The Boy Who Cried Pet-Eaters

The moral of the boy who cried wolf is saying untrue things damages people’s willingness to listen to you when you later need them to hear you saying true things. This post is not a critique of politicians crying wolf. They all do. It’s part of the gig. This post is a look at the small (re: local) political ramifications of larger-level political influencers making unbased claims. No matter your political affiliation, you have a place you call home, and this story is worth thinking through.

Kris Maher, Valerie Bauerlein, and Tawnell D. Hobbs published, How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True in the Wall Street Journal. You should read it. It’s an exceptional piece of real journalism.

Apolitically read it. Try to check your biases first. Put your Office Space hat/goggles/red staplers on too maybe. Think small, think local. Keep yourself there while you take it in.

Springfield, Ohio is a pretty typical rust-belt type of town. Dying industries have meant a loss of jobs and a steady population drain for years. Overall politically, it leans Republican. When you’ve got to conserve what you’ve got left, conservative values tend to sound pretty good and work well enough. As do Christian values. You tend to want to care about your neighbors when you actually know them.

In the wake of COVID, with the employment situation increasingly stressful and the national immigration options starting to open up, a wave of Haiti-fleeing immigrants started to arrive in Springfield. The evangelicals helped bring them in and get them set up. The employers weren’t too upset with the increased labor pool either. The city’s pandemic recovery started to take shape.

The economy did something it hadn’t done in a long time in Springfield—it picked up. It’s funny how a shift in demographics and population growth can work all the way through, and relatively quickly. How some fresh blood can lift a whole region, and, of course not without growing pains too, in the forms of traffic and healthcare and schools, but still, growth beats declining, pretty much every time.

Then, in 2023, a tragic school bus accident involving a (legally immigrated, but driver’s license lacking) Haitian driver, triggered a local political debate about the “new” citizens. The event evolved into questions about who might be profiting at what risk to the community. The guy had crashed into a school bus, there’s no way to describe it but terribly, horribly sad.

Fresh lines were beginning to be drawn. Aggressively opportunistic hate groups started to come in from out of town. White Supremacists saw the town as a platform to advance their agenda. The conspiracy theorists and assorted crazies are always on the watch for stories like this, a tragedy with a spinnable angle, and it happens all over the country if you look for it. You wouldn’t know it unless you lived in one of these places where you could experience it, but if you do or if you have, it’s pretty surreal.

That’s how the local anti-immigration climate was starting to heat up in Springfield coming into 2024.

Next, a person posted, on a private Facebook page, the now famous cat-eating immigrants story. The poster would later disavow it, but the idea was cast into the zeitgeist. J.D. Vance heard it somewhere and started tweeting about it. Not long after, Presidential candidate Trump mentioned it in a highly meme-ified clip during the debate on national TV.

And then, just like that, the pet-eating immigrants in Springfield, Ohio story was everywhere. So what do you think happens next?

A lot of phone calls. A lot of tying up of local politicians time. Many kids didn’t go to school the day after the debate because their parents opted to keep them home. Several schools, the Town Hall, and the DMV all had to close due to bomb threats. Springfield had to cancel a two-day cultural celebration event. A lady filed a police report when her cat, Miss Sassy, went missing and she suspected her Haitian neighbors. Miss Sassy then turned up in the owner’s basement. She apologized.

And, you might be wondering, have their been any actually verified reports of anybody, Haitian or not, eating pets, harming animals, or doing anything remotely abnormal that would require people to take time off from work, kids to miss school, or local businesses to have money-making communal events cancelled?

Nope.

Call it the widening gyre.

Call it the great ravine.

Call it a s***show.

What did happen, was J.D. Vance going on to make this statement in a CNN interview with Dana Bash, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…”

Watch the whole thing. You’re an adult, you can decide how you feel about what he said and the snippet I’m quoting out of full context.

I’m sad. Part of us, Americans, humans, peoples, getting along is being responsible local citizens. Just be a good human. Have some good influence on humanity. Do it on any scale you can. Please.

I increasingly don’t care much for just about any politician these days, but we, as humans, have to do better than this.

We all create stories. Directionally orient the purpose of the stories in positive directions. Call out the full effects of people who don’t.

And support quality journalism, it still matters.

h/t Dave Nadig for sending me this article too, and for framing it as an excellent example of quality journalism.