(I clicked on a Springfield New-Sun article the other day; they let you read everything if you start an account or register or whatever; email address, user name, and a password. Anyway, it’s a very polite paper, and the work, so far as I’ve seen, is exemplary. If you click through to the page, take a look at their headlines to see how things are going in Springfield, thanks to the Republican ticket. Some of it is good news for residents; there is balance.)
Clark State is investigating after officials found a suspicious package this morning on the College’s Springfield campus.
The college’s security found the package around 8 a.m. on the Leffel Lane campus and immediately contacted police, according to a statement on the college’s website.
“Police responded quickly and determined that the package was not of concern and no threat exists,” the statement said.
Administrators and police searched the buildings and campus before the Springfield Police Division said the campus was safe at 11:12 a.m.
Clark State closed all of its campuses this week and moved to remote classes through Friday as a result of two email threats of a potential bombing and shooting from last weekend.
The former president’s debunked comments that Haitian immigrants are eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio, is just the latest in a long history of smears against them, experts say.
Call it a mother’s intuition. After former President Donald Trump repeated a vicious smear about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, during his September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, many parents in that community instinctively kept their children home from school. They were right to be concerned. In the days following Trump remarking on national television that these immigrants are eating household pets — a debunked rumor that first spread on social media — the threats rolled in.
The bomb and mass shooting threats that started shortly after the debate and continued through the weekend forced evacuations and closures of government buildings, hospitals, a university and schools in Springfield. Although Trump’s words have imperiled Haitian immigrants, he has not withdrawn his claim; he has doubled down on it. On Thursday, while campaigning, he suggested Haitians had ruined “beautiful Springfield” and were not in the city legally, although Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said they are living and working there lawfully. Trump also insinuated the immigrants are involved in sexual violence against “young American girls,” continuing his pattern of linking immigration to the predation of White women and girls.
The targeting of Haitians in the smalltown Midwest has led to an outcry of support from the public, policymakers and immigration advocates. The National Parents Union, a woman-led organization made up of parent advocacy groups fighting for equity in education, criticized “the reckless and irresponsible comments” from Republican leaders and announced that it “stand[s] with the families of Springfield” in a statement on Friday.
But no one empathizes with Springfield’s Haitian community like Haitian Americans themselves, they say. The 19th spoke with scholars and immigrant advocates, mostly women of Haitian heritage, about the repercussions of Trump’s words. They contend that his claim — and the hate before and after it — are nothing new: Due to the unique ways race, religion and resistance have intersected in Haiti’s history, immigrants from the Caribbean nation have experienced a specific brand of xenophobia in the United States, even as Black immigrants in this country lack visibility.
“This kind of narrative has been going on since at least the middle of the 19th century,” said Danielle N. Boaz, professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “We can connect all of this back to the thing that Haitians did that was unforgivable to people of European heritage, which is they had this . . . rebellion that started in the 1790s and culminated in what historians have sometimes called the only successful slave rebellion in history, where they were able to defeat not only the French but other foreign powers.”
Illustration depicting Francois Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture participating in the successful revolt against French power in St. Dominique (Haiti). Hand-colored engraving. Bettman/Getty
The 1804 creation of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti, left slaveholding societies terrified that the human beings they held in bondage would also rebel. For securing their freedom, Haitians were demonized, with the Vodou religion often used to make wild claims against them, Boaz said.
“So, over the years, the narrative just kind of increases about how Haiti is this barbaric place,” she said. “It’s run only by Black people.”
Trump reinforced the barbarism messaging by implying Thursday that Haitians are “savage criminal aliens.”
