The Republican Meltdown on Martha’s Vineyard

It’s how it worked in the American South in the early 1960s, when, as you may have read in recent days, some white Southerners organized “Reverse Freedom Rides” to send Black people north on exactly the same logic used by today’s GOP governors. And it’s how it works in Russian troll farms, which, as The New York Times reported Sunday, worked to sow division among participants in the 2017 Women’s March by having writers who “posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.”

Republicans have hit new low after new low in recent years, really over the course of this entire century. But this is something different. This callous stunt signals a new phase. The American right has long been trying to create an alternate reality to actual reality. They’ve just never used suffering human beings to do it. We still need to learn more details about who Perla is and who hatched this plot. I suspect that when we do, we’ll see that their motivations were born of malevolence, hatred, and—remembering that this is all about obtaining political advantage in the midterms—fear that the voters will deliver a genuinely democratic verdict against them.

Meanwhile, the people of Martha’s Vineyard—and beyond; remember, these buses have been coming north for a few months now, months during which the response among Northerners has been to try to get these people the assistance they need—have met a crisis manufactured to embarrass them and score political points with decency and civic virtue.