How to Engineer a Moral Panic For Fun and Profit

The Republicans' insane anti-Haitian terror campaign is a dangerous new low that brings to question their deeper motives

I honestly never thought that anything was going to surprise me anymore about US politics, let alone shock me. There’s always been some degree of plausible deniability involved in the insinuation that Donald Trump and his party are “racist”—not that I’m among the deniers (on a scale from 1 to Elon Musk, Trump is at least a 7) but they’ve always at least attempted to mask their identitarian bigotry by pretending they’re just talking about border protection or drug trafficking or something.

Then some rumours started bubbling up from social media that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were breaking into people’s yards to hunt, kill, and eat their pet cats and dogs. That’s absolutely the kind of claim I expect from people like Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson, Michael Knowles, Charlie Kirk, or anyone else who failed the IQ test on their application to be the guy who bleaches the Klan hoods.

This is the kind of internet story you expect to conclude with people clapping and one of them is Albert Einstein

Then, of course, Elon Musk follows and uncritically believes every word posted by any account that’s fascist enough, so faster than you can say “apartheid baby” he’s retweeting people with names like ReichGroyper88 reporting on black immigrants in Ohio reverting spontaneously into some kind of prehistoric jungle instinct and chasing dog walkers down the street with spears, dropping insightful replies like “concerning” and “!!”

Again—I’m not shocked by this coming from Elon Musk, who once approved of a tweet that suggested Mel Gibson’s fitness was the result of him hating Jews.

What did shock me was how the accusation then travelled from Elon Musk’s rectum to JD Vance’s mouth.

And then someone slipped it into Donald Trump’s debate notes and anyone remaining who isn’t chronically online knows the story from there.

What dumbfounds me about this is how hard and blatantly this steps up the game, from dog whistles, codes, and insinuations, to “just saying the thing.” It’s analogous to if Vance claimed that Haitian migration into Ohio was resulting in a desperate watermelon and fried chicken shortage.

Which, incidentally, also would not be dissimilar to remarks Vance actually has made: After Donald Trump’s close advisor, lunatic, and let’s face it, probable mistress Laura Loomer made a crack about Kamala Harris making the White House smell like curry (a remark that even neo-Nazi-adjacent Nick Fuentes ally Marjorie Taylor Greene found abhorrent, if you want to know how far under the barrel we are now), Vance, whose wife is Indian, was asked what he thought of the remark. As though he thought this was a game show and his challenge was to make the statement worse, he replied that it shouldn’t matter whether she is eating curry or fried chicken.

It's not even enough that this is more bigoted than usual—it’s bigoted, seemingly, against Trump’s tactical advantage. It’s practically jettisoning the battleground state of Florida, where a third of a million Haitians live.

And shit, even doubling down on a claim that harms your own side might be commendable if it’s in service to the truth. But it, of course, is not.

Put bluntly, not a single piece of evidence has ever been presented to substantiate the claim that Haitian immigrants (whatsoever) or anybody else in America (to any extent worth mentioning) have ever eaten a cat or a dog.

That doesn’t mean they haven’t done their best to come up with something. Nevertheless literally the only piece of evidence anybody has produced so far that we seem to be reasonably able to deduce actually depicts someone trying to eat a dead cat—therefore shared most often and regarded the “smoking gun” by those pushing the claim, including Elon Musk, is a body cam police video…

…of an American born citizen in a completely different city some time ago being arrested during some kind of mental breakdown during which she apparently killed a cat on a driveway. She isn’t Haitian and she isn’t an immigrant or a foreigner but she is black, and that’s the same thing to JD Vance and Elon Musk.

The second most circulated piece of evidence is of a black man carrying a goose that the usual suspects have claimed is a Haitian carrying home a bird he illegally killed in a Springfield lake.

As much of an indictment as this is on the news media I regret to inform you that it was up to fucking TMZ to actually do an investigation and discover that this goose was hit by a car and taking home roadkill is legal where this took place—which, by the way, is Columbus.

Again, there’s no evidence that this man is an immigrant, let alone Haitian, but he is black, and that’s enough for JD Vance and Elon Musk and a shit ton of Republican apologists to condemn him for a legal act that their favourite white Kennedy trophy is famous for doing all the time.

Remember, I started from the top here. Those are the most convincing pieces of evidence anybody has found. It gets dumber from here on a logarithmic scale.

The notorious Christopher Rufo (Evil Mirror Universe Ryan Gosling), whose entire approach to journalism is to try to trick people into believing things instead of just reporting facts, realised eventually that this is based on nothing and actually offered a $5000 bounty for anyone who could provide him with evidence to pass along to Vance as an ex post facto justification for his outbursts.

Even still nobody came forward even with a tasty five grand weighing on it. Rufo was forced instead to run with the best thing he had—a TikTok from last year that looks like it was filmed on the Game Boy camera attachment from 1998:

As you can see, it has everything. It’s rock solid. There’s a barbecue. There are cats walking around near the barbecue. Even the guy filming says that’s a cat they’re roasting! If you can’t trust an anonymous guy on the internet sneak-filming his neighbours through a turnip, who can you trust?

