See Something, Spay Something
It's time to neuter the reproductive potential of fear
Sept. 17: State police protecting Springfield … Trump rhetoric targets Democratic rhetoric targeting Trump rhetoric … U.S. calls Israel’s killings of civilians “outrage” … Harris/Teamsters sit-down …
And now, some hectoring moralizing about policing our face noises! And not just from your ever-scolding TFN. Now it’s coming from Republicans!
That’s right, the party of freedom, Free Speech Über Alles, the anti-woke crowd, now want us to shut our dangerous yaps.
Was it because of what Republicans have done to Springfield, OH? With their lies about Haitian immigrants there stealing jobs and evicting the elderly into the streets where they’ll starve to death because the Haitians eat all the road kill?
Well, yesterday, Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) mobilized the state police to protect the town not against law-abiding, document-carrying Haitians, but against the invasion of Republican (R-USA) lies about the town.
The Ohio State Highway Patrol today is patrolling schools — which are not highways — sweeping them not to make them neat and pretty but to look for bombs. The state is also setting up security cameras throughout Springfield and there’s a bomb-sniffing dog on call.
All because, as DeWine himself has said, of lies about Springfield spread by national Republicans whose names rhyme with Rump and Ants.
The city has shut down and/or evacuated schools and other public buildings as 33 threats have come in, all of them hoaxes presumably carried out by people whose motives I am absolutely unable to comprehend.
DeWine wouldn’t directly criticize former Pres. Donald Trump or Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), because that kind of rhetoric is definitely not allowed by the free-speech party. But DeWine defended the Haitians and talked up how — despite struggles to ramp up civic services — Springfield is actually on the right trajectory compared to “even five years ago.” (When He Who Must Not Be Shamed was president!)
As I said on yesterday’s Nicole Sandler Show, I’m reluctant to blame the unthinking yahoos who relay this stuff online. They don’t realize that we’re all publishers now, and we all have to practice some degree of caution about veracity and potential consequences.
Plus, when one political party decides that — if it’s okay to cherry-pick intelligence to start a war — it must be okay to cherry-pick Facebook posts, then they’re going to find whatever is useful to them, no matter how far-fetched.
That said, knowing that our posts can become political fodder for identifying rhetorical cannon fodder means it’s time to spay and/or neuter our toxic “See Something, Say Something” mentality. Toss it out the window. Preferably with the Ring camera next to the window.
When FDR said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, he was talking about Springfield. About Iraq. About militarized police. Because solutions born of fear will do far worse than the threat they’re meant to solve. Which is an especially low bar when the threat is imaginary.
So if an uninformed lizard brain sees something it fears/suspects, it’s the job of the rest of the brain to spay and/or neuter that shit before it escapes through one’s speaking flaps or typing hand sausages. Thinking brain just needs to say, “Remember, amygdala, you’re a scared little baby. No motor control for you.”
In other words, See Something Keep Calm Say Something Carry On. The life you save may be your own a Black kid who mistakenly rang the wrong doorbell.
But, no, despite the turmoil their free speech has caused in Springfield, a sudden case of remorse and reflection is not what’s got Trump and Vance getting woke today!
Instead, it appears that someone in the Republican Party finally looked up “stochastic violence.”
With as much evidence as there is of Haitian cat-eating, Trump yesterday blamed Democratic rhetoric for the attempt on his life and the attempted attempt on his life.
Trump gave Fox a statement that simultaneously warned against apocalyptic, maximalist rhetoric, and deployed it:
“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
(In fairness, it’s not just Democrats hitting Trump with inflammatory rhetoric. I mean, if you literally call yourselves The Lincoln Project, that’s a bit on the nose, no?)
Vance, meanwhile, speaking at a theocratic dinner held by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom [sic] Coalition, said without a trace of irony:
“I do think that we should take this opportunity to call for a reduction in the ridiculous and inflammatory political rhetoric coming from too many quarters of our politics.”
In case anyone thought his nonpartisan approach was sincere, Vance clarified:
“You know the big difference between conservatives and liberals, is that we have–no one has tried to kill [Vice President] Kamala Harris in the last couple of months and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out. Somebody’s gonna get hurt by it.”
So now it matters that somebody’s gonna get hurt! In order:
That’s actually not the big difference between conservatives and liberals.
People trying to kill Trump is not strong evidence or even evidence at all that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric.1
The one (1) person to actually shoot at Trump was a registered Republican.
For all we know, the guy arrested Sunday — an apparent 2016 Trump voter — was a camper exercising his Gov. Ron DeSantis-given right to pack a semi-automatic rifle.2
That said, what’s happening to Springfield is evidence that Vance is right about the power of rhetoric. And it’s not just whether it’s factual or not.
