Previous: The Material Consequences of Unreality.

Current: How Distributed Participation Manufactures Social Facts.

Next: The Information Landscape — Architectures that Stabilize Parallel Worlds.

The Breakdown in Reality

It took ninety-six hours for a local rumor that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets to become a presidential debate point. Thirty-three bomb threats followed: schools closed, public events were canceled, and the Haitian families at the center of it — people who had come legally, been recruited by local employers, helped revive a town that had been losing population for decades — were afraid to leave their homes. The mayor, the police, the Republican governor all said it wasn’t true. None of it mattered.

When JD Vance was asked directly on CNN whether the Springfield rumors were just a story he helped create, he said yes — it was worth it, he explained, to “create stories” if it meant the media would pay attention. To fabricate, to manipulate, to construct a narrative he knew wasn’t true — as long as it worked.1

That posture had been visible from the start. Far before the CNN interview, as fact-checks began circulating, Vance did not retreat from the claim; he defended its persistence. He posted a long thread cataloging real local tensions — strained services, rising rents, a tragic accident — and ended with a directive: “Keep the cat memes flowing.” He mocked critics and encouraged continued amplification. In doing so, he was articulating something structural: the durability of the claim did not depend on its factual basis. It depended on its function.

The story bound together disparate frustrations into something legible and portable. Springfield — a Rust Belt town navigating economic transition and demographic change — could stand in for many others. It was not powerful because it was unique, but because it was representative. A complicated municipal reality was compressed into a symbol that could circulate easily and attach to broader narratives.

And yet, while Vance and Trump elevated the story, they were not the authors of its momentum. By the time it reached national politics, it had already accumulated velocity across platforms — memed, reframed, argued over, believed, mocked, repeated. They didn't build the structure that carried it. They stepped into something already moving.

Springfield does not primarily illustrate the power of individual villains. Nor does it illustrate a simple failure of fact-checking. It reveals something structural about the modern information ecosystem: claims can stabilize through circulation even when their factual grounding is nonexistent. Once embedded across overlapping networks, a narrative no longer depends on accuracy alone to persist.

And Springfield is not the last instance of this pattern. It is a visible case of a broader dynamic: symbolic claims move through converging incentives, accumulate reinforcement, and eventually produce material consequences. The same structural pattern has appeared in narratives about election fraud, migrant “invasions,” FEMA disaster response, and vaccine conspiracies: claims factually unfounded yet socially stabilized through circulation.

To understand how that happens, we need to look at the overlapping incentives that sustained it in this case.

Distributed Construction

The Woman in Springfield

Let’s start with the Facebook post that “began” it all. A resident in a local Springfield group posts that she heard from a neighbor that the neighbor’s daughter’s friend saw Haitians eating pets.

She’s not part of some disinformation campaign. She’s not trying to trigger a national controversy. She heard something alarming and she’s warning her community — doing what feels like the responsible thing. Does she know for certain it’s true? Probably not. But she heard it from someone she knows, and people have been talking about things around it: it feels plausible enough to share.

The post draws limited engagement: some comments, reactions, shares within local networks. Some skepticism, some affirmation. Nothing about this step requires malice. It’s perfectly human: rumors have long functioned as collective sense-making under conditions of uncertainty.2

But she's posted it. Without knowing it, she's provided the organic, local confirmation that the machinery has been priming the public to receive for months — the thing that makes a pre-existing narrative about dangerous, unassimilable immigrants threatening white American communities feel suddenly, viscerally real. It doesn't matter that it's a rumor of a rumor of a rumor. It matters that it comes from someone who lives there, who has no obvious agenda, who was just worried enough to say something. She would later say she regretted how it traveled. But by then it had already done what it needed to do — given amplifiers up the chain something they could point to as grassroots, local, human. That's the proof: that's all it needed to be.

She’s posted something that slots perfectly into a system designed to harvest exactly this kind of raw material. By trying to be a good neighbor, she’s unwittingly materialized the manufacture. She provided the specific, tangible anchor: a jagged, viral handle for a narrative that was just waiting for a place to land

The Right-Wing Influencer

Call him Marcus. He runs a political account with a couple hundred thousand followers across X and Telegram. He’s not a grifter exactly; he genuinely believes immigration is destroying the country, genuinely thinks the political establishment has sold out working Americans, genuinely feels like the culture is under siege. He’s been posting about immigration for years — this is one of his issues.

Marcus sees the Springfield post and it slots perfectly into everything he already believes. Does he think Haitians are literally eating cats? Hard to say, and that’s kinda the point. It’s not that he’s cynically spreading something he knows is false; it’s that the question of literal truth doesn’t really come up for him the way it might for someone outside his world. The claim feels right: it matches his understanding of what unchecked immigration does to communities. Whether this specific incident happened exactly this way matters less than the pattern it represents.

He creates a thread — pulls in other stories about immigration impacts, crime statistics he’s been collecting, clips of officials he thinks are lying. Springfield becomes Exhibit A in a case he’s been building for years. The pet-eating claim isn’t necessarily the entire argument, but it’s fuel. Does Marcus even know the claim is false? Maybe not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It passes his smell test: it fits the pattern he’s been tracking, it matches the world as he understands it, and it makes sense alongside everything else he’s seen. The specific claim almost doesn’t matter; it’s a door into a larger worldview. And the real grievances arranged around it — the strained services, the rising rents, the cultural friction — make the false claim feel less like a lie and more like a detail someone got slightly wrong in an otherwise true story.