Despite Springfield Police denying any “credible reports or specific claims” of Haitians abusing animals or committing other crimes, Trump’s allegations have reverberated nationally. Christopher Rufo, who has led the national push against critical race theory in schools and is a trustee for the New College of Florida, where hundreds of books on gender and diversity were discarded last month, offered a $5,000 “bounty” to anyone with evidence of Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating cats. In Florida and New York — the states with the largest Haitian-American communities — Haitian-American leaders condemned Trump’s remarks and similar statements by his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
The bomb and shooting threats targeting Haitians disproportionately place pressure on mothers, said Taisha Saintil, senior policy analyst for the UndocuBlack Network, which advocates for Black immigrants. Often children’s primary caregivers, women rearrange work schedules, stay home or make childcare plans when schools close, losing household income in the process.
A note on the front door of Fulton Elementary School directs parents to a nearby school for pick-up after the building was evacuated due to bomb threats earlier in the day in Springfield, Ohio, on September 12, 2024. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)
“Women are often the ones managing the day-to-day fears, picking up and dropping off children, and trying to shield them from the psychological trauma of these threats,” Saintil said. “This gender dynamic adds another layer to the stress, as women feel pressure to keep things normal for their families while silently shouldering the weight of their own fear and frustration.”
Having immigrated to Florida from Haiti in 2006 at age 9, Saintil said that she feels for Springfield’s Haitian community. Before moving to diverse Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she briefly lived in a White community where she said her classmates taunted, spat on her and called her a cat-eater.
“I remember . . . the fear, waking up every single day knowing that I’m going to get bullied, nobody wanting to talk to me, sitting at the lunch table by myself,” Saintil said. “When I compare it to what is happening now to the newly arrived kids, I think about just how . . . the bullying will mark them for the rest of their lives.”
Lured by manufacturing jobs, an estimated 15,000 Haitian immigrants have settled in Springfield — a mostly White town of just under 60,000 people — starting in about 2017. Before then, Springfield experienced an economic downturn caused, in part, by population decline. Then, the immigrants arrived, giving the city an economic boost.
Valerie Lacarte, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, said that immigrants typically settle in areas because they know they can find reliable employment or their ethnic community already lives there. Springfield wasn’t previously home to a Haitian community, but state officials reportedly advertised the city’s livability and jobs, news that attracted migrants.
“You have employers who are hiring these people, so from the job market perspective, that’s a good thing. You have a match,” Lacarte said.
But this mutually beneficial development did not prevent tensions, which, last year, worsened after a Haitian immigrant crashed into a school bus, killing one child, Aiden Clark, and hurting nearly 30 others. Still, Nathan Clark, Aiden’s father, spoke out at a city commission meeting last week to denounce immigration foes for exploiting his son’s death. Anti-immigrant residents, meanwhile, have complained that Springfield lacks the infrastructure for population growth.
“It’s tempting to think the growth of immigrants, that’s what’s causing the problems,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, coauthor of “Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy” and a University of California, Berkeley, researcher. “It’s the politicization of immigrants, and especially in places that have significant Republican voting populations, the scapegoating of immigrants tends to be higher. This is an issue we’ve seen time and again in the American heartland, places that are depopulating, places that are short of workers, that actually benefit from immigrant workers, but you have people . . . tapping into these national dynamics, when it comes to race and xenophobia, to win elected office.”
Officials must “be intentional about social cohesion” to avoid conflict between the longtime residents and the Haitian transplants, said Lacarte, the daughter of Haitian immigrants. It’s important to make sure that both the U.S.-born and foreign-born community members get the attention and resources needed to grow together as a diverse community.
Longtime residents may misunderstand why people who look and sound different from them are moving in, Lacarte said. They witness the demographic shift, but they don’t realize these changes can be helpful. Then, bad actors deepen anxieties by spreading disinformation about immigrants.
“Immigrants have been not only filling these jobs and helping grow the economy. They have their own demand for goods and services,” Lacarte said. “They send their kids to school. They even, in some cases, create businesses . . . and that grows the economy.”
During the presidential debate, Trump did not portray foreign-born workers as a positive but as a threat to Americans, accusing immigrants of taking jobs from Black workers. This framing overlooks that immigrants fill jobs the native-born population doesn’t pursue, Lacarte said, and that more workers are needed as birth rates decline and the White population ages. It also belies the fact that Black immigrants exist.
