News Brief: Media Incitement Against Haitian Migrants and JD Vance's Standpoint Theory for Bigoted Dopes AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Citations Needed

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Episode: News Brief: Media Incitement Against Haitian Migrants and JD Vance's Standpoint Theory for Bigoted Dopes

Author: Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
Duration: 00:18:57

Episode Shownotes

In this public News Brief, we examine rightwing media's shameful incitement campaign against Haitian migrants and J.D. Vance's smarmy, grating rhetorical tactic of blaming nameless "constituents" for his stoking of a hate mob.

Summary

In this episode of 'Citations Needed', Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson explore the alarming media incitement against Haitian migrants, particularly led by political figures like J.D. Vance. They examine how xenophobic and racist narratives are fabricated to demonize these immigrants, leading to real societal threats. The hosts highlight Vance's rhetorical tactics, which manipulate constituency concerns to justify bigoted rhetoric, emphasizing the dangers of selective media framing that associates crime with ethnic identity. The episode critiques Vance’s deceptive populism that perpetuates harmful stereotypes while undermining factual discourse, revealing the broader implications of this media-influenced bigotry.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (News Brief: Media Incitement Against Haitian Migrants and JD Vance's Standpoint Theory for Bigoted Dopes) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_01
Welcome to a Citations Needed news brief. I'm Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter at Citations Pod, Facebook Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com slash citations needed podcast.

00:00:18 Speaker_01
All your support is incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full length episodes. We will be starting season eight of Citations Needed very, very shortly. So stay

00:00:32 Speaker_01
Stay tuned for those episodes coming your way. But in the meantime, Adam, we thought we would do this news brief because one of the campaigns for president currently is inciting violence against immigrants in this country, more so than usual.

00:00:50 Speaker_01
You would think that alone would be a headline. It's not. pogrom-inciting, anti-Haitian immigrant, vile nonsense that is being spread by the Trump campaign, but also now really kind of led by vice presidential candidate, gross, J.D. Vance.

00:01:10 Speaker_01
And we've been talking about this a bit, you and I, Adam, but this kind of ongoing blood libel that is being waged through political speeches, through rallies, and also directly to the media is something that we wanted to comment on today.

00:01:26 Speaker_02
Yeah, so there's a concerted effort by right-wing media of all kinds taking their cues from the Trump-Vance ticket to incite – I don't think it's an overstatement to say to incite pogroms or to incite extrajudicial or vigilante violence against Haitians.

00:01:41 Speaker_02
Haitian immigrants, which we've seen threats. We've seen schools close. We've seen city council close.

00:01:46 Speaker_02
We've seen colleges close because of threats, kind of focusing the ire and attention on anti-immigrant animus on the specific town of Springfield, Ohio, but obviously every Haitian American, every Haitian immigrant is subject to violence.

00:02:00 Speaker_02
And frankly, every black person is subject to violence because I don't think these guys are really making a huge, very kind of discrete and thoughtful ontological distinctions, right?

00:02:07 Speaker_02
They're kind of just inciting violence against black people who are coded as being immigrants or coded as being kind of the other. And so

00:02:15 Speaker_02
This has led to the nonstop torn of headlines in the New York Post about, quote, influx of wild driving Haitian migrants turning streets of Springfield, Ohio into combat zone. They had another article, quote, exclusive.

00:02:28 Speaker_02
Post witnesses Haitian motorist making illegal turn in Springfield smashes into mom driving with autistic daughter This is just nonstop, on and on and on. Ben Shapiro, Drudge Report, Fox News has been the wall-to-wall on this stuff.

00:02:41 Speaker_02
The idea is that the town of Springfield, Ohio had an influx of Haitian immigrants, which by the way, they lobbied for. City officials lobbied for more immigrants because they couldn't fill jobs.

00:02:49 Speaker_02
We can sort of debate whether or not using relatively cheap immigrant labor was the most altruistic motive, but nevertheless, this is something the city asked for. And then they got an influx of immigrants.