Is Marcus spreading disinformation? He’d be insulted by the suggestion; he’s doing journalism the mainstream media won’t. He’s amplifying voices the establishment ignores. He’s telling the truth about what’s happening to this country. Sure, he’s growing his platform, building his brand, monetizing through subscriptions — those incentives exist, but they’re not the point, not to him. The political conviction is real, even if the specific claim might not be. Regardless, his audience lights up; people are adding their own examples, their own local stories. He didn’t just share a claim; he gave his community material to work with, a new way to express something they’ve all been feeling. And if the elites in the corporate media damn him for spreading “disinformation,” who the hell cares?

The Shitposter

A few days later, someone — let’s call him Jake — sees the claim floating around right-wing social media. Jake would consider himself a shitposter; he runs an account with a decent following. Makes political memes, mostly about culture wars or whatever dumb stuff he sees.

Jake sees the Haitians-eating-pets claim and laughs. This is perfect. It’s outrageous enough to be funny, ridiculous enough to meme, and timely enough to ride whatever’s already trending. True or not doesn’t really enter into it. The internet rewards what hits and this will hit.

He opens Grok — his AI model of choice, the one that doesn’t nag him about “harmful content” — and gets to work. Trump holding a cat, looking heroic, protective. The Haitians in the background? Make them look feral. Ravenous. Really lean into it. And throw in a blue-haired liberal somewhere, why not — go ahead and give her a nose ring too. He cycles through a few generations, tweaking the prompt until the image hits that sweet spot between absurd and shareable. Perfect.

He posts it. The response is immediate: replies, quote-tweets, people riffing on it, adding their own variations. The image takes on a life of its own. That’s the thrill: watching something you made ripple outward, mutate, get picked up by accounts bigger than yours.

The metrics matter, but so does the fun. The point isn’t just growth; it’s participation in a shared joke that feels transgressive and current. In this corner of the internet, irony and sincerity bleed together on purpose: you can lean into something outrageous and, if challenged, slide back into “it’s just a meme.” The ambiguity is part of the game.

Whether Jake believes the claim is secondary. What matters is what the meme does. It provides a vivid image that others can reuse, exaggerate, weaponize. It sharpens the frame. It turns a rumor into something visual and repeatable. In doing so, it contributes to how Haitians in Springfield are imagined: not through formal argument, but through repetition and play.

The meme performs political work regardless of the intent behind it.

Regular Jane

Jane is 62, retired from an IT job, living in a small town about an hour east of Springfield. She doesn’t think of herself as particularly political; she watches the news, scrolls Instagram, keeps up with family on Facebook.

The meme appears in her feed and, at first, she barely registers it. Later that day she sees another version — slightly different image, slightly different caption — and then another reposted by someone she knows. Over the next day or two it keeps resurfacing in different forms, circulating across accounts she follows and pages the algorithm surfaces for her. The repetition softens its edges. It begins to feel less like a stray joke and more like part of the background conversation, something everyone has at least seen.

She laughs; it’s absurd, which is part of the appeal. The image is exaggerated, ridiculous, almost cartoonish. But it also echoes fragments of other conversations she has been exposed to: immigration on the news, stories about border crossings, politicians saying things are chaotic or out of control. She isn’t consciously stitching those threads together — the meme simply lands in an environment where those themes are already circulating.

Does she sit down and evaluate whether Haitians are literally eating cats? No. That’s not how the interaction works. It passes through her feed in the same way countless other cultural signals do: quick, emotional, ambient.

She taps “like.” Maybe she adds a light comment — “Keep your pets inside 😹.” It’s a small gesture, the kind of low-stakes participation that makes you feel part of a conversation everyone’s already having. Which is, of course, exactly how it works.

The Fox Producer

A producer at Fox — let’s call him Mike — is monitoring social media trends. That’s his job: track what the conservative audience is talking about, find stories that will resonate, keep the numbers up.

Springfield is blowing up across right-wing social media. His own family members are sharing the memes. The audience clearly cares about this.

Does Mike believe Haitians in Springfield are eating pets? Maybe he does — where there’s smoke there’s fire, and perhaps his audience has concerns the establishment dismisses. But that question is less important than how the story functions in his world. Springfield is trending. His audience is talking about it; competing outlets are covering it. A claim circulating at scale becomes, by definition, something to discuss.3

The story makes air. On the evening of September 9th — hours after Springfield police had already released a statement saying there were “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community” — Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher told viewers that Haitian migrants “are taking people’s pets and killing them and eating them.” The debunking is already public; coverage proceeds anyway.

With that, the claim acquires something it did not previously have: institutional weight. What begins as a Facebook rumor, then circulates through memes and threads, is now delivered on national television by a network anchor behind a news desk. The frame shifts from “something people online are saying” to “something being reported.”

The social reality under construction just got a lot more solid.

Trump

Peggy Noonan once wrote that the “battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” In the 1980s, that battle was fought by staffers, cabinet members, and speechwriters: a closed loop of professionals trying to plant a flag in the president’s worldview.

