Lies Absurd, and Telling

Posted on Tuesday 10 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The latest absurd Republican lie is about cat-eating Haitians, and they don’t care whether it’s true or not, they know it will rile up their base;
  • A Republican suggests that the Great Depression was planned;
  • An article that quotes Republican politicians about Trump, then and now, reveals cognitive dissonance.

Today’s Republican lie is surely one of the most absurd yet.

Vox, Ian Millhiser, 9 Sep 2024: JD Vance’s racist, cat-eating conspiracy theory, explained as best we can, subtitled “Apparently, when you are a Republican political candidate you can say literally anything.”

Republicans at the highest levels of government are pushing a bizarre message: that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating pets.

One of the most high-profile spreaders of this strange claim is JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee. On Monday morning, Vance posted on X the false claim that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” In the same tweet, he claimed that “Haitian illegal immigrants” are “causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.”

For the record, there is no evidence that any Haitian immigrant ate a cat in Springfield, Ohio, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. But the lack of factual evidence hasn’t stopped the GOP from pushing the nativist narrative, which seems designed to play off bigotry and suspicion against the mostly Black population of Haitian immigrants.

Presumably because Republicans know they can always count on the racism and xenophobia of their base.

Other headlines:

And this round-up this afternoon. The homepage title is “God, These People Have No Shame.”

Slate, Molly Oldstead, 10 Sep 2024: Yes, They’re Really Claiming Immigrants Eat Cats and Geese Now. You Can Guess Why., subtitled “A racist GOP scare tactic has taken over the internet.”

As we get closer to the election, the Republican Party is finding it increasingly politically useful to fix the public’s attention on the supposed dangers of immigrant populations. The Trump campaign keeps calling Vice President Kamala Harris the “border czar” in its attacks. (In actuality, Harris was tasked by the Biden administration with addressing the root causes of migration from Central America in 2021.)

Conservative media have played up stories of an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, that was supposedly taken over by a Venezuelan gang (it wasn’t), and the Heritage Foundation has pushed the idea that noncitizen voters pose a serious threat to the legitimacy of the upcoming presidential election (they don’t). On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victim Perspectives,” exploring “the effects of the Biden-Harris Administration’s open borders policies on American families and communities” through testimony from “victims of fentanyl poisoning” and “criminal illegal aliens.”

But no anti-immigrant scare tactic has captured the troll internet space quite like the Haitian pet-eating panic.

On Monday, social media was flooded with A.I.-generated images of Donald Trump holding kittens and ducks—and sometimes carrying them away from Black people giving them chase. The images, which as memes are meant to convey an own-the-libs kind of dark humor, are based on a false claim that has bounced around the conservative internet—that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating Americans’ pets.

In the first place, the claim is based on a single, fictitious, Facebook post. “Neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s cat” indeed. How much more dubious source could you imagine?

As racist misinformation goes, this instance of fake news is particularly vile and dehumanizing, in a kind of classically nativist way. There’s no dog whistle here—the bigotry is open and gleeful. The claim originated with a fictitious Facebook post about Springfield, Ohio, in which the user said that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s cat was cooked and eaten by Haitians. The post also said that Haitians were cooking ducks and geese in a local park. These claims were utterly false, but some people on social media conflated it with an unrelated story from Canton, Ohio, in which a woman killed and ate a neighborhood cat. The woman does not appear to be an immigrant.

In the second place, it doesn’t matter to Republican politicians, who are confidant their base consists of 1) people who shrug this sort of thing off as meaningless politics, and 2) people who really will be riled up to more evidence of the threat of immigrant hordes. Republicans count on them. And so, as this piece ends:

It was a tirade meant to stir up the fears that Trump loves to provoke. There was a political argument here—even if it’s a xenophobic one—based on the idea that migrant populations are straining public resources. The New York Times reported that in Springfield, the Haitian population has taxed certain institutions, such as the health care and educational systems, but that it simultaneously rescued the town’s flagging local economy. That kind of nuance is seemingly uninteresting to Vance, who indicated he cared less about the truth of the situation than in stoking hate. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” he wrote. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”

So why should anyone count on JD Vance to be honest about anything?

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Yet another.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 9 Sep 2024: This May Be the Kookiest Conspiracy Theory We’ve Heard All Year, subtitled “And that’s saying something.”

At this point, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s assertion that Joe Biden got dementia from the COVID vaccine, and Donald Trump’s careless promotion of QAnon, it’s tempting to think that many of our government officials have had their brains completely addled by internet conspiracy theories. But every once in a while, a politician comes along to remind us that our representatives don’t always need the internet’s help—they are totally capable of latching on to nonsensical beliefs the old-fashioned way.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, did just that in an appearance on a radio show that surfaced last week.

He refers to some book published in 1994 and mentions that “the Great Depression was pretty well planned.” And “I know it really sounds like a conspiracy theory. I don’t completely understand it. But it sure seems—it just, in my bones, I just feel there’s a great deal of corruption and control there that the vast majority of people do not understand.”

(Again, boys and girls: beware gut feelings, intuition, and feelings in your bones; they are not reliable guides to the truth.)

The rest of this article tries to unpack what he might have meant by that.

If that answer makes no sense to you, that’s because it’s incomprehensible even to people who study conspiracy theories. It seems that Johnson is implying that a sinister cabal of “big money men” planned the Great Depression for their own personal gain, but it’s not entirely clear.

There’s something here that I alluded to yesterday, when I said “bureaucracy inevitably implies some kind of coordinated purpose among many people.” Which conservatives distrust, being independent rugged individualists, as we know. Which suggests… that any major event in history… must have been plotted out? And coordinated? In some kind of conspiracy?

At the same time, conservatives who blame major historical events on conspiracy theories have a charming, if naive, trust in the ability of large numbers of people to coordinate and cooperate. We’ve thought about this many times before. No one who believes in such schemes has ever been a project manager. No major industrial project has ever come in on time and on budget. And so on. How can these conspiracies have succeeded — without any snitch blowing the whistle — while all these real-world coordinated efforts have not? And yet, conservatives think bureaucracies inefficient and wasteful. Think about it.

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One more piece that I just saw late today, and haven’t fully read. But the sidebars make a crucial point.

The Atlantic, Mark Leibovich, 9 Sep 2024: Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump, subtitled “He said Republican politicians would be easy to break. He was right.”

I’m going to pass over the theme of the essay itself, and note for now the various sidebars about what Republican politicians said about Trump back when, and what they’ve said recently. I’ll quote three.

MARCO RUBIO
2016: “Donald Trump is a con artist.” He is “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.”
2024: “The only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again is to make Donald J. Trump our president again.”

TED CRUZ
2016: Calls Trump a “pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.” Also says, “Donald, you are a sniveling coward.”
2024: “God Bless Donald J. Trump.”

J. D. VANCE
2016–17: Trump is “cultural heroin” … “Never liked him” … “I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy” … “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office” … “a moral disaster” … “America’s Hitler.”
2024: Named Donald Trump’s running mate.

Skimming the article, and term “cognitive dissonance” comes up several times. And that’s what this is all about: how the mind, at least these particular Republican minds, tries to resolve conflicting beliefs. And what we see here is how pursuit of tribal solidarity overrides all sense of actual moral standards.

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