See, the thing is… I’ve never skinned a cat myself, so I can’t say for certain that they’re not made of white meat like the creatures on the grill, but I can say I’ve never seen a cat with talons.

There are people saying these carcasses aren’t consistent with chickens for one reason or another—more plausible theories I’ve seen are ducks or guinea pigs—but they could be sasquatch for all it matters, the point is that it’s an incredible stretch to assume that these blurry blobs are cats when the possibilities are too numerous to count and we have zero evidence to draw that conclusion beyond the fact that that’s what Christopher Rufo and his gremlins want them to be.

Rufo wrote an accompanying article detailing his in-personal investigation, if that’s what you want to call it. Like everything Rufo writes, this reads like it was spat out by ChatGPT, an assembly of sentences pieced together in such a way that you’re supposed to applaud it for achieving coherent English. He goes into detail about how he visited the town (Dayton, not Springfield) and tracked down the owner of the video.

He confirms the house exists, even confirms that the barbecue exists. There are Africans living there, from the Congo. He even saw cats in the neighbourhood.

It’s a load of huckster nonsense designed to look like research and trick people into thinking he’s “validated” the video when in fact he’s arrived at no conclusions that can’t be discerned from watching the video at home. What he’s confirmed is that the video is not a figment of your imagination—the physical location exists, as do barbecues, and cats.

What you assume would be the actual relevant point requiring validation—that a cat was eaten—is simply pre-accepted as fact going into the story. There’s an attempt at creating the illusion that this premise was backed up somewhere. We are left only with the reasonable certainty that some people were cooking meat on a grill, and must even put trust in Rufo’s word that this act of carnivorism was committed by Congolese people.

Again, they are not Haitian, but they are black, and that’s enough for Christopher Rufo, JD Vance, and Elon Musk.

But as I said, Christopher Rufo is not an investigative journalist, he’s not a muckraker, he’s described only as an “activist” (mouth fart, wanky-motion) but he’s barely that. He’s a bargain bin social engineer who openly teaches conservatives how to use bad faith disinformation to tactically mislead people into believing falsehoods that are advantageous to their greater project of yadda yadda. Nothing he writes is worth anything except when what he’s writing is teaching you about what he’s actually trying to do.

All of this is, as far as I can tell, the exhaustive list of all substantive evidence that anybody has been able to produce about the cat eating thing, and everything else is hearsay. Not that JD Vance has any problem with hearsay. This is the bread and butter of the story he’s doubling and tripling down on—it doesn’t matter that there’s never been any kind of official report, people from Springfield have told him it’s happening. Are you calling his constituents liars? How dare you?

And there are indeed videos going around of people being interviewed on the street, such as this popular one that begins with the interviewer laughing with a guy screaming “fucking sand monkey” at a nearby black man.

That guy is not a villain of the piece but is presented as one of its heroes. A regular no-nonsense citizen put up as one of the chief representatives of white people in Ohio. Another guy describes to the interviewer that he personally witnessed a Haitian driving around the neighbourhood in a van “with over a hundred cats” that he picked up and then took home to eat, and of all the true stories that have ever truly happened, that one definitely happened the hardest.

But of all the witnesses that come forward in the video one element of their testimony stands out to me—when asked about what they’ve seen or heard, they keep saying they heard someone talking about it, or they read about it on Facebook.

Friends, that is not a witness testimony. That isn’t how the internet works. Proximity becomes irrelevant. It doesn’t even matter if something happened on your driveway—if the only way you know about it is what you read on Facebook about it then your testimony is no more reliable than the testimony of someone reading the same Facebook post at the South Pole.

And that Facebook post, by the way? The woman who wrote it walked it back with an apology because she pulled it out of her ass. The Vance campaign also at one point was shopping around a single police report of an abducted cat as conclusive evidence for the cat eating epidemic, but that woman walked it back with an apology after her cat returned home safe and sound. There is, to be perfectly clear, zero evidence of this thing happening anywhere. Zilch. It is literally below Bigfoot on the weight of evidence.

And yet.

The torrential onslaught of attacks on Springfield from the Republican elite and amplified by the right wing media is already taking a terrible toll on its residents, and the whites are suffering consequences right alongside the Haitian targets. Dozens of bomb threats have closed down the schools. The town has been forced to cancel its annual community festivals.

The white nationalist gang Proud Boys have begun patrolling the town, and the Ku Klux Klan are moving in as well.

All of this naturally follows the traditional Klan shakedown playbook: Collateral damage from the white population is simply part of the plan: “Excise these people from your community, or we will make things worse for all of you. And worse, and worse.”