Trump is the hyper-digital evolution of that barren terrain, but the trenches have been filled in. If Reagan’s mind was a battlefield for his inner circle, Trump’s is a firehose aimed directly at his face. He is the first truly terminally online president: an executive whose information environment looks less like a formal briefing and more like your uncle’s Facebook feed at 2 AM.4

By the time the Springfield story reaches him, it has already passed through multiple layers of circulation: a local Facebook post, screenshot threads, meme accounts, a prime-time cable segment. It is no longer obscure or confined to a corner of the internet. It has been repeated, reframed, and discussed at scale. The precise pathway by which it arrives in front of him is ultimately less important than the fact that it does. Perhaps he sees it on television; perhaps someone on his staff flags the segment; perhaps it surfaces through the same social platforms that are feeding it to millions of others. In a media ecosystem where viral content, cable coverage, and political messaging constantly intermingle, exposure becomes almost inevitable once a claim reaches a certain level of visibility.

When he repeats the claim — first online and then on the debate stage — the story completes a circuit that no one designed but everyone contributed to. A Facebook post became a thread became a meme became a segment became a presidential talking point. At each step, the claim picked up legitimacy it didn’t earn — not because anyone verified it, but because enough people repeated it. By the time sixty-seven million people hear it on the debate stage, it doesn’t matter whether Trump believes it. It matters that he said it, and that saying it felt normal, because by then the entire information environment had already made it feel normal.

For those already inclined toward him, the debate moment doesn’t convert skepticism into conviction. The specific factual question — are Haitians eating pets? — has long since stopped being the point. The story has become shorthand for something larger, and whether any individual participant believes the literal claim matters less than whether they’re willing to participate in what it represents.

The Pattern in View

What we have just traced is not a sequence of villains but a convergence of incentives. Each participant engages for different reasons — community, ideology, humor, engagement, profit, spectacle — and the story moves through all of them like current through a circuit. No one directs the outcome. No master plan is required. Just millions of people following their own incentives, all pushing in the same direction, contributing to the circulation of a claim that some believe, some doubt, and many treat as beside the point.

Kate Starbird calls this participatory disinformation: not propaganda flowing from a central command, but a distributed process in which reality is collaboratively constructed. The power does not lie in coordination so much as in accumulation. No one builds it alone; everyone builds it together.

That is what makes the process so disorienting. Move through each node carefully and every single person is doing something that makes sense from where they’re standing. Each action is locally rational — each participant is responding to their own incentives. Nobody thinks they’re building a machine.

And yet, when you step back, the collective product is something far stranger: a nation mobilizing against legally present immigrants on the basis of a story that cannot be traced to a single firsthand account. What emerges is not the result of obvious villainy at every step, but of cumulative participation. The system generates an outcome for which no individual actor, taken alone, appears fully responsible. And when reality is constructed through distributed participation rather than anchored in common verification, its consequences do not remain contained to the narrative sphere; they reorganize how people interpret the world around them.

What Springfield makes visible is not just the vulnerability of one community, but the fragility of shared reality itself.

The Social Construction of Reality

That fragility isn’t something most people think about. We move through the world assuming everyone around us is more or less operating from the same set of facts — that the ground beneath us is shared. But Springfield makes the cracks hard to ignore. We share physical space with people who inhabit entirely different constructed worlds — ride the same elevators, use the same currency, breathe the same air — yet the maps we use to interpret that air no longer overlap.

You don’t have to look at national politics to see it. You might be able to see it at your own dinner table.

I see it most clearly in my own family. It’s the quiet violence of sitting at a Thanksgiving table with people who raised you — people you know are kind, people who have taken in family members when they had nowhere else to go, people with advanced degrees and professional lives built on rigorous thinking — while your phone buzzes with links from a universe you don’t recognize. My aunt sending articles about gangs taking over the city where my brother and sister-in-law live. They live there. They walk those streets every day. That is not what’s happening. Family members sharing posts about school psychologists brainwashing kids into being gay — in a group chat with my sister-in-law, who is a school psychologist. The transgender panic, from people who once welcomed my transgender friends into their home without hesitation.

It’s a specific kind of vertigo. I look at them and think: I know you aren’t stupid. So how are you this deluded? For a long time, I thought the gap between us was about facts. I thought if I could just bring enough “truth” to the table, the fever would break. But as I’ve moved from the dinner table to the research lab, spending my career studying how information actually flows, I’ve had to accept a much harder truth: They aren’t failing a cognitive test; they are passing a social one.

The Springfield story looks like a psychotic break from the outside. But from the inside? It feels like community. It feels like finally being seen. It feels like a transgressive joke shared among friends, or a “directionally true” way to scream about a world that feels like it’s slipping away. The gap between “how could you believe this” and “how could you not” isn’t entirely a gap between intelligence and ignorance. It’s a canyon between two entirely different, self-stabilizing worlds.

And as I dug into the literature to make sense of my own life, I realized the unsettling part: none of this is actually new. I was looking for a modern glitch, but what I found was a fundamental law of human nature. Sociologists have argued for a century that “reality” isn’t something we just stumble upon in the woods; it’s something we manufacture, stabilize, and defend together.

Look at this picture.

These are British barristers. In 2024, in one of the most advanced legal systems on earth, the officials responsible for adjudicating law and liberty go to work wearing traditional white wigs — historically made of horsehair, now often synthetic — with different styles for different ranks. No one is unaware of how archaic this appears; it’s frequently joked about. Yet the practice endures because within that institutional context it signifies authority and continuity. From the inside, the wig reads as legitimacy. From the outside, it can look almost theatrical.

Everything is like this. Every institution, every norm, every moral certainty that feels solid and self-evident endures because enough people continue to act as though it is binding. Most of us carry a faint awareness of that in the background — that money is paper, that borders are lines on a map, that authority is fabric and ritual. Occasionally that awareness snaps into focus — in an Intro to Sociology lecture, or halfway through an edible — and you think: wait, we really did just decide all of this. Even our deepest values — what counts as respectable or shameful, sacred or obscene, patriotic or traitorous — stabilize because communities perform them into existence. None of it descends from nature fully formed. It holds because we keep reenacting it.

Sociologists have been formalizing this intuition for over a century. In the 1890s, Émile Durkheim observed that collective rituals generate what he called social facts — realities that exert force not because they are individually discovered, but because they are collectively sustained. A totem is just wood until a community treats it as sacred; once it is treated as sacred, it becomes sacred in every way that matters. The power does not reside in the object itself, but in the group’s recognition of it.

By 1966, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann gave this intuition a name: the social construction of reality. Their claim was disarmingly simple. Common sense is not discovered; it is produced. Reality is stabilized through conversation, repetition, and institutional reinforcement. The physical world exists, of course, but the meanings layered onto it — what counts as normal, valuable, threatening, sacred — are social achievements. And once established, they rarely feel like achievements. They feel obvious. They feel natural. They feel like the way things simply are.

We see this in the mundane. Americans tip 20 percent; in Japan, tipping can be taken as an insult. In France, bread is bought twice a day because “fresh” is a socially maintained expectation. Most of the time, these shared constructions are the glue that holds a culture together. But the same mechanism that produces tipping norms also produces political common sense. Chomsky and Herman mapped this at the institutional level in Manufacturing Consent: the news does not simply report reality; it structures the boundaries of what is treated as serious, legitimate, or even imaginable5 — not necessarily through conspiracy, but through the incentives of ownership, advertising, and sourcing that determine which claims are amplified and which are dismissed. The range of acceptable opinion — like the barrister's wig or the 20 percent tip — is a collective performance we often mistaken for a natural law.

We see this pattern throughout history, ranging from relatively contained moral panics to moments of genuine catastrophe. Medieval blood libel, the “stab-in-the-back” myth in Weimar Germany, the Satanic Panic in 1980s America — each involved narratives that hardened through repetition and collective reinforcement. In more extreme cases, coordinated media environments have reshaped not only belief but behavior. During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, radio broadcasts that repeatedly dehumanized Tutsi as “cockroaches” were associated with sharply higher participation in violence in areas with greater signal exposure.6 Across these examples, the underlying dynamic does not change. Repetition, institutional authority, and shared reinforcement can turn constructed narratives into lived necessity. Springfield is squarely in that tradition, just running on new infrastructure.

Manufacturing Realities

The question has never been whether reality is socially constructed. The question is what happens to a democracy when the construction fractures — when it becomes possible to build entirely separate worlds within the same borders.

Because democracy requires a minimum of shared ground. Not agreement on values — democracies have always contained deep disagreements about what’s right. But agreement on what’s happening. You can argue about immigration policy. You cannot argue about immigration policy when one side believes Haitians are eating pets and the other side thinks that’s insane and a third side thinks it’s hilarious. You can debate healthcare when you share basic medical premises. You cannot debate healthcare when your opponent believes vaccines are poison and that raw milk cures disease. How do you have a substantive policy conversation when you can’t establish shared facts to argue about?

Springfield is a glimpse of what happens when that shared ground disappears entirely.

In one Springfield, Haitians are legal workers recruited by employers to revive a dying town. The city’s population had been declining for decades: factories closing, young people leaving, tax base eroding. Haitian residents passed background checks, received legal work authorization, took jobs at local manufacturers desperate for labor. The town’s economy stabilized. Boomed, even — became Ohio’s second-leading county for economic expansion. Population decline reversed. This Springfield is validated by city officials, economic data, local employers, and the direct experience of anyone who works alongside Haitian colleagues or sees them at church on Sunday.

In another Springfield, Haitians are invaders dumped on the town by nefarious officials who don’t care about regular Americans. They’re overwhelming services, driving up housing costs, changing the character of the community, and — the story goes — eating pets. This Springfield is validated by the memes people see, the politicians they trust, the media figures they follow, their friends and family discussing it, and the sheer volume of people discussing it.

There are other Springfields still: the one where the housing crisis is real and immigration is the only explanation anyone’s offering; the one where the whole thing is content to harvest; the one where it’s a punchline proving Republican gullibility; the one where the real story is deindustrialization.

It doesn’t matter which version was true. The people peddling the false narrative won: elected to office, dismissing those who tried to correct the record, and now governing based on the reality they constructed. They even attempted to revoke the legal status that had brought Springfield’s Haitian residents to the town in the first place. A judge blocked the move, for now, but the ethos born in Springfield — policy shaped by fiction, accountability to narrative over fact — didn’t stop there.

