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Opinion: The lanternfly law of American politics
You have probably heard the news. New Yorkers of all ages have become gleeful, merciless killers.
On the streets. In the subways. In the parks. Even in their own homes. The massacres here continue, with no end in sight.
But it’s not what you think.
The tens of thousands of nameless dead are in fact Spotted Lanternflies, nickel-sized insects with kimono-like layers of spotted gray, black, and fiery-red wings. “A sexy cicada,” as my colleague Riley Callanan aptly describes them.
And the trouble with the Lanternflies around here is simple: they’re out-of-towners.
Native to Asia, they’re believed to have hitched a ride to the US on a shipping container about a decade ago. The population exploded across the Northeast, along with concerns about their impact on forests and farms.The Lanternflies, it turns out, secrete a gooey honeydew that foments deadly fungi.
Experts began warning of billions of dollars in damage. And so local governments urged us all to kill them on sight.
People listened.
Today, if you point out a lanternfly on any New York sidewalk, stoop, shirtsleeve, subway platform, or slide, people will spring into action: stomping, swatting, crushing, squashing. The bloodlust for this tiny creature is immense. As one popular science magazine put it, we must “destroy this useless garbage insect ... without mercy.”
Even the youth have been conditioned to kill. My 8-year-old son told me yesterday a girl in his class has declared herself head of “The Lanternfly Committee.” Her primary responsibility in this role is to scream that there are lanternflies around whenever there are lanternflies around. And when there are lanternflies around, all committee members (and present non-members) must stomp them into oblivion.
I will say this – it can be cathartic to stomp the shit out of lanternflies. Boss chewed you out at the office? Stomp a lantern fly. Mets blew a lead in the ninth? Die, lanternfly. Fed up with your kids asking you about lanternflies? Stomp more lanternflies.
No one is sure if all this killing is really controlling the lanternfly population, but so what? We aren’t just venting – we’re doing our part for society. This violence is virtuous. The killing must go on. And it will.
In that sense, I think there’s actually a little of the lanternfly in our politics more broadly these days. Call it the Lanternfly Law of Politics. It says: our opponents are no longer simply people we happen to disagree with, they are a threat that must be wiped out before they can do more harm.
You see this kind of thinking everywhere these days. Depending on what your views are, you might see liberals, or conservatives, or Donald Trump, or Kamala Harris, or the media, or the tech companies, or the police, or the federal government itself as a menace steadily devouring the foliage of our society.
As a result, in response, our political culture is becoming more extreme, more violent. People on the left will point to January 6th or the broader increase in threats of rightwing terrorism in recent years. People on the right will point to the not one but two plots to kill Donald Trump that occurred this summer.
We should all point to this as evidence that we are in a bad place.
Perhaps nowhere is the Lanternfly Law more obvious, or more dangerous, than in the language used to describe immigrants. When Donald Trump describes his political opponents as “vermin”, or immigrants as parasites who are “poisoning the bloodstream” of our country, he is tapping into a rich, vile history of demonizing foreigners as invasive species.
It’s powerful, of course, because it works. True vermin and invasive species are, by definition, threatening to our organisms, our communities, our ecosystems. So that kind of language taps deep into our lizard brains and provokes a primal emotional response.
But we aren’t … lizards, we are human beings. And immigrants or people you disagree with politically aren’t vermin, they are … also human beings.
We can argue about sensible rules for immigration, abortion, speech, guns, Lanternflies, whatever. But giving ourselves permission to dehumanize our neighbors and rivals like this is always dangerous.
The Lanternfly Law is, in the end, the root of all demagoguery: it’s a kind of political conjuring trick that gives people license to express their basest impulses under the cloak of civic virtue or community protection. You aren’t behaving like an ideologue, a loon, or a psychopath, the Law of the Lanternfly says, you are defending society as you know it.
So the next time a Lanternfly scuttles by or settles down, by all means stomp it to death if that makes you feel good.
But when it comes to the way we speak and think about our politics and society more broadly, be careful before you go chasing those sexy cicadas.
The New York migrant crisis up close
Since 2022, New York City has absorbed more than 170,000 migrants, mostly sent on buses by Texas officials from the US-Mexico border. Many of them are asylum-seekers who hail from South American countries facing political and economic upheaval, like Venezuela and El Salvador. But increasingly, people from Asia, western Africa, and the Caribbean have been making the difficult journey to the US via the southern border as well.
