A truckload of nuts

There is a Haitian problem, and it's not a conspiracy. Plus, another shot at Trump.

(Good morning. I’m aware of the latest news, and I cover it down below. But the first piece is also relevant, so please bear with me before the news cycle crushes it—Steve.)

It’s an inviolable rule, as solid as gravity: Anything can be buried under a truckload of nuts. I say that because it’s easy to focus on the truckload of nuts. Poking fun at Springfield, Ohio—the likely, but never confirmed, home of The Simpsons—is fun. Hank Azaria did a hilarious bit about dogs and cats on Twitter. But under the tons of tree seeds, there lies buried a real problem.

Diplomatic Security Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The caption on the above image from the U.S. Department of State reads:

March 2024: In early 2024, gang violence surged in Haiti, putting the U.S. mission and diplomats at risk. To enhance the U.S. embassy's security posture in Port-au-Prince, the State Department deployed a U.S. Marine Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team and DSS Mobile Security Deployments units to augment the Regional Security Office's efforts.

Haiti is a dangerous place. Without going into too much history or detail, much of Haiti’s current problems stem primarily from bad and bungled U.S. policy. That country is right in our back yard, and like the Central American and South American states we find are creating so many headaches for us (and opportunities for our rivals like China), it’s because we’ve ignored the Monroe Doctrine’s “sphere of influence” for too long, or used it in stupid ways. I don’t want to dwell on this part, because there’s enough there to fuel many long-form articles, and to spark hours of legitimate debate.

To keep Americans in Haiti safe, our nation has made significant investments in security. We know what happens to Americans who aren’t under that umbrella. They are kidnapped and killed by gangs.

Haitians, for their part, dream of getting out of Haiti. By the thousands, they do what they can to make the perilous journey off the island—to anywhere—eventually showing up at a U.S. border, then crossing, where they can turn themselves in to the Border Patrol, get a date (years away) for a refugee hearing, and then head to places where other Haitians gather. The Haitians who are here, regardless of how they got here, that are known to the U.S. government were granted legal status this summer, and many who already had that status had theirs extended.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas granted 200,000 Haitians who held Temporary Protected Status an extension through February, 2026. He also expanded the TPS program to add 300,000 more Haitians. That’s a half million Haitians living in the U.S. who will have legal residency documents, and with that a possible path to the coveted “green card”—permanent residency.

Where do the Haitians go? Well, obviously, 500,000 Haitians are not all living in Springfield, Ohio, consuming the canine and feline population of that city. Before I move on, I think it’s important to go back to the whole conspiracy flinging poo-fest and how it started in the first place.

It’s absolutely ridiculous to assert this dogs and cats thing, and anyone who believes it richly deserves every drop of derision coming at them on social media. I’ve heard these kinds of made-up stories before, but mostly about some local Chinese buffet, or by an ex-employee of a Mexican place who has a grudge against the owner. I fully believe that most of these posts are coming from foreign-controlled bots, which are fed by evil generative AIs. There are enough of them posting to groups where people like the owner of the Twitter account (at)EndWokeness lurk that eventually something gets picked up and reposted. Then a large-footprint account like Elon Musk (who regularly reposts these kinds of things) picks up the thread and you have a viral conspiracy.

The U.S. seems to be the main target of foreign social media manipulation, and there’s a reason for that. As online-obsessed Americans, we’re fairly responsive to these attacks, which encourages more of them. So that explains why Haitians eating dogs and cats became a thing on the Internet, which leaked into the debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. My partner on this site David Thornton covered this in detail.

We know the Haitians are in the U.S., and that they end up clustered in places where other Haitians live, because new immigrants are going to head to where they know people (meaning jobs and a place to live). A good number of them end up in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been covering these stories for a while, and as recently as August, they profiled some Haitian immigrants who came to the Bay State, despite the fact that the state has indicated it’s “full.”

“I have friends in Boston, and they have told me there is a lot of support in Boston,” said Wendell Alcé, a Haitian father staying at a migrant shelter in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, with his wife and 8-year-old daughter Wenderly. “There is work there, too.”

At least 11,633 Haitians came to Massachusetts in the 2023 fiscal year, according to statistics quoted by the Globe. That number only includes immigrants who registered with agencies distributing federal support funds, so it’s likely a much larger number. This makes up about 72 percent of the state’s incoming migrants. It’s more likely that if pets were being roasted, the reports would be coming from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, than from Springfield, Ohio.

It’s reasonable to assume that when a 7,500-bed emergency overflow shelter opens in your neighborhood, you might have a negative reaction to it. Even those who are sensitive to the plight of Haitians fleeing a horrible situation in their own country are aware that a so-called “anti-immigrant backlash” is kind of baked in to the cake of giving these migrants free food, shelter and a long-term ticket to residency. Yet, I sigh when I see newspaper editors so swiftly and effortlessly pivot from exposing their own city’s stories of immigration struggles to “Biden lashes out at Trump over false claims about Haitian immigrants.”

