Content Warning: I’m going to talk about this insane post birth abortion nonsense, which requires that I address palliative care for dying babies. It’s horribly fucking sad but I want everyone to know the grim truth about this conspiracy – so go ahead and skip this piece if that’s too upsetting. <3
We all watched the debate the other night, right? We knew Trump was going to say some unhinged shit, but “they’re eating the pets” and “executing babies” was not on MY bingo card (you know what was? “Actual racial slur”). These assertions are very obviously not true, but like a lot of urban legends and conspiracy theories, they’re important to investigate. It’s not lost on me that a quarter or so of Americans are eating this shit up with a spoon, and I have some ideas about why.
First of all, there’s the question of what to call these statements – are they lies? Certainly. Are they propaganda? Totally. You can also make a case for calling them misinformation or disinformation, but I think the ROOTS of these lies are actually urban legends. And that is what makes this so fascinating and TERRIFYING. Because an urban legend takes hold from a kernel of truth and spreads like crazy – people repeat it as fact without understanding why.
THEY’RE EATING THE PETS!
Urban legends are weird or scary stories that circulate informally – person to person and online in digital spaces – and are passed off as true. The key to identifying an urban legend is that people have a vague personal connection to it: “My friend who lives there told me” or “my mom’s cousin says.” When JD Vance posted these bizarre tweets about Haitian immigrants in Ohio EATING THEIR NEIGHBORS PETS, the tell is he’s heard “inquiries.” Sure, Jan. Vance is repeating something he heard on the internet, cementing its urban legend status, and using it as propaganda. I HIT THE FOLKLORE TRIFECTA ON THAT ONE YOU GUYS.
Like a lot of urban legends, we can track the evolution of this story. Jonathan M. Katz, an incredible journalist and TikTok’s most patient man, tracked the story down. It’s also been reported extensively in the news, but I wanted to give Katz the credit here. In September, a woman—who was on drugs? in a psychotic state? possessed by the devil?—killed and tried to eat her neighbor’s cat. This woman is an American citizen, who is not Haitian but IS Black, which greased the wheels in racist Internet bottom-feeder Ian Miles Cheong’s ever shrinking brain. He tweeted about it, which got a stunted ghoul with the smallest human mouth ever seen, Charlie Kirk, to repeat it as “people are reporting.” Et voila! This slithering deformity of xenophobic troll bait was hatched and grew up to become the cursed highlight of an extremely cursed debate performance by a man whose scrambled eggs brains are actively leaking out of his ears.
When I say that JD Vance took the urban legend and turned it into propaganda, I mean that he saw something in this story that could advance his platform, and he passed it off as true in pursuit of that. Vance, I think in some regards even more than Trump, has a nativist, nationalist (and I would say fascist) agenda. He explicitly scapegoats immigrants as the cause for all of America’s problems – unemployment, the wealth gap, the housing shortage, crime, and drugs. Despite both he and Trump being married to immigrants, there’s a lot of talk about cultural chauvinism and low birth rates – both of which demonize non white immigrants. So a story about Black immigrants ruining a nice white town with their barbaric practices and diseases and also THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!
I’m not going to debunk this story. Plenty have, and if you believe Haitians are eating other people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, you’re an asshole. Attacking recent immigrants for being diseased, barbaric, or gross has a long history and I think everyone knows that.
I have some ideas about the conspiratorial fixation with Haiti, and Haitian immigrants, though. First of all, this is not a new thing. John Ganz of Unpopular Front writes about a version of Haitian immigrant slander in the early 90s, when stories began to pop up about refugee children eating cats. There was also plenty of hysteria and fear around HIV, which first started to appear in hetero populations in Haiti. At that time, it was Pat Buchanan and David Duke hammering on the “boat people of Haiti” in the press. Fun company to keep, you guys! Long before Trump called it a shithole country, Haiti and its people have had a weird place in the American imagination.
My theory is that this is because Haiti holds up a mirror to American imperialism and meddling. There’s plenty of racism and xenophobia in the mix, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve been interfering there for a long time. I don’t want to go off the rails on this – scholars have dedicated their lives to this topic – but here’s a primer. We’ve been in and out of there, occupying, overthrowing, and leaving a mess in our wake for over a century. And because we’re separated by only a 700 miles of ocean, Haitians have been coming here to escape it.
