Turmoil erupts in Pennsylvania town after Trump spreads false claims about Haitians there

[Dennis Donovan]

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Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️
Turmoil erupts in Pennsylvania town after Trump spreads false claims about Haitians there - Raw Story https://www.rawstory.com/trump-haitians-pennsylvania-town/

Turmoil erupts in Pennsylvania town after Trump spreads false claims about Haitians there

Sarah K. Burris

September 16, 2024 3:56PM ET

For the last week, former President Donald Trump has been leveling false attacks against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio —and now, it appears a western Pennsylvania town could face the same crisis.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Monday that the city manager of the small town of Charleroi, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, has been complaining about the same types of xenophobic allegations.

In Charleroi, there are “people on Facebook saying that there’s a government-funded tent city in the Rite Aid parking lot, that there’s people walking down the street carrying live chickens," city manager Joe Manning told the Inquirer.

Trump put a spotlight on Washington County, Pennsylvania during a recent rally in Arizona on Thursday in which he said Charleroi and the surrounding area had seen a boom in the Haitian immigrant population that was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in local taxes, and he suggested the town had been left “virtually bankrupt.”

Manning said none of it was true and that the crime rate had dropped recently, according to the Inquirer.

/snip

It's clearly their adopted tactic now. The Springfield Crisis was not an campaign anomaly.

[underpants]

1. Jesus.

[gab13by13]

2. Keith Olbermann Opines

that these are practice runs for the upcoming election. Can TSF put out the word to his cult to descend on (insert name of city) like Atlanta or Madison, claiming election fraud, and can his Magat cult shut down the election in several cities?

Do not underestimate the evil in TSF.

[Think. Again.]

6. YES!!!

By planting all of these little disruption bombs in as many cities or towns as possible, they plan to create a thick cloud of chaos and violence to serve as a disruptive smokescreen for the legal confusion he has began fomenting, all to deter proper voting and vote handling and to cast doubt on the results of the election as a whole.

[Think. Again.]

3. I believe it was George Takei who pointed out...

...that trump is probably focusing his hatespeech onto the Haitian community because Harris has a Jamaican ancestry.

If he he can whip up hate for, and fear of, anyone from the Carribean, it will spill over to Harris in the minds if his idiotic hate-filled, downright stupid and evil, core voters.

[Diamond_Dog]

4. The Haitians

Changed her tire for her! Wow, we can’t be tolerating that third world behavior!

[musclecar6]

5. This guy

Is running way off the guard rails.

[Botany]

7. And no doubt those lies are started by Russian operatives in order to stir up domestic discontent in America

Last edited Tue Sep 17, 2024, 12:33 PM - Edit history (1)

…. as it now looks like is the case in Springfield, Ohio too and then shit birds like Vance, Trump,
Fox News, others spread the misinformation, and a small % mouth breathers run with it.

[dalton99a]

8. The GOP's terrorist-in-chief expands his terror campaign

[DFW]

9. The American Devolution

1775:
The British are coming! The British are coming!

2024:
The Haitians are coming! The Haitians are coming!

[LizBeth]

10. Creating small little pockets. Ohio, Arroyo, now Penn. Little pockets that can expand out.

[Norbert]

11. If this is a winning strategy that works

This country is doomed.

Hoping that, for once, we Americans get our shit together.

[Efilroft Sul]

12. I grew up near Charleroi. Let me tell you about the area specifically and the battle for Pennsylvania in general.

To be clear, I grew up across the river in a steel town, Monessen; Charleroi was the glass factory town. And this part of Pennsylvania has long been ripe for the MAGA movement.

Once upon a time, southwestern Pennsylvania, the industrial heart of the nation, was reliably blue. Allegheny County with Pittsburgh would anchor surrounding blue counties like Westmoreland (Monessen) and Washington (Charleroi), and Beaver and Butler counties most occasions. As for Fayette and Greene counties? Those largely rural counties were ever the lost cause, Klan strongholds, really, even when the Democrats were at their strongest.

Now many of you know that southwestern Pennsylvania took a shot to the gut when the steel mills and mines began to shut down through the 1980s. And yet, the area was still reliably blue. Well, until talk radio happened. And the Democratic Party ignored all the warning signs that people were gradually being turned against it. Truth be told, this area was also taken for granted by the party. If you don't like me saying that, well, you probably don't live here to know any better. And if you do live here and disagree, explain the vast support Trump has on the mid Monongahela Valley. Part of his popularity is because the Democrats are perceived as having not done enough for the locals, and perhaps too much for others. Trump came waltzing in during 2016 and promised he'd reopen the mills and the mines, and, buddy, that's the siren song to anyone living here who's old enough to remember prosperity.

Of course, Trump lied; he always lies. But people in these parts are susceptible to really big whoppers — especially if the liar promises to restore the social order, their heritage, and their perceived greatness. Exploiting the generational racism of white people living in Charleroi and Monessen is key. Monessen, which has a large black population, has a lot of families that can trace their local roots back to ancestors brought up from the south to break strikes in the late 1800s. Union members would call them scabs, but you can imagine what they were called in "polite conversation." I grew up with that polite conversation, whether neighbors were talking over the fence or hedge and using disparaging terms, or if families gathered in homes and discussed which black athlete on the Steelers or Pirates was one of "the good ones." Such was the talk I often heard in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, I reckon polite conversation has grown worse; otherwise, why else would we be hearing about Haitians in Charleroi being smeared in the news?

Long story short, the mid Mon Valley MAGAbillies can't be saved. They have zero redeeming values. If a federal agency brought in some jobs program that would employ 10,000 of them, they'd all storm the main facility while it's being built because nearly 40 years of brainwashing has convinced them it would bring the Deep State or socialism to the land. Truly, this part of Pennsylvania is the confluence of midwestern malignant ignorance and southern-fried cruelty.

Now expand those hometown values I described to southwestern Pennsylvania in general. Don't believe the rosy stories you hear on DU about so-and-so drove through this ghost town or that rural backwater and didn't see as many Trump signs as in 2020. Nuts to that. This area is MAGA Country. In the November election, you can count on the Philadelphia to staunchly support Harris, the vast nothingness across the middle of the Commonwealth to side with Trump, and perhaps the smaller cities like Erie and Scranton-Wilkes-Barre and State College to lean Harris. And when you add up all the votes from those parts of the Commonwealth, you'll be about as close to 50/50 split as possible. The battle for Pennsylvania comes down to my region, and I hope that all Pittsburgh-area and southwestern Pennsylvania Democrats come out on Election Day with fire in their bellies, because the other side surely will — especially if they've been conditioned to believe that poor black immigrants are going to eat their household pets.

TL/DR: Pull back, nuke from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.