Two weeks ago, a white nationalist named Drake R. Berentz was barred from a Springfield, Ohio, city commission meeting for making threats. Shortly thereafter, racist accusations against the state’s Haitian community proliferated online, spread by well-known disinformation outlets and eventually picked up by GOP officials.
The unsubstantiated claim that Haitian immigrants eat pets gained national attention after it was repeated first by Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance (the junior senator from Ohio) and then by his running mate Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris this week.
The origins of the conspiracy theory are largely unknown, but New lines The research identified several amplification points of known disinformation spreaders. Their relatively rapid spread shows how extremist narratives move from the fringes of the internet into the mouths of politicians seemingly overnight.
Less than a week earlier, End Wokeness, an X-account (formerly Twitter) that has been linked in the past to white nationalist Jack Posobiec, had published a Facebook post claiming that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. Political commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk promptly repeated this claim during his show on Steve Bannon’s media network.
Kirk commented that this brought the United States “one step closer to the Great Replacement,” referring to the white nationalist narrative that nonwhite immigrants would replace white people in the United States. This narrative was originally obscure but has been increasingly taken up by mainstream Republicans in recent years.
Kirk is a close confidant of Posobiec, and both his claims and the End Wokeness account’s tweet point to a single anonymous post in a private Facebook group as evidence for their claims.
Another tweet from the End Wokeness account followed on September 8, in which an influencer and podcaster named Anthony Harris tweeted a video from a Springfield City Commission meeting claiming that Haitian immigrants were eating ducks in the parks. This claim appears to be based on a repurposed image taken a month earlier of a man in Columbus, Ohio, holding a dead Canada goose.
A few days later, Fox News host Trace Gallagher repeated these claims on his evening program on September 9.
The racist narrative spread like wildfire on the right-wing internet, and AI-generated images of Trump holding cats flooded X. Even the official account of the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee shared one of these images.
Well-known disinformation outlets such as InfoWars and Zero Hedge quickly spread the claims online. Several organizations published 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 used the End Wokeness tweet as their primary source. About six of these sites were monetized and ran ads alongside that content, primarily through Google Adsense.
Zero Hedge’s story has been republished on at least eight other websites, but several of these sites do not indicate where the article originally came from.
Public figures such as Vance and Elon Musk quickly repeated these claims, after which Ohio authorities denied them.
Now that story has garnered national attention. Trump claimed Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Ohio. When corrected onstage, Trump chose not to backtrack, instead stating, “Well, I saw people on TV saying my dog was taken and used as food. They eat the dogs of the people who came here; they eat the cats. They eat the pets of the people who live there.”
“People on TV are saying their dog was eaten by the people who were there,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out.”
After the presidential debate, Vance persisted, claiming that voters in Ohio had called his office to report their missing pets. Vance not only repeated these claims, but tried to position himself as part of the community spreading them.
“The media didn’t care about the carnage this policy caused until we turned it into a meme about cats,” Vance said in an interview with CNN after the debate.
Late last month, a neo-Nazi group called Blood Ties organized a march outside the Springfield Jazz and Blues Festival. At the August 26 City Commission meeting, Drake R. Berentz claimed responsibility for organizing the march and introduced himself under an anti-black pseudonym. He was promptly removed from the hearing after declaring, “With every Haitian you bring in, the crime and cruelty will only increase.”
Springfield has experienced an influx of residents over the past four years, about a quarter of whom are Haitian immigrants. Whether Springfield is therefore seen as a symbol of the revitalization of the Rust Belt is a matter of partisan debate.
Blood Tribe has reportedly since begun celebrating Trump’s comment about the conspiracy theory on the debate stage. However, the allegation that Haitians are eating pets in Ohio might not have reached Republicans’ ears without the amplification of the End Wokeness X account and Kirk, who were the first to spread the private Facebook post and subsequent accusations. The majority of junk news and fake news sites sharing these claims link to at least one of End Wokeness’ tweets.
Fake news sites, right-wing influencers, and GOP leadership appear to have formed a circular echo chamber around themselves. False claims are spread and amplified by disinformation outlets and wannabe politicians before being picked up and legitimized by GOP officials and political candidates. The current state of X makes it a powerful incubator for conspiracies. This hate-and-fear-producing machine is especially effective when amplified by GOP officials and the platform’s owner.
The relationship between Republican politicians and “alternative” media is nothing new, but the GOP’s official embrace of extremist narratives blurs the line between the way the Republican Party talks about immigration and the way organized neo-Nazi groups talk about immigration. It doesn’t take much for the former to start echoing the latter as their media ecosystems become interconnected.
