Scapegoats

In the aftermath of two hurricanes, Donald Trump weaponizes his toxic information environment.

When the mob arrived at the gates of the Jewish quarter in Barcelona on a tempestuous Saturday night, they came to accuse their neighbors of biological warfare.

“They have brought the deadly poison into the world,” the mob called, beating at the door to the enclave. “From them came this great evil upon us.”¹

It was 1348, and the Black Death has just arrived in Spain. The region had been hobbled by famine and economic instability for more than a decade prior. Now, this fresh horror was sweeping through their towns. The local Spaniards had come up with a clear culprit: Their Jewish neighbors. For every Jew who died of this horrific disease, it is said to have killed 100 Christians.

In a frenzy, the locals broke down the doors and began inflicting atrocities. Twenty Jews had already been slain when the skies opened up. “The Lord caused it to thunder and rain from an overwhelming shower and flames of fire; and our adversaries were amazed,” wrote a local Rabbi.²

The storm warded off some of the worst violence, but the pogroms followed the spread of the disease. First in Cervera, then Tàrrega. When they reached the gates of the latter Jewish enclave, the locals screamed “kill the traitors” as they threw spears and fired arrows. Over the next year, hundreds of Jewish people in Spain would be murdered in this pestilence panic. This trend would repeat itself in Germany, Switzerland, and throughout Europe.

For centuries, these pogroms have occupied an awkward space in our collective history. Had the Spaniards, as Rabbi Hayyim Galipapa wrote at the time, “clothed themselves with jealousy” at the fact that far fewer Jews were dying from the illness? Did they genuinely believe, as some historians have written, that the Jews were poisoning water supplies and conjuring dark magic? That is: Were these regular people taken by a particular kind of misinformation, which drove them to blame natural disaster on their blameless neighbors?

Documentary evidence from the time suggests something more nefarious. First-hand accounts tell of a mobs imbued with “a diabolical spirit.” Wielding axes and clubs, they went house-to-house, stealing “all the goods and property of the Jews, just as if they were thieves.” The mob “tore and burned many legal instruments and various written contracts of the Jews.” Given that the Jews had been forbidden from various guilds and professions, many turned to a profession strictly discouraged or forbidden by the Vatican: Money-lending. The violent had, through pogrom, absolved their own debts.³

As historian Albert Winkler argues, the “medieval holocaust” inflicted on Jews across Europe cannot be explained merely by a sudden explosion of hate and violence. Not even by obscene economic self-interest. As Winkler writes, “at critical junctures, the powers that traditionally defended Jews proved to be too weak, inept, or immoral to stop what was happening.”

Various lords and politicians had come to realize that these antisemitic canards, of blood magic and well-poisoning, had a useful purpose. By carefully inciting, encouraging, or directing this hate, one could — and did — oust a rival politician or overthrow a competing lord.

Anti-Jewish paranoia became a useful weapon, wielded by the most ruthlessly ambitious.

“The members of the Jewish community,” Winkler writes, “could be used as scapegoats for other issues and punished by any faction of the city.”

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about lies, damned lies, and natural disasters.

Misinformation has become a political reality of our modern age. But our leaders’ immoral use of it to target a new scapegoat is bringing us to some new and dangerous territory.

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Sandwiched in-between tweets telling women on the internet that they have “beautiful feet,” William Parsons kept demanding to know why “ol’ Pedo Joe” and “the whore” had not yet been put on trial for “ELECTORAL FRAUD AND TREASON.”

Scrolling through the few political interactions Parsons has on his Twitter page, amid a lot of smut, it’s a portrait of an increasingly pedestrian type of uber-online Republican — he gets his news from media sites like Leading Report, a notorious fake news page; and far-right influencers like KanekoaTheGreat, a QAnon-adjacent account. He rages about men no longer being men, complains about the “queers,” and lives amongst the reply guys of Joe Biden’s Twitter account.

Parsons readily regurgitates the various bits of impossibly-resilient misinformation about the 2020 election: Alleging, for example, that Democrats “trashed Trump ballots and even passed out sharpies to Republicans, to fill in the ballot so they would be invalid.”

Parsons lives, like an increasing number of people do, in a toxic information environment — once relegated to Truth Social and a small constellation of far-right social media platforms, it now lives openly on Twitter and exists in symbiosis with the Republican Party and its sympathetic media organizations.

