Trump and Vance are using one of America’s oldest racist playbooks

One of the strangest moments in US presidential campaign history was Donald Trump’s insistence on Haitians during a recent debate with Kamala Harris Immigrants are eating cats and dogs In Springfield Township, Ohio. Of course, this racist garbage isn’t true, but the former president and his vice presidential pick can’t help but repeat these false rumors day after day.

But as an infectious disease epidemiologist and HIV+ scientist, what really caught my attention was Ohio Senator J.D. Vance’s claim that immigrants bring infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, Springfield is a small town in southwestern Ohio between Dayton and Columbus.

Debunking these lies is easy; there are public data AIDSVu.org and Clark County Unified Health District’s own web page Vance’s claims proved to be nonsense. But if these accusations are not true, why level such accusations of sedition in the first place, especially against your own constituents? I think there are a lot of other attacks on their political opponents that are at least grounded in reality.

History provides clues as to what might have happened here. For generations, demagogic American politicians have linked marginalized groups—whether immigrants, people of color, or women—to infectious diseases. from Attacks on the Chinese community In 1900, the Black Death broke out in San Francisco, and just a few years later, thousands of American women were rounded up across the country. Chamberlain-Kahn Act Such campaigns, ostensibly to spread sexually transmitted diseases, have continued throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, including HIV, Ebola virus, and coronavirus. Some of the scariest stories are largely unknown, such as the use of kerosene and a chemical called Zyklon B made famous by the Nazis, Delousing Mexican Migrant Workers in El Paso From 1917 until the 1970s.

In some cases, these incidents stem from the panic and paranoia of real outbreaks, in which infectious disease control can serve as a smokescreen for crackdowns on immigrant communities. But even the threat of disease can be weaponized to achieve political goals. Under the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, women could be arrested for any reason; more than 30,000 women were interned during World War I, a campaign that continued into the 1950s and was less about controlling sexually transmitted diseases , rather to control sexually transmitted diseases. Control women’s behavior and bodies.

What all of these sorry stories have in common is that they are all about determining who belongs in America, who is a “real American” and who is an interloper. as new york times Columnist Jamelle Bouie once saida “flesh-and-blood nationalism that makes some Americans more American than others.” This means that some people, because of their origins, or the origins of their parents or grandparents, cannot become full and equal members of the national community. Trump and Vance are arguing for much more than that: They see immigration as a real and imminent threat. Volckerreal people. In this structure, immigration is a pathogen that must be purged, purged, from the body of the nation.

All of this should send shivers down your spine. The impact of Trump and Vance’s false claims is already being felt Earthquake felt in SpringfieldHospitals, schools, city buildings and local universities received bomb threats or canceled events out of an abundance of caution after receiving other threatening emails.

Back in the early days of the HIV epidemic, Senator Jesse Helms expressed a particular hatred for people living with HIV and members of the LGBTQ community. In the early 1990s, a spin-off of the activist group ACT UP decided they had had enough. They put a huge condom on the senator’s house that said “Helms is deadlier than the virus”.

The fallout from the Trump and Vance attacks is creating a crisis in Springfield where there wasn’t one, terrorizing the town’s residents and certainly affecting their mental health, disrupting health care, education and city services with bomb threats. HIV is not a Springfield problem; HIV is not a Springfield problem. It was these two men who decided to use a community for their own political purposes and a press corps for their own political purposes. One can only wonder if this is good politics.