The Making of the MAGA Hoax About Pet-Eating Haitians

It exposes the movement’s racist foot soldiers and indicts anti-woke conservative intellectuals like Chris Rufo and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

City mural in Springfield, Ohio (Credit: CiEll, Shutterstock).

When Donald Trump sensationally accused Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian immigrants of stealing and barbecuing their neighbors’ household pets during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, the story was already national news. The day before the debate, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, who had already been murmuring about the community in the months prior, catapulted the new allegations into the national spotlight.

While these claims have been thoroughly debunked, the story refuses to go away—largely because Trump supporters keep trying to spin the fiasco in his favor. In the most recent chapter, Trump surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy showed up in Springfield for a town hall meeting where he brushed aside questions about the racist hoax spread by Trump and Vance and pushed a subtler xenophobic narrative blaming immigration-friendly policies for local problems.

From the Bowels of Far-Right Discourse to GOP Talking Points

It started with an X hatefest I happened to catch at the outset. On Sept. 7, a full three days before the debate, I saw left-wing-crank-turned-right-wing-loon Naomi Wolf share a post from misinformation superspreader End Wokeness (an account that may be run by far-right troll and Pizzagater Jack Posobiec), containing what seemed like an obviously made-up story: “ducks and pets” in Springfield, Ohio being gobbled up by Haitian migrants. The evidence: an anonymized Facebook post about a “neighbor’s friend’s daughter” who had seen her lost cat being carved up by the Haitians next door. I decided to post a sarcastic comment, unaware that I was wading into a dumpster fire.

In response, my replies were inundated with racist and antisemitic posts such as:

Some users tried to “own” me by sharing a video of an Ohio woman apparently killing and partially eating a cat in August. Relatively big names like anti-woke obsessive Wesley Yang and right-wing anti-immigration crusader Nate Hochman (the guy who got fired by the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign for sharing a video prominently and favorably featuring a Nazi “sonnenrad”) rebuked me for not acknowledging the video as corroboration. Never mind that the cat-eating incident happened in Canton (some 175 miles from Springfield) and involved a lone, clearly mentally ill woman, not a family calmly carving up a kitty carcass in its front yard. (X user Alice From Queens lampooned this discourse by pointing to a white, native-born American killing and trying to eat a dog in New York, implicitly daring anti-Haitian posters to extrapolate from that case onto white people in general.) Oh, and also: there was no evidence that the woman was Haitian or an immigrant. In fact, she was later confirmed to be a Canton native.

What I didn’t know is that “They’re eating pets!” was just the latest in far-right attempts to whip up an anti-Haitian panic. As Robert Tracinski points out for The UnPopulist, “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because [the neo-Nazi group] Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians for a year now.”

Enter JD Vance, boosting the rumors that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country” (consistently rebutted by Springfield police and the Republican city government) in an obvious ploy to harness anti-immigrant animus for electoral gain. “Vote for Trump to save the cats” memes proliferated, shared by prominent Republicans including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. And then Trump himself picked up the cause before a national TV audience with the now-infamous, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Springfield’s Struggles

In subsequent days, Vance both defended the pet-eating claim on the basis of supposed accounts by “constituents” and shifted the goalposts by asserting that the real point of the story was to draw attention to “the suffering of the American people” in places like Springfield that legacy media had been allegedly ignoring.

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JD Vance's Weird Plan to Disenfranchise Childless Cat Ladies

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Yet, in fact, The New York Times had done an in depth report on Springfield four days before the cat-eating rumor started spreading on X and six days before it was amplified by Vance. The Times piece reported that the influx of Haitians, while revitalizing the town, had also created pressures on “housing, schools, and hospitals,” including a spike in Haitian patients at a health clinic from 115 in 2021 to 1,500 in 2023, an increase in costs for translation services from $43,000 in 2020 to an estimated $436,000 in 2024, growing expenditures on language programs in schools for Haitian students, and a rise in rents.