This information environment, in recent weeks, turned its attention to the massive hurricanes pounding the American south.

LeadingReport, for example, updated its 611,000 followers about the state of the recovery in North Carolina: “BREAKING: Biden/Harris administration says FEMA does not have enough funds to make it through hurricane season, following the allocation of billions in foreign aid.”

Other accounts warned that FEMA was descending on small towns, flattened by the hurricane, to seize supplies. Or that federal officials were arresting locals trying to aid in the recovery. And that they blocked supply helicopters and pocketed critical assistance, leaving locals with nothing. If you lived in this media environment, you would be assaulted with the news that the U.S. government was indifferent to human suffering on a mass scale.

These are all lies, easily disproven. The government response was, if imperfect, good. Nearly $2 billion has been approved for disaster relief and recovery, and a litany of politicians in the area — including South Carolina’s Republican governor — have been begging for this baseless criticism to stop.⁴

In a normal information ecosystem, these lies would be curtailed, disputed, perhaps snuffed out so forcefully that it would actually increase trust in whatever institution is being maligned. But on Twitter, they are actively encouraged by Elon Musk and his army of blue checkmark power-users. The idea that the disaster response was insufficient and uncaring was amplified by Republicans like Matt Gaetz, then Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. These lies were challenged on platforms that still value the truth, but their mass proliferation on Twitter meant they seeped onto Tiktok, Instagram, and other mass-social-media-of-the-normies.

And so this is the ecosystem William Parsons lived in. As the storm clouds, real and metaphorical, formed, he got angry. Angry enough, police allege, that he loaded up his assault rifle into his truck and, while stopped for gas, made casual mention of his plan to take on the crooked FEMA disaster response teams.

The threat was taken seriously enough that FEMA ordered its staff to evacuate the area in western North Carolina. Real disaster relief was paused because, they feared, Parsons was preparing a bloody rampage. Far from being an exception, this threat came amid a deluge of vitriol aimed at the rescue and recovery operators.

Parsons, luckily, was arrested without incident — police charged him with going armed to terrorize the public. But he is a particularly intense manifestation of the paranoia encouraged by this toxic information ecosystem.

While we’ve been living in this storm of bullshit for more than a year, it has only recently become apparent to Trump and his ilk that their claims and innuendo no longer need any connection to the real world. The idea that Trump can lie is, of course, nothing new. And, of course, there has long been a digital army of supporters who have been keen to buttress his lies with a thousand others. What’s novel is that a whole apparatus has risen to meet them. These lies are now served farm-to-table, and their purveyors no longer bother trying to cement these fictions in some semblance of reality. In fact, they now bitterly fight the truth, insisting that anyone who still believes in the establishment narrative must be footsoldiers for a great evil. And it is working on a significantly grander scale than before.

FEMA and the National Guard descend on Asheville to help North Carolinians evacuate and rebuild? No they didn’t, says J.D. Vance. FEMA says it needs more money, because a stop-gap appropriation wasn’t enough? They’re broke and can’t help these vulnerable Americans, Speaker Mike Johnson insists. Climate change is worsening the hurricanes? They can control the weather, Marjorie Taylor Greene says.

Put very simply: The Republican Party, and all those who support or emulate it, have learned that lying comes with only upsides and no consequences.

Last week, Charlie Warzel ominously warned “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is.” Writing in The Atlantic, Renée DiResta picked up on how rumors, in particular, have become ideas more true than facts, depending on who endorses them. “Rumors have always circulated,” she writes. “But the decision by Republican politicians and Musk to exploit them has created a problem that’s genuinely new.“ 404Media has covered the “AI-generated slop” that integrated into the real-time coverage of the storms, signalling the dawn of a “fuck it era” where “the truth is often an actual hindrance in conveying whatever might be best for your side politically.” Here on Substack,

Parker Molloy

asks us to start understanding the extent of the threat we’re facing: “This isn't just about a few wild stories circulating online; it's about the systematic dismantling of our shared understanding of truth.”

All of this is true. But there’s an aspect of this that I feel gets lost in the storm clouds.

When Donald Trump and his footsoldiers lie, they do so not just to destroy institutions, dismantle realities, and smash their political opponents. No, their lying and disinformation comes with a very specific intention in mind: It is to demonize, vilify, and scapegoat migrants as a kind of original sin of liberalism. It is a blood libel that should make us very, very nervous.

