The Lies That Kill – by Joshua P. Hill

Immigrants have increasingly become the subject of immensely dangerous disinformation campaigns designed to paint vulnerable people seeking a better life as violent criminals, or worse. These efforts, these viral lies, dehumanize those in need and put them in immediate danger. The latest crusade of the past 48 hours has been so vile and brazen that it’s hard to believe anyone believes it. But far-right cop Benny Johnson, one of the conservative influencers who “unwittingly” millions of dollars taken from Russiais one of those leading a campaign to say that migrants are walking around eating pets. Yes, unfortunately you read that right.

Normally, I wouldn’t even let these kinds of claims be heard because they’re so vicious and inflammatory and patently untrue. But I want to see it as part of a larger pattern. Conservatives have been demonizing immigrants for decades, using increasingly deranged lies to do so. Unfortunately, their lies have been so persistent, and their pipeline for getting their disinformation into the mainstream has been so successful, that even stories that people should immediately reject are now sometimes believed and often amplified by conservative mass media.

A striking example of this has emerged in recent months. Throughout the summer, tweets, videos, and headlines have repeatedly claimed that migrants, particularly Venezuelan gangs, are taking over apartment complexes. Elon Musk even got in on the fake news. The idea appears to have initially originated in Colorado, where, as the colorado sun writes that a “property management company that manages three apartment complexes blamed their dilapidated condition on a ‘takeover’ by the notorious Tren de Aragua gang, saying their property manager was too afraid to collect rent. A Fox News video showing gunmen outside an apartment door fueled the fire. Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky blamed ‘failed border policies’ and helped some residents move out of one of the apartments, sending social media into meltdown.”

I’ve been watching the social media explosion that followed this story, and I know many of you have too. But if you were lucky enough to miss it, it’s mostly viral videos (with no evidence whatsoever) claiming to have firsthand knowledge of this “notorious” gang taking over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado. What the takeover entails is never really explained, and why exactly the police did nothing and the landlord gave up is also never explained. In lieu of facts, multiple “content creators” rely on tropes, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the assumption that the viewer already shares a variety of negative assumptions about the entire situation.

The Aurora story eventually spiraled out of control to the point where elected officials like Rep. Lauren Boebert repeatedly spread lies about these apartment complexes, media outlets like the Daily Mail and the New York Post amplified the landlord’s lies, and rumors circulated that the Hells Angels were coming to beat back the gangs. The tenants then felt compelled to hold a press conference reminding everyone that the absentee landlord was the problem, that he was the reason everything was falling apart, not a gang invasion of their homes.

Aurora police and several local elected officials have also tried to cut through the noise. the Denver Post wrote“Aurora officials — and residents of the properties — have said the unlivable conditions at the company’s properties are longstanding and the result of the company’s mismanagement, rather than an overwhelming gang presence. Aurora’s interim police chief said Friday that gangs had not ‘taken over’ any of the complexes.” The local paper goes on to report that only 10 members of this “notorious” Venezuelan gang have been identified in the entire city. According to police, there are 10 people known to be associated with the gang in a city of 400,000. And Aurora is technically its own city, but it is within the much larger Denver metropolitan area. That’s the perceived threat: 10 people in the Denver area. What’s more, these gang members have only been linked to one crime this summer. One crime in the past four months. That’s it and that’s it.

And yet the story continues. The absentee landlord is now selling the property. Conservative media is using the sale to spread their outright lies, with the NY Post once again attributing this latest development to migrant gangs:

But let’s see what a local newspaper, a newspaper that actually does journalism, has to say. When you go to the denver gazette You’ll note that “Aurora officials agreed to drop all charges against the owner of the Aspen Grove apartment complex in exchange for the sale of the property” and, in case you’re still unsure of the truth of the matter, “officials agreed to drop dozens of charges against Zev Baumgarten for failing to maintain the property.”

According to the sun of coloradoIt was the property management company that first started this rumor in late June when they sent a letter to the state attorney general blaming the Venezuelan gangs for what was clearly the result of their own criminal negligence and gross disregard for their tenants. But we also need to investigate the media and its consumers — the people who have been all too willing to believe this story that makes very little sense if you think about it critically.