00:03:00 Speaker_02
And obviously the Vance and right wing media saw an opportunity to kind of demagogue this based on this racist myth about eating cats. That's how it started off. Then they pivoted to geese.

00:03:11 Speaker_01
Well, right, exactly. So this was kind of mainstreamed during the September 10th presidential debate when Donald Trump said like live on air that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating house pets and

00:03:25 Speaker_01
Then it kind of spread from there, got mainstreamed, and the threats started pouring in against that community.

00:03:31 Speaker_01
The lies kind of morphed, as you were saying, Adam, that it became, you know, maybe not cats and dogs, but they're stealing geese from public parks.

00:03:40 Speaker_02
And that like- I mean, that's different though. They went from cats to geese. And it's like, well, okay, but I don't, you don't go to a lake house with your buddies over the weekend and go cat hunting, but people go goose hunting. It's a thing.

00:03:49 Speaker_02
Like, I'm not saying that, but there's no evidence they even did that either, but they kept moving the goalposts. That's the point.

00:03:54 Speaker_01
And so, yeah, the xenophobia and the racism, which is all kind of balled up here, is grotesquely par for the course.

00:04:02 Speaker_01
You had people like Christopher Rufo, who's a far right, like anti-DEI and CRT crusader, offering up on his social media channels like a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could like send him proof of the eating pet story.

00:04:19 Speaker_01
Now, this is after the claim was made, like the damage is already done. And then it's like, oh, well, And I'll give $5,000 to anyone who could offer to confirm my priors. Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly.

00:04:29 Speaker_01
Bounty out for some guy to find some black guy grilling something somewhere, which obviously incites all sorts of other things to follow. And then we've seen J.D. Vance. I want to get around to that piece of garbage to J.D.

00:04:41 Speaker_01
Vance, vice presidential candidate continuing to double and triple down on this total disinformation, this total myth, lie, racist bullshit. And yeah, so we're seeing this also play out then through the media, as you were saying.

00:04:57 Speaker_02
Yeah, because again, it's just kind of a, it really showed to a great extent, we don't want to sort of blame liberals for this, because I think that's not really accurate. And we want to make sure our target is calibrated correctly.

00:05:06 Speaker_02
But the liberal response initially was like, well, let's sort of just ignore it or let's make jokes about it. There's like high profile people making memes about it. And it's like, well, okay, but this is actually quite serious.

00:05:18 Speaker_02
This kind of speech is illegal in a lot of countries and for good reason. Now, would I trust the US government to make this illegal? Would they not just turn around and use it to like defend Israel?

00:05:26 Speaker_02
Probably, but, you know, assuming the power structures were different and the actual like people adjudicating this, we're doing so in good faith. In many societies, you can't just like incite pogroms against ethnic minorities.

00:05:38 Speaker_02
Now, this reminds me, because when we did our episode on demagoguing and incitement against homeless people, an editor would say, homeless man attacks woman with a knife, or homeless man is seen doing this or robbing this.

00:05:51 Speaker_02
And I would reach out to the editors and I'd say, well, how come you say that the alleged perpetrator is homeless, but you never say when they're not homeless, you never say like house person stabs wife, or house person commits robbery?

00:06:03 Speaker_02
Like by selectively only highlighting the housing status of the person doing the crime, you're necessarily engaging in selective incitement. And I had at least two editors who responded by saying, you know what, you're right.

00:06:15 Speaker_02
It's just a playbook they were reading from. It's not something they thought about because the goal is to make homeless people as a class and as a sort of social status, collectively responsible for the actions of a few people.

00:06:26 Speaker_01
And also like a kind of undeniable, almost integral part of their identity, right?

00:06:31 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:06:32 Speaker_02
Well, it's to incite violence and to incite vigilante violence against a group of people because you don't, again, and you'd say, well, you wouldn't say like black suspect kills someone or black person robs this or Latino person runs red light, but they do.

00:06:45 Speaker_02
And they're doing it with Haitians right now, right? So any Haitian immigrant who commits any infraction is now being watched by right wing media. And you see the New York Post saying, you know, Haitian gets into car accidents.

