Once Again, Grieving Parents Forced To Beg Bigots (Trump, Vance) To Stop Exploiting Their Child's Death
Incredible how they don't feel remotely gross about doing this.
Just over a year ago, Nathan Clark lost his 11-year-old son Aiden in a car accident. Now he has to deal with another kind of heartache, the kind brought on by hateful bigots who are thirsty to use his son’s death as a cudgel against immigrants — because the driver of the vehicle that struck Aiden’s school bus was a Haitian immigrant.
It’s been bad for a while, with Ohio wingnuts trying to blame his son’s death on immigration — but it’s gotten worse this week since Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance made it a national story, wrongly claiming that Aiden was murdered rather than killed in an accident, in hopes of justifying the misinformation he delighted in spreading about immigrants eating people’s pets.
Now, Nathan Clark is pissed the fuck off. During the public comment period at a Springfield City Commission meeting on Tuesday, Clark got up and let loose on those who have spent recent days trying to use his son’s death for their own political gain.
He said:
I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. And I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt. But if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone. The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces.
But even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem as though our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate. That we should follow their hate. And look what you’ve done to us? We have to get up here and beg them to stop.
Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose. And speaking of morally bankrupt politicians, Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump, they have spoken my son's name and use his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.
They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis, and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.
I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies.
To clear the air, my son Aiden Clark was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti. His tragedy is felt all over this community, the state, and even the nation. But don’t spin this towards hate.
Nathan Clark should not have had to give this speech. No grieving parent ever should.
But Mollie Tibbetts’ father had to do the same thing. God knows how many other families have had to do their same over the last few years as right-wing anti-vaxxers have claimed that anyone who “died suddenly” was killed by the vaccine.
But unfortunately, this is something that just keeps happening because people like this are so desperate for a tragedy they can use to justify their nonsense. They don’t care that being an immigrant has nothing to do with getting into a car accident, they just want so badly to be able to make their cause look moral rather than hateful.
And it’s not. Remember, these are the same people who fly into a rage over gun control advocates (many of whom are the parents of children killed by guns) talking about gun control after a mass shooting. The same ones who get furious over people “using” victims of police brutality to call for police reform. This is why you will see them so often mimicking the response to those sorts of tragedies in their own responses to tragedies they are desperate to exploit. They’ve fallen quite madly in love, for instance, with using the #SayTheirNames hashtag for their own ends.
Except the thing is, people call for gun control because they want to people to stop dying in mass shootings, because they want to decrease the suicide rate, because they are sick of stories of toddlers accidentally killing themselves or others because someone didn’t bother to secure their gun. No one would have a problem with guns if these were not issues, just like deaths from police brutality are the reason people want police reform. If the police were not killing unarmed people, no one would be protesting the police killing unarmed people.
Speaking of the police killing people — you know who kills a lot of people with cars? The police. One investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle found that from 2017 through 2022, police chases (many of which occur for non-emergency purposes) resulted in the deaths of at least 551 innocent bystanders. But you’re not going to see these people who are now pretending to care about the death of Aiden Clark getting upset about that or talking about how to prevent that, because they’re not actually angry about a kid dying, they’re angry about immigrants.
People like JD Vance, like Chip Roy, like Bernie Moreno and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, and people like Donald Trump have been using this same template for over 100 years now — against every wave of immigrants, against people of color, against religious minorities, against anyone else they have no other justifiable reason to hate. It’s always the same story over and over again, and it never makes more sense than insinuating that no one would die in car accidents were it not for Haitian immigrants or claiming that immigrants are eating people’s pets. They will never have anything remotely more connected to reality than that, because bigotry is inherently stupid.
They don’t call it ignorance for nothing.
I just keep thinking back to Vance's indignant "fuck you" in support of his ugly blood libel about this very topic. Hey JD Vance, fuck you with a rusty whale-sized dildo. Fuck you so very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard. There is not enough karmic retribution that can come fast enough.
Jo
@JoJoFromJerz
Republicans will hand a 6 year old a gun, send a 12 year old to work in a meatpacking plant, force a 10 year old to carry her rapist’s baby to term & allow a grown man to marry an 11 year old, but do go on about how it’s the Democrats who aren’t keeping our kids safe, won’t you.