This isn’t just about one town or one lie. When Pizzagate fabricated a reality about a pedophile ring in a DC pizza shop, it sent a man with a rifle. When Springfield manufactured a story about immigrants eating pets, it didn’t just spread fear — it won elections and shaped policy.

And Springfield is only the most visible example. Look around: your doctor insists the election was stolen. Your child’s teacher warns that vaccines alter DNA. Your neighbor shares memes about Jewish weather machines. This is happening everywhere: in every town, every workplace, every family. Communities share the same streets, the same schools, the same air, but inhabit entirely different worlds.

And it doesn’t matter who is actually right. When enough people inhabit the same constructed reality, they don’t need to be right — they just need to be enough to vote, enough to govern, enough to make the physical world bend until it matches what they believe.

Seventy percent of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. Sixty-one courts rejected the claims. It didn’t matter. The man who tried to overturn the results won the presidency again. Measles is back because enough parents inhabit a reality where vaccines are poison. Legislatures have passed election security laws for a fraud that never happened. We’re not losing an argument; we’re losing the ground the argument is supposed to stand on.

Springfield is a glimpse of a structure that makes shared reality optional. There has always been money in division, ratings in outrage, votes in fabrication. But never before have the tools to construct and sustain a separate reality been this accessible, this scalable, and this profitable — all at once. And they’ve arrived into a society already primed for it: atomized, economically precarious, stripped of shared institutions, and shaped by decades of media infrastructure built to exploit exactly these conditions — conditions that happen to be load-bearing for a functioning democracy.

In the next installment, we’ll move from the people who build these stories to the architectures that stabilize them — examining the structural blueprints of the parallel worlds we now call home.

Acknowledgments: I’m grateful to colleagues who offered careful feedback on earlier drafts, particularly Annie Kelly.

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A woman in Springfield, Ohio, sharing something she'd heard from her neighbor about something the neighbor's daughter's friend had supposedly seen. A cat, hanging from a tree branch. Haitians carving it up. She hadn’t seen it, but her neighbor’s daughter’s friend did. Like a game of telephone: my neighbor's daughter's friend's coworker's cousin's...

That was it. The start of something that would help define an election.

Soon, the post was circulating beyond its original Facebook group. Within days, it had jumped to X, picked up by large right-wing accounts. Within a week it was on cable news, one side amplifying it, the other debunking it.

And then came the spectacle. A future vice president posting on X about “reports” that “show” pets being “abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” The official House Judiciary Committee GOP account posting calls to vote Trump to protect Ohio’s “ducks” and “kittens.” And then, a former (and once again current) president stood on a debate stage in front of sixty-seven million people and said, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”

A Facebook post. A rumor from a neighbor about an acquaintance no one had spoken to. Three degrees of separation in a single sentence — my neighbor told me that her daughter’s friend saw. Within a month it was on a presidential debate stage, in campaign ads, on billboards in Arizona. It was triggering bomb threats, closing schools, sending a community into hiding.

This is a story about how that happened; how a rumor moved outward, how it accumulated attention, and how it came to justify real responses. It is a story about Springfield. But Springfield is not unique. It is a place where unreality crossed into consequence, under conditions that exist elsewhere.

The Groundwork

Why Springfield?

Because before that Facebook post ever went viral, the town had already been selected. From the top, as a symbol. From the bottom, as a target. The ground was being prepared from more than one direction.

From the Top

At the National Conservatism Conference in July 2024, J.D. Vance pointed the audience toward Springfield, Ohio as a warning. “Now go to Springfield, go to Clark County, Ohio,” he said. “Ask the people there whether they have been enriched by 20,000 newcomers in four years.”

He framed the city as evidence of what he described as the economic and social consequences of immigration. Housing costs, he said, were “through the roof,” and longtime residents could no longer afford to live in the town they had grown up in.

According to NPR, It wasn't the first time the Ohio Senator had mentioned the city. In a presidential race where immigration had become central, Vance frequently leaned on Springfield as his cautionary tale — of unchecked immigration made visible. A town of 60,000 overwhelmed by tens of thousnads of newcomers. “I couldn't believe it when I first heard it,” he told the crowd. “Ask the people there, whether they have been enriched by 20,000 newcomers in four years.”

The allegation was a centerpiece of the Trump-Vance ticket: migrants taking American jobs, driving down wages for native-born workers. Springfield, in this telling, was proof. A symbol. A place to point at.

Why Springfield specifically? It’s hard to say for certain. But it was an Ohio town, Vance’s home state, and it had all the ingredients for a familiar story: a struggling Rust Belt community, a wave of newcomers, the sense that something had been lost. Never mind that the Haitian workers had been actively recruited to fill jobs that weren’t getting filled, or that the town had seen the second-fastest wage growth in Ohio since their arrival. The economics didn’t matter. The narrative was already written. Springfield just had to fill in the blanks.

And so it became: not an indictment of the policies that hollowed out the town in the first place, but an indictment of the people recruited to revive it. A story about them. Taking your jobs. Straining your resources. Stealing your future.

