Heavy Petting
Hit dog hollers, lets cat out of the bag
So Donald went there. I didn’t think he would, not really, though I shouldn’t be surprised.
I’m talking, of course, about the “immigrants eating cats and dogs” thing.
Some people learned of this only through the presidential debate, as perhaps one of the best examples of TFG just flying off into WTF Crazyland and making folks double-take so hard that just the ensuing chiropractic treatments will boost the national GDP for this fiscal quarter, thus—finally—allowing Trump to contribute something to small businesses, health care, and the economy.
These people—those who first heard of the Great Ohio Pet-Nomming Epidemic of 2024 from a raving Orange Man on ABC—are not what we call “terminally online” or terribly engaged in the daily squabbles that define present-day politics.
I, however, probably am so engaged. I try not to be.
That is why I knew about said Epidemic the day before, thanks to Gary Legum:
I try really hard to be aware of right-wing awfulness without losing my goddamn mind, so I noted this new (actually very, very old) demonization tack, assimilated it into what I already understood about the Right, shook my already bobbled head, and moved on.
See, the Right has been trying and failing to pin something horrid on Harris/Walz for weeks and weeks. Truly, it’s been comical. A great deal of it has gotten some traction, if you look only at the demographic the Trump/Vance campaign is targeting: edgelords and butt-sniffers. Meanwhile, the hordes of normal, very smart, very fed up, very receipt-keeping people from all walks of life have simply been rolling over all the attempts to defame or scandalize the Democratic ticket like a deliciously indifferent katamari of joy + spite.
I mean, come on. It was the day before the debate. If you’re going to establish a scandalous narrative, you need more time than this to sink the hook. You can’t just Swiftboat out of thin air; you have to till the soil a little, set up a astroturfed organization, do some press conferences, generate a few headlines. And all the headlines were debunkings, although, by the morning of the debate, Parker Molloy1 wisely noted the debunkings still had the effect of letting the demonization in.
Molloy’s argument is that simply debunking the falsehoods is not enough. She points to Trump’s notoriously batshit remarks at Moms For Liberty’s Aug. 30 annual convention where he said, “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” Instantly debunked. Our work here is done, right? Nope. Parker writes:
This is the exact strategy conservative groups used with Trump’s false claim about gender transition surgeries. They’re fine with lies because they get the group they’re trying to demonize into the news. Check out this excerpt from CNN’s fact-check of those comments:
Tiffany Justice, the Moms for Liberty co-founder who conducted the public conversation with Trump, said in a Tuesday interview: “Are kids getting surgery in school? No they’re not.” But she continued that she was still “thankful to President Trump” for making the claim – since, she said, his remark has drawn attention to the important issue of schools facilitating children’s social transitions without parental consent.
Justice said of Trump’s claim: “It grabbed your attention, and we’re talking about it now, and that makes me very happy.”
See? It doesn’t matter if it’s true that kids are getting “transed” in schools or Haitian immigrants are eating pets so long as those stories can be used to demonize trans people and migrants, respectively. What matters to the right is that it is able to hijack the public’s attention, to “start a conversation” about the supposed problems caused by these groups, true or not.
What media needs to do instead is call out the frame and the strategy of the lies for what they are—intentional dehumanization in order to grab attention, shock, and generate headlines. Media both-sidesism then compels reporters or opinion writers to dispense with the “extreme” version of lunacy as if they are being reasonable, then open the door to coverage, discussion, and advocacy of subtler and more palatable-sounding attacks on marginalized populations, offering up excuses for bigotry that are fit for polite conversation. In this way, prejudice goes mainstream when it should be growing more and more taboo.2
And it works. Has worked, in the case of immigration in particular, for years and years. Trump owes much, if not most, of his political success to hatred and suspicion of immigrants, and he knows it, which is why he instructed his GOP lackeys to tank the very immigration deal they worked so hard to hammer out in Congress under Biden, the one that gave them virtually everything they wanted, but which would deprive Trump of most of his campaign fodder had it become law.
But the fact that Trump actually went there during the debate, putting all his weight on shall we say, the imaginary Haitian pet-eat fours when the lie was only about 24 hours birthed from the brains of the bog-dwellers of Bigotryville shows very much two things, I submit: (1) how much Trump lives online and in a bubble of bros who hail from Bigotryville himself, and (2) how badly beaten up he was by Harris in the debate. A savvier, saner, remotely sensate Trump should have known that particular piece of racism needed much longer to get its wobbly little legs under it before it could carry him, let alone make a damn lick of sense to people outside Elon Musk’s Nazified micro-blogging platform.