About one in five Black people are immigrants or the children of Black immigrants, the Pew Research Center reported in 2022. Africans have driven Black immigrant growth; their population increased by 246 percent between 2000 and 2019. In 2005, The New York Times reported that more Africans were entering the United States than since the slave trade. Today, Africans make up 42 percent of the Black foreign-born population, while Caribbean immigrants make up 46 percent. Of the latter, most come from two countries: Jamaica and Haiti.
A United States Border Patrol agent on horseback tries to stop a Haitian migrant from entering an encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande near the Acuna Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas on September 19, 2021. The United States said Saturday it would ramp up deportation flights for thousands of migrants who flooded into the Texas border city of Del Rio, as authorities scramble to alleviate a burgeoning crisis for President Joe Biden’s administration. PAUL RATJE/AFP
After footage of Border Patrol agents on horseback confronting Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, went viral in 2021, Saintil said she received multiple messages disclosing, “I did not know there were Black immigrants. Where did they come from?” She assumed, due to her profession, that people knew the United States had Black immigrants.
“Most of my work now has been to raise visibility of Haitian and Black immigrants,” Saintil said. “We’re the most detained, the most placed in solitary confinement. Our bail bonds are higher. So, the same things that are happening to African Americans in the criminal justice system are happening to Black immigrants in the detention center. Our asylum claims are the most denied because immigration judges don’t trust our pain.”
Long before the debate, Trump disparaged Black immigrants. In 2017, he reportedly said that Nigerians lived in “huts” and Haitians “all have AIDS.” The following year, he labeled Haiti, African nations and El Salvador “shithole countries.” In Springfield, local Republicans have echoed Trump’s remarks. In addition to the pet-eating allegations, they’ve accused immigrants of being in gangs, spreading disease and practicing “voodoo” rituals, claims police have denied.
As Haiti became the yardstick for measuring whether Black people could participate in society equally, attacks on its character escalated. By the 1880s, stories spread about Haitians engaging in cannibalism and human sacrifice, especially of White children, Boaz said. Told repeatedly, these stories inform the rumors about Haitians in Springfield today, and they may jeopardize women.
“Historically, women in marginalized communities, whether immigrants, ethnic minorities, or refugees, have been specifically targeted for intimidation,” Saintil said. “This may be because some view them as ‘easier’ to attack or harass than men. . . . In this context, when Haitian women are being targeted for threats, harassment or even racial slurs in public spaces, the consequences are far-reaching. This not only creates an atmosphere of terror for women but can also ripple through the entire family.”
Haitian-American anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse, a professor of humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that she’s tired of defending her personhood and identity. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Ulysse wrote a book called “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle” because she found the dehumanizing remarks about Haitians then disturbing.
“We’re always having to refute as opposed to having an identity that is an affirmed one,” Ulysse said. “There is a profound disappointment that in 2024 that I am listening to someone who is running to be the president of the highest nation in the land say something this surreal, this absurd. But I’m also someone as a Black woman, as a social scientist, as someone who understands race and racial construction, what that is meant to do, and that is to paint Haitians as the ultimate ‘others,’ cannibalists and otherwise, so that it can keep fueling this narrative that’s necessary to strip people of their humanity.”
Ulysse said that the broader immigrant community faces xenophobia, too. One study concluded that the level of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the Republican Party today rivals anti-Chinese sentiment during the late 1800s, a period that restricted Chinese immigration. Chinese immigrants have also been accused of consuming dogs and cats, insults revived during the onset of COVID-19, which Trump called the “China virus.”
“He’s gone from talking about Mexican immigrants as predominantly being criminals and rapists to then talking about immigrants as vectors of disease and and now using similar kinds of dehumanizing language to talk about . . . not just what they eat, but the kind of the social threat they supposedly pose to American society,” Ramakrishnan said. “I think the kinds of emotions it’s supposed to evoke are emotions of disgust, of othering and reduced empathy, and also support for drastic measures like rounding up and deporting people who are not deemed to be American.”
