J.D. Vance

My Congressman, Marc Molinaro, has made the demonization of undocumented immigrants one of his main focuses in his battle to win re-election against his Democratic opponent, Josh Riley, in New York's 19th Congressional District. This has become standard fare for the Republican Party.

There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants in our country. You are bound to have some extremely violent criminals in any population of that size. Whenever an undocumented immigrant is responsible for a particularly heinous rape or murder, you can count on Republicans to scream, “LOOK AT THAT. THESE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE HORRIBLE, AND IF IT WEREN’T FOR OUR DEMOCRATIC OPPONENTS, THEIR VICTIMS WOULD STILL BE ALIVE.”

This group demonization is particularly unwarranted since immigrants do not commit violent crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans. In fact, a Cato Institute study of homicides in Texas found that “illegal immigrants were 26 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide.” This makes intuitive sense because undocumented immigrants WANT to keep a low profile. They try not to attract the attention of the police because they know that they are likely to be deported if they are caught committing crimes.

Marc Molinaro has gone far beyond the normal Republican attacks against undocumented immigrants in his attempts to smear Josh Riley. Molinaro retweeted an image of a Facebook post claiming that Haitian immigrants were butchering and eating dogs and cats as well as ducks and geese in Springfield Ohio. A second image attached to Molinaro's tweet shows a Black man walking down the street carrying two geese.

@JoshRileyue fought for open borders and dismantled our border security.
This crisis - the fentanyl flooding our streets, the rampant crime, and now this - is his to own. pic.twitter.com/n418uJj7TC

— Marc Molinaro #NY19 (@marcmolinaro) September 9, 2024

Numerous Republicans and right wing media outlets have blamed Thomas Crooks' assassination attempt against Donald Trump's on Democrats who have said that Trump is worse than Hitler. Derek Hunter writes in The Hill

If you are willing to call your political opponent literally worse than one of history’s greatest monsters, is it unreasonable to think that at least a handful of your listeners — perhaps a few mentally unstable people with a political obsession — might take you seriously and act to stop the threat?

 

“Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation,” Biden said just three weeks ago. “That is not hyperbole. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He is literally a threat to the America that we stand for.”

If you could go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, you would do it, right? So if Biden and Hillary Clinton believe their own assertions that Trump is an existential threat to our nation and our way of life, then how can they be happy that Trump survived the assassination attempt over the weekend?