Which isn’t to say that the lie about Haitian immigrants in Ohio wasn’t put out there. Musk himself, who has the biggest megaphone on his Xitter (pronounced “shitter,” I believe), boosted it. JD Vance did as well. So did Senator Ted Cruz, whose name and persona rhyme with Ooze. So did the House Judiciary Committee Republicans (Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, et al). So did Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA and all other Turning Point yada yadas). I mean these assholes really tried to make it a thing. Kinda like “fetch.”
So, if you only learned about the Nomming Epidemic from the debate confabulation, good for you! You are relatively unburdened by the knowledge of how cretinously insane these people are. Unfortunately, you really should dip a toe in now and then, maybe listen to some folks who more frequently don hazmat wetsuits and swim in their sewers, then emerge, undergo decon protocols, and report on the horrors.
Because we’re not making this shit up.
Some folks focus more on the absurdity, for the mockery-fodder, and hoo-boy, there’s scads of that. I mean, just look at today’s memes! And if that’s all you take away from the episode, that’s fine. Laugh at these lunatics and please vote accordingly. I get that there’s buckets of stuff to be crushingly disappointed about with the Democrats,3 but we absolutely must keep people like Trump and Vance and the sick and wrong hangers-on they attract like corpse flies away from power. The United States isn’t just another country: it’s immensely powerful, and you don’t want delusional fascists running that show, especially now that they’ve got game plans to get their shit together and implement hellish goals.
Me? I focus on the ideological substance, which is why I initially blew off the Epidemic of Domesticated Animal Cuisine stuff at the eleventh hour. If it turned into something with legs, I could return to it, but these bastards throw so much spaghetti at the wall in hopes of some of it sticking…and I just didn’t think it would come up at the debate because I didn’t think Trump would break down that much to mention it.
But, as it turns out, according to The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, Noshing on Fluffy and Spot was supposed to come out in the debate. Just not the way it happened.
Okay, for this to hold water, you have to believe the debate strategists who helped prep Trump, people like Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Laura Loomer, as well as Caputo’s face-saving source, but here’s the tale:
If the moderators hit him for spreading a baseless urban legend about Haitian immigrants eating cats in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, the ex-president was supposed to execute a classic rope-a-dope strategy: He would dodge the punch and place the blame for the story on town locals; then he’d pivot to attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and the media over the toll of rampant immigration on housing, healthcare, and crime in Springfield.
It was all strategized in advance. There was just one problem: It required Trump to execute it.
But when the topic of immigration came up, the former president got sidetracked by taking umbrage with Harris’s insistence that he had uninspiring rallies. He then mentioned the possibility of World War III. Only after that did he launch into the rumors of pet-eating, and then without preparing viewers about the backstory.
“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating — they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.”
The entire episode ended up being less rope-a-dope and more a dope who had hanged himself with some rope. And Trump’s team knew it. Privately, Trump confidants sensed that the ex-president had missed a real opportunity.
“The [former] president was supposed to pivot but Trump blew it,” sighed one campaign insider who had been told of the never-executed debate tactic. “He was supposed to make her own the Biden record. That didn’t really happen.”
It was left to his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, to play cleanup and showcase the campaign’s strategy during an appearance on CNN 45 minutes after the debate had ended.
“This town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in . . . This is what Kamala Harris's border policies have done,” Vance said. “The media didn't care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats . . . If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we're going to keep on doing it because the media should care about what's going on.”
Side-notes here on Vance’s spin:
“Ravaged” — Bullshit. Read the press accounts. He’s trying to blame every social issue (housing costs) on immigrants. This is MAGA scapegoating bog standard. Remember in Hillbilly Elegy when he blamed every social ill on how poor whites lacked the gumption and character to improve their own lives?
“Kamala Harris’s border policies” — She’s not the president. She’s the veep. She doesn’t set immigration policy.
Haiti and the US do not share a border.
He’s trying to keep alive the “Kamala’s the border czar” meme the Right has been peddling, when in fact, Harris was tasked to work on improving underlying conditions that drove migration in other countries, not oversee US immigration policy about who gets in, how many, and under what circumstances. Moreover, the Haitians are climate migrants, so unless Kamala has godlike powers or a magic Sharpie, there’s not much she can do to spare Haiti from natural disasters.
If you want to try to conjure up some sympathy for climate sufferers, take a gander at Kansas images of the Dust Bowl. For the youngins, that’s when we were a “shithole country.”
Fuck you, JD, go impregnate some furniture.