There are a dozen reasons to get to the bottom of this viral disinformation campaign and understand that the lies are coming from the landlord. The first is that it’s not unique to Colorado. Tenants in Chicago seem to be experiencing an oddly similar campaign, with rumors of the same Venezuelan gang taking over a building:

In Chicago, as in Aurora, viral videos and social media posts suddenly surfaced, only to be debunked by local journalists. Block Club Chicagoa local publication, writes: “There is no evidence that a group of migrants took over an apartment building in Washington Park on Monday, a false claim that went viral on social media and was amplified by Elon Musk.” Another local journalist went to the neighborhood and spoke to people who live in and around the building. Amando Sanchez posted the videos of his conversations with residents and said: “The people we spoke to seemed genuinely welcoming to the migrants living in the building and stressed that the migrants living there had not taken over the building.”

This is the key. The reality of people welcoming immigrants into their communities is exactly what landlords and conservative forces want to obscure in this hazy torrent of viral disinformation. It should come as no surprise to any of us that there are people who use new media and new methods to divide and conquer us. But this playbook is really just a slightly modified version of one that has been used for decades: to spin absurd lies about immigrants and use every available resource to launder and amplify them. When I was interning in Congress about 10 years ago, I was sitting at that desk and I started getting phone calls that were bogus about ISIS bringing Ebola across the Mexican border. Yes, I’ve heard that exact conspiracy theory multiple times. And these callers were from New Hampshire, so it was clear that border politics was practically knocking on their door.

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In all seriousness, while stories about gangs taking over buildings without police resistance or claims of immigrants eating your pets are all racist nonsense, the consequences are unfortunately very real. In some cases, the result is violent attacks on individual immigrants. In other cases, it is a broader shifting of the Overton Window that has allowed, for example, actual vigilante gangs of white men on the US-Mexico border to steal water left for immigrants and to conduct some form of “citizen’s arrest” and kidnap people seeking a better life.

At the highest levels, this relentless parade of migrant fear stories being concocted and disseminated has pushed the window so far open that Democrats are now trying to outflank Republicans on “border security.” I wrote about the Democrats’ changing approach I want to address the recent developments in immigration and the immense danger it poses to migrants and to all of us. I won’t go into too much detail here, but I will briefly say that it’s a slippery slope to competing over who can implement the toughest border policies and scapegoat migrants more effectively if we leave the narrative to Fox News, Breitbart, and the right.

It’s hard to imagine that the outrageous videos claiming Venezuelan gangs have taken over buildings from Colorado to Chicago or tweets about Haitians suddenly deciding to eat pets would go so viral and be so easily believed without the years of anti-immigrant propaganda that has permeated so much of this country. Each insidious narrative builds on the momentum of the last. We’ve seen how the media and an alarmingly wide range of people have accepted an increasingly dangerous framing of every migrant story in recent years. Even when the subject was poor migrants on the streets of New York, or being shipped from Florida to various cities across the country by Ron DeSantis, the framing still tended to paint people who arrived here with nothing and slept on the streets as dangerous.

But the dangerous people aren’t the ones who come here looking for a better life, they’re the politicians who are willing to use people as props in their stunts. The dangerous people aren’t immigrants without housing, they’re media figures who are willing to create and spread stories that they know will cost lives. The people who pose a danger to all of us are landlords and billionaires, not asylum seekers and refugees. As a rule of thumb, people with little more than the shirt on their backs are infinitely less dangerous than those who are willing and eager to dedicate themselves to the dehumanization of others.

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It is imperative to challenge the power of those who readily dehumanize the vulnerable among us, whether the stigmatized are migrants, the homeless, transgender people, or others. Combating dehumanization involves creating and supporting alternative media, building community organizations to care for one another, and developing the power to demand policy change based on care and compassion rather than hate and division. But we must also ask ourselves why people are inclined to believe outrageous stories and lies that only serve to spread fear. Why do people believe videos without evidence that promote outlandish claims with the sole purpose of making us angry at the vulnerable? Who benefits when we fear migrants and panic about things they don’t actually do?

In other words, at the same time as we build the infrastructure of change, we must foster changes in the way we see each other. Ultimately, that inner change can make us much harder to divide and much harder to conquer. The antidote to division and fear-mongering is solidarity, and what the ruling class hates is to see us collectively flex that muscle. That is why they continually foment division, and why we must continually respond with a growing and overwhelming response of solidarity with each other and with oppressed people, whether they are on our borders, in the streets, or on the other side of this small globe.