Martha’s Vineyard and the Conservative Media Machine

When the truth is inconvenient, create your own!

On September 14th, a plane full of Venezuelan migrants landed in Martha’s Vineyard. By all accounts, the community there was not expecting their arrival and rushed to respond. But that is where the accounts begin to differ. A quick glance through the conservative media space reveals two distinct and totally incompatible narratives of what happened to those migrants and the community they were flown into.

According to conservative commentators like Mike Cernovich, the left responded to the arrival of 50 illegal migrants by “losing their shit.” Locals immediately began calling for deportation, and an underbelly of hidden liberal racism was made bare. After declaring a state of humanitarian emergency for fear of their own community being disrupted, those liberals betrayed their ideals by calling in the national guard to forcibly deport the migrants.

To conservative media circles, this was a master stroke by Ron Desantis (the Republican Florida Governor who chartered the flight), in that it demonstrated liberal hypocrisy and racism. In their mind, the left is lying when we claim to support human rights — or at the very least, the left would quickly drop their pro-migrant beliefs if a “blue state” were ever faced with migrants. That is the “hidden truth” that conservatives believe this plane of migrants revealed; the truth that nobody really cares about migrant lives and dignity, at least not when it’s their own community on the line.

The only problem is that none of it is true.

On September 14th, 50 legal migrants awaiting asylum hearings were given gift cards and told that, if they got on a plane to Boston, they would be given jobs and housing. They boarded the private planes, which were chartered by Ron Desantis at the cost of tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars, and were followed the whole way by a Fox News crew, hoping to film their arrival. Before being flown out, immigration officials appear to have lied about the migrant’s addresses on forms, making it extremely difficult for those migrants to complete their fully legal applications for residency.

Once the migrants arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, the response was anything but xenophobic terror — at worst, it was concern and confusion. Immediately, the local community organized shelter in a local church, donated food from a local restaurant, and provided the migrants with clothing. Students studying AP Spanish at a high school nearby were given the day off to help interpret, and the Church even organized a Catholic mass that night.

The three biggest pieces of evidence for the alleged liberal xenophobia and terrified response to the migrants provided by conservative outlets are:

1. This video (linked above) of a local homelessness activist calling for the migrants to be moved somewhere with greater resources.
2. The “state of humanitarian emergency” declared by local officials.
3. The calling in of the national guard and the bussing out of the migrants that followed.

For total clarity, let’s go through each:

1.) This video is being compared to “build the wall” and “deport them all” type rhetoric on the right, as a way to justify those views and point out liberal hypocrisy. However, even watching only the portion that has circulated on the right, she is clearly not calling for the migrants to be deported from the country by force, nor is she saying the migrants are any kind of “threat.” Having run homeless shelters on the Vineyard, she is painfully aware of the lack of low income housing available even to locals on the island and knows that there are areas (like Boston, and even San Antonio) that do have dedicated infrastructure to house migrants like these.

To be totally clear, however, I think there is a valid criticism of liberals here. Martha’s Vineyard is incredibly wealthy and is covered by unused housing. I would absolutely support the construction of new housing on the island, or even the forced repatriation of the empty mansions to working people who live on the island all year round. Any liberal who opposes that is a hypocrite.

2.) The state of humanitarian emergency was not called by local officials because they believed that the migrants presented a threat. It was declared on behalf of the migrants who, again, were lied to and flown thousands of miles away to a location without infrastructure to house them while their fully legal asylum applications were processed. Some conservatives have rightfully wondered “If 50 people once is a humanitarian crisis then what is 5,000 a day?” I agree! There is a humanitarian crisis at the southern border, and we should respond with policies proven to lower the cost to the US government and local communities, protect the economy, and prevent crime. That is to say: we should respond by opening our borders and making citizenship far easier to get.

3.) The national guard was called in by Republican Governor Charlie Baker, not a liberal official, and the movement of the migrants from Martha’s Vineyard to a facility closer to Boston was fully voluntary. There is no basis, outside dishonesty, to claim they were deported by Democrats.

Given the above, it is extraordinary and, frankly, terrifying to see the extent to which conservative media has stuck to their thoroughly debunked narrative. They know it is a lie to claim the Martha’s Vineyard community responded with racism, or to suggest the migrants were deported. They know the whole scheme of flying migrants to liberal strongholds is based on the lie that only Republican states are dealing with migration (California and New Mexico also share the southern border, and for what it’s worth, Florida doesn’t).

I have two explanations for that dishonesty.

For one part, conservative media have an explicit agenda which they will advance at any cost. Billionaire funders like the Koch brothers desperately want to turn Americans to the far right (in order to gut welfare and lower wages) and will gladly lie to stoke fears about immigration if that would win a few votes.

But for another, and possibly more disturbing explanation, it seems conservatives cannot compute the idea that there are people who do not fear migrants. Fox News flew along in that plane because they expected to catch liberals in Massachusetts revealing their secret disdain for migrants. They expect that all people share an ugly racism in their hearts that can be hidden by rhetoric, or by naivete, but never truly extinguished. Faced with evidence directly contradicting that worldview, what choice do they have but to reject reality itself? The alternative would mean considering that their hateful ideology that permits massive systems of racism and abuse to persist isn’t, in fact, natural and correct.

We have reached a point at which conservatives no longer bother looking for truth before producing their narratives. In this case, the conservative web of lies was woven well before there was even time to see how Martha’s Vineyard responded. Only a dedicated campaign to support independent media and pressure major outlets to call lies what they are has a chance of overcoming this terrifying conservative fake news machine.