By Michael Woyton
An Ohio woman behind a post on Facebook that began the baseless and racist claim that Haiti immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield — leading to fear in the community along with bomb threats and school closings — now said she is filled with regret and fear over the fallout.
Erica Lee of Springfield told NBC News Friday that she has no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and said that a neighbor told her she thought a missing cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.
Lee’s neighbor, Kimberly Newton, told Newsguard Reality Check that she had heard about the attack from a third party and that Lee’s Facebook post had misstated her story.
Read the entire NBC News article by Alicia Victoria Lozano for more of the story, including how she never thought her post “would set off a national news cycle.”
That former president Donald Trump, a convicted felon, continues to baselessly vilify the Haitian community himself and through his surrogates, like his running mate JD Vance, should be of no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to real estate developer and “entertainer” over the years.
A column in The New York Times Saturday by opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen is called “Trump Has Crossed a Truly Unacceptable Line.”
Polgreen wrote that there was a temptation to treat this latest vulgarity spouted by Trump as just another of his rants.
“[P]ets, in politics and in life, are the ultimate humanizer,” she said, citing Nixon and his cocker spaniel, FDR’s Fala, Bill Clinton’s chocolate lab and Mitt Romney lashed-to-the-roof-of-a-car Irish Setter.
“And so it cannot be an accident that these resonances have been fused in an allegation against Haitians, a people who have long stood in for a kind of universal other in America,” Polgreen wrote, adding that there is a “long and grim tradition of demonizing Haitians in the United States.”
This writer for one thinks it’s ironic for someone such as Trump to use the family pet card to try to humanize himself when he’s never had a dog or a cat.
Polgreen ends with saying that Trump’s “blood libel” against a group of legal immigrants who escaped a strife-torn nation “in search of a better life through hard work,” proves he is a “dangerous and malevolent figure whose menace must be confronted and defeated, fully and frontally, in this election.”
Read Polgreen’s complete opinion column here.
Lead art: Screen grab from Today on NBC.
On Second Thought 