If Harris becomes president, she would not only be the first woman in the Oval Office but also the first person of South Asian and Caribbean heritage. Might that change perceptions and policies related to Caribbean immigrants?
“No matter how well meaning one person may be, they’re part of a social structure and a system that makes decisions,” Ulysse said. “She’s not going to make decisions by herself, so what difference does it make that she’s from the Caribbean? She’s got advisors. She’s got to think about Congress. She’s got to think about the Senate. She’s got to think about geopolitics and history.”
Community members eat at a Haitian restaurant in Springfield, Ohio, on September 12, 2024. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)
When Trump took aim at Haitian immigrants during the debate, Harris laughed in apparent disbelief but did not rebuke him. Ulysse finds it disturbing that many people laughed at Trump’s claims because, as absurd as they are, they’re endangering Haitians.
On Friday, President Joe Biden called the attacks on Haitians “simply wrong,” noting that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is “a proud Haitian American.”
Along with being terrified and traumatized, Saintil said the Haitian children and parents impacted by the threats and smears likely feel betrayed.
“You’re getting it from a country that you thought you could be safe in,” she said. “You’re getting it in a country that you’ve been hoping to be in because you thought your life would be better, but now you’re being treated worse than dirt. You’re being called a savage . . . How do you go on from there?”
Springfield, Ohio's city hall was evacuated this morning due to a bomb threat.
This comes two days after former President Donald Trump boosted the baseless rumor that Haitian immigrants there were “eating the pets of the people that live there.” pic.twitter.com/VnCwYE5Zpy
Springfield Police confirmed to me that "multiple facilities" including at least city hall and Fulton Elementary have been evacuated due to a bomb threat received around 8:20 this morning https://t.co/MyOVu2bgze
Wittenberg University is currently taking precautions following a possible threat to campus tomorrow, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. All events and activities tomorrow are canceled. See alert website at https://t.co/q8SBqL88p1 for more information, safety tips, and resources. pic.twitter.com/w7GcwjIlWC
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine defends Haitian immigrants, telling @MarthaRaddatz that while there are “legitimate” problems at the border, “What’s going on in Springfield is just fundamentally different.”
A day after a Springfield school and other public buildings were evacuated and closed due to bomb threats, and the same day that two other Springfield elementary schools were evacuated and one middle school closed due to a new, separate bomb threat, Husted posted a photo of two geese on X Friday morning with the comment, “Most Americans agree that these migrants should be deported.”Husted’s spox has refused to comment. He first appeared here in 2012 when as Ohio secretary of state he eliminated extended hours for early voting.
NEW: Fraudulent petition signatures cited by the DeSantis administration to justify its probe of Amendment 4 had already been rejected by a local supervisor of elections.
They were never counted toward the total that got the initiative on the ballot. https://t.co/f0sXetVwUW
Ron DeSantis has mobilized the Florida state government to spend taxpayer resources on the political process. He's now waging a multi-front war against Amendment 4, which would restore abortion rights pic.twitter.com/QreyQAi7Kn
This kind of propaganda issued by the state, using taxpayer money and operating outside of the political process sets a dangerous precedent.https://t.co/dJbVj8A6kK
After sending police to knock on doors of voters who signed petitions to get the FL abortion rights amendment on the ballot, now Ron Desantis is using taxpayer funds to illegally have a state agency & website campaign against the amendment. Story.https://t.co/2ywnO6kALR
BREAKING: In a 2022 tirade against reproductive health care, Mark Robinson repeatedly waves his hand by his groin, says young women just need to “get this under control." #NCGovpic.twitter.com/QXuUtZuBAL
“When people ask me…What’s gonna happen if the Flip – Flopping, Laughing Hyena Wins?? I say…write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo…when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live…We’ll already have the addresses of the their New families…who supported their arrival!” Zuchowski wrote.
