Bloomberg

There’s something eerily familiar in Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Part of it is that American nativists have a long track record of fearmongering about what immigrants eat — with jeers about dog meat, in particular, regularly showing up in bigotry directed at new Asian arrivals. Wong Chin Foo, a late 19th-century Chinese immigrant activist, once quipped, “I never knew that rats and puppies were good to eat until I was told by American people.”

But there’s something else: the glee with which Republicans are spreading an obviously bigoted lie, the joy in demonizing a vulnerable migrant population.

After Vance kicked off the pet-eating panic with a tweet, the pro-Trump internet almost immediately flooded with memes and AI-generated images of Trump protecting animals from Haitian hordes. After Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) condemned the fearmongering, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) shared one of these images to taunt him.

Vance has since admitted he had no proof of Haitian pet slaughter in Springfield, saying “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” Yet he nonetheless urged his allies to keep pushing the claims.

“Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing,” he tweeted.

This juxtaposition, between the old-school racism of the allegation and the relish with which the falsehood spread, reminded me of a political phenomenon from the recent past: the ascendant alt-right circa 2016. The alt-right’s online legions rose to prominence alongside Donald Trump, trolling his enemies with death threats and “ironic” Nazi memes.

It even briefly attempted to move into real-world politics by staging real-life rallies, most infamously in Charlottesville in 2017. The negative attention and legal fallout following Charlottesville proved to be its undoing as an organized political force. Today, there are no major alt-right institutions, and the term “alt-right” itself has largely fallen out of favor on the extreme right.

Yet the way in which people like Vance and Mace have aped their style, the enjoyment they take in spreading hate through a sheen of “just joking” plausible deniability, show the movement’s enduring influence.

The alt-right grew out of a collision between two internet subcultures: intellectualized racism, represented by the namesake web publication Alternative Right, and the culture of trolling and shock humor on message boards like 4chan. Alternative Right founder Richard Spencer and his ilk dreamt of a white American ethnostate; the “channers” loved to share shocking material for the pure joy of transgression.

“Making Nazi jokes was itself a joke [on 4chan], a way to keep away outsiders,” the journalist Elle Reeve writes in Black Pill, her recent history of the internet fringe. “Over time, new people came to the site and interpreted those jokes as sincere, and eventually the group became the thing they’d once satirized, a herd of brainwashed swastika-posting sheep.”

This “herd” adopted Trump as their cause célèbre in the 2016 cycle, correctly seeing his rise as a moment where the boundaries of what was possible in American politics were wide open. And it worked: Reeve’s book, as well as a mountain of contemporary reporting, shows that the lines between the Trump movement and the alt-right became quite porous.

One small but telling example: In July 2016, the Trump campaign released a graphic that referred to Hillary Clinton as “the most corrupt candidate ever” — while slapping a Star of David atop a pile of money right next to her face. While the Trump campaign claimed it was a “sheriff’s star,” reporters quickly sussed out the graphic was created by antisemitic alt-righters on 8chan, an even more extreme 4chan offshoot. Trump’s team was literally disseminating alt-right propaganda.

While the organized alt-right fell apart after Charlottesville, with Spencer and others facing financial ruin from lawsuits, its style of gleeful “just kidding” racism and neo-Nazi imagery remained — simply folded into the argot of the online right. 

Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images 

Last year, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign for president got in trouble for pushing a video that contained an obscure neo-Nazi symbol called the sonnenrad. It’s the sort of thing you’d only know about if you spent time in the right’s online circles, where this kind of edging-toward-fascism is considered fun and even cool (as long you maintain just enough plausible deniability to keep your job).

The origin story of the Haitian dogs and cats meme appears to be remarkably similar. Two reporters, Zaid Jilani and Kate Ross, traced the panic about Haitians in Springfield back to an August march staged by the nearby neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe. One of its leaders, Drake Berentz, spoke at an August 27 city commission meeting to warn that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”

But it’s not just that the preoccupations of the extreme are making their way into the mainstream. It’s their style, the spreading of memes in ecstatic indifference to truth, that is so distinctively alt-right — yet now so normalized in the Trump movement as to be almost banal.

One X user perceptively compared the Haitians-eating-dogs meme to Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of “bad faith” in mid-century antisemitic rhetoric.

The philosopher wrote:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I’m familiar with this quote. It made the rounds among media types in 2016, as a description of both the way that Trump and his alt-right fans use language to spread bigotry.

That it applies to much of the GOP today shows that we’re still living in a political moment the alt-right helped create.

For more from Zack Beauchamp on the ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, sign up for the On the Right newsletter here.

Kate Green/Getty Images

The Swift effect: Always knowing how to cause a stir, Taylor Swift finally posted a carefully worded endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to Instagram just minutes after the presidential debate ended on Tuesday night. It came as a denouement after months of conjecture, active campaigning for the endorsement (from the Biden team), and even bullying (from Trump). Here’s how the endorsement of the world’s most famous pop star can make a difference in this very close race.

Wait, Kamala Harris owns a gun?: At the presidential debate on Tuesday night, Harris stated that she and her running mate, vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, are both gun owners. Although Harris has called for banning assault weapons and passing universal background checks, her personal stake in the public debate on regulation shows the nuanced reality of gun ownership in the United States.

Bird flu on the rise: Last Friday, the Missouri health department announced that there had been a recent human case of bird flu. The patient is the first among 15 people infected in the US who didn’t report having contact with animals. It’s still unknown whether the virus is H5N1 influenza —  the subtype that raised flags among experts about another potential pandemic. Here’s how to minimize your risk this upcoming flu season.

Meet the godfather of neopatriarchy: The political views of self-proclaimed sexist Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard professor and author, explain much of the right-wing gender politics that are popular today. His 2006 book Manliness attacked modern feminism’s ideal of a “gender-neutral society” and focused on an increasingly open celebration of the virtues of the traditional gender norms touted by many conservatives today.

Tyreek Hill’s disturbing police encounter: Last Sunday, Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill was pulled over by police for a traffic stop near Hard Rock Stadium. During the stop, an officer violently dragged him out of the car, threw him to the ground, and handcuffed him. Hill said he was “shell-shocked” by the entire exchange, which is generating renewed public conversations around police brutality.

Slow and steady is less scary: Apple’s upcoming artificial intelligence system, Apple Intelligence, won’t ship as a finished product. Apple Intelligence will only work on the latest iPhone models, including the iPhone 15 Pro, and MacBooks and iPads with M1 processors or better. It will also launch in beta mode, which might be by design as companies try to mitigate public fears about the speed of AI technology development.

The maternal health crisis continues: According to a new report, half of US counties currently lack a hospital that provides obstetric care. These “maternity care deserts” are disproportionately likely to be rural and are associated with a higher risk of preterm births. [Axios]

A different American dream: A recent survey found that while 88 percent of boomers agreed that owning a home was part of the American dream, only 68 percent of Gen Zers did. Many young people now list a sense of community, having a family, and pursuing the careers and lifestyles of their choice as what they aspire to in their own version of the American dream. [The New York Times]

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— the percentage of applications for research project grants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that are successful.

The NIH funds the vast majority of biomedical research in the US, and most grants expire in less time than it takes scientists to make worthwhile discoveries. Many grants do not provide enough funding for labs to sustain themselves and run on their own. The grant application system worked well a few decades ago, when over half of submitted grants were funded, but it’s harder than ever for grants to get approved and for scientists to get enough funding to take on ambitious research. To learn more about how the grant system works — and when it doesn’t — read Future Perfect fellow Celia Ford’s piece here.

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you Monday!

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