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When Stephen Miller oozed onstage to introduce his boss in Reading, Pennsylvania earlier this month, he made the nexus between migrants and the hurricanes very clear. Donald Trump, he said, “believes that you’re entitled to a secure border, a sovereign country, a country without crime, a country without chaos, a country without corruption, a country where FEMA prioritizes American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

These “foreign migrants and refugees and illegal aliens and trespassers and criminals” had designs to “hurt and murder and kill our people,” Miller continued.

When Trump took the stage, he wasted no time spelling out exactly what he planned to do: “I will liberate Pennsylvania and our entire nation from this mass migrant invasion of murderers and child predators and gang members, terrorists, drug dealers, and thugs,” the former president said.

Donald Trump has never been shy about blaming immigrants for America’s social ills. His political project was launched with the allegation that Mexico is sending rapists, drug dealers, and murderers. His administration tried to ban Muslims from entering the country. But this campaign has seen this hateful rhetoric rise to terrifying new levels. Borrowing Nazi language, Trump has warned that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

The histrionics have gotten so extreme that it has become a narrative in search of facts.

Vance has argued the Democrat White House worked to “reorient FEMA’s institutional focus away from U.S. citizens and toward aliens who either have no legal right to be here or whose legal status depends on the say-so of the Biden-Harris administration.”

Notoriously racist Senator Tommy Tuberville claimed “people are dying because FEMA is worried more about diversity, equity, inclusion, and climate change than they are helping the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.”

Meanwhile, the sycophantic pro-Trump disinformation machine has scrambled to point him as the man saving North Carolina, as the state falters. As Leading Report detailed, Trump was personally housing those displaced by the hurricanes, financing the rebuilding himself, and delivering aid to the most striken areas.

Trump has already blamed migrants for the fentanyl crisis, a rise in “migrant crime,” the housing crisis, and all manner of other social and economic ills.

His compatriots, once horrified by his xenophobic rhetoric, are racing to help out.

This Sunday, on ABC’s Face the Nation, Johnson was asked about his party’s coordinated effort to lay the groundwork to challenge this election if they lose. “I think there is going to be some cheating in this election,” Johnson proclaimed. “I think non-citizens are going to vote.”

Naturally, the far-right fake news press has run story after story after story claiming that the White House is fighting to allow non-citizens to vote. Again, not true. It’s never been true.

AI is helping, too. Researchers at Clemson University uncovered a network of hundreds of Twitter accounts, responsible for 130,000 posts between them, tuned to pump out pro-GOP talking points, particularly anti-migrant rhetoric. While this campaign was sloppy and didn’t garner much engagement, it did the one thing that makes online botnets effective: Spammed the replies to bigger, trusted accounts.

These LLM-run botnets amplified the fake news about migrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio, writing: “Haitians are resorting to eating wildlife and pets in a desperate attempt to survive.” It’s lies all the way down.

The Republicans are now asking their supporters to endorse their lies, because they are in service of the nationalist crusade. As Vance argued in a recent interview with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

Vance: This issue more than any other makes me extraordinarily frustrated at American leaders. Because American leaders who are talking about Haitian immigrants who have no right to be in this country — and we’ll get to that in a second — they talk with such compassion about what’s happened to the schools, about what people have been unable to do. Where is their compassion for American citizens in Springfield, Ohio, who now, a community of 60,000 people, there are 1,000 children in Springfield schools who do not speak English. For years, I have heard from the American citizens of Springfield, Ohio, that their lives have gotten worse. Have we talked about the fact that many of them have been evicted from their homes, and then Haitian migrants are moved in, four families to a home, massively violating zoning laws?

Garcia-Navarro: They’re not moved in. They have been attracted there because they’re working —

Vance: They’ve been attracted there to violate zoning laws, Lulu. They’re subsidized by the local authorities, by the federal authorities, by your tax dollars. So now four families are living in a home.

Garcia-Navarro: It’s a Republican-run city and a Republican-run state. Your state.