From the Bottom

While Vance was pointing at Springfield from the national stage, others were circling from below.

Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi white supremacist group, had identified Springfield too. Same town. Same targets. Different vocabulary.1

The group was founded in 2021 by Christopher Pohlhaus, a former Marine turned tattoo artist. Pohlhaus — who has “Wotan” tattooed on his face in runes — reportedly dabbles in what’s called “esoteric Hitlerism,” a variant of neo-Nazism that treats Hitler as divine, and claims Hitler was “an incarnation of Wotan.” (That’s a direct quote.) Their stated goal, according to the GW Program on Extremism: turning the United States into an “all-white ethnostate through the violent removal of all Jews and non-white minorities.”

And why Springfield? Probably for similar reasons it appealed to Vance. A struggling Rust Belt town. A wave of newcomers. The sense that something had been lost. For a group whose worldview revolves around white replacement, those ingredients would have been hard to ignore

In July 2024, as Vance was ramping up his rhetoric about Springfield on the national stage, Blood Tribe reportedly launched what they called a “hit” against the city — casting the influx of Haitians as an “invasion” threatening “good White residents.” According to a later lawsuit, members heeded the call. Hateful posts. Harassing voicemails. Doxxing.

Then they showed up in person.

August 10, 2024. Springfield was hosting its annual Jazz & Blues Fest — a beloved local event that’s seen Grammy-nominated artists grace its stage over the years. According to reporting by NPR, a dozen Blood Tribe members marched through downtown. Matching red shirts, black pants, ski masks. Rifles and swastika flags. They stopped at City Hall, delivered a racist and antisemitic rant, chanted “Sieg Heil,” threw Nazi salutes. An eyewitness later reported that four of them aimed their rifles at her family’s car and shouted, “Go the fuck back to Africa.”

Two days later, on August 12, NPR profiled a local GOP committeewoman named Glenda Bailey as “one of the loudest voices against Haitian migration.” Her accusations: diseases, voodoo, gangs. And then: “They have become the occupiers. What they’ve done is they’ve replaced the population in Springfield, Ohio.”

Bailey sat somewhere in the middle. The diseases and voodoo stuff could have come straight from Blood Tribe — classic dehumanization, the same script run against immigrants for over a century.2 The “occupiers” and “replaced the population” language closely tracked Great Replacement Theory: a conspiracy rooted in white supremacy that, by 2024, had become common on the American right.3 Vance himself had invoked its themes for years.

Bailey probably wasn’t trying to launder neo-Nazi talking points. She likely just absorbed what was in her information environment — the same feeds, the same figures, the same framing — and repeated it. But that’s how this tends to work. The stuff from the top and the stuff from the bottom don’t meet on their own. They need people in the middle to blur the lines. Local officials. Influencers. Facebook groups. By the time a claim passes through enough hands, it stops sounding like a neo-Nazi talking point. It just sounds like something people are saying.

And by late August, you could see it happening in real time.

August 27, 2024. Drake Berentz, whom researchers at the GW Program on Extremism describe as Blood Tribe’s second-in-command, showed up at a Springfield city commission meeting. He approached the podium in the group’s colors — red and black — and identified himself as having led “the anti-Haitian immigration march earlier this month.” Then he issued a warning: “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in, and with it, public frustration, threat and anger.”

At that same meeting, a local resident and self-proclaimed social media influencer influencer named Anthony Harris (who may have had his own reasons for making a scene) brought up an allegation of immigrants grabbing ducks from the city park, killing them and eating them. Blood Tribe reportedly echoed the claim on Gab.

A neo-Nazi and a local influencer. Same meeting. Same room. Same claims. That’s what a prepared ground looks like.

Blood Tribe’s leader would later boast that “we put Springfield in the public consciousness.” He wasn’t entirely wrong. But he wasn’t entirely right either. The neo-Nazis helped prepare the soil. People like Bailey helped churn it. By the time that city commission meeting happened, the claims didn’t seem strange anymore. The ground was ready. It was just waiting for something to fall on it.

The Seed

By early September, the ground had been prepared. From the top, a vice-presidential candidate had spent months painting Springfield as a cautionary tale. From the bottom, neo-Nazis had marched with swastika flags, and baseless claims about diseases, voodoo, and pets had been circulating in Facebook groups and city commission meetings. Local officials were repeating them to NPR. A local influencer was making them at the city commission podium. The lines had blurred.

And then a local resident posted to a private Facebook group about something her neighbor’s daughter’s friend had supposedly seen.

The post itself was a rumor. Three degrees of separation in a single sentence. Not “I saw.” Not even “someone I know saw.” A friend of a daughter of a neighbor.

The claim was entirely unfounded; police and local government officials quickly debunked it and similar rumors. But in the information environment that had been building for months, it didn’t matter. This woman wasn’t trying to start a national incident. She likely genuinely believed what she’d heard. She was a person in a Facebook group, sharing something she thought might be true, warning her neighbors. That’s what people do in Facebook groups. That’s what neighbors do. (She later apologized, reportedly horrified by what followed.)

In a different information environment, maybe the post gets a few skeptical comments and disappears. Someone asks for proof. Someone checks with the police. But this wasn’t a different information environment. This was Springfield in early September 2024: where a GOP committeewoman had just been with NPR talking about diseases and voodoo and replacement, where neo-Nazis had marched through downtown, where the idea that Haitians were eating pets was already circulating on Gab and showing up at city commission meetings.

