Alicia Hooten of Murphysboro, Illinois, is a hoax-endorsing Trump supporter who sees the Donald-hyped 'caravan' of non-white people possibly maybe looking to request asylum in America as an existential threat to the country—a "ploy to destroy America, and to bring us to our knees." Playing her part as one of white nationalism's relied-upon folksy but paranoid buffoons gets her a few neutral paragraphs at the head of a new New York Times article, because of course it does.
The journalism construct of using her uninformed quotes is used as reportorial launching point for exploring why she believes the extremely stupid things she apparently believes (she "blamed Mr. Soros, Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama for the caravan"). But it is important to remember we are not allowed to make fun of her or similar Trump supporters because being an ill-informed racist conspiracy-peddler is just good heartland values, and more to the point if anyone in America points out to Trump voters that it isn't very bright of them to readily adopt whatever idiotic conspiracy theories a ranting racist guy from television shouts in their general direction, those Americans will get very angry and go threaten to burn down the nearest university. Whatever.
We are doing great damage to our nation in not properly addressing the role of abject stupidity in electoral politics. It is not that our nation is having a pitched battle between two opposing ideological structures. We are having a pitched battle between the people who, whether they are liberal or conservative or in-between, believe our national priorities should be based on real-world evidence and a second set of people who will readily believe ISIS-trained groundhogs are tunneling through the planet's core in order to emerge from under midwestern Walmart stores, so long as someone battling to remain conscious despite lethal outgassings of hairspray tells them so on their morning television programs. The second set considers the first group “elitists,” and “enemies of the people,” and demands they be purged from the national ranks. The first group considers the second group “homespun,” and sends reporters out to document their largely unintelligible thoughts with the same grace and fascination that National Geographic brings to a story on a newly-discovered species of lizard.
But let's go through it. Here is what the Republican Party, not merely Donald Trump but lawmakers and in party-produced campaign ads, and Fox News hosts, and Fox Business hosts, and conservative "think tanks" like the increasingly dubiously named Judicial Watch, are pumping into Americans' heads incessantly. You may recognize them as being key factors in several recent terrorist attacks.
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First: That a 'caravan' of Central American refugees fleeing violence is a threat to America on par with terrorism. And that some are probably terrorists themselves. And that there may be "Middle Easterners" mixed in, because the raving idiots of television conservatism are absolutely insistent that terrorism can only take place if you've got someone "Middle Eastern" involved. This gaudy mix of racism with racism, peddled by groups with long histories of race obsession, would appear to suggest that the entire construct is in fact nothing more than another burp of hoax-devoted racism.
Second: That George Soros specifically, or "Jewish groups" in the abstract, are the puppet masters behind American immigration. This is peddled by Republican lawmakers, singling out Soros by name, and is a central conceit of the Judicial Watch rantings that got one of their more overt anti-Semites booted even from Fox News. So now we've got the inclusion of a new form of racism: The non-white immigrants have been joined by Muslim terrorists in a plot by Jewish masterminds to undermine the pure white American race. Already, we learn that the caravan is no mere event but a plot hatched by all of white supremacy's most feared enemies, all rolled up into a single news event.
At this point, this is beginning to sound not like a news story or even a campaign argument, but like the entirety of the Republican Party just got out of a neo-Nazi rally and started writing down whatever parts or the shouting they could remember. And, in fact, it is; the premise that the Jews of the world are behind every significant worldwide event, policy shift, and possibly the f--king weather itself is a core preaching of the worst and most unhinged anti-Semitic hate groups. These conspiracy theories, somehow, have managed to make it into the closing arguments of myriad top Republican lawmakers and campaign teams—Republican lawmakers and campaign teams that have been caught, repeatedly, interacting with such groups—but we are still not allowed to deduce just how these new Republican theories entered Republicanism. We are supposed to believe it happened coincidentally and spontaneously.
But there's more! We are also told, by no less than the intellectuals of Fox News, that the non-white immigrants are bringing disease. And not even good, recognizable modern disease, but old-timey Biblical plagues like leprosy. Strikingly, the premise that non-white immigrants are plague-infested disease vectors is, once again, a slander handed down from 100 years' worth of racist, fascist, and Nazi pamphleteering. Strikingly, it is now appearing unbidden on conservative networks, as if someone just stumbled on those pamphlets yesterday. It is, categorically, a white supremacist talking point. The immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers coming to this nation are almost always coming from countries with better vaccination rates than our own nation, because they are not filled with stupid people forwarding stupid hoax-laden anti-vaccination screeds from idiot Facebook friends. If you want to stop disease outbreaks, start in Texas. If you want to stop disease outbreaks, for the love of God, do not fly in airplanes.
So here we are, with a new election-eve conspiracy theory that just happens to tie in each one of the most prominent conspiracies and bigotries of American white supremacist hate groups—accidentally, of course. We are in imminent danger from non-white people coming to "overrun" our "culture," and also ISIS is probably there for some reason, and it's all being orchestrated by the Jews, probably this one specific Jew, who secretly alters worldwide immigration patterns, for the sake of promoting Liberalism and harming the True People, and these non-whites are unclean and must not be touched, and by the way All Glory To The White Race, now stand by for the Sean Hannity show.
The New York Times, it should be noted, does a good job of churning down the list of sub-conspiracies peddled here by the conservative movement. It does not, however, clarify that each of them can be traced directly from the white supremacist movement, and that each detail of the hoax is borrowed from racist rhetoric that has stewed and simmered in those groups for the last 100 years. It quotes Trump's bloated claims that the Democrats want to bring in "murderous thugs from other countries who will kill us all," but does not point out that this bit of particularly insane and unhinged rhetoric is lifted from white nationalist propaganda. It is an entirely racist hoax.
The Times, in fact, makes no apparent reference to the racist origins of each claim at all. The "hyperbolic" nature of a Breitbart News claim of diseased immigrants is noted; that those fears are unfounded, have been roundly disproven by both science and history, and that the language is an archaic and well-established strategy to dehumanize immigrant groups and stoke public panic about them is, though, somehow left unmentioned. We are supposed to judge these actions in a history-free vacuum; it may only be coincidence that the party has seized upon a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory involving non-whites, Muslims, and The Jews all acting in league to destroy the nation by sending young families to request political asylum at the southern border.
And it must be the same "coincidence" that allows the conspiracy to be repeated by Trump voters standing outside his rallies with only a few scant words to describe it all. Soros, they say, and the whole conservative movement nods its head and knows, somehow, exactly what they are referring to. How did that happen? That seems a story worth telling; that seems a story that could clarify how all the rest of this came to bubble up, from white nationalist groups to White House strategists to Rep. Matt Gaetz to Donald Trump himself.