MAGAReport for 9/11/2024 - Cat memes

Profoundly dangerous anti-immigrant rhetoric is spreading as a cope for Trump's debate performance

There is strong scientific evidence that memes can affect people’s beliefs and offline behavior. Today I am going to bring you some extremely-online insight into the memes that are taking off on right wing social media and the deep danger they pose.

Trump had a bad debate last night, and for me, the most crucial moment came around his presentation of the unfounded rumor that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Ohio.

If you have been fortunate enough to miss this right-wing conspiracy theory, here is the background. A random person shared on local Springfield, Ohio Facebook group that her neighbor’s cat had gone missing and that the neighbor later said her Haitian neighbors had eaten the cat. She’s “been told” the immigrants were also doing it to ducks in the park and that police were involved. Anyone on NextDoor or a community Facebook group knows this style of second- and third-hand racist fearmongering. This rumor got picked up by a popular far-right account and started to spread.

The whole thing is absurd. The police said there have been no reports of pets or wildlife being killed. If you really want to know more about the “evidence” being shared and why it’s nonsense, Snopes did a good job on the fact check. This whole thing is an anti-immigrant, racist lie with no evidence behind it, and in the last few days, it has been wildly popular on far-right forums. A big reason why is that it lets people make lots of racist memes with AI-generated images of Trump saving cats and geese. If you’ve been seeing pro-Trump cat memes and wondered why, now you know, unfortunately.

This kind of thing is the norm on far-right (and even not-so-far-right) social media. One would think the bar would be higher for the kind of information a Presidential candidate shares on the debate stage, and yet…

If you skipped the debate, steel yourself and watch this wild and deranged 2 minute clip which has Trump’s share of these false claims, the excellent fact check, and the moment for me that was the most devastating of the night for Trump: when he responds to the fact check with “I’ve seen people on television!!”

This nonsense should never have been shared on the debate stage, but I’m not surprised Trump couldn’t help himself; this kind of thing plays well at his rallies, and he has a hard time stopping it in front of other audiences. What did surprise me was that Trump himself shared this meme on his TruthSocial account last night:

This isn’t just a weird pro-Trump army cat. This is the MAGA army taking up weapons and marching into battle. And who are they fighting? Immigrant invaders. It’s a stupid meme, but it’s also a clear endorsement of and, I would argue, a call for attacks. And it was posted by the a man who has a history of inciting violence among his supporters who are enthusiastic to carry it out.

This is the kind of social media posting that leads to offline violence. Nothing should shock me at this point, and yet I gasped when I saw this post from Trump. It is so profoundly dangerous.

It is also classically fascist. I posted last weekend about the characteristics of fascism, and wanted to highlight these two:

2. Propaganda—to attack enemies, to justify violence, to justify laws against “Them” and to support the authoritarian leader.

4. Unreality—supporting conspiracy theories that tarnish the “Other” along with an outright denial of facts when convenient.

Once again, Trump is engaging in fascism and here, taking it a step further to call for violence in his name. It is so important that people who shrug off this side of Trump start to recognize that it’s not just a guy with mean tweets being a jerk online; it’s textbook fascist politics and it’s dangerous. Support for Trump at this point is support for a fascist America.

I anticipated giving you a summary of how the MAGAs were reacting during the debate last night. If you were really looking forward to that nonsense, here are some clips from MAGA forums posted during and just after: