Weekend reads: On decency

The right debases itself with ugly claims about cat-eating migrants

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Like tens of millions of other people, I watched the American presidential debate this week — and came away dismayed. I am no fan of Kamala Harris. I found her performance contrived and sanctimonious, and thought it was astonishing how little detail she provided about her policy plans.

Indeed, Harris’s evasiveness may well have emerged as the story of the night if Donald Trump had not, in characteristic fashion, gone off the rails.

As a friend pointed out to me in a text, the debate essentially ended the instant Trump made ugly comments about migrants, thus making any sober comparison between the two candidates’ policies impossible. Trump chose to repeat Internet rumours — now disavowed by the Ohio woman who started them — that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were abducting pets and eating them. When the ABC moderator David Muir interjected, saying the city manager maintained there were no credible reports of this, Trump doubled down, insisting he’d seen it on television.

Trump has said outlandish things for as long as he’s been in the public eye, so this episode was hardly unusual. (He also called Harris a Marxist during the debate. This, while Harris is being funded by so much Silicon Valley cash that old school leftists trained in Marxist theory are penning pieces titled “Kamala Harris: creature of the oligarchy.”)

We might have hoped that Vance would demonstrate more compassion, more principles, and more basic decency. Vance has himself experienced how difficult life can be on the American margins. Watching him perpetuate a xenophobic moral panic — stoking tensions in his own home state — was hugely disappointing.

Springfield, Ohio was already deeply divided before all of this began, as the town of 59,000 has received roughly 20,000 Haitian newcomers since 2020, straining the housing, healthcare, and education systems. There is a conversation to be had about the impacts of rapidly increasing the population of a small town. But a calm, rational conversation about immigration levels is now impossible. In fact, it was made impossible the moment a former president and his running mate started talking about people eating cats.

The town of Springfield is currently experiencing bomb threats, and that crisis has become the focus of the news cycle.

This week’s events highlight a rising tide of nastiness on the Very Online portion of the right. But what’s interesting — and incredibly heartening — is the number of prominent conservatives, both here and in the U.S., speaking out against this trend.

In Canada, on a recent Hub podcast, Lean Out guest Rudyard Griffiths and his co-host Sean Speer made a direct appeal to fellow conservatives to stop “defining deviancy down,” drawing on a phrase from Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Citing a recent example of Trump circulating a vulgar sexual meme about Harris, the pair argued that the Very Online right was degrading the discourse, and that it was important for those who believed in conservative ideas to restore decency to the public conversation. This was made difficult when, as Griffiths put it, you had the “single most prominent, powerful” conservative figure in the world “engaging in this kind of crass, sexual, denigrating attacks against his female opponent.” Griffiths and Speer both agreed that it was crucial for those on the right to engage in some serious self-reflection.

Stateside, there are multiple examples of high-profile conservatives taking their own side to task. This week, influencer Laura Loomer, who’s been travelling with Trump, tweeted that if Harris took office, the White House would smell like curry. None other than MAGA Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Twitter to object, calling the post appalling and saying that this was not what Republicans stood for. (Lean Out guest Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has championed some of Trump’s policies, similarly made her position clear on X: “I’m not voting for someone who continues to fly on a plane with a person who said the White House will smell like curry if Kamala Harris wins, in case there was any doubt about that.”)

Elsewhere, Lean Out guest Sohrab Ahmari, a leader on the New Right, published an essay, “There is an intellectual sickness on the American right,” taking aim at the darkness he has been observing. And Lean Out guest Zaid Jilani also penned an arresting piece: “Conservatism Has a Proud Tradition. Let’s Not Deface It With Lies About Cat-Eating Haitian Immigrants.” (You can read Jilani’s subsequent exchange with J.D. Vance on X here.)

Meanwhile, in the pages of The Atlantic, Russell Moore, editor of Christianity Today, took a strong stand against the cruelty online and its real-world ramifications for Ohioans, including the evacuation of elementary schools in Springfield on account of threats. “When we are willing to see children terrorized rather than stop telling lies about their families,” Moore writes, “we should step back, forget about our dogs and cats for a moment, and ask who abducted our consciences.”

If we can find some solace in the acts of decency I’ve just drawn attention to, there’s more to be found in a recent column from a conservative commentator at The New York Times, David Brooks. “In 2018, the group More in Common released a survey of the American electorate in which it popularized the phrase ‘the exhausted majority,’” Brooks writes. “Many people were tired of the bitterness, the endless Trumpian and culture war psychodrama. There was an intense desire to leave all that behind.”

The country is primed for a major cultural shift, Brooks believes. And what we are now witnessing is a battle between the forces of indignation (which characterize the era we’re leaving behind) and the forces of exhaustion, as more and more people — of all political stripes — long for a saner politics. “An increasing number of people tired of living in an endless atmosphere of tribalism, enmity and conflict,” he writes.

“People can be up in arms for only so long,” Brooks stresses. He adds: “We’re still an exhausted and battered nation, but if history is a guide, then just over the horizon there is some new cultural moment coming.”

Let’s hope he’s right.