In this game, you have to know how to hate
If you don't know how to wield hatred, you risk being consumed by it and turning into doughy fink like J.D. Vance.
Alex Cockburn, an Irish-American journalist, famously used to ask his interns a question: “Is your hate pure?”
Those who stumbled on the question were instantly seen as unfit for the mission.
The idea was that, in this game, you have to know who to hate, but more importantly, you have to know how to hate.
Some people don’t feel comfortable with that line of thinking. My dad always used to say that “hatred corrodes the vessel that carries it.”
Yet, somewhat paradoxically, as I have waded deeper into the sewers of Ohio’s politics, I’ve realized that none of Ohio’s politicians are worthy of my hatred.
Our state’s leaders are primarily decrepit and uninteresting men who shuffle around searching to shine the shoes of the nearest “captain of industry” or whatever.
But I still hate what those leaders do, especially to the most marginalized populations of the state.
The latest flashpoint in the right wing’s never-ending cultural war—the 15,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—is the perfect example.
Take Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Senator Boss Baby.
Cruz is a smarmy ball of grease who couldn’t even defend his wife from Donald Trump’s misogynistic attacks. He will die unfulfilled because he never realized his ultimate dream of being president because his Ivy League education couldn’t even handle a swarm of Indiana hog voters:
Vance, on the other hand, is a deeply traumatized man-child whose loathing of his absentee mother should have been worked out with a cadre of therapists instead of a nationalized vice presidential campaign.
In contrast, these two cloying nerds are prime examples of hatred corroding the vessel that carries it because they don’t know how to hate.
They have allowed themselves to be consumed by their hatred of their fellow human to the point they enjoy peddling racist garbage about people who came to this country to work jobs for the types of business leaders that fund the Republican Party at large.
Vance wrote an entire book blaming the plight of poor white people on drug addiction, an unwillingness to work, and a predilection for Mountain Dew—among other things.
He doesn’t talk about that book anymore because those disaffected and angry white people are a vital cog in the MAGA coalition, and he’s proven that he has no qualms about dabbling into 19th-century-style racism to focus their rage down the socio-economic ladder than up.
He doubled down on the racist lies about Haitians eating people’s pets yesterday. He used a dead child—killed in a tragic auto accident by a Haitian immigrant here legally—against the demands of his surviving family not to use their son’s death to fuel the flames of hatred against the Haitian community.
On Tuesday night, a Neo-Nazi operating under the name “Nate Higgers,” strolled into the weekly commission meeting and regurgitated talking points that sounded eerily similar to those peddled by the likes of Vance.
From Marshall Weiss of The Dayton Jewish Observer:
The Blood Tribe member, who provided a variation of a racial epithet in place of his real name, had spoken for almost a minute when he told the mayor, “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing, before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”
The mayor then cut him off. “Thank you,” Rue said. “You sound threatening to me.”
As the neo-Nazi attempted to talk over Rue, the mayor asked police to remove him from the meeting peacefully. “You’re done,” the mayor added. The speaker then left the meeting.
There will be no condemnation of this man from Vance, Attorney General “Dirty” Dave Yost, or Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, who has a half-eaten piece of bologna where his brain is supposed to be—to name a few of the cowards that have pushed this agenda over the last week.
“Gotta hand it to Team Trump,” an Ohio Republican operative told me this week. “If there was one thing to get cat ladies back on board, the shit in Springfield is it…”
And sure, you almost gotta hand it to the right-wing ecosphere for shamelessly pumping a racist, easily debunked story to the cretinous morons it counts as its customer base.
On one hand, it’s concerning to see the elevation of blatantly racist rhetoric by the likes of Vance. It somehow feels even more insidious than Donald Trump pretending that Barack Obama was a gay Marxist Muslim born in Kenya all those years ago.
But on the other hand, peddling fictitious stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats doesn’t strike me as the move of a campaign that is feeling good about itself. It strikes me as a campaign that is tight on money and almost literally throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks.
I’ve had some right-wing trolls goad me on Twitter the past couple of days to “load up my bike” and go to Springfield—as if I need a motor to get to the Championship City in the first place.
Unfortunately, I didn’t envision Springfield becoming the latest cultural war flashpoint, and I have plans today, tomorrow, and this weekend.
But next weekend, my schedule is clear. And I’ll be biking to Springfield to get to the bottom of this nonsense. Not that I expect to win a Pulitzer Prize—though I would accept if offered—but because Springfield paints the picture of basically the only way our state can save towns of that stature.
And I mean that with no disrespect to Springfield. I’m from Marion, after all.