Two weeks ago, a white nationalist named Drake R. Berentz was booted from a city commission meeting in Springfield, Ohio, for making threats. Shortly after, racist claims aimed at the state’s Haitian community began to surge online, boosted by known disinformation outlets and eventually echoed by GOP officials.
The unfounded narrative that Haitian immigrants were eating pets reached national attention after being repeated this week first by Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance (the junior senator from Ohio) and then his running mate Donald Trump at the latter’s debate with Kamala Harris.
The origins of the conspiracy theory remain largely unknown, but a New Lines investigation has identified several points of amplification from known spreaders of disinformation. Its fairly rapid spread reveals how extremist narratives travel from the fringes of the internet into the mouths of politicians, seemingly overnight.
Less than a week earlier, End Wokeness, an account on X (formally Twitter) that has been connected in the past to the white nationalist Jack Posobiec, shared a Facebook post alleging that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. The claim was quickly repeated by the political commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, during his broadcast hosted on Steve Bannon’s media network.
Kirk commented that this brought the United States “one step closer to the great replacement,” referring to a white nationalist narrative that claims non-white immigrants are replacing white people in the U.S. The narrative was originally obscure but has been increasingly embraced by the GOP mainstream in recent years.
Kirk is a close associate of Posobiec. Both his claims and the End Wokeness account’s tweet reference a single anonymous post on a private Facebook group as proof of their claims.
This was followed up on Sept. 8, when the End Wokeness account tweeted a video from a Springfield City Commission meeting where an influencer and podcaster named Anthony Harris claimed Haitian immigrants were eating ducks in the parks. This seemingly spawned from a repurposed image of a man holding a dead Canada goose in Columbus, Ohio, taken a month before.
A few days later, Fox News host Trace Gallagher repeated these claims on his Sept. 9 evening program.
The racist narrative went viral in right-wing internet spaces, and AI-generated images of Trump holding cats flooded X. The official account of the House Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority even shared one of these images.
Known disinformation outlets like InfoWars and Zero Hedge immediately shared the claims made online. Several outfits republished the same story copied and pasted from Zero Hedge.
Within the first few days, at least 14 different articles were published, almost all of which referenced the tweet from End Wokeness as their main source. About six of these sites were monetized and ran ads next to this content, primarily through Google Adsense.
The story from Zero Hedge was reposted on at least eight other sites, several of which don’t disclose where the article originally came from.
Public figures like Vance and Elon Musk were quick to repeat these claims, prompting Ohio officials to dispute them.
Now, this narrative has reached national attention. Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Ohio. When corrected on stage, Trump opted not to back down, instead stating, “Well, I’ve seen people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food. 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.”
“The people on television are saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” Trump said. “We’ll find out.”
After the presidential debate, Vance doubled down, claiming that constituents in Ohio were calling his office to report their missing pets. Vance not only repeated the claims but attempted to position himself as part of the community that spreads them.
“The media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats,” Vance said in a post-debate interview with CNN.
Late last month, a neo-Nazi group called Blood Ties organized a march outside the Springfield Jazz and Blues Festival. At the Aug. 26 city commission meeting, Drake R. Berentz took credit for organizing that march while introducing himself via an anti-Black pseudonym. He was promptly removed from the hearing after stating, “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”
Springfield has seen an influx in population over the past four years, about a quarter of which is made up of Haitian immigrants. Whether this makes Springfield symbolic of Rust Belt resurgence differs along partisan lines.
Blood Tribe has since allegedly begun celebrating Trump’s comment on the conspiracy theory on the debate stage. However, the accusation that Haitians were eating pets in Ohio may not have reached GOP ears without the amplification that the End Wokeness X account and Kirk provided. They were the earliest spreaders of the private Facebook post and subsequent accusations. The bulk of junk news and fake news sites sharing these claims link to at least one of the tweets from End Wokeness.
Fake news sites, right-wing influencers and GOP leadership appear to have formed a circular echo chamber around themselves. False claims are circulated and amplified by disinformation outlets and would-be political actors before being brought up and legitimized by GOP officials and political candidates. The current state of X makes it a powerful incubator for conspiracies. This machine that churns out hate and fear is particularly effective when amplified by GOP officials and the platform’s owner.
The relationship between Republican officials and “alternative” media is not new, but the GOP’s official embrace of extremist narratives blurs the line between how the Republican Party discusses immigration and how organized neo-Nazi groups do. It doesn’t take much for the former to begin repeating the latter when their media ecosystems become connected.
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