The Road to Springfield

There’s  something delightfully incongruous about driving through the West Virginia hills under a warm blue sky and hearing via the radio’s 3AW app of shivering Melbourne enduring another day grey and frigid. What you see on the road and what you hear from home – sometimes they’re a challenge to reconcile.

Australia Overnight’s wee-hours compere, my driving companion on that American Sunday afternoon, is radio veteran Tony McManus, who broadcasts across Australia via Nine’s terrestrial radio network and digitally to the rest of the world. Mostly his shtick is what you might expect of a sleepy 3am. Lonely old ladies, the incoherently argumentative, assorted insomniacs, night workers and a good many nostalgic voices keen to share memories of things as once they were. It’s homey, hokey, low-key fare most of the time, instructive if you’ve ever wondered whatever happened to Izzy Di or MacRobertson Chocolates. But that wasn’t the case yesterday, when McManus succumbed to a frequent temptation and launched into one of his regular rants about the loathsomeness of Donald J. Trump.

As a voice in the lonely night, McManus does a serviceable job. As a consumer and regurgitator of news, he is one-eyed when passing on to his listeners what he has gleaned elsewhere. In this regard he is one of many. Trump, he pronounced in tones of disgust, had told a filthy, flat-out lie when he accused immigrants during his debate with Kamala Harris of eating their homegrown neighbours’ cats and dogs. He just made it up, the compere continued, and those irresponsible lies had transformed the once happy town of Springfield, Ohio, into a cauldron of xenophobic hatred, racism, suspicion and bomb threats. The new arrivals from Haiti were much loved, especially by local employers desperate for labour, and Trump had “made up the whole thing out of his very small head”. You can hear the whole show here, with the remarks about Trump coming about an hour and ten minutes into the broadcast.

Talk about exquisite timing! As it happened, Quadrant’s 5.7-litre V8 mobile US office was steaming west on Interstate 78, en route to Springfield, where there is a story worth checking out. Had Trump got it entirely wrong, as McManus and plenty of alleged journalists have asserted, or was there more to the story than an easily dismissed urban myth about peckish Haitians making off with Moggy?  That certainly seemed the consensus of Legacy Media types — McManus’ source material, one assumes – very few of whom actually bothered to head for Springfield and find out. Those that have journeyed to the town in Ohio’s western flatlands have focused their reports, predictably, only on refuting the charge that terrine of terrier is a recent addition to the town’s standard fare.

The mayor has said he has had ‘no credible reports’ of petnapping, while the woman whose Facebook post sparked the whole brouhaha has since done a massive mea culpa and admitted that basing her claim on gossip she picked up third-hand via the friend of a friend of a friend was deeply irresponsible. That she continues to be blitzed with abusive phone calls and the odd death threat no doubt plays some part in her contrition. For good measure, the networks’ reports from Springfield have often included interviews with a local silk-screen printer who has been churning out lawn signs proclaiming ‘Hate has no place here.’ See, the narrative goes, multiculturalism shines bright in Ohio despite Trump’s attempt to  burn crosses on its beautiful and culturally enriched front lawn. That has been the approved narrative. But surely there is more to the story? Well, yes, there is.

Consider for starters residents’ testimony at a recent city council public hearing (video below) which heard of Haitians fetching their duck dinners from the pond in the local park, of setting up camps on residents’ front lawns, of intimidating shoppers in the aisles at Walmart and getting behind the wheel without knowing how to drive. That last charge has been officially acknowledged by an emergency deployment of state troopers sent to stop a surge in “erratic driving” in the town, where an unlicenced Haitian on the wrong side of the road last year rammed a school bus and took the life of an 11-year-old boy. That Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has ordered the Springfield traffic blitz can be taken as confirmation there is more than racism behind complaints about Haitians’ estrangement from community norms. Spare a minute or two to watch the video below and, when you’re done, compare the witnesses’ sincerity, their end-of-the-rope pleas, with the Panglossian platitudes of a media that favours the agenda over truth, wokeness above evidence.