What if Haitians were eating cats? The issue isn’t whether Vance and Trump’s untrue claims were true, it’s whether they’re demonizing and dehumanizing humans as animals for eating the wrong animals.
Vance is right that calling Trump a threat to democracy logically is a call to violence. The stated purpose of history’s most powerful military force, America’s, is defense of democracy. If all those guns and tanks and jets and submarines and missiles won’t save democracy, is it any wonder that some person will think it’s up to them? Where’s the lie in that logic?
The response, of course, is that assassination is the ultimate anti-democratic tactic. You can’t save the people’s right to choose by denying them the right to choose.
Besides, even if Trump does have anti-democratic intent, (a) so do Democrats, (b) so does everyone, in one way or another, but most importantly, (c) Trump’s intent won’t matter without popular support. In other words, right now, at this moment, the greatest threat to democracy is democracy.
It’s also the sole force capable of saving democracy. And if you’re wondering how the peaceful battle for democracy is going, fought by unsung canvassers and volunteers every day, as of this morning, 538 predicts that Harris wins in 61 out of 100 election simulations. She’s up by 2.2% in Nate Silver’s polling averages. Real Clear Politics has her up by 1.7%.
There, you’ve had your fix of calming poll numbers, now forget all about ‘em and work like democracy is at stake and only democracy can save it.
OF COURSE ELON MUSK SAID SOMETHING STUPID Someone convinced the self-anointed king of free speech to unfree his wealth-infected brain parts.
Yesterday, Elon Musk, a known serial killer of corporate stock values, posted that “No one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” And then deleted it.
Musk is famous for doing and saying stupid things, and convincing other rich people to pay him for doing them. In his defense, his intelligence has been squoze by the crushing weight of billions of unearned dollars.
EXCLUSIVE: Vance’s Real Scary Rhetoric
If all you otherwise-attentive Newsfuckers hadn’t noticed, I’m splitting up TFN so that this Substack is solely the weekday-morning news roundup, and shifting my original reporting to the Jonathan Larsen Substack. (Both are still free, but if you sign up this week for a paid TFN subscription, you’ll get a free paid subscription to the other one, too. And, yes, it also hurt my brain to type “free paid.”)
Anyway, over on that other, Substack, in a me exclusive yesterday, I uncovered previously unreported comments by Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), in a speech that’s drawn attention recently for its other commentary about Springfield, OH.
And, yes, thanks for asking, I do have another Springfield exclusive coming today, so you might wanna subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss it!
Vance’s July 10 speech was at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon), just after Vance first went public about Springfield’s woes based on a letter he got from the city that Vance then twisted to mean the opposite of its intent. (The letter asked for help serving the legal, working Haitian immigrants and for help meeting the service burdens such as housing and health care that the city was struggling with.)
What I found in the speech was a possible predicate for carrying out a threat former Pres. Donald Trump made on Friday. You may recall that Trump vowed “large deportations from Springfield.”
The hiccup there is that Springfield’s Haitians are legal immigrants. So how can you deport them?
That’s where Vance’s July 10 speech comes in. Vance rejected the legitimacy of the Haitians’ legal immigration status:
“I heard this yesterday: A third of the local county health budget is now tied up in giving free benefits to illegal immigrants. And, of course, the left will fact-check and say, ‘Well, they’re not illegal immigrants.’ Because, through the abuse of asylum laws, and through [President] Joe Biden’s massive paroles, they’re now no longer technically illegal aliens, because according to Joe Biden nobody is an illegal alien.”
In other, terrifying words, Vance doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of asylum or Temporary Protected Status granted by Biden. Which means they can treat even immigrants here LEGALLY as undocumented.
Targeting legal residents of this country for deportation and/or general persecution isn’t (just) a Project 2025 fanfic explicit goal. The Trump Justice Department created an entire division dedicated to “denaturalization” in 2018 targeting not just immigrants who are here legally but citizens.
And if you’re thinking “not me,” you’re probably next. Whenever they run out of the group “below” you, they never call it a day, they always turn their weaponry against whoever’s up next. Looking right at you, conservative [insert ethnicity here] naturalized citizens!
Did the Secret Service Fail Again?
A man with a rifle was spotted on Sunday before former Pres. Donald Trump came within his sights, the Secret Service shot at him, chased him away, and police caught him.
So now security veterans are calling that…a failure?
No, they’re not KHive who were rooting for an assassination. These experts think the non-shooter should have been stopped from not-shooting long before he didn’t get any shots off.
Politico reports that criticism is coming from both congressional Republicans and people who know what they’re talking about.
“I think it’s a failure, 100%,” said Carrie Bachner, who runs a security firm and served as an adviser to the Department of Homeland [sic] Security.