Unlike other so-called “sanctuary cities,” New York has a legal mandate, known as a consent decree, that requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who asks for it. But the already under-funded, under-resourced system is struggling to deal with the influx of so many people. Adding to the chaos, in October, the city changed its policy to require everyone in the shelter system to reapply for a bed every 30-60 days. For asylum seekers already trying to navigate byzantine legal and healthcare systems, the instability can have devastating consequences.
That’s why grassroots organizers like Power Malu of Artists Athletes Activists, Adama Bah of Afrikana, and Ilze Thielmann of TeamTLC have been stepping up to fill a major gap in the city’s immigration system: greeting arrivals, pointing them towards resources, providing food and clothing. Most crucially, they're help people understand their rights and apply for asylum, so they can get work permits and find permanent housing.
Speaking from the front lines of this crisis, the organizers say the city isn't fully meeting the needs of the migrants coming here, despite spending $1.45 billion on migrant costs alone in 2023. "The illusion is that they're in these beautiful hotels and they're getting all of these services and it's not true," Malu says, "That's why you have organizations like ours that have stepped up and had to change from welcoming to now doing case management, social services, helping them with mental health therapy."
GZERO’s Alex Kliment spent time on the ground with newly-arrived asylum-seekers and the volunteers to better understand the reality on the ground, how this current crisis getting so much national attention is functioning day to day, and if the city could be doing more to help.
GZERO has reached out to City Hall for comment and will update with any response.
Learn more about the organizations mentioned in this report:
Catch this full episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on public television beginning this Friday, March 15. Check local listings.
- Ian Explains: Why Congress can't fix the US border problem ›
- The US border crisis at a tipping point ›
- NYC Mayor takes on Texas migrant buses ›
- “This will destroy New York City”: What the Big Apple’s immigration crisis tells us about the 2024 elections ›
- Will Biden's immigration order help border control...and his campaign? - GZERO Media ›
“Everything is political” is personal: the NYC migrant crisis
“Do you know,”
Jhon asked me, shivering slightly in the lengthening afternoon shadows of New York’s Penn Station, “do you know if we can stay here – in America?”
Jhon is a wiry 42-year-old construction worker who fled Ecuador a month ago with his wife and four children. The recent surge of narco-violence there had gotten so bad, he said, that the local school switched to virtual classes for the safety of the students and their parents.
Now, after a trying journey by foot, boat, bus, and train, he was standing in the middle of New York City, bewildered but hopeful.
“I just want to work,” he told me. “I don’t want anyone to take care of me or to rely on anyone else. I just want to be able to work.”
But in those early moments, Jhon and his family did need help – to find their way to New York’s intake center for migrants seeking shelter, to learn to navigate the city’s byzantine health and legal systems, to stay on track with their asylum applications.
In that way, he is like many of the more than 170,000 undocumented migrants who have arrived in New York City over the past two years, most of them on buses from Texas.
The city government says it’s struggling to deal with the influx. Mayor Eric Adams has warned that providing services to the migrants will “destroy this city” and cost more than $12 billion. But a small group of grassroots non-profits has stepped up to welcome, orient, and support the new arrivals.
I met Jhon while shadowing Power Malu, an Afro-Puerto Rican activist from New York’s Lower East Side, whose Artists Athletes Activists organization is one of the subjects of a new report I’ve been working on for our TV show “GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.”
Nearly every day and night for almost two years, Power’s been at Gotham’s various bus and train stations, welcoming migrants like Jhon, giving a guiding hand to people who arrive in a city of millions after a journey of months and simply don’t know whom to trust or where to go.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent many hours with Power and other activists in New York – like Adama Bah, a formerly undocumented migrant from Guinea who has built the largest Black-oriented migrant services network in the city (a big deal given that migrants from Haiti or West Africa are chronically underserved by systems geared mainly towards Latinos), and Ilze Thielmann, who started a free “store” that gives clothing, strollers, and toiletries to recent migrants.
Along the way, we met people like Igor, a refugee from violence in Burundi who left behind a cushy job as an IT manager and traveled through Mexico on foot with his pregnant wife to get to the US. He finally got asylum several weeks ago.
Or Brandon, from Venezuela, who braved the treacherous Darién Gap and the constant gauntlets of extortion, kidnapping, and violence in Mexico on his journey to New York, and who now works with Power to welcome others who followed the same route.
Why did my producer Molly Rubin and I pick this subject? Migration is now the top political issue in America. A recent poll showed close to three in 10 voters say border policy is their primary concern, topping the list for the first time since 2019, and outstripping other perennial contenders like “the economy,” “inflation,” or the always exciting “crime.”