An obvious thought, one that doesn’t bespeak a hint of racism, is how any of us might react were tens of thousands of uninvited strangers to arrive in our towns or suburbs, few speaking English and bringing with them customs distinctly at odds with, in Springfield’s case, the culture and traditions of a largely white, Grant Wood kind of town. But that’s a matter which simply can’t be addressed, isn’t permitted to be addressed, for it would be a career-killer for any news show producer giving voice to the heresy that diversity might not be such a strength after all.

The trouble in Springfield began, as do many things with the best, of intentions. The DeWine family sponsors a charity in Port-au-Prince and official connections grew, sponsored migration with them. Then came the Biden administration’s open borders and life in Springfield changed suddenly and dramatically. No one is quite sure just how many Haitians now call the town home, with estimates ranging from 12,000 to twice that number. In a town of 58,000 even the lower figure represents a lot of new neighbours. How many are legal, how many undocumented, how many hold long-term temporary visas? Nobody really knows. The driver who rolled that school us flew to Brazil, came overland to the Texas, declared himself to immigration authorities and was granted one of several varieties of long-term visas, then loaded aboard an aeroplane bound for Ohio. The rest is history and a funeral.

So, yes, on all the available evidence, Trump lied about the incidence of catabalism in Springfield. It can’t be denied that the one known case of recent cat consumption occurred not there but in a town 100-odd miles away, and the blurry snap that circulated widely on social media of a black man carrying a dead goose was likewise taken somewhere else in Ohio, although the X posts and memes putting pets on Springfield’s specific menu weren’t identified as misleading until after Trump blurted out his debate remarks.

Accurate or not, as with most of his misstatements, boasts and habitual exaggerations, there’s a resonance to it – fake but accurate, as the Left is wont to say when its own sacred lore is gored. Radically different cultures living cheek by jowl in orchestrated amity is most definitely one of the most hallowed of those myths.

Come election day, as Trump knows and returns to endlessly, immigration and the border will be among the foremost concerns on voters’ minds. Abortion, a big deal elsewhere, won’t figure in Ohio, where a runaway pro-choice win in last November’s state referendum settled the issue once and for all. So when Trump seizes on a social media furphy about Springfield he’s pushing a broader message intended to echo well beyond borders of a state now comfortably Republican. In Denver, the migrant rush has stressed the public hospital system to breaking, just as it has done in Springfield and scores of other US cities. Voters in all those locations — those not irredeemably of the Left, that is — will be wondering even more than presently why their government is giving welfare benefits to illegals, providing free accommodation and, in many states, walking-around money as well. In California, thanks to an initiative Kamala Harris pushed through as attorney-general, illegal aliens in state prisons have been getting taxpayer-funded gender surgeries since 2017. In New York City, catering to 180,000 recently arrived illegals will cost $10.5 billion this year alone.

Night owl McManus at his microphone would know little of this background; Trump is a figure he has been led to believe, eagerly one gathers, who deserves to be held in contempt, and for thousands of the little cogs in the mainstream multimedia machine, that’s enough to know and repeat.

Liken Trump to Hitler, swear he must be kept from the Oval Office “by any means necessary”, to quote Liz Cheney, or that he “has to be eliminated”, as fellow Democrat Dan Goldman puts it, and lots of people will take you seriously. Some will believe, hate silently and leave it at that. Others, like 3AW’s overnighter and thousands of his media peers, will further spread the lies and libels drawn from the poisoned well of obscenely distorted news coverage. And others such as would-be golf course sniper Ryan Wesley Routh, well they might just reach for their guns.

Two assassination attempts in 63 days and 48 more yet to run until all ballots are cast. As an actuary might warn, don’t be surprised if there is a third.

A NOTE: All going well, Quadrant should arrive in Springfield tomorrow. A further report will be added in days to come