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Notes -
I keep trying to draw some sort of second-order conclusions from the Haitians eating cats thing. Is it supposed to sway people who were on the fence about border controls? Like, if it is true - then what? I imagine the leftist response to this story being absolutely confirmed would be:
0.) Continue to deny it anyway.
1.) When they have learned our country's norms they'll stop, it's not really their fault.
2.) Even if it's true, it's their culture and we should respect it, not try to change them to be like us.
3.) Either way the good they bring outweighs the bad.
Even my liberal dad admitted, he would feel concern about having 20,000 Haitians added to his community all at once. My impression as a private citizen has been that this reinforces something already true about America: the only way you can control who lives near you is to make more money. You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people. The poor people who were not able to leave Springfield when its industries crashed - they are "suffering what they must."
If it was true, then of course we have never denied it and you are racist for not respecting their cultural traditions. (OTOH, woke people really prefer dogs to pigs to some unreasonable degree, so perhaps it goes 'we have never denied it and anyway it is just a few isolated incidents and does not matter, why would you even talk about that anyhow')
That being said, I think it is very likely that it is either a complete fabrication or that it will never be proven beyond reasonable doubt. I just don't think that Trump operates the way that he would only make such an outrageous claim if he had ironclad proof, instead, he likely read the claim on twitter somewhere and that is close enough to the truth for him.
I think that the culture war playbook of the left here is solid. By focusing on one outrageous claim from Trump, they can reframe the whole discussion about what the benefits and downsides of suddenly having 20k refugees from the third world in your town, which is not an argument where the left is likely to win, into an argument if Haitians eat cats, which they can be reasonably certain to win.
I think one of the key selling points of woke ideology over traditional left-wing ideologies is that it goes so well with economic inequality. A Marxist paying ten times the rent a member of the working class makes might have to face the cognitive dissonance of himself qualifying as an enemy of the working class.
In the woke mindset, economic disadvantage is an effect, not a cause. You are poor because you are black or female in a bigoted society, not because your parents were poor. (I guess if you are a poor white male, you are probably poor because you are either lazy or terrible racist and sexist.) This frees you to discriminate against poor people in a way which a traditional leftist would fine shameful. If you manage to keep the poor out of your neighborhood, you are basically all set, that black lawyer or immigrant doctor who can afford to live in your suburb are very unlikely to be involved in violent crime, hence any claims that a culture celebrating crime festers in any minorities are just racist libel.
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