Once again, and very likely not for the last time, Haitians find themselves in the crosshairs of the Republican propaganda machinery. This time the slurs pivot on a malicious and utterly racist falsehood involving debunked allegations of migrants making meals of stolen pets in Ohio.

And it’s not just the deranged Donald Trump who is advancing the lies. Republican leaders nationally are engaged in a coordinated assault targeting Haitians specifically.

It’s a disgusting display.

Sadly, people of Haitian descent here in the United States are accustomed to being the targets of white supremacists, who have long targeted Haitian immigrants with tired-old tropes that seek to cast them as both subhuman and a threat to the white hierarchy of the United States.

One can draw a direct line from Donald Trump and JD Vance’s current attack to the earliest days of the Haitian republic, when the successful Haitian revolution horrified the still-young American republic, which enslaved millions of Africans for six more decades after Haiti’s slaves freed themselves.

Haiti – and its diaspora – have never recovered from the affront of casting off their chains and the audacity of challenging the white man’s presumption of a permanent world order, one in which Blacks would forever be the lesser people, the subjugated, the ruled.

For two-and-a-half centuries American leaders – Democrat and Republican alike – have nursed this existential grievance by hobbling Haiti with debt, military invasion and occupation, and relentless interference in its domestic affairs, all with the intent and result of US domination.

Despite their many contributions to our workforce, economy, and culture, Haitians who have migrated here have been frequent targets of abuse.

Until the Trump era, perhaps the most egregious example was the myth advanced in the 1980s that sought to scapegoat Haitians as being somehow culpable for the AIDS epidemic, a state-sponsored fallacy that singled out and stigmatized this immigrant group with no evidence. It was all, of course, false –much like the latest nonsense spun out of Springfield, Ohio.

Pastor Nicolas Hoimicil, a Haitian-born minister who is the bishop at Mattapan’s Voice of the Gospel Tabernacle summed up the feelings of his flock and his family this week:

“All of us feel terribly hurt,” he told The Reporter.

“Donald Trump,” the pastor reminds us, “doesn’t live in the world of the truth. But I am also fearful and very concerned. Even though he expressed a lie, he has so many people who cannot see the truth. And it is shameful for any American who accepts someone being so hateful to other people like this for no reason.”

It is shameful. And all Americans should pause and reflect on what it portends, not just for this upcoming election, but for our collective futures.

The insidiousness of this latest assault is a grotesque throwback to the nativism of earlier centuries and should be familiar to other immigrant groups, like the Irish, who were for decades portrayed by nativist propagandists as apes and brutes, incapable of living among “real” Americans.

The lies that mainstream Republicans have seen fit to propagate in the last week target Haitians, but all Americans should be revolted by what it says about them and their disdain for what Abraham Lincoln called “the common right of humanity.”

Bill Forry is the executive editor and co-publisher of the Reporter. Linda Dorcena Forry, a former Massachusetts legislator and first Haitian-American to serve in the Massachusetts State Senate, is the co-publisher of the Reporter. Photo by Lee Pellegrini/Boston College