Yes, it’s a bad thing to talk about Haitians eating pets. Mostly because it’s not true. Also, partially because the Haitians are indeed being housed in certain cities and there is a tendency for people who live in those cities to have a “backlash.” Some of that backlash can come in the form of threats of violence, because there’s always a violent element among the offended class. And there’s no shortage of sources of chaos, that like to stir things up and foment violence—again, I think there’s solid evidence much of the posting and even some funding comes from foreign adversaries like China and Russia.

But talking about Haitian immigrants doing criminal or antisocial things is a message that is being heard by people affected by the Haitian immigration problem. They probably know that the pets angle is stupid, but it does shine a light on something that’s not a conspiracy. They are glad for the attention.

Plymouth County, Massachusetts, ranks fifth in the state by average income, at $140,463. That’s higher than Suffolk County, which contains Boston, and also higher than the affluent North Shore—Essex County. In Plymouth County, the state operates a migrant shelter in Rockland—a city with around 18,000 residents. A 26-year old Haitian immigrant named Cory Bernard Alvarez was arrested for allegedly raping a 15-year-old girl at the migrant shelter (he didn’t live at the shelter). Alvarez was one of the Haitians who arrived in 2023 under the Biden administration’s relaxed protocol called the “Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.”

The program allowed up to 30,000 immigrants per month to come into the U.S. As Secretary Mayorkas happily announced the expansion of the Haitian refugee program, his own department in early August suspended the parole program due to “concerns about fraud by their financial sponsors.” So, we’re expected to swallow the government’s position. Haitian sponsors for people entering the U.S. under this program—who are required to have a place to live and pass a background check—are lying to the point where the whole program is paused, but it’s okay to extend the TPS umbrella to another 300,000 Haitians who are already here?

Why is this not being talked about, while the president is excoriating Trump for spreading conspiracies about dogs and cats? The Associated Press and the Boston Globe have covered these stories as real news, but somehow now fail to remember they ever happened because it’s more important to show how stupid Trump is for bringing up the issue of Haitian migrants.

I’d love to hear the arguments that if Trump were in office, these migrants would be as legal as they are now under the Biden administration (nope). I’m fairly certain most of them would still be in the U.S., but they would be illegal immigrants versus legal immigrants pending refugee adjudication. Trump vowed to deport them all. I think that’s a difficult, if not impossible, task, not to mention dangerous for both the migrants and Haiti’s future stability. And if Trump is elected and tries to deport the Haitians, the same news editors who report issues created by the Haitian influx with a straight face, will call Trump’s policy to deal with the problem evil, with a straight face.

Over the years, I’ve seen this again and again dealing with actual issues that Trump manages to bury under a truckload of nuts. He brings up extreme examples of things that didn’t happen, or things that happened differently than he claimed. But the underlying problem is ignored by the very people who know it’s a real issue. Therefore the folks who know it’s a real problem because they live it have a terrible choice. They either live pretending as if there’s no problem, because Trump said there is one, or they support Trump and buy a truckload of nuts.

This is what’s going on with the Haitian issue. There is a problem, and it’s not a conspiracy. The top eight states for Haitian migration are Florida, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Georgia and Pennsylvania are must-win states for both candidates this November.

You might think Trump’s blurting of stupid conspiracy theories is crazy. But maybe it’s just his strategy going back many years. Any maybe it sometimes works.

Don’t be surprised if voters who need to decide what to buy with their vote end up opting for a truckload of nuts.

ANOTHER SHOT AT TRUMP. At the time of this writing (Sunday night), it appears that the shots fired at Mar-a-Lago were indeed a Secret Service agent engaging with a potential assassin. As the story has matured, I have seen it morph from a “shots fired” story to “unrelated to Trump,” to what it is now, a full-fledged FBI investigation of someone carrying an AK-47 type weapon with a scope mounted, pointing the barrel of the rifle through the fence of the golf course at Trump’s resort/home, while the former president was on the golf course just one hole away from the shooter’s location.

I think, now that the person of interest has been arrested, the story should be how that person knew where Trump would be Sunday, and nearly the exact time he’d be there. This isn’t a “target of opportunity” situation, in my mind, like the previous attempt on Trump’s life by a 20-year-old on the roof of a building at a rally. This is a specific threat that required some coordination. The reports say that the suspect fled in a getaway vehicle, a black Nissan, and was captured by local law enforcement.

The story now is that the alleged potential assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, is a longtime petty criminal, whose run-ins with the law included various firearms charges. One incident charged Routh with possessing “weapons of mass destruction,” meaning a fully-automatic machine gun. Oh, and also, Routh is a supporter of Democrat candidates—he made multiple contributions to ActBlue.

It will be difficult to accept that Routh happened to be there by pure coincidence or bad luck.

I am not sure how the investigation will go, but I do think the government—at the highest levels—needs to take it very seriously. Democrats have always held Republicans accountable for invective leading to violence. Now they need to hold themselves accountable. Vice President Harris tweeted “I have been briefed on reports of gunshots fired near former President Trump and his property in Florida, and I am glad he is safe. Violence has no place in America.”

President Biden has not made any comment at this time.

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