a part of London where lots of Turks and Kurds, as well as Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, lived side-by-side. In their countries of origin, these people probably would have avoided each other at best, and fought each other at worst.
They were still culturally Turks, Kurds, and Greeks - they often spoke their families' native languages at home and kept following local religions and customs. But how they behaved with each other in the UK, where everyone was a minority and more or less on the same footing, was totally different. Similarly, we can tell from the life outcomes of Haitian immigrants and their descendants in the US that they probably behave totally differently when they live in a functioning state that isn't rife with paranoia and fear.
Sometimes people from diaspora communities do bring grievances with them. Maybe these people also self-selected for open-mindedness because they were willing to move to a completely different country. But I still think it shows to go that people from the same culture can behave very differently in different settings.
I used to feel the same way: any group of people could be successful, capitalist, liberal, tolerant people like we are. People are blank slates. Cultural explanations are racist. Then my country spent 20 years trying to export democracy and liberal values to the Middle East. Now I'm a little more realistic about culture.
Culture is real and important, but people also assimilate rapidly to new cultures, especially to American culture. That's the piece that rightists deny.
One question I like to ask in discussions like these: Do you think culture is a fence or a gate?
It depends on what you call "cultural". Much of the trouble in Haiti seems to come from the fact that it never had a consolidated "state", only occasional strongmen. So in a collective sense, the trouble with Haiti is due to "the culture of Haiti", meaning the collection of institutions that exist in Haiti. But that's not a property that is inherent in individual Haitians, and probably doesn't even stick to them when they move to a place that more-or-less has rule of law.
I've learned in sociology that the concept of "culture" does a lot of heavy lifting, and when arguments get to the point of having to pound the dictionary, the concept itself serves as a motte and bailey.
"There were a number of trademark Trump moments, such as when he declared that Harris 'wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison'."
What is odd about saying that? It sounds like you believed the media's "fact checking" instead of considering that it might actually be true! https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/kfile-harris-pledged-support-in-2019-to-cut-ice-funding-and-provide-transgender-surgery-to-detained-migrants/index.html
I think most of us are just sick of these incredibly niche, irrelevant issues being elevated to the level of national significance. It’s basically just embarrassing and it’s part of the reason that the GOP keeps losing winnable elections.
Matthew, there's a Substack here you should read: https://www.pittparents.com/
When men are stealing women's sports scholarships, it's not niche.
When 8 year olds are telling their parents their blue-haired teacher taught them there are 9 genders, it's not niche.
When school boards become battlegrounds over whether gay pornography should be stocked in school libraries, it's not niche.
When healthy 14 year olds are slicing off their boobs and the ruling class is celebrating it as a triumph of liberation, it's not niche.
And when people (mostly girls) who have been abused and mutilated by the medical profession are now speaking out and trying to reclaim their lives, it's not niche.
I have 3 daughters. This sort of thing matters to me. And I vote based on it. And most of the other parents on that PITT substack do too. You are probably 1-2 degrees away from a family that has been destroyed by gender ideology; you just don't realize it.
I read this post and it just made me tired. I want the stupid era of US politics to be over. Probably the best reason to vote blue.
Matthew, all of this is available and provable if you choose to look. Lia Thomas wasn't someone's conspiracy theory. Riley Gaines is a real person. So is Andy Ngo. Why are you choosing not to look? You're insulting the intelligence of others while choosing to retain your own ignorance of reality.
The whole point is that he choosing to look, and getting exhausted with your desire to extrapolate something that may or may not have happened to 5 or 6 people in America, to the other 333 million people in America.
Let's be clear. We're a nation of 333 million people. You're focused on like, 5 or 6 of those people where the facts of their situation are already shaky to begin with (3rd or 4th hand information, from unreliable 3rd or 4th hand sources) and trying to extrapolate it into a nationwide issue. Stop, and focus on the policies that actually matter. You'll feel better when you do! I'd recommend a start with noahpinion.blog and then work your way to https://kamalaharris.com/issues !
I don't even know what to say to this. If you really think it affects "5 or 6 people", clearly you haven't bothered to look.
There are hundreds of detransitioners that have criticized there former doctors.
Dozens of lawsuits against them. Dozens of athletes braving abuse and criticism over this issue.
I get that Noah's an economist and this is an econ blog. But there's more to life than tax policy and making money. Read When Harry Became Sally or The Case Against the Sexual Revolution or Irreversible Damage. Go read Riley Gaines -- one of the bravest young women in America as far as I'm concerned. There are lots of people taking huge professional and personal risks to try and get the truth out on this issue. Respect them enough to at least consider whether they might be right.
