John Jay Kim/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images
There is something very familiar about Donald Trump and JD Vance’s lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.
Part of this is because Americans have a long track record of scaring nativists immigrant Eat — with jokes about dog meat, in particular, appearing regularly in dogmas directed at new Asian arrivals. Wong Chin FooA late 19th century Chinese immigrant worker, Once satirical“I never knew it was good to eat rats and puppies until American people told me.”
But there’s something else: the glee with which Republicans spread patently bigoted lies, the glee of demonizing a vulnerable immigrant population.
After Vance started the pet-eating panic with a tweet, the pro-Trump internet was almost immediately flooded Memes And AI-generated images Trump is protecting animals from Haitian forces. After Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Condemned the intimidationRep. Nancy Mays (R-SC) shared one of these photos to taunt him:
From Vance He admitted that he had no evidence “It’s possible, of course, that these rumors will turn out to be false,” says Haitian pet slaughterer in Springfield. Yet he urged his allies to push their demands.
“Don’t let the media whiners discourage you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing,” he tweeted.
This juxtaposition, between the old-school racism of the accusations and the relish with which the lies are spread, reminds me of a political phenomenon of the recent past: the online legions of the ascendant alt-right in 2016 dominated by Donald Trump, his enemies’ death threats and “ironic” Trolling with Nazi memes.
Even tried to move into real-world politics by holding real-life rallies, most notoriously in Charlottesville in 2017. Today, there are no major alt-right organizations, and the term “alt-right” itself has largely devolved to the extreme right.
Yet the way people like Vance and Mays developed their style, enjoying the glitter of disdain of “just kidding” rational denial, shows the movement’s lasting impact.
They are all right
The alt-right grew out of a clash between two Internet subcultures: intellectual racism, represented by the name Web publishing option rights, and the culture of trolling and shock humor on message boards like 4chan. Alternative Right founder Richard Spencer and his ilk dreamed of a white American ethnostate; “Channers” loved sharing the shocking material for the pure joy of transgression.
“Making a Nazi joke was a joke in itself [on 4chan]A way to keep outsiders at bay,” wrote journalist Eli Reeve black pill, His recent history of the Internet fringes. “Over time, new people came onto the site and interpreted those jokes as sincere, and eventually the group turned into what they once were satires, a herd of brainwashed swastika-posting sheep.”
This “herd” embraced Trump as their cause célèbre in the 2016 cycle, rightly seeing his rise as a moment in which the boundaries of what was possible in American politics were stretched. And it worked: Reeve’s book, as well as a mountain of contemporary reporting, shows that the lines between the Trump movement and the alt-right have become quite porous.
A small but telling example: In July 2016, the Trump campaign released a graphic that referred to Hillary Clinton as “the most corrupt candidate of all time” — while slapping a Star of David on top of a pile of money next to her face. Although the Trump campaign claimed it was a “sheriff’s star”, reporters were quickly put off The graphic was created by antisemitic alt-writers on 8chanA more extreme 4chan offshoot. Trump’s team was literally spreading alt-right propaganda.
The organized alt-right split after Charlottesville with Spencer and others Facing financial ruin from the lawsuitIts gleeful “just kidding” style of racism and neo-Nazi imagery remains — just wrapped up in an online rights argument.
Last year, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ primary campaign for president ran into trouble for pushing a video. An obscure neo-Nazi symbol called the Sonnenrad. It’s something you’ll only know if you spend time in the online circles of the right, where this kind of aging-fascism is considered fun and even cool (as long as you maintain just enough reasonable refusal to keep your job).
The origin story of the Haitian dog and cat meme seems remarkably similar. two journalists, Zaid Jilani And Kate RossAn August march in Springfield led by the nearby neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe explored the panic about Haitians. One of its leaders, Drake Barentz, An Aug. 27 speech to the City Commission meeting to warn that “crime and brutality will increase with every Haitian you bring in.”
But it’s not just extreme engagements that are making their way into the mainstream. It’s their style, spreading memes with an exuberant disregard for the truth, that is so distinctively alt-right — yet now so normalized in the Trump movement as to be almost commonplace.
A x user Compare perceptually An Analysis of “Bad Faith” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Mid-Century Anti-Semitic Rhetoric in the Haitian-Eating-Dogs Meme. The philosopher wrote:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely ignorant of the absurdity of their answer. They know their comments are frivolous, open to challenge. But they kid themselves, because their opponent is obligated to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. Anti-Semitism has a right to play. They even like to play with speech, because they disrespect the importance of their conversation by making ridiculous excuses. They delight in acting in bad faith, for they seek not to reason but to frighten and annoy. If you press them too closely, they will suddenly fall silent, with a few loud phrases indicating that the argument is over.
I am familiar with this quote. It made the rounds among media types in 2016, as a description of both the way Trump and his alt-right fans use the language to spread bigotry.
That this applies to many GOPs today shows that we’re still living in a political moment that the alt-right helped create.
