American Voodoo

“Forget about the Haitians eating people’s pets in Springfield. That’s obviously completely untrue – they are actually practising Voodoo and raising the dead as zombies,” an anxious Trump campaign strategist has told The Weekly World Shopper. “The pet eating business was just misinformation – probably fed to us deliberately by scumbag Democrat infiltrators – and has, I know, made us look foolish. But believe me, the zombie stuff is real – they’re raising the dead and sending them out against decent white folks!” The strategist, Hank Prinnock, was reacting to the recent media furore which followed presidential candidate Donald Trump making the bizarre claims of pet-eating by Haitian immigrants – claims which threatened to make a laughing stock of the former president. Prinnock has been quick to back up his claims of zombies on the streets of Springfield with anecdotal evidence, arranging an interview with The Weekly World Shopper for Springfield resident Buck Hopstock, who claims to have first hand experience of the living dead. “I came home the other day to find three zombies eating my mother in the front room,” he claimed in the tabloid interview. “I knew they were zombies because they were dressed in rags and stank as if they were decaying. I also know that it was her Haitian neighbours who sent them – my mother had been complaining about them playing their damn Voodoo drums too loud for weeks!”

Many conservative commentators have expressed relief at this change of tack, feeling that it has put the Trump campaign back on track. “I just thank God that they saw sense. I mean, what was all that pet-eating nonsense about? Nobody was going to believe that crock. I’m just amazed that it wasn’t obvious to his campaign strategists from the start that the most obvious and convincing racial slur to aim at Haitians is that of Voodoo and raising the dead,” declared Reese Thumbold on his syndicated radio show. “It really makes me question the competence of some of those advising President Trump.” Even some liberal commentators have concurred with these opinions. “The failure to exploit the zombie aspect of Voodoo politically from the outset is simply yet more evidence of the general ignorance of right wing crackpots,” wrote Wes Trott in his weekly column in the Seattle Radical Examiner and Used Car Mart. “Certainly, it tells us that they don’t watch cheap horror movies from the seventies, where Haitians, (or, indeed, just about any black person), were always busy raising corpses for nefarious purposes. The thing is that never, ever, in any of these films did I ever see those Haitians eating cats and dogs, either as part of their zombie-raising rituals or just for fun – and I can tell you that cheap exploitation films never lie about such things.”

With their new anti-immigrant campaign having seemingly received the seal of approval from commentators and gutter press, they have wasted no time in doubling down on their claims about zombies. “It’s quite obvious that rises in crime rates in cities with significant Haitian communities are down to this zombie invasion,” opined Prinnock in another interview with The Weekly World Shopper. “Damn it, they are sending their black zombies out to murder white guys and rape their women! The only thing we can be grateful for is that they aren’t eating the cats and dogs of these poor people!” In a move seemingly calculated to stoke racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiments, Prinnock has further claimed that evil Haitian voodoo witch doctors are now raising white people from the dead as zombies. “I shudder to think what they are doing with them,” he told the tabloid. “Maybe they are committing necrophilia with them Or, they could claim that, in an equally gross out scenario. Maybe they are getting all those white zombies to perform demeaning acts for their amusement – even engaging in gross out decomposing orgies!” There are signs, though, that he might have overreached himself with the latter claims, which have been dismissed by some liberal commentators as a sort of gross out ‘black-brutes-raping white-women (and men)’ meme.

Other members of the Trump campaign, however, are busy trying to tie the whole Haitian immigrant issue in with President Joe Biden himself. “We have very good reason to believe that Biden has actually died in office, then been resurrected as a zombie by Haitian voodoo witch doctors,” Representative Abe Lumpfoot claimed during a Fox News interview. “The evidence is plain to see: his mumbling, barely animated, performance in the debate with Donald Trump, the way he shuffles around, not to mention the fact that he can barely manage to string together a coherent sentence these days. Look, is it any wonder that his administration and the Democrats in general, are in thrall to the immigrant lobby? The immigrants have the White House under their complete control with a zombie president in the Oval Office!” The Congressman further claimed that the Democrats’ current presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris is herself a Voodoo high priestess. “She’s black and has a foreign name – it’s obvious,” he told the horrified Fox News hosts. “She’s already got effective control of the White House via the zombie Biden – only a vote for Donald Trump can stop the sound of Voodoo drums over the White House becoming permanent!”

These comments have elicited a furious response from Democrats, who have branded them ‘idiotic’, ‘grossly offensive’ and ‘crudely racist’. “I don’t see where these Republicans get off in referring to Biden as being a zombie – have they looked at their own ranks in Congress?” asks Senator Tom Frimp. “I mean, just look at Mitch McConnell – he’s surely the very definition of the walking dead.” Frimp has also expressed scepticism that the Hatian rumours all originated with extreme right-wing political activist and self-styled ‘journalist’ Laura Looney, who, reportedly, currently has the ear of Trump. “While all this talk of eating pets and raising the dead is just the sort of crackpot idiocy she usually trades in, surely even she isn’t that stupid?” he muses. “As for those rumours that she has a hold over Trump because she’s pregnant with his child – utter nonsense! I mean, he’s so grossly overweight that he hasn’t seen his own penis in a couple of decades, so the idea of him impregnating anyone is ludicrous! Besides, even if he ever did get that thing cranked up again, all that would come out would be a puff of dust.” In Springfield, meanwhile, gangs of redneck vigilantes have apparently taken to the streets, shooting at anyone they suspect of being a zombie, despite the police pointing out that there have, in reality, been no reports of graves being disturbed or anyone’s pets or mothers being eaten.