The news out of Haiti the past few weeks has not been very good.
This should come as no great surprise, as the news out of Haiti has not been very good for the past 200 years or so. It is, of course, one of the most miserable and destitute places in the world: 60% of the country lives below the poverty line. The average life expectancy is under 65. I could go on listing depressing statistics, but that’s probably not necessary.
And yet somehow, recently, life in Haiti has gotten even worse. The situation has sunk below Haiti’s already extremely low baseline. If you lived in the country, you would right now be pining for the old days when you were merely miserable, starving, and destitute. That was far better than what’s happening now.
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What’s happening now is that the Haitian government, to the extent that it ever existed, has collapsed. Violent gangs have taken over the country and are prowling the streets executing people at random. The Washington Post describes the scene:
On a ride through the gang-controlled streets of Haiti’s capital on Friday, past an improvised barricade, the motorcycle taxi reached a crossroad. First came the smell — of something burning. Then, the sight: a corpse, charred black, lying in the middle of street, its bones and feet sticking out of the pile of ash. The night before, Jimmy Boursiquot, a carpenter who lives nearby, heard two gunshots. Peering carefully out his window, checking his watch — it was 8:24 p.m. — he saw two men drive away, leaving the body behind, not far from a university administration office and one of Haiti’s largest telecommunications companies. A few hours later, he said, the men returned and burned the remains. The streets of Port-au-Prince reek with the stench of the dead. It’s a grisly new marker of the violence and dysfunction in this beleaguered Caribbean nation of 11 million people. In the absence of a functioning state, violent armed gangs have taken control of more than 80 percent of the capital, the United Nations estimates. Gunfire crackles at all hours. Residents who dare leave their homes stumble across bodies that have been left where they fell. Port-au-Prince reached a high of 92 degrees on Friday. The smell of decaying corpses, human rights activists say, has driven some people from their homes.
It’s a terrible picture. And it only gets worse, the more you look. Consider the guy who has now seized control of the country — a notorious gang leader going by the moniker “Barbecue” — who has launched a war against the remnants of the Haitian government while attacking prisons and freeing thousands of violent criminals in order to then recruit them into his gang. And if you’re assuming that there must be some horrific reason why the Haitian warlord has been nicknamed “Barbecue,” you’re right. It’s exactly what you think. Reportedly, he earned the name due to his habit of setting people on fire. In fact, Barbecue has been basically the de facto leader of Haiti for a while now. This is in spite of the fact that, nearly a year and a half ago, the UN leveled sanctions on Barbecue.
As NBC News reported at the time, it was a move that was supposed to bring about “more peaceful days”:
Well, shockingly, that didn’t work out. The sternly worded letters to the third world gang leader named Barbecue somehow didn’t have any noticeable effect. Barbecue didn’t listen to the UN press conferences and read their letters and say, “Gee, you know what? These folks are right. I should stop brutalizing innocent people.” That was not his response, which no doubt came as a shock to the UN.
Now things have gotten so bad that, according to reports circulating all over social media, the violent gangs terrorizing Haiti have even resorted to cannibalism. That’s the thing about Haiti. If it has proven anything over the past couple of centuries, it’s that a bad situation can always get worse, and then the worse situation can get even worse than that.
Unfortunately for us, here in the United States, Haiti is a violent, war-torn failed state that happens to sit not very far from our own borders. Which means that we have already been taking in thousands of illegal Haitian migrants every year, and those numbers are only going to go up.
How many of the illegal Haitian migrants are members of the brutal gangs terrorizing their country? How many are escaped prisoners? Now we must even apparently ask: how many are cannibals? These are questions that the Biden Administration certainly won’t concern itself with, and hasn’t concerned itself with. We will be called to open our arms to the downtrodden Haitians, even if that means our arms will be chopped off and eaten for breakfast.
But that’s not the point we’re focusing on right now. As important as the point is. Instead, recent events in Haiti have prompted a bit of a trip down memory lane for some conservatives on social media, who have reminded us about one of the many frivolous, media-invented controversies of the first Trump Administration.