As far as I can gather, the way the “rope-a-dope” was supposed to work was that Trump was supposed to tiptoe up to the line about Haitians in Ohio (?) to trigger a fact-check by the moderators (?) unless the whole thing hinged on the moderators just throwing out the fact check unprompted, and then Trump was supposed to enact the pivot to “Harris the border czar” and so on with the “substance.”
Weak sauce. Bad strategy to depend either on Trump executing either such a tricky double-axle or counting on a third party to say just the right thing to enable the gambit to go forward.
I mean, it could have worked, because our major media blow chunks, but it really ignores the agency of a lot of other parties involved and still relies on ignoring #1-5 above.
So if you want the Know Your Place backgrounder analysis, the heavier stuff behind all this, all you have to do is sample a few pieces that detail the ideological roots of why these guys always go to these unhinged, racist places. The TL;DR…
MAGA hates immigrants because they’re a nativist, ethnonationalist reactionary party of whiteness (and whiteness means an ideology more than it means just a skin color, folks).
They really hate Black immigrants because, well, Black!
Haiti has that association with voodoo and shit from Hollywood depictions, and Hollywood is as far as any American understands any other country or culture, and MAGA is a Christian Nationalist movement.
Haiti has a history of really pissing off and scaring the shit out of the white south by successfully self-liberating from French enslavement in 1804, and you can’t understand movement conservatism and the present-day MAGA folks without understanding neoconfederate bullshit.
Trump infamously referred to Haiti as one of his “shithole countries” in 2018, so there’s reverb for that theme among the MAGA faithful. It’s true that Haiti has been through the wringer, but it also has always struggled. I mean up from slavery at the outset, and then shackled by the French with the threat of invasion lest they compensate the people who enslaved them, resulting in a national debt they couldn’t get out from under for 143 years.
So here’s some other reading that goes deeper into the ideologies at play here.
Here’s John Ganz of Unpopular Front, recapping some potentially lost-to-memory stuff from the days he focuses on in his valuable book When the Clock Broke.
Ganz’s book is about the formative and prefigurative year 1991, more or less, the election contest among Ross Perot, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, when Pat Buchanan and David Duke were making noises and trouble, when the Reagan years revealed their now-forgotten economic hangover effects, and the first stirrings of Trumpism can be seen, per Ganz. He makes a compelling argument. In the piece above, he tells how, while the US was oh-so-sympathetic to the poor refugees from Cuba and mean ol Castro, we treated Haitian boat people differently, and the rhetoric from both Buchanan (a Trumpian figure if there ever was one) and Duke (who Buchanan consciously and admittedly copied) is just racist AF and yet would surprise absolutely no one in this, the Year of Our Lord, 2024, thank you GOP. Here’s Ganz:
Speaking about the Haitians on This Week with David Brinkley, Buchanan took an openly racial approach to the issue, opposing not just the admission of Haitians but blacks in general: “I think God made all people good," he said, "but if we had to take a million immigrants of, say, Zulus next year or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we are a European country…” David Duke had made similar noises, telling a Miami radio station that while Cubans were of “European descent” and therefore should be welcomed, Haitians should not be allowed in. Writing about the boat people in late 1991, Sam Francis recommended Jean Raspail’s sci fi novel about brown hordes invading white Europe Camp of the Saints:
Today the future is now. The Haitian boat people who sought entry to the United States by the thousands in the last few months are only a small part of the wave. While the Haitians are not yet coming in the millions, other illegal immigrants from Third World cultures are moving across the U.S. border in human herds that defy enumeration. Not since Genghis Khan rode out of the Asian steppes has the West - Europe as well as the United States — encountered such an alien invasion.
Not for nothing, that sounds a lot like something JD Vance might say today.
Gil Duran from The Frame Lab tackles how JD Vance endorses the book Unhumans by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. It’s a truly execrable screed from execrable people. Posobiec pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (which held that Hillary Clinton and others where, like, harvesting adrenochrome or whatever from child porn victims in the basement of a basement-less pizza joint) until a rando decided to show up with a big-ass gun and liberate the poor kiddos. Posobiec is regularly boosted by all the usual hideous people on the Right, of course.
Anyway, Duran walks through how Unhumans paints communists as dehumanized demons out to exterminate all good folks in the world. Since commies are all about equality, this means that anyone else who values equality is also a commie, so all Dems, progressives, liberals, et al, are therefore demons out to exterminate all good folks in the world.
So after Let’s Eat Mr. Fluffikins got boosted—but before the debate—Duran went back to Unhumans to examine just how Posobiec had treated the Haitian revolution and how he fit the Haitians into the dehumanized hordes of evil, equality-loving murderers framework. He predicted the next step in the propaganda effort would be to try to tie Kamala Harris to Haiti by association to Jamaica (where her father is from), because to Americans, they (Caribbean islands, of course) all look the same. Doing so would essentially replicate the Hillary-eats-children conspiracy from Pizzagate for the Harris campaign, only this time it’s Harris-will-(by proxy)-eat-your-pets.
