Many MAGA Republicans are insistent about placing the 10 Commandments in public schools. Apparently MAGA Republicans are not so concerned the commandments actually be obeyed, especially by Donald Trump himself.
In Tuesday’s debate, seen by 67 million people, Donald Trump made the claim that Haitians in Ohio are eating peoples’ pets. He said, “In Springfield (Ohio), they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
When one of the moderators pointed out that the Springfield police stated they had received no such reports, Trump responded he had seen some people on television saying it.
The Associated Press tried to figure out how the original rumor got started:
“On Sept. 6, a post surfaced on X that shared what looked like a screen grab of a social media post apparently out of Springfield. The retweeted post talked about the person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” seeing a cat hanging from a tree to be butchered and eaten, claiming without evidence that Haitians lived at the house. The accompanying photo showed a Black man carrying what appeared to be a Canada goose by its feet. That post continued to get shared on social media.”
That’s right, the “proof” for this rumor comes from a “neighbor’s daughter’s friend.” It seems to me such a low standard of verification should disqualify an applicate for the lowest law enforcement office in the land, much less the highest.
And, since the MAGA movement considers the 10 Commandments so foundational, let’s think about what their presidential candidate’s false witness might mean to some of the people he is putting in harm’s way.
The Haitian Times interviewed Haitian Americans in the aftermath of Trump’s claims that Haitians are eating the pets of people in Springfield:
“We’re all victims this morning,” said (one) woman, who moved to Springfield six years ago. “They’re attacking us in every way.”
Aside from the anxiety caused by Tuesday night’s debate, the woman also said her cars have been vandalized twice in the middle of the night. She woke up one morning to broken windows and another to acid thrown on the vehicle. She’s added cameras to her driveway and tried to report the incidents to the police to no avail.
“I’m going to have to move because this area is no longer good for me,” she said. “I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart. I’m anxious and scared.”
Trump supporters have sent out a flood of cat memes to fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment. In many ways memes are the perfect replacement for reason and science in propagandized minds. Memes are powerful images that require little or no actual thought. They just feel true.
When Donald Trump said any journalist criticizing him was guilty of printing “fake news” he brought America to a crisis point. Democracy cannot stand if people refuse to test their truth claims by some objective measure. The commitment not to bear false witness is a commitment to test our assumptions, not by whether they make us feel comfortable, but whether they stand in the harsh light of other vantage points.
Being honest witnesses means not presenting as personal knowledge that which we only know secondhand. Being honest witnesses does not mean always defending our beliefs from criticism. It means ruthlessly testing such reports before we share them as facts.
Being good witnesses means remembering that all human knowledge is perspectival. In Gandhi’s imagery, each of us looks through one facet of a great diamond. We must be ruthlessly honest about what we know AND what we do NOT know. Only by each of us honestly playing out our role as faithful witnesses can we together find glimmers of that truth obtainable to we quivering primates who call ourselves “humankind.”