As the Times noted, many of these tensions exploded in August 2023 after a school bus crash caused by a Haitian immigrant driving with a Mexican license not valid in Ohio, in which an 11-year-old boy was killed and nearly two dozen other children injured. Multiple grievances and suspicions were vented at city commission meetings. (The boy’s father recently implored “morally bankrupt politicians,” including Trump and Vance, to stop using his son’s death “for political gain.”) 

The real picture in Springfield is not easy to sort out. Did 20,000 Haitians really “flood” or “overwhelm” a city with a population of 58,000 in just two or three years? In fact, it’s apparently 15,000-20,000 immigrants, 10,000-12,000 from Haiti, in all of Clark County, which has a 136,000-strong population. It’s not clear how many of them arrived after 2021.

Are the Haitians undercutting local workers because they’ll work for low wages, perhaps thanks to government subsidies? Are they pushing out local low-income renters because of a government program that pays the landlords? Doesn’t seem like it: the Haitians, legal immigrants who are mostly in the Temporary Protected Status program introduced under George H.W. Bush, have work permits and generally work at market rates, and there is no indication that they get housing subsidies. (Most people with Temporary Protected Status are not eligible for federal housing assistance.)

As Kevin Williamson puts it in The Dispatch:

With the Haitians working overtime … landlords who had been participating in affordable housing voucher programs widely used by the preexisting (largely white) population of Springfield began shifting to offering their properties on a market-price basis, and found Haitian renters willing to pay. From the traditional conservative point of view, the Haitian story in Springfield is, at least in part, a success: Hard-working people got jobs and put in a lot of hours and drew assets out of the subsidized welfare-state economy into the free market. Which is great if you are the ghost of Milton Friedman but a real inconvenience if you are an underemployed denizen of Springfield looking for a subsidized housing arrangement and unwilling to match the [Haitians’] work ethic...

Both Williamson and investigative journalist (and The UnPopulist contributor) Radley Balko have done deep dives into the story of Springfield’s Haitians. They haven’t been “shipped to” or “dropped on” the city by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—language that drips with contempt for the agency and humanity of migrants. Mostly, they came, often from other locations in the U.S. such as Florida, after learning that jobs were available and rents were low; Springfield had been actively trying to attract employers and workers, including immigrants, since 2014. The Haitians haven’t depressed local wages—quite the opposite. Nor have they caused a surge in disease or crime (a time-dishonored racist trope). Generally speaking, Haitian immigrants in the United States tend to do quite well, on a variety of measures from employment and children’s educational attainment to crime.

The picture in Springfield isn’t entirely sunny, even apart from the strain on schools and social programs. Claims of a sharp rise in shoplifting and motor vehicle theft from 2021 to 2023 are based on authentic police records (obtained and publicized by the far-right and unreliable Daily Caller, but undisputed so far), though there is no data to show that migrants are to blame. Williamson notes that even enthusiastic supporters of the Haitians complain about poor driving by migrants who are either generally inexperienced or unfamiliar with U.S. traffic laws. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has been generally supportive of the immigrants, recently directed the state highway patrol to “address the increase in dangerous driving in Springfield by inexperienced Haitian drivers and all others who disregard traffic laws” as part of a package of measures to help both the migrants and the city.

Anti-Immigrant Animus and White Nationalist Tropes

It’s difficult to tell how widespread animus toward Haitians is in Springfield. What’s clear is that whatever real migration-related problems there may be, the backlash has often taken the form of blatant and raw bigotry.

Tracinski and others have documented the role of Blood Tribe, an actual neo-Nazi group, in amplifying this bigotry. On Aug. 10, about a dozen Blood Tribe members held an “anti-Haitian immigration march” in downtown Springfield, waving swastika flags; on Aug. 27, a member of the group, using a racist pseudonym, spoke at the Springfield City Commission meeting to declare that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in,” but quickly got himself ejected for using threatening language.

