The right-wing media firestorm that Sen. JD Vance helped unleash on Springfield, Ohio, may have died down, but his constituents already have reaped the disastrous consequences of their toxic lies. 

The New York Times reported Monday on the heavy costs local resident Jamie McGregor and his family have endured due to the businessman’s praise of his Haitian immigrant employees. McGregor, described by the Times as “a lifelong Republican who voted twice for” Donald Trump, has experienced “death threats, a lockdown at his company and posters around town branding him a traitor for hiring immigrants.” From the article: 

A flood of threats was directed not only at him, but his family and his business.

They came by the hundreds — phone calls, emails and letters from white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other people they had never met.

“The owner of McGregor Metal can take a bullet to the skull and that would be 100 percent justified,” said one message left on the company voice mail.

“Why are you importing Third World savages who eat animals and giving them jobs over United States citizens?” another asked.

The Times reported that FBI agents visited McGregor’s business unannounced to warn him  “that some of the threats on social media were credible and that he must take precautions,” and security experts recommended the family “vary your driving routes to work, school and other places,” and “don gloves and use tongs when handling and opening mail.” 

McGregor’s family was the collateral damage of the furious right-wing media smear campaign targeting the city last month, in which a local Facebook poster’s wild, thirdhand rumor about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets spread through the MAGA fever swamps to Vance, the Fox News propaganda machine, and Trump himself, who amplified it at the September 10 presidential debate.

The Springfield story promptly collapsed, with public officials at every level saying that the claims were false. 

But the MAGA pundits refused to either admit their error or to let the tale die, even as death threats rained down on the McGregors, bomb threats targeted Springfield’s public institutions, and Haitian immigrants feared for their safety. Instead, they spent days scrounging about for anything resembling evidence that the Haitian population was corrupting the city. Vance, meanwhile, touted his ability to “create stories” that drive media attention to the purported horrors of immigrants and criticized the “disgraceful” reporters trying to get a handle on his lies.

The right does seem to have finally moved on, and as Springfield left the national debate, the Times reports that the threats abated. But the McGregors and their neighbors won’t soon forget what it was like to become the target of the MAGA media. 

And with a new lie about immigrants seizing the interest of the right-wing commentariat late last week, there will likely be more victims in the days to come.