The claim fit. It rhymed with everything people had already been hearing — diseases, voodoo, replacement. Now: pet libel, scaled for social media4. Ritualistic cruelty to innocents, proof of fundamental incompatibility. And so instead of dying, it spread.

The Convergence

What happened next is a case study in how fringe claims reach the mainstream: it didn’t happen through some slow process of gradual acceptance, but through a rapid chain of amplification where each link added a layer of legitimacy.

It started with a screenshot.

September 6:

An X account called @BuckeyeGirrl — about 2,500 followers — posted a screenshot of the Facebook post.

Remember when my hometown of Springfield Ohio was all over National news for the Haitians? I said all the ducks were disappearing from our parks? Well, now it’s your pets.

She tagged Fox News. Then, in a self-reply, she tagged @EndWokeness.

@EndWokeness — an account with 2.9 million followers that has become something of a clearinghouse for right-wing moral panics and disinformation, linked to far-right operative Jack Posobiec5 — picked it up the same day. They posted the screenshot alongside a photo of a Black man holding a goose. (The photo was actually taken near Columbus, not Springfield. That didn’t matter.)

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.

From there, it moved into a more organized layer of the ecosystem.

September 8:

Figures who routinely translate online narratives into national political talking points began to take it up. Charlie Kirk — founder of Turning Point USA, close associate of Posobiec, and no stranger to great replacement rhetoric himself6 — posted the screenshot to his millions of followers: “residents of Springfield, OH are reporting that Haitians are eating their family pets.” On Steve Bannon’s7 podcast, he added that this brings the United States “one step closer to the great replacement.”

Then, that same day, @EndWokeness tweeted the video of Anthony Harris — the local influencer from that August 27 city commission meeting — falsely claiming Haitians were eating ducks in the parks. The claim completed a circuit: from neo-Nazi Gab posts, to a city commission meeting, to a Facebook group, to a 2.9-million-follower account, back to the city commission footage.

By this point, the rumor had achieved something more durable than virality.

September 9:

It crossed into institutional media — and into the hands of political figures.

Fox News host Trace Gallagher repeated the claims on his evening program. According to reporting by News Line Magazine, “known disinformation outlets” — InfoWars, Zero Hedge — quickly share them. The Zero Hedge story got reposted on at least eight other sites, several of which don’t even disclose where it came from. Within days, at least 14 different articles were published, almost all citing the @EndWokeness tweet as their source. Six of these sites are monetized, running Google ads next to the content. In this ecosystem, whether publishers believe the claims they circulate or simply profit from them is difficult to disentangle. And it is increasingly beside the point.

The same day, JD Vance — the vice-presidential candidate who had spent months pointing at Springfield — posted on X: “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

Fact-checks scrambled to keep up. The city of Springfield told ABC News: “there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” It didn’t matter.

AI-generated images of Trump holding cats flooded X. The official account of the House Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority shares one. Elon Musk posts an AI-generated cat and duck with the caption “save them!” Millions of views.

The claim had shifted from allegation to signal. It was reproduced through memes, echoed by official accounts, and circulated without regard to its factual status. Belief was no longer required for the story to function.

September 10:

Vance conceded that “it’s possible” the rumors were false. Then, dismissing those attempting to fact-check as “crybabies in the media,” he told his “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing.”8

With the claim now circulating as a sanctioned narrative, it began to draw in adjacent events that could lend it weight. One such event was a tragic accident from the year before, when a Haitian immigrant crashed into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark. Vance invoked it in his thread: “Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” It’s a classic tactic: anchor the unfounded claims to something true, something inarguable, and let them blur together9.

The boy’s father, Nathan Clark, went to a city commission meeting that same day to respond. “My son was not murdered,” he said. “He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti.” He wished his son had been killed by “a 60-year-old white man” so “the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.” He asked Trump and Vance to stop using Aiden “as a political tool,” and to stop making “untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members.”

The clarification didn’t matter. His son’s death had already been absorbed into the narrative. The story was now a full-blown meme; in this ecosystem, memes are currency. AI-generated images of Trump saving cats from menacing Black figures flooded X. Accounts like “Catturd” — a Florida man named Phillip Buchanan with 3.9 million followers, known for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation, whose reach Elon Musk had personally intervened to boost — posted images dripping with racist undertones: Trump clutching a terrified cat, dark-skinned figures pursuing in the background. The joke and the threat, indistinguishable.

The narrative was now being reproduced through official campaign channels. The Arizona Republican Party put up billboards in Phoenix reading: “EAT LESS KITTENS — vote Republican!”

At that point, it was no longer peripheral to the campaign. It had become part of the environment surrounding the candidate himself.

Once embedded in formal campaign messaging, it was only a matter of time before it reached Trump directly. Traveling to the ABC News presidential debate that night, he posted repeatedly on Truth Social — sharing AI-generated images of himself surrounded by cats and ducks, AI-generated images of cats with MAGA hats holding guns, and the now somewhat infamous clip of Anthony Harris claiming migrants were eating ducks in the park. Rather than distancing himself from the memes, he joined them.