But set aside the Nazis and take a look at what a local Republican activist named Glenda Bailey, at the forefront of the anti-migrant backlash, has said at city commission meetings. (One story identified her as a “Republican committee woman,” but her name doesn’t seem to be listed anywhere in any official capacity.) Some of Bailey’s comments about “low IQ” Haitians “occupying our land” have been quoted in outlets like NPR and the Times; but those brief quotes don’t come close to conveying the full and loathsome flavor of her rhetoric, drenched in more or less overt white nationalism and racist conspiracy theory.

Here she is at the July 30 meeting:

Haitians will soon be the majority population in Springfield. Nowhere on the planet is it acceptable for another culture to create a majority population by replacing the native population. Should Israel be forced to accept a new majority population of Africans? ... Should China be forced to accept a new majority population of Brazilians? Leftists would be throwing screaming fits if this were the case. Only white populations are expected to accept and welcome foreigners of a different culture to overtake them as the majority. … Haitians are occupiers in Springfield, and taxpaying citizens have become their economic slaves.

Practically every word here is a white nationalist trope—including the singling out of Israel as an example of open-borders hypocrisy, particularly laughable because there are plenty of African Jews whom Israel does welcome. There is also the race-flipping invocation of slavery in the claim that Springfield’s white population has been turned into “slaves” to the black Haitians. (The 17% of non-immigrant Springfield residents who are black are ignored—except when Bailey gleefully points to a black perpetrator of an anti-Haitian hate crime.)

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JD Vance Is Ready to Remake America in MAGA's Image

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White nationalist themes were even more overt in Bailey’s remarks at the Aug. 13 meeting, when she shrugged off the incursion of “alleged Nazis” and accused local “leftist whites” and the NAACP of a sinister racist agenda—that is, the replacement and even “extinction” of “Springfield’s white population”:

Whites comprise 6.5% of the world’s population and white countries and communities have been targeted for destruction by the same groups. Ireland is burning, Great Britain is a police state for whites, literal white genocide is happening in South Africa, and white countries are losing their ethnic identities.

The speaker who followed Bailey, Shannon Stanley, started out with nostalgic reminiscences about her childhood in Springfield but quickly moved on to describing the Haitians’ presence as an invasion of pests. The immigrants, she insisted, were “living their life here the way they did in Haiti: angry, stealing, polluting, living in filth, and acting like animals.”

These are the people with whom Trump and JD Vance have aligned themselves in Springfield.

To their credit, Ohio’s more old-fashioned normie Republicans such as Gov. DeWine and Springfield Mayor Rob Rue have openly challenged the immigrant-bashing. But it is also worth noting that some local Republican officials, presumably in a more MAGA mold, have helped stoke the anti-Haitian hysteria. In two interviews in July, Jeannette Chu, executive chair of the Republican Party of Clark County, speculated that Haitians were being brought to Clark County for some ulterior reason—perhaps because the county was heavily Republican—and insinuated that they might be involved in sexual trafficking, repeating the urban legend about traffickers with vans stalking women at Walmart.

Misinformation as Corroboration

In recent months, the city commission meetings in Springfield also became a platform for wild rumors about Haitian immigrants—including dramatic tales of gastronomic atrocities. Stanley, for instance, claimed that Haitians were not only “pulling off the highway to publicly clean and gut the roadkill” and stealing and chopping up farm animals, but “making some barbaric stew out of the birds that live in our park.” Another resident, Anthony Harris, asserted that “Haitians are in the park grabbing ducks, cutting the heads off, and eating them.” A lot of this material ended up in videos circulated on the right in a desperate scramble to confirm the cat-eating story: Cats, ducks—what’s the difference? The clip of Harris was especially popular because he’s black and his complaints about Haitian migrants couldn’t be blamed on racism. (Never mind that he’s a trollish YouTuber, or that the only mentions of Haitians on his X account refer to bad driving.)

Even a cursory look at these lurid narratives should have shown that none were based on personal knowledge of such behavior; the “witnesses” were simply regurgitating rumors they had heard (as Anthony Harris has since admitted). And yet Wesley Yang, once a serious journalist before his descent into “heterodox” crankdom, insisted in our X exchange: “All the claims at city council meetings of wild animals being killed and eaten from regular citizens both black and white are inherently credible. There is no reason to doubt them.”