Read the full article. Replies to his post are turned off. Zuchowski made news several years ago for a rant about the name change for the Cleveland Indians, which he claimed was “erasing our heritage.”
Ryan Routh voted for Trump in 16’, then supported Gabbard, and then moved on to Hailey. He’s no liberal. He’s a Republican who is disillusioned with Trump’s foreign policy and Putin-phelia. pic.twitter.com/PaEkWoPcqX
Suspect Ryan Wesley Routh is a Democrat. He was allegedly hiding in the bushes with an AK-47 with a scope, two backpacks, and a GoPro and was spotted by the Secret Service before he could take action on President Trump #shootingpic.twitter.com/3xkbB7EU19
Elon/X has allowed someone to create a fake account under the alleged shooter’s name (Ryan Wesley Routh), and it’s now being used to spread vile anti-Semitic content including quotes from a Hitler account that X is also allowing on the platform. pic.twitter.com/reqGUcmynS
“I’ve seen the guns myself and all, and, yeah, they had a lot of guns and stuff over there, and, yeah, a lot of people were afraid of him back in the day,” she said.
The State Attorney for Palm Beach County is an elected Democrat, so Desantis is doing what Desantis does.
Maybe Desantis should investigate himself for making it so easy to acquire and walk around with an assault rifle in FL even with an extensive criminal history. pic.twitter.com/DwAWAE928L
“These are people that want to destroy our country. It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat. They do it with a combination of rhetoric and lawsuits they wrap me up in.
September 17, 1924 Mohandas Gandhi began a purifying 21-day fast for Hindu-Muslim tolerance and unity following communal riots in Kohat on India’s northwest border in what is now Pakistan. A Hindu, Gandhi spent his fast at the home of Mahomed Ali.
September 17, 1961 Bertrand Russell at anti nuclear weapons March, 1961 1,314 anti-nuclear protesters were arrested during a sit-down in London’s Trafalgar Square by 12,000 (authorities had denied a permit). Philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell, aged 89, and 32 others were already in jail, having been arrested the previous month during a demonstration on Hiroshima Day in Hyde Park. Russell’s Committee of 100 had organized the sit-down and other actions to resist nuclear weapons, challenging the authorities to ‘fill the jails’, with the intention of causing prison overload and large-scale disorder. On arrest members would go limp so as to create maximum disruption without conflict. History gallery: The Committee of 100
September 17, 1988 Haiti’s military government was overthrown by a group of non-commissioned officers who installed Lieutenant General Prosper Avril as the new head of state. The leaders of the coup were outraged by the attack the previous Sunday on St. Jean Bosco Church during which 13 parishioners were killed and nearly 80 injured. Fr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a persistent critic of the military regime, had been celebrating mass when the attack occurred. From the report of the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, issued on September 7, 1988: “ The Commission has come to the conclusion that the current military government in Haiti has perpetuated itself in power as a result of violence instigated by elements of the Haitian Armed forces resulting in the massacre of Haitian voters on November 29, 1987, the manipulation of the elections held on January 17, 1988, and the ouster of President Leslie Manigat on June 20, 1988.”
Donald Trump’s “transgender operations” line during this week’s presidential debate is already the talking point that launched a thousand memes — but what may have sounded like word salad managed to contain the barest hint of a real, honest-to-goodness fact.
During Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’ first and potentially only debate on Tuesday evening, Trump accused the sitting vice president of approving “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Trump was ostensibly responding to a question about hydrofracking, though he veered wildly between other claims, including sensational and misleading allegations that protestors “burned down Minneapolis” in 2020. But for once, Trump’s comments about trans people weren’t entirely fabricated — although calling them “accurate” would be a stretch.
