Trump and Vance Swatted an Entire City
False reports sent worst responders descending on the city of Springfield, OH
You can support TFN’s work by upgrading to a paid subscription here or making a one-time donation if you want to support this article specifically.
Miss Sassy is alive and well.
Anna Kilgore of Springfield, OH, told the Wall Street Journal that Miss Sassy, her cat, returned home safely after going missing for a few days in late August. But while Miss Sassy was out of pocket, Kilgore told police that her Haitian neighbors might have put Miss Sassy in their pocket and then turned her into a Hot Pocket™.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) shared a copy of that police report with the Wall Street Journal, to back up Vance’s claims of Haitian immigrants eating Springfield pets.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal not only reported on Kilgore’s debunking of her own bullshit claim, it reported that, on Sept. 9, Vance’s staff asked Springfield City Manager Brian Heck whether Haitians were eating pets and that Heck told them Heck no.
“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the Wall Street Journal. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
Vance kept his Tweet online anyway, without correcting it.
Falsely reporting a crime, bringing an armed response to the alleged location, is known as swatting when people do it to an individual. Vance and his running mate have now done it to an entire city.
You can argue that then-Pres. Donald Trump already did it to Portland, OR, but at least there was some non-fiction violence happening there. (Which, in a metaphorical swatting, became the impetus for collecting information on non-criminals.)
But virtually everything in the reports from Trump and Vance — reports which have drawn threats of violence down on the city — is false.
The city did not invite Haitian immigrants there, they passed a welcoming resolution that was purely rhetorical. In fact, before all of this happened, last year, Springfield began investigating unidentified local businesses for working to bring in immigrant labor — without telling the city, denying Springfield officials a chance to prepare, and explaining why Springfield was not randomly chosen by the Haitians.
The city is not besieged by crime, and a Haitian did not “murder” a Springfield child; it was a car accident and the child’s father has begged Trump and Vance to take his son’s name out of their collective mouths.
The county does not spend a third of its health budget on free services for Haitian “illegal immigrants” as Vance claimed. Clark County Health Commissioner Chris Cook told me that there’s not even such a thing as a county health budget. His office is a state office, and the county makes additional health expenditures. Other than translators, there are zero people on Cook’s staff dedicated solely to serving Haitians. Out of his office’s roughly 100 staffers, six speak Haitian Creole.
Communicable diseases are not rising. Despite the population increase, the absolute numbers are down, the Wall Street Journal found (in its excellent, in-depth report on the city). Infectious diseases were at 1,370 last year, the lowest in almost ten years. (Tuberculosis is up, however, from one in 2021 to four last year.)
Sexually transmitted diseases are not soaring. Yes, HIV cases increased in 2023…to just 31 (and some of those cases doubtless were not transmitted in Springfield). But overall, the number of STDs was down — despite the massive population spike! — to just 965 last year, again, the lowest in almost a decade.
Ironically/tragically, swatting may not be the best analogy. There’s another kind of armed response that’s all too common. In this situation, someone calls 911 to get help for themselves or someone else, and they or that someone else gets shot by the responding officers. The worst responders.
Let’s call it fuzzing.
Because in this scenario, somewhere along the line of communication, the cops got really fuzzy about the nature of the call they’re responding to.
The reason fuzzing is a more apt analogy is that this all started after Springfield asked Vance for help. Vance first spoke up the day after he got this letter from City Manager Brian Heck.
Second sentence: “Many factors have played in to where we are today…”
The ask: “...significant support at the Federal level…to provide ample housing for all of our residents.”
Heck did not say help us get rid of these Haitians. Heck did not say help us with crime or sexy-time germs. Heck blamed no one — “many factors” — for Springfield’s housing crunch.
And yet Trump and Vance have been fuzzing the entire city for more than a week now.
Schools and hospitals have been forced into lockdowns, evacuated thanks to the presidential ticket’s worst responders.
Mayor Rob Rue told Rue told NBC: "We need help and not hate."
But you can’t call for help safely anymore. Because a cry for help is a confession of disorder. And order now matters above all else. Order must be imposed over all else.
In Florida, an 11-year-old boy allegedly threatened to shoot up a school. This is what used to be known as a cry for help. The kind ignored time after time prior to actual school shootings.
The boy’s cry for help was met with fuzzing. The sheriff arrested him. Then they handcuffed the boy, while he was still eleven years old, and videotaped him as they took him in for his mug shot.
The boy, still not yet 12, was led into a metal cell with chains on his ankles, cuffed with his hands behind his back. An officer asked him, “Do you have any questions?” and locked the cell door.
“No sir,” the boy said.
Does your 14-years-from-fully-formed brain have any questions?
We know all this because the sheriff released the mug shot and the video online. And people loved it.
This is where fuzzing has got us. Where terrorism’s GPS guided us. Except there is no destination. There is no end to this path, because whatever degree of order we achieve will only lead us to pursue the next one.
We’ve created a fuzzing engine that no longer has anywhere to direct itself but at us. We have fuzzed the enemy and it is us.
Electing Democrats isn’t the fix. Both parties have been complicit in the philosophical approach that got us here. Democrats are for sure less draconian and better able to recognize absurd fuzzing, but they’re not moving us in the other direction, they’re just lagging the Republicans on the same road. Militarizing police. The border. Everything inside the border.
The only answer is cultural. To reject fear, to elevate actual freedom over order, to embrace a vision of what seven or eight decades of existence ought to look like in the richest, most technologically advanced culture ever to emerge on this planet.
Because without that clarity, we’re all fuzzed.
You can support The Fucking News by upgrading to a paid subscription. Thank you.