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.”
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“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........