It began with a woman in Springfield, Ohio, reporting to police that her cat was missing and her suspicion that her neighbors, Haitian immigrants, had taken the pet.
Miss Sassy would get discovered two days later in the Springfield woman’s basement.
The woman apologized, but the damage had already been done.
On a private Facebook page, someone said the Haitian neighbors had eaten her cat. When the story escaped to the full internet, Haitian immigrants in Springfield were said without any evidence to have regularly abducted and eaten pet dogs and cats.
JD Vance, Ohio’s junior senator and former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, then repeated the false story even though he was told that was not true by Springfield city officials, according to the Wall Street Journal
Vance also claimed the Haitian immigrants were in the country illegally, another fabrication.
Vance’s claim appears to be part of his and Trump’s narrative that immigrants were hurting this nation’s economy and increasing this country’s crime rate. Studies have repeatedly shown that both claims are untrue.
Vance’s unfounded claims were immediately picked up by Trump, who repeated them on Truth Social, at his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, and his rally last week at the Nassau Coliseum.
More than 30 bomb threats followed the false claims – against Springfield schools, government buildings and city officials’ homes, forcing evacuations and closures. Springfield also canceled its annual celebration of diversity, arts and culture in response to the threats, and state police were deployed to city schools.
City officials acknowledged growing pains from the influx of some 15,000 Haitian immigrants but said there’s no evidence to support the claim they are consuming anyone’s pets.
Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a native of the Springfield area, repeatedly said there was no basis to the claims Haitians were abducting and eating pets, hurting the economy and bringing crime.
Just the opposite.
“Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation,” DeWine said in an op-ed in The New York Times. ‘Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs.
“They are there legally. They are there to work,” DeWine said.
But the genie was out of the bottle.
The false claims had reached such a feverish pitch that the Miami-Dade Haitian Democratic Caucus held an event in South Florida titled “We Don’t Eat Pets Rally.”
The threat unleashed by Trump and Vance is not limited to Haitians. The only outward distinguishing trait for Haitians is that they are Black, so it is not unreasonable to believe this false story represents a potential danger to all Black people.
The assertion that Haitians are abducting and eating dogs is not the only false claim made by Trump and Vance in recent days.
CNN said it counted 12 fraudulent claims made by Trump in the past month.
This included a variety of claims about Harris and a story about how the Congo has deliberately emptied prisons to somehow get its criminals to come to the United States as migrants.
So why make these false fabricated claims?
Either Trump and Vance believe that voters in places like Nassau County are willing to accept the Trump campaign’s lies without question or that they like the message he is sending regardless of whether what he is saying is based on fact.
This is a dangerous game. A functioning democracy is based on informed citizens casting votes based on a common set of facts. A lack of informed citizens leads to autocracy.
Trump and Vance are by no means alone in promoting disinformation.
Social media, internet websites, and political rallies have become filled with the spread of intentional disinformation and misinformation innocently passed along.
Some of this disinformation comes from foreign governments seeking to divide Americans and undermine our democracy. Others for personal or political gain.
Howard Schneider, the former editor of Newsday and the current executive director of Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy, has led a years-long campaign to teach students and the public how to discern between fact-based journalism and propaganda.
“We read vertically now, which means if I read a text or watch a video, I’ll watch it, and I’ll ask questions,” Schneider said at a panel discussion hosted by Blank Slate Media three years ago. “Lateral reading means we have to read it and go elsewhere and check it out. That’s how professional fact-checkers work. They leave a text, interrogate it elsewhere and come back.”
The time is long past when adults and students are given the tools to discriminate between fact and fiction.
Let Springfield, Ohio, serve as a reason why.