How to Engineer a Moral Panic For Fun and Profit
I honestly never thought that anything was going to surprise me anymore about US politics, let alone shock me. There’s always been some degree of plausible deniability involved in the insinuation that Donald Trump and his party are “racist”—not that I’m among the deniers (on a scale from 1 to Elon Musk, Trump is at least a 7) but they’ve always at least attempted to mask their identitarian bigotry by pretending they’re just talking about border protection or drug trafficking or something.
Then some rumours started bubbling up from social media that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were breaking into people’s yards to hunt, kill, and eat their pet cats and dogs. That’s absolutely the kind of claim I expect from people like Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson, Michael Knowles, Charlie Kirk, or anyone else who failed the IQ test on their application to be the guy who bleaches the Klan hoods.
Then, of course, Elon Musk follows and uncritically believes every word posted by any account that’s fascist enough, so faster than you can say “apartheid baby” he’s retweeting people with names like ReichGroyper88 reporting on black immigrants in Ohio reverting spontaneously into some kind of prehistoric jungle instinct and chasing dog walkers down the street with spears, dropping insightful replies like “concerning” and “!!”
Again—I’m not shocked by this coming from Elon Musk, who once approved of a tweet that suggested Mel Gibson’s fitness was the result of him hating Jews.
What did shock me was how the accusation then traveled from Elon Musk’s rectum to JD Vance’s mouth.
And then someone slipped it into Donald Trump’s debate notes and anyone remaining who isn’t chronically online knows the story from there.
What dumbfounds me about this is how hard and blatantly this steps up the game, from dog whistles, codes, and insinuations, to “just saying the thing.” It’s analogous to if Vance claimed that Haitian migration into Ohio was resulting in a desperate watermelon and fried chicken shortage.
Which, incidentally, also would not be dissimilar to remarks Vance actually has made: After Donald Trump’s close advisor, lunatic, and let’s face it, probable mistress Laura Loomer made a crack about Kamala Harris making the White House smell like curry (a remark that even neo-Nazi-adjacent Nick Fuentes ally Marjorie Taylor Greene found abhorrent, if you want to know how far under the barrel we are now), Vance, whose wife is Indian, was asked what he thought of the remark. As though he thought this was a game show and his challenge was to make the statement worse, he replied that it shouldn’t matter whether she is eating curry or fried chicken.
It's not even enough that this is more bigoted than usual—it’s bigoted, seemingly, against Trump’s tactical advantage. It’s practically jettisoning the battleground state of Florida, where a third of a million Haitians live.
And shit, even doubling down on a claim that harms your own side might be commendable if it’s in service to the truth. But it, of course, is not.
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