(Also jumping on this bandwagon: conservative pundit Wil Reilly, a professional skeptic about hate crimes but not, apparently, about anti-migrant atrocity porn. At least Reilly did later concede that “this ‘cats’ thing” makes the right look dumb.)

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MAGA's Ever-Shrinking Definition of Who Counts as a 'Real' American

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The Federalist, once a semi-respectable conservative publication that has gone full MAGA, dug up an Aug. 26 police call in Springfield about Haitians allegedly snatching geese at the park. Apparently, the investigation into this report came up empty. What’s more, the report itself—made amid rampant rumors of waterfowl theft by the Haitians—has many details that invite skepticism, starting with the caller’s focus on the alleged goose-snatchers’ ethnicity. He starts by saying that he saw “a group of Haitian people, there was about four of ‘em, they all had geese in their hands.” He also says he didn’t write down their full license plate number, only the last four digits, because he was driving by in a hurry to get to a job orientation—but he did manage to hear that they were speaking Creole and identify them as Haitians.

Meanwhile, X owner Elon Musk amplified the anti-Haitian narrative by boosting a video in which Christian TikToker Rebekah Faidia claimed that her father, from whom she was estranged, emigrated from Haiti in the 1960s and told her about voodoo and animal sacrifice in the island nation—which she took as evidence that the claims of pet-eating made by Trump and Vance are being too casually dismissed.

Perhaps the most creative attempt to validate Trump’s and Vance’s claim came from anti-woke conservative superstar Christopher Rufo, who offered a $5,000 bounty for “hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.” What did he find? One African immigrant in Dayton, Ohio, some 26 miles from Springfield, may have grilled two stray cats—or maybe they were chickens; the video is fuzzy, and despite Rufo’s claims of “multiple witnesses,” only one person, the maker of the video, says he saw cats on the grill. Rufo reported it as “migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio,” and Vance crowed his supposed vindication.

Lessons from a Hoax

By now, the cat-eating story has collapsed as completely as a story can collapse. The woman who made the original Facebook post about someone’s cat being eaten by Haitian neighbors has deleted and retracted, saying it was based on garbled fourth-hand rumors. The photo of the man with the goose which appeared in the same viral X post as the Facebook screenshot was taken in Columbus, not Springfield; the man is not a migrant, and it turns out he was removing two geese that had been hit by a car.

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Trump's Attack on Haitians Borrows From Neo-Nazis

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What about the Springfield woman who called the cops about a missing cat which she thought might have been eaten by her Haitian neighbors—and whose report was cited by Vance as evidence? She found the kitty in her basement, alive, well, and uneaten. Also, it turns out that when Vance amplified the pet-eating rumor, the Springfield city manager had already told him the claim was baseless.

Yet the GOP presidential candidate, his running mate, and many other high-level Republicans have used it to unleash a hate-storm more blatantly and disgustingly racist than anything seen in national American politics in decades. Not only were Haitians explicitly targeted as a group: the label of Haitian migrant was readily slapped on any black person who fit the narrative, such as the Columbus man with the goose and the mentally-ill cat eater in Canton.

Some Trump supporters are still trying to keep up the spin. Maverick-liberal-to-MAGA convert and The Free Press commentator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, has blamed the bomb threats that have shut down schools, government offices, and other institutions in Springfield in recent days on a shadowy “they” who are trying to make “the Springfield/Haiti story … go away,” because it exposes “Kamala Harris’s border ideology.”

But in the end, it’s Trumpian populism that stands exposed by this story as a hateful and essentially fraudulent brand of identity politics. After Springfield and the cat memes, the GOP ticket looks ridiculous, bigoted, mean-spirited. Vance’s insistence that he will continue calling the legal immigrants in Springfield illegal—is just plain weird and vicious. But that ticket could still have the last laugh if Trump wins in November, carries out his pledge to deport those immigrants, and continues to make the Glenda Baileys of this world feel that their repugnant views represent America.

© The UnPopulist, 2024