“Lies can be lethal”

Editorials expressing support for Springfield and Haitian-Ohioans, and rejection of anti-immigrant rhetoric, are pouring in from around the country.

“Lies can be lethal,” write the editors of the Florida Sun Sentinel, reprinted in the Orlando Sentinel and Daily Camera in Colorado.

Despite “rooting” for J.D. Vance when he was chosen to be former president Trump’s running mate, the Lima News editorial board in Ohio blasts Vance and other elected officials for their “dehumanization of our Haitian humanitarian guests, turning to oftentimes racist, inflammatory and false tropes to enflame fears and rachet up rhetoric.”

The Springfield News Sun’s editorial was reprinted in the Dayton Daily News.

We’ll let the New York Daily News have the last word, in excerpts from their editorial reprinted in MSN, Arkansas News-Gazette and Yahoo News.

Local children who are forced to wait for the all-clear from bomb-sniffing dogs, if their parents have let them go to school at all, are not being harmed by the Haitian population. They are being harmed by the Republican presidential campaign ticket, who see them as essentially cannon fodder in a messaging war waged for reasons of political expediency and power.

….

Vance and Trump have fixated on this false story because there is no equivalent real story of horrors resulting from the population of Haitians in Ohio.

That’s all without mentioning the Haitian population itself, a group that has suffered plenty and worked to reestablish lives in the United States only to now be put at direct risk for what are, at their core, openly racist tropes of the kind that we had once hoped would no longer be acceptable in mainstream U.S. political discourse.