So we shouldn't provide people in prison healthcare? The actual details of what she said, are actually way more nuanced and niche than Trump making it sound like "wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison". Trump was arguing in bad faith, made a stupid comment, and also tried to hit the trifecta of anti-lgbtq sentiments, anti-immigration and weak on crime dog whistles. As usual with a lot of these conservative culture war statements, they have a nugget of truth and then the rest is a strawman argument. Similar to the cat litter in schools stuff all over again. You clearly didn't even read the CNN article you sent over in detail.
That was the fastest I've seen anyone go from "That's not happening" to "Yes, of course that's happening, and that's good, actually."
That is literally not what I said, and you conveniently didn't even read my entire reply.
What Trump said is still not happening... This is what Trump said mate according to your quote... "he declared that Harris 'wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison'."
So where is the support that Harris wants to do transgender operations on illegal immigrants? You are arguing in bad faith, and are trying to pretend that you are being the logical one.
Well, yeah. Medical care falls into elective and medically necessary. We don't to liposuction on inmates just because they say they want it. We don't do elective plastic surgery on inmates. So why would we pay to slice off their dicks or their boobs? This doesn't seem like rocket science.
Can you provide an example of inmates getting elective surgeries that they don't need? Especially when it comes to gender reassignment surgery? And not just one or two niche examples, please show this happening at scale and is a topic that we should even be taking seriously. Of all the things that America is facing, this doesn't even crack the top 50. Prisoners in America don't really get cosmetic or elective surgeries anymore just because they want them and haven't since the 90's. You are literally creating a strawman argument before looking up to see what is actually happening in reality.
You don’t do any surgery on someone just because they “say they want it”. You always need to go through a process of conversations between the patient and medical professionals. We absolutely should do bariatric surgery on prisoners if they are having significant health issues that could be improved (though gastric bypass is more likely to be helpful than liposuction). It’s unlikely that a prisoner is going to be at the phase of gender transition where it’s really clear that surgery will benefit them, but they haven’t already done it, precisely at the moment that they’re in prison (particularly if this is immigrant detention you’re talking about, where people don’t tend to spend years at a time) so it costs us almost nothing to make clear that we will do whatever care is medically relevant.
What is the actual medical difference between "a prisoner is going to be at the phase of gender transition where it’s really clear that surgery will benefit them" and "just because they say they want it"?
You say these decisions are made with "consultations of medical professionals". You mean the same medical professionals who have a track record of handing out cross-sex hormones to teenagers (and in some cases surgically mutilating them) essentially on demand? What kind of consultation can validate the difference between "I want my dick sliced off" and "I will have better self esteem and mental health if my dick is sliced off"? These are the same thing, just sanitized by academic language.
The idea that "we don't slice the private parts off of people in prison at taxpayer expense" ought not be controversial.
The same kind of consultation that goes into getting weight loss medication or assisted suicide or an abortion. All of these have significant burdens of proof, even if they’re not as high as you’d like.
"Assisted suicide" Good comparison. I agree 100%.
What’s with Trump and Vance’s obsession with cats? Or Trump’s Hannibal Lecter fascination? They really have an opportunity here to tie these memes into one pretty package:
Haitian immigrants are feeding the babies that are being executed at birth to their kids because they believe this will help their kids transition to another gender and make them want to read banned books.
Thank for the book recommendation of A Midwestern Mosaic. I’m going to order a copy before it is banned.
When I worked in the Tulsa Covid-19 POD that vaccinated 2,000/day, the team of 100 Tulsa County Health employees and volunteer nurses, physicians, and Oklahoma Medical Reserve Corps was lead by a Haitian-American, Felix. He did a fantastic job, leading early morning team meetings, keeping morale high, and solving daily logistics problems. He stood beside me when a woman showed up at the entrance with a handgun tucked in the back of her jeans. He calmly explained guns weren’t allowed in County buildings. For a minute, we didn’t know what was going to happen. She complied and returned the gun to her car, then checked in for her appointment to be vaccinated. That’s leadership. Can you imagine if someone started shooting into a snaking line of hundreds of people?
Hannibal Lecter comes from Trump not being able to comprehend that asylum can have two meanings: one being an institution for the insane and the other being a refuge.
Trump, having watched "Silence of the Lambs", remembered that dungeon Hannibal Lecter was confined to. An insane asylum. He hears that immigrants coming to the U.S. are asylum seekers, an actual category for coming to the U.S. for fleeing war, political persecution, etc. Trump thinks that Venezuela and other nations have emptied their mental asylums and come to the U.S. to be locked up in American mental institutions on the American taxpayers' dime.
Hannibal Lecter -> cannibal in insane asylum -> asylum seekers -> cannibalistic lunatics coming to the U.S. to be institutionalized in insane asylums.