Trump’s claim about “transgender operations” can likely be traced back to a 2019 survey from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which the organization says it sent to all presidential candidates that year, CNN’s KFILE reported on Monday. In that survey, candidates were asked if they would use presidential authority to ensure that all trans people, including incarcerated people and undocumented immigrants, received “comprehensive treatment” for their transition “including all necessary surgical care.” Harris said she would do so. (snip-MORE)
Matthew Sheffield is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. His father had rebelled against the Mormonism of his youth, resentful of how it had shed its original, 19th-century strangeness. So he invented his own version, one in which he had direct prophetic access to the supernatural realm—for instance, the time Satan tempted him to become gay. He spent several years beseeching God, walking around in the mountains above the University of Utah, nearly killing himself several times from starvation.
The elder Sheffield was a professor of classical guitar, a brilliant composer beloved by the great Andrés Segovia. God commanded him to abandon his job, pack up his growing family, and become an itinerant street musician instead. “There were times we were homeless,” Matthew Sheffield told me. “One of my brothers was born in a tent. My mother gave birth to my sister by herself, in our apartment, with two kids around.”
He corrects himself: “No, three kids. Right next to her.”
Busking became a family profession. (“The Dark Osmonds,” I propose. “Yeah,” Matthew replies, “but we were classical.” He played French horn.) He grew interested in politics, in part from family connections (a grandfather was the Republican whip in the Utah state Senate), in part because the family did a lot of performing in the streets of Washington, D.C., because it was easy to scavenge food that vendors on the Mall threw away.
He and a brother developed computer proficiency, and he picked up a college education in dribs and drabs. He has a hard time remembering which of the nine universities he attended when he developed the first college newspaper website. He was around 20, and still on the road with his family, when he and his brother decided that CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather was too mean to Kenneth Starr, the special counsel investigating Bill Clinton. His brother came up with the idea to put some quotes of Rather’s on the internet to reveal his stealth liberalism. Matt said they should aim higher, and build a comprehensive website. So they did. “But we were afraid to put our names on it because we were two college kids. So we didn’t. And, um, the CBS people accused us of being a secret operation funded by Republican donors!”
The exclamation is a rare touch. He explained the rest nonchalantly at the Szechuan restaurant where we’re lunching in Chicago’s South Loop during the Democratic convention. Sheffield’s typical mien is sardonic bemusement at the strangeness of the world he managed to escape—as when he explains a second reason why he and his brother kept themselves hidden.
“Also, we were afraid because my mom had a dream that Bill Clinton was going to try to kill us.”
Sheffield’s faculty profile at the Leadership Institute, a right-wing clearinghouse for what they call “journalism training,” is no longer online, but it had noted that RatherBiased.com was “credited by the New York Times as being the most influential blog in taking down Dan Rather during the famous ‘Memogate’ scandal. Since that time, Matt has worked with … groups such as the Media Research Center where he created NewsBusters, Rush Limbaugh’s favorite blog. He also works with the Washington Examiner, helping them increase their traffic by over 600 percent to over a million visitors per month.”
Sheffield has long since become a committed leftist. I’m writing about him not just because he fascinates me. I’m writing about him because the lessons he learned on the road to becoming a right-wing media operative, and what he has learned since in his almost entirely frustrated efforts to impart those lessons to the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, are so crucial for all of us to know.
SHEFFIELD’S CAREER ON THE RIGHT was rather doomed from the start. Because he cared about the truth.
His damnable allergy to propaganda had already shown out by the time he came up with an idea for a study during a stint at Virginia Commonwealth University. It asked: Where Do Columnists Come From? “And my general thesis was that newspaper columnists who are on the right come out of political operations, and ones from the left come out of—journalism.” That is to say, they carry with them journalistic values of fairness and accuracy, by which conservative columnists remain blessedly unburdened.
In 2007, he joined Brent Bozell III’s Media Research Center, because that’s where the money was. He started NewsBusters, the site Limbaugh loved, which ferreted out alleged liberal media bias. NewsBusters would run pieces about Michelle Obama, “and we’d have to shut off the comments because they were too disgusting.”