00:06:54 Speaker_02
Well, there's thousands of car accidents a day. Why are we highlighting? Why is it national news? Why in New York publication in your tabloid and Fox News highlighting minor traffic accidents in a small town?

00:07:04 Speaker_02
Because it is racist incitement because it's racist incitement. It's only a logical explanation because you're not saying white person or native white American rather runs into mom with autistic daughter, this kind of salacious.

00:07:16 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly.

00:07:16 Speaker_02
Grotesque framing. Right.

00:07:18 Speaker_01
Of the kind of, you know, barbaric, savage and the innocent victims.

00:07:22 Speaker_02
Yeah. Look, I mean, this is really just Der Strummer shit. I mean, they kind of keep the distance, right? They're not using the N-word, but God damn it, they really want to.

00:07:31 Speaker_02
But they're doing this sort of heightened, lurid, selective kind of tabloid press just like Der Strummer did against Jews in the 30s.

00:07:39 Speaker_02
Obviously, the situations are different, but the sort of general framework of tabloid demagoguery and tabloid pogrom promotion and pushing is very similar. And others have, of course, pointed this out.

00:07:50 Speaker_02
And the fact that the vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who I obviously fucking hate, we've talked about in the show quite a bit, is kind of the worst elements of Trump, but with an added layer of smarm that makes it somehow worse, disingenuous.

00:08:02 Speaker_02
And I wrote a piece for my substack called J.D. Vance and the Grim Rise of Right-Wing Standpoint Theory. which details a rhetorical tactic he uses. Again, this is someone who emerged and rose to prominence vis-a-vis liberal media.

00:08:14 Speaker_02
Terry Gross, he was on MSNBC five different times. He was the go-to supposed white working class whisperer in 2015, 2016, 2017.

00:08:25 Speaker_02
The reason why liberal media loved him so much is he trafficked in this Charles Murray blame white poverty on cultural failings with white people. They're axiomatically bigoted, they're axiomatically backwards. It's a culture of poverty.

00:08:40 Speaker_02
This is always what he uses. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Charles Murray, Culture of Poverty Framework, basically saying that no left economic populism could possibly win these fucking yokels.

00:08:50 Speaker_02
Therefore, what Clinton was doing, and the strategy of Clinton was actually this sort of neoliberal orthodoxy at the time, was in fact good and needed to kind of angle to win over more professional class people as someone who, again, worked for a VC, went to Yale.

00:09:03 Speaker_02
He knew exactly what he was doing. He was reaffirming the priors of rich people, except he switched from rich liberals to rich Republicans.

00:09:10 Speaker_02
He pivoted from the Daniel Patrick Moynihan mode of classism and racism into this more overt, obviously fascistic racism. But in response to criticism, he does the exact same faux standpoint epistemology.

00:09:23 Speaker_02
I want to play a clip here of Vance defending his position to Dana Bash. I want you to notice the framework he takes from the onset.

00:09:30 Speaker_00
Why have I talked about some of the things that I've been talking about? Let me just say this. My constituents have brought approximately a dozen separate concerns to me.

00:09:39 Speaker_00
Ten of them are verifiable and confirmable, and a couple of them I talk about because my constituents are telling me firsthand that they're seeing these things. So I have two options, Dana.

00:09:51 Speaker_00
I can ignore them, which is what the American media has done for years to this community, or I can actually talk about what people are telling me.

00:09:59 Speaker_02
Yeah. Again, he does this repeatedly and every time he's been confronted with this, he says, I'm simply responding to what my constituents are telling me. Well, yeah, but your constituents are fucking email chain racist idiots.

00:10:12 Speaker_02
What does that have to do with anything? I mean, This idea that somehow we're supposed to take these alleged 12 constituents, you represent millions of people in Ohio. Do you listen to all of their crackpot theories?

00:10:24 Speaker_02
Again, he doesn't want to say, I'm jumping on this because I thought it was politically advantageous to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment, to distract from Trump's multiple policy failures, or just because I enjoy the action, I'm genuinely just racist.

