During his debate with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, the Republican candidate accused Haitians living in the United States of eating domestic animals. A false statement with long-standing roots.
Vandalized cars, closed schools, multiple bomb threats… In Springfield (Ohio), nothing is the same as before. The city, and more particularly the Haitian community that lives there, has become the obsession of the American extreme right: activists from the virile and nationalist groupuscule Proud Boys have been spotted there and leaflets from the supremacist group Ku Klux Klan demanding the departure of Haitians have circulated.
During the presidential debate, Republican candidate Donald Trump lambasted the immigration record of his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s vice president, based on a racist rumor: “In Springfieldpeople who come, they eat dogs, they eat cats, they eat the pets of the inhabitants, this is what happens in our country and it is a shame”he said, on the night of Tuesday 11 to Wednesday 12 September.
The denials, particularly from the local police, reported by Reuters, did not prevent the rumor from circulating and being exploited by the most conservative right in the middle of the election campaign. But how did this fake news reach the billionaire ex-president, who is used to disinformation, in just a few days?
Newsguardan American NGO fighting against online disinformation, was able to trace the origin of this viral claim, which was exposed to “67 million people” during the presidential debate and inspired numerous parodies. These accusations started from a simple message posted a week earlier in a private Facebook group by Erika Lee, a 35-year-old hardware store employee from Springfield.
“My neighbor informed me that her daughter’s friend had lost her cat (…) One day she came home from work, looked over to a neighbor’s house, where Haitians live, and saw her cat hanging from a branch, like you would do for a deer for slaughter, and they were cutting it up to eat it”Erika Lee says in her post, advising Internet users to “watch these animals”. Her post then went viral on social media, going from Facebook to X on September 5, with Trump supporters sharing a screenshot of the message and mentioning conservative media outlets like Fox News to get their attention.
This message was actually a “fourth hand story”according to Newsguard. Erika Lee relied on the testimony of her neighbor, Kimberly Newton, who herself had told her the words of a friend who knew the cat’s alleged owner. “I’m not sure I’m the most credible source, because I don’t really know the person who lost the cat.”admitted Kimberly Newton to Newsguard. “I have no proof”she added. She expressed concern about the negative impact of the influx of Haitians on the city’s health and education systems.
Clark County, which includes Springfield, a city of nearly 58,000, is home to between 12,000 and 15,000 immigrants of all origins, according to an estimate by officials. In recent years, many Haitians have settled legally in this deindustrialized Midwestern city, fleeing the deteriorating political and security situation on their island since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. Interviewed by CNN, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue estimates that the population has jumped 25% in three years, partly due to the arrival of Haitians.
Erika Lee, the author of the original post, identified herself to Newsguard as a Democrat who supports Donald Trump. She explained that she “was just trying to inform people (…) without saying that Haitians as a whole [sont] bad”. “It just exploded into something I didn’t want to happen.”she continued on NBC News. “I am not racist”she defended herself, adding: “If I were in the shoes of the Haitians, I would be terrified too that someone would attack me.”
The screenshot of his Facebook post was shared on September 6 by an influential far-right X account, followed by three million Internet users, amplifying the rumor and dramatizing it by adding a photo of a black man holding an inert goose in his hand.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, a local media outlet, the photo was taken in July in the city of Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield, and posted on the English-language forum Reddit by a user who now regrets his actions. On its website, the city of Springfield supports “that there is no evidence to support” the allegations that “Haitian refugees kill geese in parks for food.”
At the same time, several news items have crystallized animosity toward this community: a Haitian motorist accidentally caused the death of an 11-year-old child, and an African-American woman, sometimes wrongly presented, notably on X-rated television, as a Haitian migrant, having been tried for having killed and eaten a cat last August, notes USA Today.
It was in this context that the rumor was relayed on X on September 9 by JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate and senator from Ohio, in a tweet viewed more than 11 million times. Two days later, the former Republican president took up the fake news on television in front of millions of viewers. On CNNsix days later, his running mate admitted that it was a story “invented” and says he is ready to “create stories” so that the American media “pay attention to the suffering of the American people”Erika Lee’s Facebook post has since been deleted.
Fear and disgust over foreigners’ diets is nothing new. As recently as the Covid-19 pandemic, a false theory circulated that bat consumption in Asia was the source of Sars-Cov-2, sparking a backlash from internet users against people perceived as Chinese. “Go eat some bats, Chang”illustrates an American study on the emergence of online Sinophobia.
In the 19th century, this fear was already being used by Westerners to ostracize the Chinese, against a backdrop of commercial competition, recalls France Culture. “Eating dog, a pet for Westerners, reflects the barbarity of the Chinese”writes historian and journalist Jeanne Guérout, co-author ofHistory of prejudice (The Arenas, 2023). “It’s about tracing what defines ‘us’ and what defines the others. ‘We have an emotional relationship with dogs and cats. And the others are those who eat them'”analyzes anthropologist Charles Stépanoff on France Culture. “There is a kind of violation of a food taboo when we treat these animal-children as food animals. These are categories that are obviously arbitrary.”he recalls.
In the United States, Italians were treated as “garlic eaters”Mexicans mocked for eating beans, while the stereotype of the immigrant eating cats and dogs is more often used against Asian Americans, notes the American public radio NPR. In his previous speeches, remember France InterDonald Trump also associated immigration with the cannibal Hannibal Lecter, the psychopath in the film The Silence of the Lambs.