American Unreality — Part 1: Springfield, Ohio
The Story That Devoured a Town
It “started” with a Facebook post. But something was always going to fill that space.
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.
Researchers often talk about “bridging mechanisms:” the idea that extremist rhetoric has to travel some distance before it reaches mainstream politics. Pass through intermediaries. Get softened along the way. There’s laundering involved, sure, but the key assumption is distance: that the fringe and the mainstream are far enough apart that ideas need to make a journey to get from one to the other. What I saw in Springfield made me question that assumption. It looked less like a bridge and more like a shared driveway. If you’re curious, check out Benkler, Faris, and Roberts’ Network Propaganda on the integrated right-wing media ecosystem; Whitney Phillips’ “The Oxygen of Amplification” on how mainstream attention launders fringe content; and Kate Starbird’s awesome work on participatory disinformation and how false narratives emerge collaboratively across networked publics.
None of this replacement or disease rhetoric is novel. It’s the same script that’s been run against every wave of non-white immigrants in American history. The Irish. The Italians. The Chinese. The Jews. In 1894, the founders of the Immigration Restriction League warned that “Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe.” In 2024, a GOP committeewoman in Ohio described Haitian workers as “occupiers” who had “replaced the population.”
There’s a really interesting history to how the Great Replacement Theory — the idea that non-white immigrants are being deliberately brought in to displace white populations — has become normalized on the American Right in recent decades. A decade ago, saying this out loud would mark you as a fringe crank, the guy your family avoids at Thanksgiving. But by 2024, it had already made the trip across the shared driveway. Tucker Carlson had invoked it repeatedly on Fox News, reaching millions. Republican senators had endorsed it. The theory had been cited in the manifestos of mass shooters in Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Christchurch. “You will not replace us” was the chant at Charlottesville in 2017.
The structure echoes what historians call “blood libel:” medieval accusations that Jews ritually murdered Christian children for ritual purposes. Like the Springfield claims, blood libel often spread through hearsay chains (“someone told me”), resisted factual correction, and weaponized alleged harm to innocents to mark a group as fundamentally incompatible with civilized society. The pattern repeats: accusations of ritualistic cruelty toward beings we’re meant to protect (children then, pets now) create permission for exclusion and violence. The technology is old. The infrastructure is new.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Posobiec is “known primarily for creating and amplifying viral disinformation campaigns,” including #Pizzagate and “Stop the Steal.” The SPLC reports that he “has collaborated with white nationalists, antigovernment extremists, members of the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis” and “has used his prominence on Twitter to promote Russian military intelligence operations.” Trump has promoted him by name.
This is the same Charlie Kirk who has said the Biden administration’s immigration policy “is about bringing in voters that they like and, honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.” The same Charlie Kirk who has talked about “prowling Blacks” targeting white people “for fun.” The same Charlie Kirk who wondered aloud whether Black women in customer service jobs are there “because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action.”
Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, is the architect of the “flood the zone with shit” strategy: the idea that you can overwhelm democratic institutions and disorient opponents by rapidly forwarding large volumes of (often dubious) information. His podcast, The War Room, has become a clearinghouse for MAGA politics; as one expert put it, “If someone wants to be a major part of the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement, they need to debut themselves through Bannon’s podcast.”
In the days that followed, he would articulate the logic more directly, saying in a televised interview that he was willing “to create stories” in order to force media attention. The remark clarified what was already visible in practice: the Springfield claims were not being advanced as assertions to be verified, but as narratives meant to mobilize.
The effectiveness of false claims has never depended on their accuracy. It depends on their ability to attach themselves to something real: a death, a crisis, a grievance people already recognize. That logic runs from classic atrocity propaganda through Cold War psychological warfare to today’s participatory disinformation, where narratives are built collectively and made durable by repetition. (Ellul, 1965; Allport & Postman, 1947; Kuran & Sunstein, 1999; Benkler, Faris, & Roberts, 2018; Phillips & Milner, 2021; Starbird, 2019).
See reporting by the Associated Press and NBC News… Both denials came from Republican officials. The call, as it turned out, was coming from inside the house.