Friday, September 13, 2024

Extraordinary Republican Delusions and the Madness of MAGA (We need to talk about the pet-eating thing)

(If I lose you in the middle, go ahead and skip to the end. That's the weird part.)

I know I got a bit cute with the title, but there really is something extraordinary going on here, much of which sounds like something from Mackay.


 The past few years have been a great deal to raise the bar on abnormal, but the popular delusion about immigrants stealing and eating household pets still more than meets the standard. It's important that you hold on to that initial sense of shock because the abnormality is a key part of the story, particularly if we want to get our heads around the weirdness of the rest of it.

Even before Tuesday night's debate, this delusion was widely accepted among Trump supporters, to the extent that those who don't believe are accused of being either liars or dupes.



MAGA started making sense to me when I realized that owning the libs was just about the need for attention, like a toddler breaking a favorite toy so you'll stop ignoring him.

(Johnson is both MAGA and a known Russian asset, so double points.) 

 



Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a CalTech physics PhD, and a big deal in Silicon Valley.

 

Draino is a big deal in Trump's world.

 







Springfield is now a part of Trump's standard stump speech along with surprise gender reassignment operations.

 

And at least one state GOP organization is spending money to brand itself with the lie. 

In what ought to be a headline in The Onion but is instead a clear reminder of the deplorable state of political discourse from MAGA world, the Arizona Republican Party has launched a billboard campaign declaring that only the GOP opposes eating kittens.

I wish this was just monkeyshines, but it’s very, very real.

The billboards, which ape the iconic Chik-Fil-A billboards featuring cows encouraging people to eat chicken sandwiches instead of hamburgers, are quite insane. The purpose, AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda crowed in a press release, is to highlight “disturbing stories” about illegal immigrants perpetrating “unthinkable behavior” in Ohio that acts as a “sobering reminder of the stakes” in the election.

It’s all hogwash.




 


 

For the people of Springfield, this popular delusion is having real and horrifying consequences.






And, as promised, here is the weirdest part of the whole very weird story. It went from being a rumor almost no one had heard of outside of that corner of Ohio to being one of the defining beliefs of MAGA in literally a matter of hours

From NewsGuard's Reality Check:


Lee’s since-deleted Facebook post first appeared in a private Springfield Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information” earlier this month (Lee could not recall the exact date). The post said: “My neighbor [Newton] informed me that her daughters [sic] friend had lost her cat. … One day she came home from work, as soon as she stepped out of her car, looked towards a neighbors house, where Haitians live, & saw her cat hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat.”

(However, Newton told NewsGuard that the connection to the acquaintance was not through her daughter.)

The claim jumped from Facebook to X on Sept. 5, when a conservative user named @BuckeyeGirrl posted a screenshot of Lee’s post, with Lee’s name redacted. 

On Sept. 9, city officials said they had no evidence of pets being stolen, injured, or eaten by the immigrant population in Springfield. In an emailed statement to NewsGuard, a city official said: “In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Nonetheless, on Sept. 10, the story reached the national stage. “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,” Trump declared as fact during the debate. (He was fact-checked in real-time by debate co-moderator David Muir of ABC News.)


How JD Vance Turned The Conspiracy Machine On Haitians In A Small Ohio City by TPM's Josh Kovensky

Dorsainvil has lived in Springfield, Ohio, since 2020, and heads the Haitian Community Help and Support Center there, an organization that assists recent immigrants to the area. He’s part of a wave of 20,000 Haitians that, city officials say, have recently moved to the town, which had about 58,000 residents according to the 2020 census. Resentment toward the newcomers has been simmering among some longtime residents, Dorsainvil said.

But it wasn’t until Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) suggested in an X post on Monday that the Haitian community was abducting and feasting on local pets that the harassment spiraled out of control. (Springfield authorities have made clear that they have no reports that anything of the sort is happening in the town.)

“We get the threats through our telephones, people telling us get the F out of here,” Dorsainvil told TPM. “It happened since yesterday after the tweet of the vice president, the man running for vice president.”

It’s been a surreal experience for Dorsainvil, but Vance’s tweet seized on a conspiracy theory that has been bouncing around the right-wing echo chamber. The core allegation that Haitians in Springfield had “abducted and eaten” pets followed a meandering path, from local Facebook groups to the online, right-wing influencers that Vance follows, and onwards to the current vice presidential candidate.

It’s an example of the engine that drives modern right-wing politics: wild and false claims start off scattered across the internet, before being vacuumed up and boosted to mass audiences, sometimes by high-profile politicians whose status as public figures lends credence to what, only days before, had been random, unverified posts.


Just to be clear, were talking about this Monday. Before Vance's tweet, virtually no one had heard about this urban legend. Within 24 hours after that, it had become unquestioned truth for the Republican base. In an extreme and somewhat ironic example of the Mandela Effect, Donald Trump had convinced himself he had seen television interviews about a popular delusion he had first heard about the previous day.

If that's not a case for the social scientists in the audience, I don't know what is.


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