That’s because the suspected non-shooter who not-aimed his rifle at Trump on Sunday was able, apparently, to camp out at the Florida golf course for 12 hours before Trump showed up. Which, um, land of the free?
Apparently, the dude — sorry, alleged dude — was outside the fence, so he wasn’t even trespassing. And carrying a rifle is a Florida birthright, so it’s still unclear what legal ground the Secret Service had for opening fire at, or even firing warning shots near, Ryan Wesley Routh, the alleged dude.
“[T]he former president wasn’t shot, which is great, and no shots were fired from that particular individual,” Bachner said. “However, that’s sort of looking at the glass half full, if you want to be positive about it.”
I was led to believe that was the entire glass.
The danger is that every time anything happens or might almost have eventually possibly posed a risk of having had happened, we move the security perimeter further out. Into your face but more importantly my face.
Which will lead — just you watch — to outlawing [insert legal innocuous thing that could serve as a precursor to an illegal thing]. So we need to stop asking “security experts” what to do because they will always suggest something more we can do — and start asking human experts how to build the kind of country we want to live in where we’re safe from assassins and fear.
U.S. Ambassador Calls Israel’s Civilian Killings an “Outrage” and “Preventable”...By Someone Other than the U.S.
In remarks the Associated Press called “unusually outspoken,” Pres. Joe Biden’s ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, yesterday weighed in on recent Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killings of civilians and alleged civilians.
Thomas-Greenfield called IDF’s fatal shooting last week of Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American activist, an “outrage” and said, “The IDF is a professional military and knows well how to ensure that incidents such as these do not happen.”
Conversely, the IDF is a professional military and knows well how to ensure that incidents such as these do happen.
In her remarks to the Security Council, Thomas-Greenfield also said:
“In recent weeks, there have also been numerous attacks in which UN personnel and humanitarian workers have been injured or killed…
Colleagues, many of these incidents were preventable.”
Newsfuckers, many of these incidents were preventable by the U.S., which continues to arm the IDF.
An IDF airstrike last week on a shelter operated by the UN killed 18 people, among them six UN workers. And kids.
Israeli U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon said that strike killed members of Hamas, and accused four of them of moonlighting: working for the UN refugee agency by day and Hamas by night in violation of labor guidelines and a very strict Hamas non-compete clause.
The U.S. continues to reject calls to stop arming the IDF arms for its preventable outrages, and Vice Pres. Kamala Harris has given no indication she’ll change that policy. Although, in fairness, who the hell knows.
Harris Met with Teamsters
Vice Pres. Kamala Harris gave yet another interview yesterday — to a roundtable of International Brotherhood of Teamsters leaders who may decide as soon as tomorrow who will get the powerful union’s presidential endorsement.
Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien gave an interview yesterday to a roundtable of reporters about Harris’s interview with a roundtable of Teamsters, saying that it was similar to their roundtable with Pres. Joe Biden in March, before Biden got old.
O’Brien said, “There wasn’t a whole lot of difference” between Harris and Biden, which should be good news for Harris, because O’Brien also said, “Joe Biden’s been great for unions. Joe Biden’s, you know, obviously done a lot of work and we want to make sure that that work is carried on by whoever.”
That work is unlikely to be carried on by whoever, however, if whoever is former Pres. Donald Trump who (a) has vowed to undo that work, (b) led a strongly anti-union administration last time, and (c) hates carrying things.
It’s very late in the game for the Teamsters to make its endorsement. That will impede its effectiveness in getting out the vote for whoever. But the very public deliberation may also give the endorsement more power by drawing attention to it and legitimizing it as a non-rubber stamp, presumably made of durable materials by union workers in a swing state.
O’Brien’s appearance as the first Teamsters president to address the Republican National Convention made headlines (in newspapers that cover labor, anyway). O’Brien said that on Wednesday the union’s general executive board will receive polling that was done of Teamsters members to see who they wanted to endorse.
The board will decide then, and O’Brien said the Teamsters will release its internal polling.
TCB
REMINDER Your TFN newsletter is not changing! I’m just moving longer/enterprise pieces over to the Jonathan Larsen Substack so that Serious People can share them without TFN’s terrifying URL.
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Go get ‘em, kids!
Forgive him, merciful Newsfucker, he learned about evidence at Yale Law School.
He’s actually facing two gun charges: Having one while also having a criminal record, and having one with its serial number removed. But the Secret Service knew neither of those things when they opened fire.
I am becoming irrationally, or maybe perfectly rationally, angry at the shit that's flying around the last oh, idk, 20 years that the last 2 weeks seem like but I am so appreciative of how you are managing to herd these-- forgive me-- cats. And I know it's going to get worse but I'm proud to be in the trenches with you, Jon. Thank you.
Great stuff. Particularly like what you say about fear speech