RatherBiased, Sheffield notes, got all that New York Times attention because “it was completely accurate in every way. We didn’t use inflammatory language; we didn’t even state any political opinions.” No room for that in his next lunge up the right’s greasy pole. “I was horrified a lot of the time, quite honestly. You know when Ted Cruz was doing his first government shutdown attempt? I was in meetings about how we should cover the media’s coverage. I said, ‘Well, it’s an objectively stupid idea. It’s not unfair for the media to say that this is destabilizing and extreme and absurd.’”
My response is a guffaw, his a sardonic chuckle. “Uh, yeah. They looked at me like I had suggested they grow a third eye or something.”
THERE WAS A SECOND REASON Matthew Sheffield did not fit the conservative movement mold. “Our family musical group never really got off the ground. So we were beginning to wonder whether, you know, our father was as divinely led as he told us.” So he became an atheist. And you could only get so far in the conservative world without being religious, or at least paying religion obsequious tribute. “What’s her name, S.E. Cupp? She actually wrote an entire book saying, ‘Well, I’m not religious but I sure wish I was.’ That was her way of trying to get on the gravy train. And I wasn’t willing to do that.”
The consequences are more than theological. When it comes to conservatism, “the one thing that non-Republicans don’t understand is that almost all of them are bizarre religious fundamentalists. Even the ones who don’t present that to you.” And that’s how they learn to reason: as fundamentalists. Sheffield saw it over and over again on the job.
Sheffield became the first managing editor of the Washington Examiner. It’s now a website. But the project, handsomely funded by a right-wing billionaire, began in 2005 as a suite of local daily tabloids in several cities, as a strategy to move the media environment to the right by making readers feel like they were reading normal news in a normal local newspaper. “The people who I was recruiting and were writing for me often had no concept of verifying a story … Because religious fundamentalists don’t need that.” Conservatives always descend from some sacred, impregnable prior truth. As Sheffield says: “The reasoning is about affirming the concept.”
Sheffield tells a story from the Obama era about the federal program known as “Cash for Clunkers,” a rather thoughtful policy win-win that got inefficient cars off the road, stimulated new auto sales, and put cash in folks’ pocket after the financial crash. It was administered through car dealers. Someone sent the Examiner a tip that the Obama administration was discriminating against Republican car dealers. “But the thing is, almost all car dealers are Republican. It’s almost impossible to discriminate against Republican car dealers and have that program!” He nonetheless farmed it out to a young colleague, just in case. “You know: ‘This could be a really hot story if it’s true.’”
Two hours later, the kid comes up to him, exultant: “Yes! I got a Drudge link!”
“I was like, ‘Wait, for what?’ And he’s like, ‘That story you gave me.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, did you …verify it at all?’”
Right there, I put down the cumin lamb and leaned in. This was the real shit.
“And he’s like, ‘It had everything we needed right there!’ And of course it came out almost immediately that it was all bullshit. We had to pull the article. But ultimately, the fact that I believed in empirical reasoning was what destined me to flee. It meant I was not a good fit.”
[Correction: I had misheard Sheffield over restaurant din. It turns out the writer wasn’t a junior colleague, but a senior executive, the editorial page editor.]
THE SHUDDER INTO FULL APOSTASY came on the next rung up the ladder. He was working on a right-leaning comedy show, a kind of SNL “Weekend Update” rip-off, aiming for syndication on broadcast TV. It actually wasn’t terrible. (Here’s a segment covering Donald Trump and Barack Obama’s infamous convergence at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.)
“We actually got more favorable coverage from the mainstream media than the right-wing media. The right-wing media didn’t like us because it wasn’t nasty enough.” (It was plenty nasty: Grok the joke about Sharia law.) But for Sheffield’s team, not-as-nasty was the feature, not the bug. That was the pitch they made for the better part of a year to, among others, the Koch organization: “We’re going for a broadcast audience here. We’re going for Jay Leno, but slightly more conservative.” That, he argued, was the missing piece of the puzzle to keep conservatism a thriving concern: to build and keep a majority coalition. He also pointed out that without conservative-dominated media organizations that aspired to some degree of mainstream credibility, like the sort he built with RatherBiased.com, they’d lose all the smart young talent, “because the only paths available to them are to become talk radio hosts or crazy bloggers.”
