Trump clearly underperformed in this week’s debate, a view already expressed by yours truly on X during the event. That said, one topic in particular stood out as the sole exception, and that’s the issue of Trump accusing Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio of eating the locals’ pets there.

No sooner had the debate ended than the online world went into 72 hours of mudslinging, and the mainstream media pitched in too. Hilarious memes were crafted and posted and before I knew it even my young kids were asking me about the matter.

I’m not big on X (though I spend too much time on it), but had a post of mine on the subject go legitimately viral. It was a response, in fact, to a dumb tweet by Jonah Goldberg, who in a previous life had the respect of every thinking conservative after writing a stellar book titled Liberal Fascism back in ‘08.

Alas, Goldberg jumped on the Never Trump train a long time ago, and now spends most of his days posting pictures of his dogs, retweeting posts by Gary Kasparov urging the U.S. to escalate Ukraine’s war against Russia, and criticizing the Trump campaign. After the debate, he took it upon himself to inform his readers that, “If you’re insinuating, or shrieking, Trump and Vance told the truth about peoples’ pet cats and dogs being stolen, killed, and eaten by dark and sinister immigrants by pointing to stories of geese being killed and eaten, you’re not scoring the points you think you are.”

Goldberg is not strictly wrong here, of course. Sourcing for the pet eating accusation has been sketchy at best and more anecdotal than anything. And a goose from the local park is not the same as your neighbor’s golden retriever (though presumably it’s no more legal to abduct, kill and eat the former than the latter). The debate moderators were quick to debunk Trump’s claim too, based on a city official stating there was no evidence for any of it. My best guess is that there have been some incidents, but not a huge number. That said, we don’t really know, and we should be hesitant with our judgement.

What’s remarkable about this little brouhaha, however, is that, once again, Donald Trump was able to take the most outlandish and unproven portion of an issue out of context, and nevertheless make the entire story including the original underlying problem go viral through the sheer outrage of others. It’s happened before, and it can no longer be ascribed to dumb luck on Trump’s part. We have to presume now that he’s doing it deliberately with the aim of getting everybody talking about a topic considered taboo under normal circumstances. And the media, in all their huffing and puffing, happily complied once again this week.

The topic which triggered Americans’ fury, of course, was not so much the question whether pets were consumed in Springfield but the fact that this small town in the American heartland was overrun by Third Worlders, with their own culture, habits, language and everything else they brought along with them, virtually overnight. Twenty thousand Haitians now live in Springfield, which had a total population of 58,000 as of 2022.

Assuming that total population figure is still accurate in 2024 — a big if, since 15,000 Haitians have arrived there in the past three years alone per Reuters — this means Haitians are now 34% of Springfield’s total population. And this happened under the noses of the state and federal governments, which single-handedly manufactured this crisis in what amounts to a complete breach of trust towards their own citizens.

Your mileage may vary, but I honestly care less about pets being gobbled up by the Haitian next door than about the sheer scale of this mass migration event and the impact it’s had on the host population. Not a single person in the Hamptons, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Aspen, Napels, Stamford or any of the other lily-white places where a house couldn’t be had for under a million dollars (which includes my home town too) would allow this to happen to their own community. But when it’s happening to gap-toothed rednecks in wife beaters out in Ohio they just shrug their shoulders and move on as if nothing happened.

Some anonymous dimwit responded to my remarks by saying that “It was not ‘completely overrun overnight’. Y’all are so stupid [edited for poor punctuation].” My bad. Fifteen thousand in a whole three years amounts to nothing really, particularly in a sprawling metropolis of almost 60,000.

A few others objected that the Haitians are doing the jobs the drug and welfare-addled natives refuse to do, and indeed are “revitalizing” that sad excuse of a town. What’s there to complain about?

It’s very well possible that this is partly true, and who knows, perhaps even more true than the wild stories regarding the newcomers eating your cats and dogs. But even if it is, that is one poor argument for having the federal government dump thousands of aliens onto such a town. It destroys whatever social fabric was left for that city’s residents, who were living a hard-knock life as it was, and will further exacerbate existing socio-economic problems for them. This really shouldn’t be up for debate.

Again, if it’s A-OK for 4,000 bus loads of Haitians to descend upon one town, why don’t we ever send them to Martha’s Vineyard? Well, we know the answer to that, because Ron DeSantis tried it once with a single plane full of illegals, and their new hosts sent them away faster than you could vandalize one of those virtue-signaling “All Are Welcome Here” signs adorning many a front yard on that island.

That this is happening under the watchful eye of our national media, and that they essentially chose to ignore it until Donald Trump got on the debate stage the other night and forced them to talk about it, is an abomination. If Jonah Goldberg has had a single thing to say about any of this, I wasn’t able to find it scrolling through his timeline for 10 minutes.

Good for Trump for bringing attention to it, even if it’s in his own Trumpian fashion. He did our country a favor, and especially those poor souls in Springfield, Ohio.