But when it comes to the crisis at the southern border and its impact on Northern cities, the gigantic numbers can dull your sense of what is actually happening here: A story about “millions” of migrants crossing the border, or the “billions” of dollars it will cost, is still a story about individual human beings, with names, who have lived stories of tremendous suffering, perseverance, and dedication.
“Everything is political,” we often say at GZERO. And that’s true. But everything political is ultimately personal too. If it’s not, why would it matter at all?
This is one story that Molly and I hope will drive that home. You can check it out here, and let us know what you think.
Learn more about the organizations mentioned in this report:
Tom Suozzi speaks at an election rally in Floral Park.
Why New York’s special election is getting special attention
Long Islanders are heading to the polls on Tuesday to replace disgraced Republican Rep. George Santos.
The special election between Republican Mazi Pilip and Democrat Tom Suozzi is a test run for upcoming state and national elections. Both parties want to show they can win on issues like immigration and abortion in the battleground district.
In recent state elections, abortion has been a rallying cry for Democrats when restrictions have been on the ballot. But in Long Island, which isn’t considering restrictions, the issue may fall flat. Pilip has said she supports a woman’s right to choose, taking the air out of Suozzi’s accusations that she is radically pro-life.
But immigration is a more tangible concern. Unlike the rest of the country – where suburbs are trending blue – crime and, more recently, immigration, have turned Long Island red in the last three election cycles.
That’s why almost all of Pilip’s budget has been spent on immigration ads showing recently bussed-in migrants, attacks on police officers, and warnings of invasion. Suozzi is also calling to drastically limit immigration, mirroring his party’s tactical shift to the right.
Latino dreams, NY States of Mind
Hi there! Welcome back to our new daily feature, Midterm Matters, where we pick a couple of red-hot US midterm stories and separate the signal (what you need to know) from the noise (what everyone is yelling about). Enjoy and let us know what you think.
GOP looks to Latinos for upsets in Texas ... and beyond?
Republicans are betting on three Latina candidates to overturn decades of Democrat dominance in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Dems are still the party to beat, but Republicans have made major inroads with Latino voters in South Texas, seeing double-digit swings to the GOP between 2016 and 2020, when Trump spoke to local Latino voters’ anxiety about disorderly immigration and the impact of Democrats’ climate agenda on the energy industry there. This time, GOP candidates are also appealing to local voters’ conservative and Catholic values.
Nationwide, there’s a lot of noise about Dems' advantage with Latino voters fallingfrom 40 to 27 points since 2018. That’s because the GOP has begun to more effectively campaign among Latinos beyond the reliable Republican bedrock of South Florida Cubans (even if their outreach to them is still catchy as hell.) And with 40% of Latino independents undecided, there are lots of votes up for grabs.
But while Latinos are now the second-largest — and fastest-growing — ethnic/racial group in America, the signal is this: they are hardly a monolith, politically or demographically. For example, Latinos of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin tend to vote blue, while Cubans and Venezuelans skew red. Evangelical Latinos, a rapidly growing community, are overwhelmingly Republican, while two-thirds of Catholic Latinos vote Democrat. Second and third-generation Latinos tend to tilt more Republican, though younger generations across the board are more sympathetic to Democrats. Immigration matters to some Latino communities, while the economy or abortion is more pressing for others. In sum, as one super sharp 2020 study put it: “There’s no such thing as the ‘Latino vote.’”
NY governor’s race tightens
Democrats are noisily freaking out that Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin is closing his polling gap in the New York gubernatorial race against incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, with Empire State voters seemingly digging Zeldin's tough-on-crime message. The two took part in their first and only debate on Tuesday night.
Yet Zeldin winning is a long shot. The race has tightened, mainly due to Zeldin hammering his rival with daily press conferences about rising crime rates outside NYC subway stations while spending millions on TV campaign ads. But Hochul's lead remains well above the margin of error, a strong signal that she's likely to eke out a win.Democrat hand-wringing aside, a shock Zeldin victory would be a tectonic shift for deep-blue New York, whose last Republican governor was George Pataki (1995-2006).
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Florida skyrocketing COVID rates show lessons not learned: former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy
In a new interview with Ian Bremmer for GZERO World, former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy discusses how Florida went from a relatively low number of cases to the epicenter for the outbreak. Dr. Murthy says many states where cases are currently climbing did not heed "the lessons that we learned from New York." In this portion of the interview, Murthy also discusses new therapies and treatments that are helping the most severely ill. The complete interview begins airing on public television stations across the US on Friday, July 24. Check local listings and visit gzeromedia.com for more.