During Tuesday’s presidential debate, former President Donald Trump made a claim that quickly went viral on social media — and prompted an immediate fact check.
During a rant about border control, Trump repeated a conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that has gained traction in some right-wing circles.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” he said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
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ABC News anchor and moderator David Muir interjected, saying there are no credible reports of pets being harmed or abused by immigrants in Springfield. But that has not stopped Trump or his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), from spreading this and other inflammatory conspiracy theories about Haitian migrants in the Ohio city. In a lengthy Tuesday post to X, formerly known as Twitter, Vance implied that they were also spreading communicable diseases like tuberculosis and HIV.
Though the extreme nature of these claims might feel new, they have a long and ugly history. Social media users and commentators quickly likened the comments to the dehumanizing rhetoric Nazi Germany deployed against Jewish people leading up to and during World War II.
Katie Sibley, a history professor at St. Joseph’s University, believes the comparisons are valid. As she notes, antisemites including Adolf Hitler have long leaned on blood libel myths that date back to the Middle Ages, which accuse Jewish people of kidnapping Christian babies for ritualistic sacrifice. Sometimes, these pernicious stories incorporate cannibalism, with the blood of the children allegedly used to make matzah.
“It’s really striking,” Sibley said of the similarities in language. “Here we have people who were accused of eating pets, somebody else’s treasured, small, beloved creature. It sort of echoes that.”
Language’s link to violence
As scholars have emphasized, dehumanizing language often precedes violence. In the lead-up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Hutu people frequently referred to the Tutsi population as “cockroaches” on a popular radio station. In the mid-1930s, Nazi propaganda depicted Jewish people as worms and “poisonous” serpents. Damaging lies like the blood libel myth were also plastered on the cover of Der Stürmer, the virulently antisemitic German newspaper, and even continued to spread after the concentration camps were liberated. Mobs killed 42 Jews and injured another 40 in a pogrom in the Polish city of Kielce in 1946 after an 8-year-old boy went missing for two days.
Threats of violence are now starting to emerge in Springfield. Its City Hall was evacuated Thursday over an emailed bomb threat that read, in part, “We have Haitians eating our animals.” The author of the email also claimed to have placed explosives at two DMVs and two elementary schools.
According to the Haitian Times, many immigrant families in Springfield have kept their children home from school out of fear for their safety.
Loss of legal rights
Apart from violence, damaging conspiracy theories are also linked to the suppression of rights throughout history. In 1877, the San Francisco health officer blamed an outbreak of smallpox on “unscrupulous, lying and treacherous Chinamen, who have disregarded our sanitary laws.” Politicians refused to provide Chinese immigrants proper health care, sending them to the filthy “pesthouse” on hospital grounds.
This scapegoating and discrimination continued into the 20th century. In 1900, after a Chinese immigrant was diagnosed with the first case of bubonic plague in the United States, the city destroyed local businesses in Chinatown and ransacked homes, burning possessions to “fumigate” the area. The xenophobia toward Chinese immigrants extended far beyond San Francisco, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from entering the country for a decade.
“This really had an impact,” Sibley said. “People were very much mistreated. Their communities were cut off, and they were barged in upon by the police.
“There is that bridge from rhetoric to actual laws.”
As Sibley notes, racist rhetoric also preceded the internment of about 117,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Politicians including Chase Clark, the governor of Idaho, compared them to “rats.”
Trump’s comments in context
This is not the first time critics have accused Trump of weaponizing language, or echoing Nazi rhetoric. But his and Vance’s comments — along with campaign ads linking immigrants to crime — have alarmed marginalized communities and the historians who have studied these cycles again and again.
“We think in this country, we’re not going to have those kind of laws anymore,” Sibley said. “You know, we got rid of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we got rid of internment, of course, after World War II. But remember that when Trump first came into office, he talked about a Muslim registry.
“I think what’s changed is that the rhetoric has been accepted increasingly, sadly, in the public space.”
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