You may recall that, way back in 2018, the Left became outraged and deeply offended when it was reported that President Trump had referred to Haiti as a “s***hole” — or craphole, as I will call it. According to reports at the time, Trump referred to Haiti and other third world countries as crapholes during a discussion on immigration. It was one of the many times when Trump reportedly said something that every normal American either has said, or would say.
Certainly, no normal person, if they heard someone in their everyday life call Haiti a crap hole, would respond with shock and horror. “How could you say that about Haiti?! It’s a wonderful place!” That’s not how any normal person would respond. But the media is not comprised of normal people which is why there was a lengthy outrage cycle which was over the top and histrionic even by the Left’s current standards.
The media proceeded to spend several days defending the beauty and majesty of the great nation of Haiti. There were many headlines like this from Mother Jones: “Despite It All, Haiti Is Still Not a Craphole.” And this from the Washington Post: “This is how ignorant you have to be to call Haiti a ‘Craphole.’” By the way, the title of the Washington Post article I read at the start of the monologue is: “Haitians shot dead in street and there’s no one to take the corpses away.” What a difference a few years makes. I wonder: can we call Haiti a craphole now, or would that still be “ignorant”?
But back to 2018, where this became a subject of discussion and condemnation on the late night alleged comedy shows as well. Here was Stephen Colbert registering his objections:
Yes. Amen. Donald Trump isn’t the president of Haiti. Instead the de facto president of Haiti is a genocidal warlord named Barbecue. And he’s so much better than Donald Trump. After all, Donald Trump will use vulgar language that hurts your feelings. Barbecue will hack you into pieces and throw your mangled body into a bonfire. Which, I’m sure we can all agree, is greatly preferable to having our feelings hurt.
But Colbert wasn’t the only late night host sticking up for Haiti. Conan O’Brien was on the case as well:
Absolutely. Lovely people. Even the cannibals. They are the loveliest cannibals the world has ever seen. And Conan didn’t stop there.
He then embarked on a campaign to defend Haiti’s reputation. It was a campaign that even had its own merchandise:
Just as a general rule here, if you can “make a difference” for a country by selling t-shirts, that’s a pretty good indication that it is not, by any reasonable metric, a great country. A second general rule is this: if a country is a failed state stricken by mass poverty and run by criminal gangs led by a guy named Barbecue, it is not a great country. It is not a great country now. And it wasn’t back then. Despite the claims of leftists who are so determined to oppose Donald Trump on every single point that they were even baited into pretending that Haiti is a utopian paradise.
My dream is that, if Trump wins in 2024, the first thing he’ll do is declare that it’s not a good idea to get into a rocket ship and fly directly into the Sun, so that Stephen Colbert will try to prove him wrong on that point too. “Oh yeah? You think the Sun isn’t a good place to visit? At least Donald Trump isn’t president of the Sun,” Colbert will declare moments before being incinerated.
Not to belabor a point that normal people don’t need explained in the first place, but, no, Haiti is not a great country. The word “great” in this context may have some ambiguity to it — people can define great in different ways — but at the most basic level a great country is one where its people are generally able to thrive and prosper. “Great” can mean more than that, but it must mean at least that. It is incoherent to describe a country where almost nobody prospers as “great.” It is much more coherent to describe such a country as a craphole. Indeed, you can usually detect the craphole countries, and distinguish them from the great countries, because people from the craphole countries are always trying to get into the great countries. It never goes the other way around. There has never been a flood of illegal migrants from the United States going into Haiti. The flood has always gone the other way.
And of course that brings us back to the most important point in all of this. The end result, the self-fulfilling prophesy we might say, which is that America becomes less great the more that it allows unchecked immigration from the very not-great countries. We are not a craphole like Haiti. But import enough of Haiti into this country, and we might eventually get there.
Then we will be the utopia that Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien dream of. Then maybe they’ll wear “America is Great Already” hats. And walk proudly down the street in that attire. Before they are descended upon by the cannibal hordes and promptly consumed. That’s what greatness is to them, apparently.