Translated material
"They eat cats"
In the USA, on the debate against Kamaly Harris, former President Donald Trump said that illegal migrants steal and eat dogs, cats and other pets of local residents in Ohio. This remark of Trump became the most memorable on the debate, and the moderators of the event had to refute his words. In just a few days, a fake story has gone from the screenshot of the post on Facebook to the American prime-air. At the request of the “cold”, Americanist Jan Veselov explains how it became possible and why it should not surprise anyone.
Where did the fake about migrants who eat pets, and why Donald Trump believed in it
From Fake on Facebook to presidential debate
On September 10, the first presidential debate between Republican Donald Trump and democrat Kamal Harris took place on the ABC News television channel. During the discussion of the project of immigration reform, which failed in Congress under the influence of Trump, the former president said :
“And see what is happening to the cities for all the United States. And in many cities they do not want to speak - not only Aurora and Springfield. In many cities they do not want to speak, because they are ashamed. In Springfield, they eat dogs. The people who arrived. They eat cats. They eat pets of people who live there. And this is what is happening in our country. And this is a shame. ”
After that, the Debat Debat moderator David Muir told Trump that this story is fake, and the Springfield authorities deny cases of kidnapping or eating pets. In response, Trump said several times that he had heard on TV about the complaints of local residents, and promised to figure it out.
This story was really actively discussed the last days in American media. She launched a post in one of the closed Facebook groups of residents of the city of Springfield in Ohio. In it, the user wrote that a cat disappeared from the “girlfriend of the daughter of his neighbor” and, after a long search, she found her corpse hanging at the House of Migrants from Haiti, who supposedly were about to eat her.
The city authorities quickly responded to the publication. The local police said that they did not receive any messages and disappearing or abduction of pets, not to mention cases of their murder in order to eat. They also deny the fact that immigrants from Haiti were engaged in other illegal activities, such as self -seizure of housing, scattering garbage in front of the houses of residents or road overlap. The mayor of Springfield Rob Ryu and the mayor of Springfield: “Just put yourself in the place of these people and tell me, can you imagine that they say that? <...> We allow these rumors, this nationalist rhetoric to penetrate our community and share us. ”
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However, despite the statements of the authorities, the screenshot of the post quickly spread through social networks, often accompanied by photographs of a black man who walks along the street, holding a goose carcass in his hand. True, it soon turned out that the photo was not taken in Springfield, but in the city of Columbus, which is also in Ohio. The author of the photo confirmed this in a conversation with reporters and accused the Republicans of spreading fakes for the sake of political benefit.
A few days later, a video appeared on the Web from the underwear of a policeman, who detained a woman standing near the corpse of a cat. 27-year-old Alexis Ferrell was accused of murder and an attempt to eat an animal. But the incident also did not occur in Springfield, but in the city of Canton, located almost 300 kilometers from it. And Ferrell herself is an indigenous resident of Ohio and has nothing to do with Haiti.
Despite this, accusations against migrants from Haiti began to disperse widely in the conservative blogosphere. For example, they were distributed by the head of the conservative NGO Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk and a fired Buzzfeed publication for plagiarism blogger Benny Johnson , who recently became a person involved in the scandal with receiving money from Russia Today. One of the similar posts about the Hayites eating pets was replaced by a billionaire and owner of the social network X (Twitter) Ilon Musk, who supports Donald Trump in this election. "Vote for Kamalu if you want this to happen in your area!" - wrote Musk. His post gained more than 50 million views.
Soon, the Republican politicians also joined the information campaign, who decided to show that only Trump will be able to “save” animals from the “cruel” Haitians. The account of the Law Committee of the House of Representatives, which has been controlled by artificial intelligence, has an image of Trump surrounded by kittens and ducks, and Ted Cruz senator from Texas posted on the same topic, where the kittens are asked to vote for a Republican candidate.
Similar memes began to publish other republican accounts.
This story was mostly promoted by a candidate for vice presidents from the Republican Party, Jay Di Wence, who represents Ogio in the Senate. “Now there are reports that pets are kidnapped and eaten by people who should not be in this country,” he wrote .
After the Springfield authorities refuted these rumors, Vance only stated that he had received many complaints from local residents about the abduction of pets by migrants from Haiti and that he did not check their reliability. He also refused to share them with the press. In social networks, he urged his supporters to continue to spread fakes: “Do not let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, dear patriots. Support the stream of cats about cats. "
Finally, the leader of the Republicans Donald Trump began to use the fake. First, a post with the text appeared in the account of his election campaign: “President Trump deportes migrants who eat pets. Kamala Harris will send them to your city. Make your choice, America. " And then he repeated the fake story about eating cats and dogs with migrants during the debate with Kamala Harris, which provoked a wave of jokes on social networks and a series of publications with the revelations of the fake.