American occupation in the early twentieth century led to our modern (American) conception of Haitian voodoo. The Marines were obsessed with stopping the practice on the island, for a myriad of racist reasons, and they came back home to misrepresent what they saw. They told sensationalist stories of sorcery and cannibalism that turned the people of Haiti into a nation of violent, mystical savages in American imagination. This history primes us to absorb this dime store variety of racist urban legend from people like JD Vance. The worst part about this, of course, is that it’s endangering Haitians in Ohio and other parts of the US – something that fascists like Vance are surely aware of.
WE’LL EXECUTE THE BABY!
There was a second urban legend turned misinformation point in last night’s debate, equally disturbing but in a different way. Donald Trump told Americans that babies are being “executed” after they’re born. Here’s the transcript:
This is clearly, patently absurd, as is the idea that people are having casual abortions in the ninth month of gestation. “Late term abortions” have been a conservative tulpa for many years now, but the uh, executing thing is new! In the run up to the overturn of Roe, I noticed a lot of internet chatter about babies being aborted right before they could have been born. People seemed to be looking for a way to convince themselves and others that abortion was being misused, that lazy whores who should have kept their legs closed decided at 38 weeks that they just didn’t want the kid anymore!
Anti-choice people have always leaned into proscriptive, Puritanical philosophies about sex to make their point. They’re primarily religious fundamentalists, after all. They want you making soldiers for the Lord, note enjoying time with your boyfriend. It’s a completely unrealistic view of sex that the majority of the culture eschews, but we’re still vulnerable to the insinuation that women who have sex outside of marriage are whores, and getting an abortion is letting them off the hook. And that notion plays into conservative frenzy about third trimester abortions. Desperate to connect with the average American, who supports abortion under the Roe standard, they made up lies and grisly propaganda about unnecessary late abortions.
After Roe fell, they had to up the ante. The country is furious, abortion is winning on every ballot measure, and Democrats are running on it. News reports about the harms to women are dominating, and they needed a new boogeyman. I think that’s how this propaganda leapt straight into “executing babies” conspiracy thinking. Jessica Valenti, who writes the excellent “Abortion Everyday” substack (ope! Some Republicans just read that name and stroked out) traced the root of this story, and it’s incredibly frustrating and sad.
The allegation that Trump made came from an interview that a Virginia governor gave in 2019. His name is Ralph Northam and he was speaking about expanding abortion access in the state, but also about infant palliative care. Governor Northam is also a pediatric neurologist, so he absolutely knew what he was talking about. The quote that Trump took out of context and implied was about “executing babies” was about how to care for a dying infant in hospice.
Please sit for a moment and let that sink in. A baby is born with a fatal illness or abnormality, and parents are allowed to decline ineffective treatment that would prolong suffering. And Donald Trump told the world that those grieving parents, hanging on to the last minute of life with their dying baby, were committing infanticide. If you feel nauseous right now, congratulations – you’re a human being.
I’m calling this a conspiracy theory, or maybe an urban legend, because it operates the same way the story about Haitians eating dogs does. Trump – and other activists – took a true story and twisted it into something ghoulish and headline grabbing, and this thing is spreading along communications lines in America. As I mentioned before, it’s circulating around the internet; if you watch clips of Trump voters they blithely repeat it with no evidence, it’s in memes and TikToks and it’s turned into a story that a lot of people believe. Yes, it’s absolutely propaganda, and Trump is using it to deceive people, but it also has a life of its own.
It reminds me of another insane urban legend that has its roots in a painful American reality: litter boxes in classrooms. You’ve no doubt heard someone mention this, and you’ve DEFINITELY seen someone post it on Facebook. The story goes that American gender politics is so out of control that kids are identifying as cats, and schools are providing litter boxes for them in the bathrooms. Your neighbor swears it’s happening in her teacher friend’s district!! Your mom saw a photo of the litter boxes online!!
This story has been debunked many times over, but do you know where it comes from? An NBC reporter tracked it back to kitty litter in classrooms…in crash kits for school shootings. They keep litter on hand in case a young child has to pee while being locked down because a school shooter is on the loose. The locus of this weird little transphobic meme is actually a terrible, intractable threat of violence that the politicians who complain about pronouns are unwilling to fix. It’s as if turning our attention to cat ears will make us forget that they sit idly by while our children are murdered in schools.
THIS IS A LOT but also I want us all to be curious about where this stuff comes from. The stories are bizarre and funny and disturbing, but they get traction for a reason. If you want to be able to counter the bullshit in real life, it helps to understand why.