This pitch failed. “They thought it didn’t go hard enough after the Democrats.” This is conservatism’s authoritarian ratchet in action: the way the movement contains no mechanism for moderation—only for ever-greater extremism.
The last straw was when Sheffield learned about a lawsuit evangelicals filed against a liberal church in North Carolina, before the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling, that was blessing gay unions. “I was just horrified at all the awful things they were saying, and how anti-American they were, how they literally don’t believe in freedom of religion,” he said. The conservatives’ argument was: “Unless you’re historically rooted in your doctrines, you don’t have religious freedoms.”
I’d never heard of that, but it doesn’t surprise me, having written about the nascent religious right’s arguments in the late 1970s about why the state had no right to regulate churches at all, whether it came to building codes or segregation laws. They published law review articles saying that the Founders intended only Christian schools to have public legitimacy, that in fact non-Christian schools violated the First Amendment because they discriminated against Christians by inculcating a “state religion,” which was “secular humanism.”
Liberals tend to maintain a lingering sentimental attachment to the idea that people calling themselves “Christians” are, well, Christian as the word is commonly understood outside the evangelical world. Faith, hope, and charity, turning the other cheek, that sort of thing. The people who most clearly understand and articulate their imperialist designs for the rest of us tend to be apostates like Sheffield, Matt Sitman, and Frank Schaeffer.
Exiles, Bertolt Brecht suggests, make the best dialecticians. They refuse protective sentimentality toward the world they left behind. Thus Sheffield. “I was looking at polling and demographics that younger people do not believe in fundamentalist religion, that many of them are explicitly nonreligious; we have to change to have a future, to be relevant to people. If we actually want to serve people, we have to change for them.” That’s when the whole thing collapsed. “I realized that they don’t actually want to serve the public.”
I ask him to explain to liberals for whom this makes no sense how someone can be interested in the profession we after all call “public service” and not be interested in serving the public.
He replies, “The core American reactionary motivation is that they want to force the public to obey their principles.”
SHEFFIELD SHOULD BE MUCH BETTER KNOWN. You can read the exposés he wrote in Salon during the Trump presidency and his reporting from The Hill after that, or listen to his ambitious podcast theorizing how change-making works, or see him pop up in the media from time to time as a disinformation expert. But like my friend David Neiwert, the calls aren’t coming from the people who really need to understand what we’re up against, like strategists in the Democratic Party and the media voices to whom they pay most attention.
He’s a little bitter about it—“I haven’t been invited on MSNBC once”—but that’s OK; so am I, and so should you be. A party opposing authoritarianism ignoring resources like this is leaving money on the table.
“There are a lot of people like me. I have ten million-plus Twitter engagements every month. People like what I’m saying. But it goes back to that liberal thing—that they think the Republicans can be saved. They can’t be saved.”
Maybe that bluntness limits his impact. That sentimentality that there are no red states or blue states, only the United States, remains oh so seductive. Sheffield finally grasped the impossibility of Republican redemption during the high tide of Barack Obama’s fervor imploring Democrats to believe in the existence of Republicans of good faith—and that once he was re-elected, “the fever will break,” and “we can start getting some cooperation again.”
That wasn’t true then. And to believe it is bonkerdoodles now.
The conservative movement, he says, is “100 percent controlled by extremists. And they are very, very wealthy. So they can afford to push a politics that almost no one believes in. We’re not to that point yet, but let’s just say that at some point in the future the Republican Party is not getting even 15 percent in elections. They’re rich enough, fanatical enough, that they wouldn’t change. They would just keep trying to push the same things. And it might get more extreme. It will get more extreme. They have no relationship to the political marketplace.”
Who needs mere votes when you’re in direct touch with God?
“That’s right. There’s nothing that these people will do to compromise with you.”
Bertrand Russell at anti nuclear weapons March, 1961