Big Haiti in Little Springfield
The xenophobic rhetoric of the Republicans was not accidentally focused on Springfield. In recent months, the city has become the center of discussion about the US migration policy. For many years, the Springfield was a typical endangered town of “Rusty Belting” (the US region, in which heavy industry enterprises were concentrated in the twentieth century, became a victim of de -industrialization in the second half of the twentieth century). The population of Springfield was reduced, the poverty level was twice the national, and the inhabitants suffered from alcohol and opioid dependence.
Local authorities were able to save Springfield from extinction, managing to attract investments. New industrial enterprises appeared in the city - from the production of automobile parts to microchips. In just a few years, in a city with a population of less than 60 thousand people, more than eight thousand new jobs were created. But it turned out that many local residents are not ready to fill out these vacancies.
Then migrants from Haiti came to the rescue, who came in search of work from Florida and other states. The vast majority of them are legally with the United States: in June 2024, the administration of Joe Biden extended a temporary residence permit for 300 thousand residents of Haiti who fled to the United States after a destructive earthquake of 2010.
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Migrants from Haiti solved the problem of shortcoming shortages, and many local employers praise them for responsibility, hard work and lack of bad habits. They also opened about a dozen of their own enterprises. But the growth of migration turned out to be too sharp: in just four years, the Haitian diaspora increased by 12-15 thousand people, and the population of the city increased by almost a third.
Springfield ran into a number of difficulties. The number of visits of migrants to the local public clinic over two years has grown 13 times, due to the language barrier, the visits became longer, as well as the costs of translators increased. The schools had to hire teachers who can teach English as a non -native language in order to teach new students who have become four times more. The city arose in the city, the prices of which have risen sharply.
In August 2023, dissatisfaction with migrants spilled out when one schoolboy died as a result of an accident and about 20 were injured. The driver of a minivan encountered a school bus was a migrant from Haiti, who did not have local driver’s license. The culprit of the accident was accused of unconducting murder, he was convicted of nine years in prison.
Senator Jay Di Wence tried to use this accident, who accused the driver of that he should not be in the USA, although he had a legal status. Then the parents of the deceased schoolboy said that they did not want politicians to use the death of their child to spread hatred.
At public hearings, some local residents blamed migrants from Haiti in the occupation of the city, drug trafficking, thefts, rituals of voodoo and the spread of diseases. A year later, at the hearing in August 2024, the migrants of catching and eating ducks from the local pond were also raised for the first time. The event was also attended by members of the neo -Nazi group Blood Tribe, who had previously staged a rally in Springfield and marched with swastikas on flags and firearms.
The city authorities insist that the main problem is the lack of financial resources to maintain infrastructure, and the growth of the number of migrants from Haiti did not lead to an increase in crime. According to the statistics of 2017, migrants from Haiti are legal in the United States 3.5 times less often in prisons than citizens born in the country.
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Toxic rhetoric
Springfield is just one example of how the issue of migration shares Americans. For the Republicans, led by Trump, illegal migration has become the main theme of their election campaign in the upcoming elections. The reasons are for: over the past three years, when crossing the southern border of the United States, more than 6.3 million people have been detained, of which about 2.4 million remain in the United States in anticipation of a decision of their fate. And although in recent months the number of illegal border crossings has decreased sharply, migration remains one of the most important issues on the eve of the elections. And according to Gallup polls over the past four years, the proportion of Americans who want migrants to become less, almost doubled - from 28% to 55%.
Trump actively exploits the growth of anti -migrant sentiments. Since the time of the 2016 presidential campaign, when he called the drug trafficking and rapists from Mexico: he deliberately uses aggressive rhetoric, which dehumanizes migrants. In his speeches, he says that migrants “gather in the army” to capture the United States from the inside, and calls them “animals”, which “ poison the blood” of the country. Trump accuses the migrants of increasing crime, although in fact they commit crimes less often, and unreasonably says that they took away from local residents more and more jobs.
In the event of the election, Trump promises the largest operation in the history of the United States to deport illegal migrants involving the army and local law enforcement officers and promises that it will be bloody. According to some estimates, about 11 million illegal migrants live in the United States and about 80% of them have been in the country for about 15 years: many have work, pay tens of billions of dollars in the form of taxes, they have children and families.
Against the background of such aggressive rhetoric and attempts to reimburse anti -migrant sentiments, it is not surprising that the Republicans were ready to resort to frank fakes based on racist stereotypes, and false information migrated from neo -Nazis to a presidential candidate in just a few days.
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Author: Jan Veselov photo on covering Brandon / Ap Photo / Scanpix