How Lies About Pet Eating Turned Into Bomb Threats

The violent threats that have disrupted Springfield, Ohio, since Donald Trump repeated a racist lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets, during the presidential debate, follow a familiar pattern. The bomb threats that shut down elementary schools, the swatting attacks meant to intimidate community members, all form the sort of high-speed-networked harassment that over the last few years has largely focused on community events for queer and trans people. That may be because the same network of right-wing media influencers who spread a moral panic about “groomers,” leading to bomb threats, doxxing, swatting, and other threats of violence against Drag Story Hour events, has activated again—as they do each time some new panic surfaces in the right’s online information ecosystem. In both cases, they haven’t just spread lies; they have served as the go-to source of content for people willing to act on those lies.

Springfield, like too many communities across the country, is not in danger due to “rumors” and “baseless claims”—it is a community in the crosshairs of an informal yet highly engaged network, pushing violent propaganda that has repeatedly scapegoated people for “destroying” America, and activating those consuming this content to threaten and terrorize the groups being scapegoated. As the Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck recently told The Wall Street Journal, “We’re living the danger that misinformation and created stories leads to.”

An earlier attempt to scapegoat Haitian immigrants in Springfield didn’t reach a national audience, said Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who investigates how extremist groups use technology. In August 2023, an 11-year-old boy was killed after a car accident involving a school bus and a car driven by a Haitian immigrant. Afterward, a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe tried to seize on this local tragedy. “White supremacist movements have done this since forever,” said Holt, “to identify cases of white children who die in incidents involving immigrants, specifically non-white immigrants.” The group has “what appears to be a halfway-decent membership in the Midwest,” Holt said, and they had been seen in Ohio before, attempting to intimidate attendees of a Drag Story Hour event, dressed in similar attire and making Nazi salutes, alongside a banner reading, “Weimar Conditions Require Weimar Solutions.”

This summer, near the one-year anniversary of the deadly car accident, members of Blood Tribe marched on Springfield—about a dozen guys, some carrying swastika flags, some armed with rifles, most with their faces hidden. Afterward, the founder of Blood Tribe attempted to use a Springfield City Commission meeting to smear immigrants in the community and to recruit others to their racist cause, but he was thrown out by the city mayor. While this group now takes credit for the anti-Haitian lies spreading to J.D. Vance, Holt said he’s skeptical.

The Trump campaign and MAGA also earlier attempted to use Aurora, Colorado, in their fearmongering about immigrants, but it didn’t catch on, said Nick Martin, an investigative journalist and researcher who runs The Informant, an online publication that covers hate and extremism. Trump spoke about Aurora at a Wisconsin rally, not long before the debate, and lied about a community of Venezuelan immigrants in Aurora being a criminal gang taking over the city. Deportations, he said, would be “a bloody story.” Seeing the anti-immigrant lies spreading about Springfield, said Martin, “this felt like take two for me.”

But Martin could also see right away Springfield was different. The “viciousness” of the racism felt more extreme, but also, he said, “there was just delight, throughout the MAGA world, for making these racist claims, these racist lies.” With Springfield, A.I.-generated images quickly proliferated of Trump saving cuddly cats and dogs. For MAGA world, Springfield has now become “a very easy shorthand for this very intense racism,” he said. It is a way for Trump and adjacent political figures to reference an expansive corpus of anti-immigrant propaganda, from a nonexistent immigrant “invasion,” to its accompanying panic about immigrants “replacing” white Americans.

What changed, making the white supremacist propaganda ploy about cats and dogs successful where the white supremacist propaganda ploy about a car accident failed? Part of the difference may have been the way the pets lie was circulated on the social media site X—where it was “picked up by what feels like a pretty familiar cast of characters,” Holt said: “these conservative influencers that essentially specialize in a form of moral panic.” The anti-immigrant panic about Springfield quickly spread from an X account called “End Wokeness,” which had shared a Facebook post about allegedly missing pets, and from members of the crew that led the anti-LGBTQ “groomers” crusade: the early Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec and the infamous X account Libs of TikTok, run by Chaya Raichik. “The MAGA folks are trafficking in the same sick and bigoted nonsense about Springfield, Ohio that the neo-Nazis carrying swastika flags were pushing a couple weeks back,” Martin said on Bluesky on September 7—before the presidential debate. “They’re repeating the same rumors and lies. But they obviously have exponentially bigger audiences.” The day before the presidential debate, X owner Elon Musk re-shared a post by the X account for the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, featuring an A.I.-generated image of Trump appearing to rescue a hyperreal cat and a goose in a pond.

Within a matter of weeks, the right’s more “successful” campaign using the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield had wrought something that looked a lot like the anti-LGBTQ campaigns they’d led before. But the biggest difference may be that Trump so quickly elevated their campaign to the national stage.

Days after the debate, Springfield schools and hospitals began receiving bomb threats. About half of the students in the English as a second language class one Springfield woman ran for her Haitian neighbors didn’t come to class the night after the debate, “because they genuinely didn’t feel safe leaving their houses,” she told a reporter. A town hall organized by the news outlet The Haitian Times was threatened and couldn’t meet in person. A group of Proud Boys—the neofascist group that Trump had instructed to “stand back and stand by” at a 2020 debate and who played a leading role on January 6—showed up in Springfield and marched. When asked about the Proud Boys on Face the Nation that day, Vance said coldly, “Of course, I don’t align myself with the views of the Proud Boys,” before immediately launching into more racist lies about immigrants, dismissing the Proud Boys as a tactic by the “media” to “distract” people. A Spectrum News reporter has been keeping a running list of places in Springfield “that have either been placed on lockdown, evacuated, closed, or searched at some point over the last week due to threats.” He has counted 33 separate bombs threats. Among them: Springfield City Hall, a threat that Mayor Rob Rue said specifically “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.” On Monday, elementary school kids got ready for picture day and were evacuated instead. There had been another bomb threat. “Frustrated parents say they suspected it would happen,” reported the journalist Amanda Moore.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the right-wing social media moral panic crew seem to be backing off this. Vance especially is unrepentant, all but admitting that he knows what he is saying is damaging to Haitians and isn’t true. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Vance’s campaign knew before the debate that the racist stories about stolen pets were lies. “If I have to create stories so that the American people actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said on CNN, “then that’s what I am going to do.” And an unnamed Trump adviser told The Bulwark that the campaign is content to have this story continue in the news. “We talk about abortion, we lose. We talk about immigration, we win,” the Trump adviser told Marc A Caputo. “We’ll take the hit to prove the bigger point.”

We lack a good way to talk about what is going on when a major presidential campaign—consisting of a former president and a current senator—and a network of right-wing media influencers seem to be drawing from the same well of propaganda. Who is driving who? Underneath it all, underneath the campaign, underneath the information economy, there is a ready pool of anti-immigrant and racist ideas available to anyone who cares to tap into them. The presidential campaign, influencers, and the individuals making the bomb threats and neofascist groups descending on the town create a feedback loop for these ideas, reinforcing them, spreading them, fueling them.

Trump has already promised “large deportations from Springfield, Ohio.” He’s also said he’ll be going to Springfield in the next two weeks—“You may never see me again, but that’s OK. Got to do what I got to do,” he said at a rally on Wednesday. We’ll see if he actually does show up. But he may have other plans: The same players are already trying to turn a handful of other cities into the next Springfield.