Vance: I’m talking about federal authorities, federal housing right now. Four families are living in a home. They are paying way more for rent than an American citizen in Springfield can pay. So the American citizens have been evicted from their homes. They are finding housing unaffordable. They are waiting longer at hospitals. Their children are going to schools that are stressed because there are too many kids there who don’t even speak the native language. I am so much more concerned by the American citizens of Springfield, Ohio. And I think that it is disgraceful that American leaders pretend that they care about these migrants. More than they care about the people that they took an oath of office to actually look after. And when you say that these Haitian migrants in Springfield are legal, what you’re doing is, I think, making an intentional bait-and-switch. Because what most people think when they say legal resident, they think about somebody who comes to America, they get a green card, they come through the proper channels.

Very little about Vance’s arguments is genuine, intellectual honest, or even true.

Services are strained and housing is tight in America because of population growth. Vance emphatically wants population growth — but he wants it via American citizens, particularly white people, not immigration. He is also proposing cuts to those very services. America’s immigration system has always allowed inland claims, and it has a duty under international humanitarian law to seriously consider refugee claims. And America, as a country, exists as a repudiation of those who have tried to slam the door shut on the ‘wrong’ kind of immigrant.

None of that matters, of course. Vance has recently made the case that lying about migrants is justified in service of winning. He has essentially argued that the American people need to be duped into doing the right thing — electing Donald Trump.(Dispatch #111)

Journalists could spend their days, as many do, fighting these lies. Pointing out that non-citizens voting is vanishingly rare, that electoral fraud has recently become more of a Republican hobby, that migrants commit crimes at a lower rate than those born in America, that Springfield was being hollowed out long before the migrants arrived, that FEMA’s disaster response was exceedingly professional and well-run. None of that matters.

Yes, we need to be worried about the dedicated chaos-machines designed to distort reality. We have, indeed, lost control of the truth.

But we need to worry, too, who is being targeted by this systematized blood libel. The Trump campaign is now alleging, as its official campaign line, that migrants are poisoning the wells. That refugees have brought the Black Death to America.

Scapegoating migrants, using them as totems for all things wrong with the world, is a conscious decision being made. It will have consequences. We have already seen nationalist parties whip up anti-migrant fervor across Europe: Literal pogroms targeting migrants have hit Eastern Europe, while Western Europe watches boatloads of asylum-seekers drown in the Mediterranean.

That’s the baseline of what can happen without the involvement of an information ecosystem devoted to endorsing this blood libel. At the risk of repeating myself: Twitter now exists to echo and amplify this panic.

When these horrors lived primarily on Truth Social, we could have put optimism in the idea that this demand for pro-Trump propaganda would die with his presidential campaign, assuming he could be vanquished convincingly at the ballot box.

But Twitter is run by the richest man in the world. Millions continue to use it, including prominent journalists, major sports teams, and world leaders. It will outlive Trump, should he lose this campaign, and it will grow to become an extension of his presidency, should he win again.

I wrote some weeks ago that the charlatans peddling these racist lies must, someday, be consumed by the hate they have fed. I still believe that. But I am becoming more and more nervous about the infrastructure they will leave behind.

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That’s it for this week.

The Bug-eyed and Shameless publishing pipeline got a bit jammed up over the past week, but it’s becoming unstuck. Expect to see a dispatch about my conversation with former Air Force intelligence official Brian Morra, all about the risk of nuclear war, soon. (Fun!)

In the Toronto Star last weekend, I wrote some good news on a file that rarely sees good news: We’re starting to see progress in the counter-extremism space.

Just a reminder that there is a Bug-eyed and Shameless chat:

I haven’t posted in there too frequently, only because writing these dispatches tend to squeeze the sweetest juice from my mind grapes. But it’s actually a great little space — you can post articles that might be relevant to me and other BE&S subscribers, ask questions, make suggestions, etc. I encourage you to put some thoughts in there!

Until next time.

1. The Black Death and its Consequences for the Jewish Community in Tàrrega: Lessons from History and Archeology, Anna Colet, Josep Xavier Muntané i Santiveri, Jordi Ruíz Ventura, Oriol Saula, M Eulàlia Subirà de Galdàcano, Clara Jáuregui. (2015)

2. The Chronicles of Rabbi Joseph Ben Joshua Ben Meir, the Sphardi, Volume 1, Joseph ha-Kohen (1835)

3. The Medieval Holocaust: The Approach of the Plague and the Destruction of Jews in Germany, 1348-1349, Albert Winkler (2005)

4. An earlier version of this dispatch wrongly mentioned “North Carolina’s Republican governor” — but Roy Cooper is, in fact, a Democrat.