00:10:38 Speaker_02
It's not even a distraction. I just fucking like picking on immigrants. because I'm a dead-eyed psycho who fucking hates black people and hates immigrants, so if I get both in the same time, it's a twofer.

00:10:47 Speaker_02
He can't defend it on its merits, and he does this over and over and over again.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
Now, again, as evil and horrible as Trump is, he will just have this alternate reality, and he'll triple down on his lies, but he doesn't try to act like he's doing this organic bottom-up, sort of, well, my people – there were protests of 10,000 people outside of my

00:11:06 Speaker_02
office and I had to respond to this concern.

00:11:08 Speaker_02
It's fucking 12 people repeating an email chain like Facebook uncles with totally baseless story about eating cats, like obviously sort of polgrim material, not sort of something that law enforcement went up to him and mentioned or supposedly not even based on his own account or city officials or public health officials or like, I don't know, animal rights activists.

00:11:27 Speaker_02
No, of course not. just a bunch of chain emails from a bunch of Facebook uncles. And then he said, oh, I'm just representing my constituents.

00:11:33 Speaker_01
But then he's also clear about the kind of propagandistic cynicism that is driving him.

00:11:40 Speaker_01
Because in that same appearance, he said, quote, if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, end quote.

00:11:54 Speaker_01
So this idea that even if it's not true, even if it's not true, which we know it's not true. He's doing it for the benefit of his constituents.

00:12:04 Speaker_01
He's doing it for the benefit of the quote unquote American people because the damn liberal media, Adam, won't pay attention to the suffering that is going on because of what you heard in that clip that we played, the invasion, right, the invasion, the infestation, these horrible genocidal terms used against immigrant communities.

00:12:31 Speaker_01
which, as you said earlier, especially in Springfield, which was city policy to actually bring more Haitian immigrants in.

00:12:39 Speaker_01
And that kind of idea of Vance saying, if I have to create stories so that you actually pay attention, then that's how I'm going to do it, harkens a little bit back to that infamous Karl Rove quote.

00:12:53 Speaker_01
about the quote-unquote reality-based community, where he was talking to a member of the press, and Karl Rove, who is George W. Bush's right-hand man, said this, quote, people like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community.

00:13:08 Speaker_01
you believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore." And he adds, when we act, we create our own reality.

00:13:19 Speaker_01
And while you're studying that reality, judiciously, as you will, we'll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort.

00:13:28 Speaker_01
Out we're histories actors and you all of you will just be left to study what we do end quote so this idea of You can say whatever the fuck you want and create

00:13:39 Speaker_01
these new realities that then the media, by virtue of the media frenzy created by a presidential campaign and its candidates, they are creating new realities.

00:13:52 Speaker_02
He's been doing this smarmy bullshit for years. Every single horrible policy he has, every anti-immigrant, every carceral opinion,

00:14:01 Speaker_02
Every paranoid anti-china conspiracy theory he always frames it as he's actually doing that because he's defending the sort of mystical working class again never mind the fact that is a horrible labor record right never mind the fact that trump is pushing openly now for the biggest corporate tax cuts in human history the previous one being his first when he did in twenty seventeen you set all that aside in june of twenty twenty one he said quote.

00:14:21 Speaker_02
Remaining Mexico is one of the smartest immigration policies of the last 30 years.

00:14:25 Speaker_02
A president who cares about his own people dying of fentanyl doesn't do this, in reference to Biden supposedly getting rid of Remaining Mexico, although he ended up not doing it. And I said at the time, I said, quote, J.D.

00:14:34 Speaker_02
Vance's Senate run and inevitable presidential run is just going to be variations of this extremely racist opinion I have. I only have it because I care so much about poor whites, unquote. It has been his schtick for years.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
And it is, again, this fake standpoint theory, this fake standpoint epistemology, this like, I only arrive at these opinions, I care about the supposed, you know, the sort of working man, the working man of rule Ohio.

00:14:59 Speaker_02
And again, zero grade from AFL-CIO, zero grade from labor unions, supported some token stuff around train regulation after East Palestine, right, sort of. He's kind of box checking things he does.

