J. D. Vance is telling us very clearly that what they’re doing is using an on-the-ground story with a lot of momentum behind it, basically a viral moment, to direct attention to the broader issue of immigration. It was striking during the debate, too, how many of Trump’s answers went back to immigration, even when that was not what he was asked. The moment when he said “They’re eating the pets” was just one of them. It’s an example of people at the highest levels grabbing these viral, grassroots pieces of misinformation and using them for their own purposes.
And then, after that happens on a national debate stage, other white-nationalist groups pick up on it, and then the Proud Boys and other groups go march in Springfield. A whole bunch of different groups and activists will turn up. There’s going to be a range, from public-facing demonstrations and marches to flyering and bomb threats.
Is this filtering process that you’re describing mostly an Internet-based phenomenon, or is it similar to how it worked decades ago?
I think it’s very similar. What the Internet does is make it bigger and faster. Even back in the late seventies and early eighties, the Klan was using much of the same playbook, in terms of figuring out what ideas would stick with its base, finding communities that were already frustrated and trying to galvanize action in those communities.
For instance, in Galveston Bay, Vietnamese refugees who had been settled by church groups and sponsorship organizations elsewhere had become secondary migrants to this part of the Texas coast, because they were fishermen and they already knew the climate. They knew how to run fishing boats. There’s this massive population influx, the white fishermen felt like they couldn’t keep pace, and there was an economic pinch. The Klan arrived after people were already upset.
So it wasn’t that the Klan showed up and told them what to be upset about. It’s that the Klan figured out how to put their finger on an existing problem and use kind of a ready-made scapegoat to recruit a bunch of people into these paramilitary camps and escalate tension. And that’s something the Klan has always done. They did it a lot in the twenties, because at that point the Klan was huge. Around ten per cent of the state of Indiana was enrolled. It was like four million people nationwide. It was very, very mainstream.
And when people learn about that Klan in school, they usually learn that it’s anti-Black and antisemitic, and that’s true, but the Klan was also anti-immigrant in the Northeast, it was anti-Mexican on the border, it was anti-labor in the Northwest, where people were going through timber unionization. Again, the model is, you pick up on the existing scapegoat and figure out how you can explain that for your own purposes.
I don’t think it is a huge leap to note that this is exactly how Trump’s campaign is working. He figures out how to pick up on anger and dissatisfaction in the community, and then use that for his own purposes. However, the community he’s talking about is not Springfield, which had put out calls for Haitian immigrants to settle there because they wanted them for labor. The community is the nation that’s using Springfield as a story to tell about immigration. It is meant to reflect their own economic concerns.