(It’s all a descendant of the anti-semitic “blood libel,” really: Hillary milks and consumes children; pets are our “fur-babies,” and the immigrants—brought in by the “caravan” thanks to the Soros-funded Jewish “cabal” to “replace us” good, real American Christian white people—are now eating Spot and Mr. Whiskers. Pro-Tip: It’s almost never not a descendant of anti-semitism.)
Maybe that’s where they wanted to go with it. But Trump melted down and prematurely delivered that nonviable meme of a lie at the debate and pretty much guaranteed its demise. Now the world of normies is laughing.
Lest you think that Duran is paranoid, or that the ideas here flow strictly from elite influencers like Posobiec to the common folk in the stochastic terrorism model, historian Kathleen Belew (buy her book) note that this all kinda came about thanks to actual grubby Nazis surfacing this stuff as a potential issue that the folks like Vance, Don Jr. and the rest of TFG’s entourage picked up and then amplified, completing the feedback loop.4
Screenshots of Tweets by Kathleen Belew, thanks to D. K. for the heads-up here. For the articles in the tweets
Springfield city meeting sees protest, removal of Nazi group speaker
Tensions over Haitian immigration continue to be an overriding issue at City Hall meetings
A neo-Nazi is building a compound in rural Maine for his ‘Blood Tribe’
On the acres he bought in the nation’s whitest state, Christopher Pohlhaus aims to ‘rebrand the swastika’
Neo-Nazi and far right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric
Extremist groups are latching on to ex-president’s xenophobic messages to recruit people and spread ideology
And Parker Molloy is back, literally as I write this, to tell us that neither Duran nor Belew is crazy.
Yep.
Bomb threats targeting city hall, schools, and county offices shut down entire sections of the town. Haitian families reported being harassed in public, their children bullied at school. One woman told The Haitian Times that her car windows had been smashed and had acid poured on it. “I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart,” she said. “I’m anxious and scared.”
Pick the world you want to live in, folks. I know which one I want for my kids—and pets—to grow old in. It has a lot of Haitians in it.
Coiner of the term “sanewashing,” the media’s habit of translating Trump’s gibberish into something resembling a coherent statement, usually involving seances, mindreading, tarot, wishcasting, and complicity in rising fascism.
More, cowardly “progressives” fail to mount strong and principled defenses of the targets of these attacks, preferring to simply debunk, then cluck at the liars for their lies (which they never call lies, but rather an endless string of euphemistic and tortured synonyms). So instead of sticking up for trans folks or Haitian immigrants as positive, vital, important, beautiful, valuable, beloved members of our communities we would be poorer without, these fearful “allies” offer fairweather defenses against the worst slanders—sometimes—and at other times simply try to avoid the topic entirely.
Just some for-instances: after years of failing to adamantly and strenuously stick up for the positives of immigration; after running away like Brave, Brave Sir Robin every time the Right said the magic scare words “open borders” (instead of calling their bluff and helping to divide their libertarian wing by saying, “Ok, well, how come money and rich people can flow all over the globe but labor can’t? Shouldn’t actual human beings have as many if not more rights than fucking corporations?”); the Dems have allowed immigration to become their weakest issue and enabled the Right to surge and grow into its proto-nazi form largely by leveraging anti-immigrant sentiment as a wedge that allows them to open a door to all the other evils of their ideology. Now we’re to the point where Harris has pledged to sign the GOP’s harsh wet-dream of an immigration package instead of being able to point to Trump’s rejection of it as proof he only cares about the issue as a campaign issue.
CORRECTION: Apparently the “Blood Tribe” (really? can’t y’all just channel that energy into D&D like normal people?) glommed onto Springfield after Vance started giving the immigration issue salience, so we’re back to the stochastic terrorism model again: Vance called the nazis’ attention to it; they showed up and made it worse; some rando later said something about cats in a private FB group; Right-Wing Twitter jumped on that totally impeccable gospel truth source; Vance and everyone else boosted it just prior to the debate; Trump barfed it up like, what else, a cat with a hairball; bomb threats ensued in Springfield; JD then admits it’s bullshit but they’re going to keep promoting it anyway, for the media attention…meanwhile, Chris Rufo’s over there in Florida offering a $5k reward to anyone who can get proof of pet-eating by this Sunday. This is the GOP, people. You don’t have a party any more.