It’s impossible to deny now that what the pushers of this story are attempting is the deliberate manufacture of a moral panic. One that is targeted at a particular people, very similar to the Lavender Panic, the post-9/11 Islamic Panic, or the Jewish Blood Libel. Much like Christopher Rufo, JD Vance has been fairly open about the fact that this is all much more about achieving an end than it is about reporting truthfully about an issue. The first time he was fact checked by the media, he repeated the claim that the pet eating stories were first hand accounts given to him by residents but also that he wasn’t too concerned about whether they were false because they bring attention to the many other things about immigration he thinks you should have a problem with. He went on to recommend that, regardless of media “crybabies” complaining about misinformation, his followers should continue posting memes about it.

When confronted with the reality that his false allegations are leading to skyrocketing incidences of threats and intimidation campaigns against the town, he countered that he wouldn’t capitulate to a “heckler’s veto.” Though, considering the people behind these threats are on his side of this issue, it’s uncertain whether he’s being deliberately obtuse here (or else he means that the hecklers are the people complaining about the threats).

Finally there’s Vance’s apparent Freudian slip in a television interview in which he seemingly admits to “creating” the story, that being the only way he can manipulate the media into turning against Haitian people. When pressed, he gathered his thoughts for a moment and clarified: “We’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

That’s kind of like saying that you cooked a meal, and when pressed to clarify, explaining that you meant you cooked their eating of the meal. But in any case, whether Vance is lying here or just really bad at speaking, it seems pretty clear that this campaign is about more than just the inability to admit having been on the wrong side of a demonstrably incorrect accusation. The Trump campaign knew that this was false, probably from the very beginning, but the outrageous nature of the claim is used to make people panic.

The panic in this case is not about illegal immigrants—the Haitian residents of Ohio, as well as the vast majority across the country, are legal residents—but the proposed solutions to the ostensible problem of their existence do involve expanding the definition of illegal immigrant. When pressed on how he intends to deport tens or hundreds of thousands of legal residents, he simply asserts that a Trump administration will retroactively make them illegal. The message is clear that no non-white immigrant is safe, whether they arrived the right way, the wrong way, or even if they were born on American soil.

The panic isn’t even necessarily about Haitians, or even immigrants, given that precisely zero of the suspects in the invented pet eating scandal have been Haitian and their citizenship status is entirely unknown. They’re all black, and that’s good enough. The mechanism of the moral panic does not require specificity in its target. That’s what makes it a panic. “Haitian” is just a word. Many of the people being played don’t know the difference between a Haitian and one of Chris Rufo’s cat-massacring Congolese. They’re boogeymen. You’re supposed to see them behind every shadow.

But the question still remains: Why?

For some, the answer is easy enough and you can sum it up with the sound of a cash register in the foreground. Panic pays very well, as the jackass (or shrewd con artist) who won Chris Rufo’s bounty by showing him a TikTok of a couple of ducks on a barbecue can attest.

Elon Musk’s “X” Twitter platform now pays people to spread disinformation, and profiteers are cashing in and bragging about it.

But profit seeking through violence isn’t the root motive for this. It’s a motive for unscrupulous people to keep it going, but Trump, Vance, Musk, and others to the top driving the panic engine aren’t doing so for vulgar monetary profit. It has to form part of some sort of strategy, but I can’t tell you precisely what it is.

It doesn’t seem to be tied to populism, as this isn’t very popular. As I’ve said, Haitians aren’t some kind of uniformly Democrat-voting bloc that the party would strongly benefit from deporting—the vast, vast majority of them are living in Florida, many of them are (when last checked, at least) Republicans, and not fucking with Florida is usually a golden rule. There’s a reason Cuban refugees are usually exempt from the “foreigners bad” blanket. The Trump campaign, evidently, sees something in their November strategy that’s more important than securing Florida, important enough to risk endangering it.

It is a little concerning when the campaign actually stops trying to appeal to the majority of voters and switches to trying to appeal very strongly to a fanatic, picnicked minority. Recently too, Trump spontaneously posted on his personal Truth Social network:

…which you can laugh at (seriously, go back in time and try to warn anybody in the 80s or 90s about today’s politics and they’ll assume you’re trying to pitch a Mike Judge movie) but if you can compose yourself enough to take this seriously, what Trump is doing here, in response to Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, is actively jettisoning an entire demographic from his campaign. As odd as it seems to imagine Swifties voting for Trump, the fact is that both Swift and Trump poll pretty damn well with white women in America so there was definitely some overlap.

Despite this, he’s not doing the savvy political thing and trying to salvage any of those votes. It doesn’t seem to make sense for a presidential candidate to proactively abandon and reject entire demographics of people like young women or black and/or Haitian people, to essentially compel them not to vote for you, if it doesn’t really gain you anything and there doesn’t seem to be any downside to trying to appeal to them instead.

Unless.

Unless you’ve abandoned traditional politics and have a strategy to enter the White House that doesn’t necessitate people voting for you.

The Haitian and greater black communities of Ohio aren’t even the first canaries in the coal mine, not to anybody who has been paying attention during the past eight years, but this is a drastic, bold, and reprehensible acceleration of a mainstream political movement that has been projecting ever more bluntly, year after year, the agenda of white nationalism. Just saying, it would be wise to pay attention when a political candidate stops trying to appeal to the majority of citizens and focuses on raising an army instead.