While Donald Trump made baseless, dangerous claims that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets in front of millions of viewers at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Johnson Salomon, a Haitian man who moved to Springfield in 2020, was watching cartoons with his kids before putting them to bed.

Trump’s running mate JD Vance, Elon Musk and prominent Ohio Republicans had already spread the false rumors, lying about how Haitian immigrants had been killing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, a blue-collar town of 60,000 people in western Ohio. But the rumors, leaving Salomon and other Haitians in fear of being targeted for violence and discrimination, didn’t start with them.

They were initially spread online in August on social platforms used by far-right extremists and by Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi hate group.

“Blood Tribe celebrated Donald Trump bringing up the [immigrants killing cats] lie during the debate,” said Maria Bruno of Ohioans Against Extremism, a non-profit founded last month in part due to a rising presence of extremists in Ohio. “They are thrilled that there are politicians willing to echo their talking points.”

Two leaders of a white supremacist group have been charged after allegedly plotting assassinations and terrorist attacks that they hoped would bring on a race war.

In a 37-page indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors on Monday, Dallas Erin Humber, 34, and Matthew Robert Allison, 37, were accused of leading a network of channels on the Telegram app that promoted "white supremacist accelerationism."

Court filings said the ideology was "centered on the belief that the white race is superior," and the leaders hoped to start a race war that would collapse the government to create a "white ethnostate."

...the MAGA Republican candidates for president and vice president claimed without evidence that the story [of Haitians eating dogs and cats] is true and put it on the national stage. Now Ohio Republican Attorney General Dave Yost says he is investigating, and anonymous people are threatening to bomb buildings in the city.

People eating pets is just the most recent outrage that the MAGA people want us to be thinking and talking about it.

MAGA people want us to focus on such things while they complete their assault on the American system of government. Their candidate, Donald Trump, has said our elections are rigged, and our Constitution must be replaced.

MAGA, supported by some obscenely rich people, wants its president to have the power to do anything he wants with no checks and balances from congress or the judiciary, and it is close to succeeding.

Two hospitals in Springfield, Ohio went into lockdown on Saturday morning, as bomb threats plagued the town for a third day.

Officials at Kettering Health Springfield and Mercy Health’s Springfield Regional Medical Center placed the two healthcare facilities on lockdown after they became aware of bomb threats made early on Saturday morning, prompting a search of the premises before they could re-open.

Bomb threats shuttered schools and government buildings, including City Hall and DMV offices, on Thursday and Friday, with evacuations and closures disrupting town life.

The threats come amid an onslaught of racist smears against a community of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, promoted by Trump, his running mate JD Vance and other far-right figures. Haitian Americans across the country have warned that the rhetoric is leading to threats of violence against their community, an assertion Trump shook off on Friday.

Donald Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, on Sunday to declare he hates Taylor Swift, five days after the global popstar endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris.

Former US Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) replied: "Says the smallest man who ever lived."

Political analyst Bakari Swift commented: "This is dangerous. Trump knows his words matter and he does not care. He knows threats etc will come her way."

When Swift announced her endorsement for Harris on Tuesday via Instagram, she wrote: "I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos."

Years before... Donald Trump seized upon the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, he insistently promoted another supersized falsehood -- namely that charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election were "a hoax." His minions in the media, from Fox News down to the lowliest web trolls, have incessantly parroted that lie despite the volumes of evidence uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan investigation and the special counsel probe by Robert Mueller.

But now a fresh indictment released by the Justice Department on Sept. 4 shows that the Kremlin conspiracy to rig U.S. elections in favor of the Republican Party is not a liberal myth but a live threat -- and that several of the most prominent MAGA media voices denouncing the "hoax" were themselves on the Russian payroll, taking big money.

The indictment describes in detail, with supporting documents translated from Russian, how Kremlin consultants and employees of RT, the state media outlet, directed at least $10 million in funding to a shadowy Tennessee firm known as Tenet Media.

In short, federal investigators caught "Russia, Russia, Russia" -- as a mocking Trump likes to say -- interfering yet again to prop up his campaign. And just as word of the indictment broke, [he] reiterated his promise to sell out Ukraine for a "peace" plan as soon as he wins election, even before he enters the White House. What Russia spent on Tenet would be pocket change compared with that return on investment.

This time around, Paxton is suing Travis County after authorities in the fifth-most populous county in Texas decided to hire Civic Government Solutions to contact non-registered residents and encourage them to register.

The lawsuits led by Paxton are part of a series of steps both the Attorney General and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have taken in recent weeks to "safeguard Texans' sacred right to vote."