Since the dawn of time, amoral racists have projected their own pathologies onto others

A funny thing happened with Ron Desantis’s experiment in fraud and human trafficking:

Now Mr. Nazareth had one objective in mind: make money to support the two young daughters he had left behind.

That is when a well-dressed woman who introduced herself as Perla handed him and about 30 other migrants gift cards for the fast-food restaurant, which they gladly accepted. Then she made an enticing offer: a free flight to a “sanctuary,” he recalled, where there were people to help them get on their feet. The place was called Massachusetts.

Was that close to New York, Mr. Nazareth asked. She assured him that it was, and that onward travel would be available, if that is where he hoped to settle. Yet he was surprised when he found himself on Martha’s Vineyard, a small, picturesque vacation destination in the Atlantic. “I thought I was coming to Boston,” he said. “I ended up on this little island.”

[…]

On Thursday, Mr. Nazareth expressed gratitude for the warm reception that he and his brethren had received in Martha’s Vineyard. “They’re treating us super well,” he said.

“We’re getting food, clothing, all our needs met. I love Massachusetts!”

His plan: “I want to start working as soon as possible.”

The roots of DeSantis’s criminal efforts in lib-owning have the same roots as most contemporary Republican ideology:

The premise is that DeSantis has no obligation to take any more interest in safeguarding human welfare than an illegal smuggling operation does.

It’s not just that DeSantis stole the idea from Abbott. The idea was employed even earlier by White Citizens Councils in the 1960s, which — much like DeSantis — lured Black people onto buses with promises of jobs and then deposited them in the North. White Citizens Councils bused three dozen Black people to Hyannis, the Kennedy home, in 1962.

The premise of the gimmick was that hypocritical northern liberals pretended to care about the rights and welfare of Black people in the South but wouldn’t actually be willing to live up to these ideals if put face to face with the dark-skinned underclass Southerners had to live with every day. “We know you’ll protect their civil rights and give them equal employment opportunities,” sneered the White Citizen’s Council leader who carried out the stunt.

There are plenty of ways in which white liberals are hypocritical, but “supporting race-baiting kidnapping schemes” generally isn’t one of them. So the strategy is just to lie and pretend that liberals reacted the way they themselves would have anyway.

republicans shipped migrants to martha’s vineyard because they want to cast liberals as out of touch hypocrites whose politics are purely aesthetic, but they got owned because even those country club assholes have a baseline of human decency well above the median republican— Law Boy, Esq. (@The_Law_Boy) September 16, 2022