That’s why Trump’s Springfield lie was so dangerous – and so effective

An earlier attempt to scapegoat Haitian immigrants in Springfield failed to reach a national audience, said Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. WHO studies how extremist groups use technology. In August 2023, an 11-year-old boy was killed in a car crash involving a school bus and a car driven by a Haitian immigrant. Since then, a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe has tried to exploit that local tragedy. “White supremacist movements have been doing this forever,” Holt said, “to identify cases of white children dying in incidents involving immigrants, particularly non-white immigrants.” The group has “seems to have a halfway decent membership in the Midwest,” Holt said, and has been seen before in Ohio, trying to intimidate attendees at a Drag Story Hour event, wearing similar attire and giving the Nazi salute, next to a banner that read “Weimar Conditions Require Weimar Solutions.”

This summer, just before the first anniversary of the fatal car crash, members of the Blood Tribe marched through Springfield — about a dozen men, some carrying swastika flags, others armed with rifles, most with their faces covered. Afterward, the Blood Tribe founder tried to use a Springfield City Commission meeting to defame immigrants in the community and recruit others to their racist cause, but was thrown out by the city’s mayor. While that group now claims responsibility for spreading the anti-Haitian lies about JD Vance, Holt said he is skeptical.

The Trump campaign and MAGA had also previously tried to use Aurora, Colorado, for their anti-immigrant scaremongering, but that didn’t work, said Nick Martin, an investigative journalist and researcher who The informantan online publication that deals with hate and extremism. Trump talked about Aurora at a rally in Wisconsin, shortly before the debate, and lied about a Community of Venezuelan immigrants in Aurora who were a criminal gang taking over the city. Deportations, he said, would be “a bloody story.” When he saw the anti-immigrant lies spreading about Springfield, Martin said, “it was like the second try for me.”