Big Little Lies
Trump and Vance are using a well known propaganda technique known as the "Big Lie"
In 1925 Adolph Hitler coined the phrase große Lüge, or Big Lie in his book Mein Kampf. He defined it as a “gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth for propaganda purposes” and it was used to maximum effect in order to demonize the Jews, the Roma, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else he deemed “üntermensch” or subhuman.
And in 2024 Donald Trump and his vile sidekick JD Vance are doing exactly the same thing by demonizing Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio. “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating people’s pets” he loudly proclaimed during the debate with Kamala Harris. He said this despite knowing FULL WELL that Haitians were not, in fact, eating cats and dogs because town officials told him so.
Yet he spread this lie purely for propaganda purposes, as JD Vance himself later admitted when he admitting on CNN that they were making up these stories in order to “shine a light on the pain that ordinary Americans are experiencing”. Vance even expanded on the lies by claiming Haitians were bringing in communicable diseases such as HIV, by claiming they were in America illegally, and even promised to continue to refer to them as illegal aliens despite the fact that he was corrected and fact checked that they were allowed into the country under the government’s own humanitarian Temporary Protected Status which was created in 1990 and expanded to include Haitians in 2010 after an earthquake devastated that country.
But the facts do not matter to people who would willingly demonize an entire community in the interest of scoring political points against their opponents, or pushing a particularly noxious anti-immigration agenda.
And these little lies become Big Lies once they start burrowing their way into society and harming those communities. Bomb threats. School closures. Haitians afraid to leave their homes. Neo-Nazis marching through the streets. An entire town turned upside down by those very same Big Lies.
And now other Haitian communities in America are being targeted by these same Big Lies told by the Trump/Vance campaign. In addition Trump also claims the town of Aurora Colorado has been taken over by Venezuelan gangs who have overwhelmed their police force despite no evidence of this taking place.
More Big Lies from the Liar in Chief.
But these Big Lies have a purpose: to demonize immigrants of color in this country and prepare the nation for the mass deportations that Trump has made a key centerpoint of his entire campaign. In fact it’s not just mass deportations that he promises, but a literal POGROM against Haitians and other immigrants of color who reside in the United States, both legally and illegally.
Analysis of the costs of such a program of mass deportation estimates it would cost around 3.5 TRILLION DOLLARS to deport the 20 million people that he promises to deport. That’s three times the annual budget of the entire US Military. Not only that but removing that many people from the workforce would literally collapse the economy.
And think of the Herculean effort it would take to identify and capture those 20 million immigrants. Every police force in the nation would need to be employed in this effort as well as every National Guard unit. Checkpoints would need to be set up all across the nation to check on people’s citizenship status, especially if they “looked” like an immigrant. House to house inspections would be required. The kind of stuff you see in repressive regimes all throughout history.
It is, quite literally, a policy of pure madness.
But as we witnessed in Germany so many years ago, when pure madness takes hold of a nation disaster ensues. And by pushing these Big Lies despite repeatedly being told that they are lies, Trump and Vance are quite literally using Nazi propaganda techniques to further their own political agenda.
And nothing could be more disgusting, more anti-American, more anti-HUMAN than that.