Calling attention
Vance cheerily admits he’s just making shit up.
In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio.
Vance’s remarks came during an appearance on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, where he said he felt the need “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people”.
Asked by the CNN host Dana Bash whether the false rumors centering on Springfield, Ohio, were “a story that you created”, Vance replied, “Yes!” He then said the claims were rooted in “accounts from … constituents” and that he as well as the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, had spoken publicly about them to draw attention to Springfield’s relatively large Haitian population.
Yunh-uh like the way Hitler created stories to draw attention to Europe’s relatively large Jewish population. No problem, nothing to see here.
Vance ultimately defended his endorsement of the lies about Springfield as calling attention to the immigration policies at the White House while Harris has served as vice-president to Joe Biden.
That’s what lies about despised groups of people do, they call attention. Then once the attention is called, the next steps can be anything from insults to genocide.
Be careful what you call attention to.
Speaking of making shit up, am I alone in thinking there’s something fishy about today’s foiled ‘assassination attempt’ on Trump? On his own golf course, Secret Service agents spot a man hiding in the tree line while Trump’s playing two holes away; SS agents open fire, the man runs away and escapes in a black Nissan, leaving behind an AK-47, telescopic sights, two backpacks and a GoPro camera. The car is stopped a few minutes later by local police and the man is arrested.
It’s all a bit too convenient, isn’t it? When Trump was shot in the ear his ratings went up. They’ve been falling steadily since then, and he’s had nothing but bad publicity and ridicule since his performance at the Harris debate, then suddenly he’s had another close escape. If that wasn’t a set-up, I’m a monkey’s aunty.
I can’t imagine that there’s a big pool of candidates from which to draw who would be willing to “pretend” to assassinate Trump, given that any applicant succeeding in getting hired for the job would run an extremely high risk of being shot to death. If the Secret Service doesn’t kill him, any such “crisis actor assassin” becomes a huge liability to whomever cooked up such a charade. I don’t think the threat of legal action resulting from breaking an NDA is going to keep any such person quiet for long.
Don Jr in a chat with Charlie Kirk (quoted by Steve Schmidt):
“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world. That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”
I’m looking at Don Jr’s average IQ and I am NOT IMPRESSED.
I should add that, together with France (earlier on), the USA is largely responsible for the state of Haiti as a result of constant political meddling and bullying that continues into the present. Hillary Clinton was responsible for the most recent meddling and bullying, and despite its taking in some Haitian refugees, the Biden administration hasn’t being doing much better.
Re #3:
Leaving aside the race issues (which is a lot to leave aside), I’m bothered by the implication that what makes a country “third world” is the average intelligence of the population. Industrialization happens because of smart people, not resources, trade, education, any of those things? What a ridiculous claim to make. I suppose he believes that wealthy people are wealthy because they have high IQs, not because of luck, or family connections, or heck, even education?
I’m looking at the average IQ of Donald Sr, his children and their partners and hangers-on… So, come on, Ophelia, they’re wealthy! They gotta lotta dosh! They got themselves born into the right family! That’s the only real index for ascertaining IQ, according to some people. And they smash easy tests of whether or not they are suffering from mental decline! ‘Elephant’, ‘table’, etc. So that shows how high their IQs are! Stable geniuses, the lot of them!
I think it’s worse than that. What I got from Vance’s interview was something like “the media wouldn’t let us dictate the agenda (the “calling attention to” thing), so we were forced to make shit up”. It’s not enough that they lie – everyone must believe their lies. (Where have I heard that before?) MAGA = utterly shameless like a toddler.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that myths and stories matter, and they help illuminate the lives of a group of people. However, they can’t be confused with truth, with history. Religious stories and folk stories can be benign when they are just stories, like the Just-So stories or tall tales, but not when people believe these things actually happened. Of course religious groups and other groups have been pushing these stories as literally true for a long time, and Vance is lying when he claims he can tell false stories and everybody will understand they are false.
Someone should write a book, maybe calling it Why Truth Matters, on this subject.
@Francis Boyle
I don’t think they expect that or they care. The important thing (and that’s what Vance is saying, IMO) is that people are now talking bout immigrants, a topic where Trump is favored by the voters.
It does not matter how outrageous the claims are, it does not matter whether they are true or whether anyone believes them, the only thing that matters is that media cover topics favorable for Trump. It was similar with Clinton’s e-mails.
#Sackbut: There’s a story in (if I recall rightly) Nigel Barley’s wonderful ‘’The Innocent Anthropologist”, about an eager young anthropologist (not Barley himself), fresh out of university with no doubt a Ph.D to stick after his name, taking down creation myths from some elderly South American tribesman. After a time, the tribesman, who had obviously recounted these myths to a number of anthropologists, most or all of whom had been brought up in a religion that requires ‘faith’, turned to the eager young man and said, “I suppose you think we believe all this.”
@Sonderval
Ok, that was a bit forced for the sake of the analogy. They, of course, don’t care what the media or anyone else they see as the enemy believe. They do however care what their supporters and anyone else who is sufficiently gullible can be persuaded to accept, and in the post-truth world that’s what passes for belief. But maybe you’re right. Possibly just raising the issue brings pre-existing attitudes to the fore. The problem with that is that such shifts are notoriously evanescent. To make it work you have to get the timing right. A week before the election might give them a useful boost. Trying now would be bungling. So I hope you’re right.
#1 AoS
I also disagree. As Bruce points out, a pretend assassination attempt would be severely unsafe for the actor unless multiple Secret Service agents were co-conspirators. Odds seem to be against that.
And yet….
Maybe I’m being overly cynical and/or paranoid, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if there were Trump supporters willing to be martyrs for the cause.
I buy it as a possibility, but wouldn’t put even a dollar on it.