How the GOP became the party of racist memes against Haitian immigrants

There’s something eerily familiar in Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Part of it is that American nativists have a long track record of fearmongering about what immigrants eat — with jeers about dog meat, in particular, regularly showing up in bigotry directed at new Asian arrivals. Wong Chin Foo, a late 19th-century Chinese immigrant activist, once quipped, “I never knew that rats and puppies were good to eat until I was told by American people.”

But there’s something else: the glee with which Republicans are spreading an obviously bigoted lie, the joy in demonizing a vulnerable migrant population.

After Vance kicked off the pet-eating panic with a tweet, the pro-Trump internet almost immediately flooded with memes and AI-generated images of Trump protecting animals from Haitian hordes. After Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) condemned the fearmongering, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) shared one of these images to taunt him:

Vance has since admitted he had no proof of Haitian pet slaughter in Springfield, saying “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” Yet he nonetheless urged his allies to keep pushing the claims.

“Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing,” he tweeted.

This juxtaposition, between the old-school racism of the allegation and the relish with which the falsehood spread, reminded me of a political phenomenon from the recent past: the ascendant alt-right circa 2016. The alt-right’s online legions rose to prominence alongside Donald Trump, trolling his enemies with death threats and “ironic” Nazi memes.

It even briefly attempted to move into real-world politics by staging real-life rallies, most infamously in Charlottesville in 2017. The negative attention and legal fallout following Charlottesville proved to be its undoing as an organized political force. Today, there are no major alt-right institutions, and the term “alt-right” itself has largely fallen out of favor on the extreme right.

Yet the way in which people like Vance and Mace have aped their style, the enjoyment they take in spreading hate through a sheen of “just joking” plausible deniability, show the movement’s enduring influence.

The alt-right grew out of a collision between two internet subcultures: intellectualized racism, represented by the namesake web publication Alternative Right, and the culture of trolling and shock humor on message boards like 4chan. Alternative Right founder Richard Spencer and his ilk dreamt of a white American ethnostate; the “channers” loved to share shocking material for the pure joy of transgression.

“Making Nazi jokes was itself a joke [on 4chan], a way to keep away outsiders,” the journalist Elle Reeve writes in Black Pill, her recent history of the internet fringe. “Over time, new people came to the site and interpreted those jokes as sincere, and eventually the group became the thing they’d once satirized, a herd of brainwashed swastika-posting sheep.”

This “herd” adopted Trump as their cause celebre in the 2016 cycle, correctly seeing his rise as a moment where the boundaries of what was possible in American politics were wide open. 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 became quite porous.

One small but telling example: In July 2016, the Trump campaign released a graphic that referred to Hillary Clinton as “the most corrupt candidate ever” — while slapping a Star of David atop a pile of money right next to her face. While the Trump campaign claimed it was a “sheriff’s star,” reporters quickly sussed out the graphic was created by antisemitic alt-righters on 8chan, an even more extreme 4chan offshoot. Trump’s team was literally disseminating alt-right propaganda.

While the organized alt-right fell apart after Charlottesville, with Spencer and others facing financial ruin from lawsuits, its style of gleeful “just kidding” racism and neo-Nazi imagery remained — simply folded into the argot of the online right.

Last year, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign for president got in trouble for pushing a video that contained an obscure neo-Nazi symbol called the sonnenrad. It’s the sort of thing you’d only know about if you spent time in the right’s online circles, where this kind of edging-toward-fascism is considered fun and even cool (as long you maintain just enough plausible deniability to keep your job).

The origin story of the Haitian dogs and cats meme appears to be remarkably similar. Two reporters, Zaid Jilani and Kate Ross, traced the panic about Haitians in Springfield back to an August march staged by the nearby neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe. One of its leaders, Drake Berentz, spoke at an August 27 city commission meeting to warn that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”

But it’s not just that the preoccupations of the extreme are making their way into the mainstream. It’s their style, the spreading of memes in ecstatic indifference to truth, that is so distinctively alt-right — yet now so normalized in the Trump movement as to be almost banal.

One X user perceptively compared the Haitians-eating-dogs meme to Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of “bad faith” in mid-century antisemitic rhetoric. The philosopher wrote:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I’m familiar with this quote. It made the rounds among media types in 2016, as a description of both the way that Trump and his alt-right fans use language to spread bigotry.

That it applies to much of the GOP today shows that we’re still living in a political moment the alt-right helped create.