It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen during a presidential debate, and I’m exactly the kind of nerd who has watched every general election debate since he was 11 years old.
A few minutes into the contest, Kamala Harris interrupted her remarks to mock Donald Trump’s rallies. She invited viewers to attend one, made fun of Trump’s meandering and self-absorbed speeches and then said, “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
She was baiting him, and he fell for it. He responded with a barrage of conspiracy theories and misinformation that culminated in a bizarre rant about immigrants and pets in Ohio. “In Springfield,” Trump said, “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
In that moment, Trump amplified a truly strange claim that had spread through the online right over the days before. It’s hard to trace the origin of a rumor, but it blew up with a Sept. 6 post from a prominent right-wing account called End Wokeness, which claimed that “Springfield is a small town in Ohio. 4 years ago, they had 60k residents. Under Harris and Biden, 20,000 Haitian immigrants were shipped to the town. Now ducks and pets are disappearing.”
The next day, a Malaysian MAGA influencer named Ian Miles Cheong posted about a disturbing incident in Ohio in which an American-born woman from Canton, Ohio, Allexis Telia Ferrell, is being prosecuted for killing and eating a cat. (She is pleading not guilty.)
Cheong falsely speculated that she was Haitian, and MAGA ran with it. Benny Johnson, a MAGA influencer with 2.7 million followers on X (Johnson has been identified as one of the right-wing personalities who — perhaps unwittingly — received substantial payments from Russia), posted that “THOUSANDS of Haitian Migrants TERRORIZE Ohio, EAT Family Pets, Cats, Dogs & Ducks.” Another MAGA influencer, a person who goes by the online name Catturd, posted, “Unless you want your pets eaten, you better vote for Trump.” Catturd has 2.9 million followers.