Right-wingers this week spread a racist, pixelated Facebook meme that appears to only serve the purpose of stoking hate and driving turnout among the base: white folks threatened by change and people of color.
This week’s viral post from the Republican Party? A screenshot from Meta’s flagship web property claiming that someone’s neighbor’s daughter’s friend — that’s not a joke but the actual attribution — had “lost her cat” to immigrants from Haiti, who it was said had eaten the animal. That was sufficient for former President Donald Trump and his campaign to fire up their racism machine and claim that the good, majority-white people of Springfield, Ohio, were being terrorized by 20,000 immigrants from Haiti who had recently settled there, legally and with authorization to work (revitalizing what had been an economically depressed town, per local employers).
Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point Action, which is leading the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, shared the screenshot with his 3.3 million followers on X, where the false claim was amplified by billionaire owner Elon Musk (who previously asserted that migrants from Haiti are cannibals). Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, picked it up from there, the public official relying on a meme (“reports”) to claim that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
“Please vote for Trump,” stated an image featuring two cats that was shared on X by another public official, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, “so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”.
“Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!” chirped the official account of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
As is well known, it is wrong for immigrants to kill mammals outside the confines of an American slaughterhouse, where they are by contrast encouraged if not expected, even as children, to carry out the assembly-line killing that results in plastic-wrapped “meat” showing up at the local grocer and being consumed by red-blooded Americans. Haitians have broken this social compact, the viral story goes, even going so far as to kill local ducks — ducks! — without first force-feeding them to fatten their livers, the latter being the civilized, Michelin-star method of killing and consuming the animal.
The only problem — and only a problem to those outside the right-wing media bubble — is that none of this is true. According to Springfield police, “there have been no credible reports or specific claims of beings being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” per a statement shared with NBC News.
But that these claims are false will cause no embarrassment among those who promoted them with one goal in mind: to frighten more white people into voting against a woman of color. Vance, recall, falsely claimed that an Algerian woman competing in the Olympics was in fact a man, asserting that this was Vice President Kamala Harris’ vision for America before demanding that she condemn the future Gold medalist; when the claim fell apart, Vance moved on without apology to the next manufactured outrage.
Caring about poor defenseless creatures is usually coded as liberal and beta and perhaps even a plot to make us all eat more bugs and soy. Recall that Vance, prior to take up the mantle of animal rights, was mocking single women as “childless cat ladies.”
“Now he is the great protector of cats,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Tuesday, earlier expressing confusing over the jarring pivot. “First he hates them, then he likes them, then he’s trying to save them. I don’t get it.”
It is not all that hard to grasp, however. Women who choose cats over babies, in Vance’s telling, are betraying their biological duty; cats are a permissible target of scorn because it is in service of misogyny. But if the purpose is demonizing immigrants, the feline can then serve as a stand-in for the (white) women who must be protected from the barbaric other.
“President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets,” the Republican’s official campaign account posted on X. “Kamala Harris will send them to your town next.”
Haitian-American Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., called Vance and Cruz "disgusting" for spreading the baseless posts.
“And I say that be cause these are senators who are educated men, they have enough common sense to actually look into the issue and find out if it’s true, and they have a responsibility not to be spreading lies," she told CNN. “So I think that’s a disgusting thing to do, especially when you’re in such a high office, to intentionally spread these lies."
She also noted that Cruz is the son of a Cuban immigrant and Vance's wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
“I would expect this from somebody or people who had no connection to immigrant families, someone who didn’t know how hard we work and how we really push forward,” she said. “That’s who I would expect it from, but not from, you know, the son of an immigrant, nor someone who’s married into a family where you see the hard work we do every single day.”
The Trump campaign has not been subtle in its efforts to exploit racial fears and resentment in this campaign. Echoing white nationalist rhetoric about immigrants, it has claimed that a President Harris would “import the third world,” depicted in one ad as a group of Black men juxtaposed with the idyllic suburb that they would presumably annihilate. “Haitians are eating cats” is the same ad — Trump’s only ad, really — with a topical addition.
Although Republicans appeared to have fun mocking people who fled poverty and violence to build a better life in the United States of America, there is nothing amusing about what we are witnessing here: a major political party, as a collective whole, seeking to dehumanize a marginalized population ahead of what its openly authoritarian leader, Donald Trump, is promising will be a “bloody” campaign of mass removals. In 2024, the GOP cannot be accused of merely inciting acts of violence against immigrants; its candidate for president is vowing to carry them out himself.
