When someone says, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats,” the right response is, “Have you lost all touch with reality?” Have you told so many lies and found so many people willing to play along that you have lost the ability to tell the different between truth and fantasy? You’ve lost the ability to recognize which of your lies are believable and which are abused. This lie is at the most outrageous end of the spectrum of absurdity. You can search the history of Haiti going back centuries and you will not find any cat-eating cult.
The real sin of the Haitian people is that they have dark skin, and Haitians who are new to English have an accent that is difficult for American English-speakers to understand. These small differences make it easy for you to scapegoat them—easy to get people who think Haitians are weird or different or scary to play along with unfounded hate-filled lies.
When I say, “play along,” I mean that even many of your supporters don’t believe most of your lies. They play along with lies they don’t believe because they think you’re lying for them rather than to them, because they like some of your polices, because they hate or fear the same people you hate and fear, or because you’ve convinced them that everyone lies as much as you. The truth is that very few people lie with the reckless abandon that you do.
The truth is that your divisive polices don’t work for anyone—even for the people you’ve convince you’re on their side. Vilifying, persecuting, an expelling vulnerable people like brown-skinned immigrants and transgendered teenagers won’t raise wages; it won’t lower housing prices; it won’t lower the crime rate; it won’t make our nation great. It will not make the lives of your supporters better in any way. You lie for no one but yourself. But truth catches up with everyone. And it will catch up with you.
Of course, I don’t know what the right response is. No one knows for sure, but I do know that we have to call people out for the underlying racism and bigotry in rhetoric like this. There is no value in a strategy of dancing around what is really going on with the anti-immigrant movement and similar causes like anti-trans and anti-Muslim campaigns. It’s not enough to the facts without discussing the racist motivation of the lie.
What do you think the right response is?
Author’s note: thanks to Tim Widerquist and Terry Clark for comments.