00:15:10 Speaker_02
And what makes it so grating and annoying is that, and this is something we talk about a lot on the show, is that nobody wants to do ideology. Nobody wants to defend the policy in its own terms.

00:15:21 Speaker_02
It's, well, the people have spoken to me and I'm merely their representative. It's so grating in bad faith because then you can't really counter it.

00:15:29 Speaker_02
What the media ought to do when he comes on these shows or goes on PBS or MSNBC and says, well, my constituents emailed me, he's exploiting a vulnerability in liberal discourse, which is this deference to the supposed people.

00:15:43 Speaker_02
Nobody can just say, well, who gives a fuck what Cletus emailed you? What difference does it make? What are you talking about?

00:15:48 Speaker_02
what does it have to do with the price of tea in china millions of people in your state thousands maybe hundreds email you everyday why are you picking this one but not the others also haitian migrants are your constituents why do they not count instead of saying that like who gives a fuck what a bunch of email facebook uncle sent you like.

00:16:08 Speaker_02
they go, oh, well, yeah, okay. Well, I guess they were really concerned about this. So therefore it must be serious. And we got to stop doing this.

00:16:14 Speaker_01
Well, I guess he has to respond to the people, right?

00:16:17 Speaker_02
This faux populism, this faux standpoint theory, it's so smarmy and it's so gross.

00:16:21 Speaker_02
And it's like, and liberal media is just not equipped to really respond to it because what they ought to have said, and eventually they kind of did this, well, police reports say this, but by then you're already on day three or four when you really should have said like,

00:16:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, but you're just hand-picking the constituents who affirm your priors. You're not responding to some plebiscite. This is just the thing you care about, so you hand-selected those supposedly – which we don't even know for real, by the way.

00:16:45 Speaker_02
We're just taking that for granted. It's a more sophisticated form of MAGA because, again, Vance went up the ranks of liberalism. He's a Yale-educated lawyer. He knows the discourse around liberalism. It's what gave him his media career.

00:16:58 Speaker_02
And he knows how to use that kind of like small beans. And he does this, he's like, he kind of shrugs and says, look, this isn't just what my constituents tell me. And it's like, oh God, this is so much worse than Trumpism.

00:17:08 Speaker_02
It's so much worse because it's smarmy, right? It's sort of Trumpism, but smarmy and squishy and sort of cynical and cowardly. And this is the bullshit we're going to have to deal with when, you know, when this guy invariably runs for president again.

00:17:20 Speaker_02
And I think it's important that I think liberals kind of update their playbook to sort of not take these assertions of populist demands at face value because they're fake.

00:17:29 Speaker_02
He just listened, again, to the extent to which we even know these people existed. He just listened to these racist Facebook uncles because they agree with him. So, like, it's a fatuous framing anyway.

00:17:38 Speaker_01
So, therefore, they become the people, right? Like, they stand in for all of the people.

00:17:45 Speaker_02
Yeah. It's such bullshit. It's just fake. I'm sorry.

00:17:49 Speaker_01
Well, we wanted to get a little bit of discourse on J.D. Vance and the attack on Haitian immigrants by way of his defense of the attack on America. So thank you all for listening to this Citations Needed News Brief. We will be back very, very soon with

00:18:07 Speaker_01
season eight of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for that. Those are coming your way shortly. But until then, of course, you can follow the show on Twitter at Citations Pod, Facebook Citations Needed.

00:18:17 Speaker_01
And if you are not already a supporter of the show, please consider becoming one. It really does help us out. We are 100% listener funded and you can do that through Patreon.com slash Citations Needed podcast.

00:18:28 Speaker_01
But until next time, thank you all for listening. I'm Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson.

00:18:33 Speaker_01
Citations needed senior producers Florensboro Adams producers Julianne Tweetin production assistant is trend a light burn the newsletter is by Marco Cardilano Transcriptions are by Machner Emer on the music is by granddaddy. Thanks again. Everyone.

00:18:45 Speaker_01
We'll catch you next time