The last remaining boundary was the debate stage — the point at which the claim would be delivered to its largest audience under the highest formal legitimacy.

September 10, 2024. Sixty-seven million people watching.

“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

The moderator corrected him. The city of Springfield had already said there were no credible reports. Trump didn’t back down. “Well, I’ve seen people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food.”

People on television. Something people are saying.

There was something almost absurd about it: a presidential debate stage transformed into a conduit for rumor, Kamala Harris’s expression caught somewhere between disbelief and amusement. In isolation, it was easy to laugh. The clip went viral. The memes multiplied. And in doing so, the claim lodged itself into the popular consciousness in a way that no fact-check could undo.

The seed had sprouted. From a neo-Nazi Gab post to a Facebook rumor to a presidential debate stage, the distance between fringe and center had collapsed.

What followed was not retraction or restraint, but consolidation.

After the debate, Trump shared posts about Haitian immigrants allegedly carrying geese in Springfield, and a woman arrested in Canton, Ohio for allegedly eating a cat: who, the Associated Press later reported, was not Haitian and was born in Ohio. He doubled down on Fox News the next day. He posted more AI-generated images of himself with cats and ducks, including one of a cat holding a sign that read “KAMALA HATES ME.”

What had begun as a rumor, then a meme, was now being rehearsed as a message.

The Pivot: From Meme to Mandate

Days later, at a rally in Arizona, Trump reportedly folded the claim into official campaign rhetoric, telling supporters that “recordings of 911 calls show the residents are reporting the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese” and that “20,000 illegals” had taken over “a beautiful place.”

By then, the story had fully attached itself to the campaign. The ground had been prepared for months: from the top, a vice-presidential candidate painting Springfield as a cautionary tale; from the bottom, neo-Nazis marching with swastika flags and seeding claims on Gab. When a Facebook post about a neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s cat (debunked) appeared, it happened to be the thing that caught.

The speed was remarkable. From a private Facebook group to influencer accounts, to cable news, to a presidential debate stage, to rally speeches across the country. Four days from rumor to national news. A few more weeks to policy priority.

But by then, the specifics barely mattered. The cats and dogs had already done their work. They forced the story into the popular consciousness. They made Springfield a household name. And once the attention was there, the machinery shifted.

The memes gave way to talking points about “illegals” and “invasion.” A community legally recruited to fill jobs and revive a struggling town was now being presented as evidence of crisis. The spectacle faded. The frame remained.

And once a story reaches that point, the effects are no longer abstract.

The consequences were immediate. Thirty-three bomb threats. Schools closed. Public events canceled. Local officials pleaded for it to stop. State leaders called the story false.10 None of it mattered. The Haitian community — people who had come legally, been recruited to fill jobs, and helped revive the town — were afraid to leave their homes.

Those consequences demonstrated something simple: the claim worked. It drew attention, mobilized supporters, and helped create a climate in which extraordinary actions felt reasonable.

That success was not punished or corrected. It was rewarded. The actors who advanced the story did not retreat once it was disproven; they gained power — and with it, the capacity to translate the story into action.

That translation is now underway. According to reporting by NBC4 Columbus, ICE appears to be preparing operations in Springfield. News 5 Cleveland reports that Governor Mike DeWine has begun coordinating with federal authorities on immigration enforcement in a city where roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants live, many bracing for the expiration of Temporary Protected Status.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem officially terminated Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) on November 28, 2025, with benefits set to expire at 11:59 p.m. on February 3, 2026. This administrative transition serves as the bridge between unreality and policy: they’ve effectively relabeled approximately 15,000 residents who previously passed federal background checks and held valid work permits as “illegals;” thus, the narrative creates the political permission for the ensuing “surge.” It redefines a legal presence as a criminal one; when the February deadline hits, the public is already primed to see the removal of neighbors not as a shift in status, but as a “restoration of law.”

The circuit is completing itself.

What began as a rumor — something memed, mocked, and dismissed — is hardening into policy. Deportations. Raids. A community that had been legally recruited to save a dying town is now being targeted for removal.

From Unreality to Reality

The Springfield story is often described as misinformation: a failure of fact-checking, media literacy, or “truth.” But that framing misses what actually happened. This wasn’t a breakdown in the system. It was the system functioning exactly as designed.

What the Springfield case suggests is that, in today’s information environment, claims do not need to be true to be consequential. They need to be useful. Useful for mobilizing anger, for signaling belonging, or for justifying actions that were already under consideration.

In this case, the specific content of the claim appears to have mattered less than whether it activated familiar emotions, traveled through established channels, and arrived at a politically opportune moment. Rather than being corrected or filtered out, the claim was tested, amplified, memed, and repeated, moving through media, political institutions, and online communities in ways that gave it durability and force.

What began as fiction became justification. What began as something to laugh at became something to act on.

Springfield was not simply overwhelmed by a false story. It moved through a system that translated attention into legitimacy, legitimacy into permission, and permission into force. The Springfield case can be read as part of a broader pattern, one in which unreality does not stay unreal.

Unreality has consequences. The question is how this system learned to produce them.

Acknowledgments: I’m grateful to colleagues who offered careful feedback on earlier drafts, particularly Kate Starbird.

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