On the 10th of September the US presidential race held its first and likely only debate between former president Donald Trump and current vice-president Kamala Harris. By most accounts, Harris won the debate, clearly articulating positions (though not specific policies) and defending her work in the Biden administration. The former president however, degenerated into a series of anti-immigrant talking points that he kept circling back to at the expense of taking legitimate shots against the current administration.
This was expected. The appeal of Trump back in 2016 – the only substantial policy he seemed to push for was the same as what we would find from UKIP: no more immigrants. The only salient difference is that in the US we have a land border that can be exploited for fear. Aside from “Mexico” the former president was always talking about an amorphous problem of “them.” “They” are stealing our jobs, creating crime, and draining our resources. This time though, the claims were different, they were more specific – but also they were strange, strange even for a person who placed a plaque on his golf course commemorating a US Civil War Battle that never happened.
For non-skeptics, or even for skeptics who are not into the conspiracy theory parts of life; the claims seemed absurd and shockingly abrupt. For those of us in the conspiracy theory world, they were shocking but for a much different reason. Earlier this year I was forced, in the name of intellectual honesty, to defend David Icke when he criticised people like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Tim Pool, and David Rubin (the latter two have recently been discovered as being paid by the Russians, in an effort to sow division and chaos in American politics). I reference that article because Icke called these people the “Mainstream Alternative Media,” (MAM) and this debate showed us that these are the people that the former president and his inner circle are getting their information from. We know this because of four distinct things that Trump said during his debate with Harris.
I’m going to start with the most visible of Trump’s comments: that “they” (immigrants) are eating people’s pets in Springfield OH. While the internet has had a joyful reaction to this claim, we should take care of what this means. It’s not a dog whistle as some have said, it’s just a whistle. The point of this story is to take the familiar trope that immigrant populations eat “weird food” and wrap that up in an insidious claim that that they are roving the streets looking to abduct and kill our beloved pets. This reduces these populations to being nothing more than vermin animals like coyotes or badgers, that need to be culled.
The story that this claim is based on is a bit convoluted. There was a woman who was recently charged with killing and eating a cat, which did not take place in Springfield but in the city of Canton, OH. This person was not only not a Haitian immigrant, but she was also not an immigrant at all. One of the stories about a murdered pet can’t seem to be proven to have happened at all. Then there are two stories which involve actual Haitian immigrants. The first is a bus accident in 2023 which resulted in the death of child. The second was a report to police that a group of Haitian man had killed some Geese. The reason that this story doesn’t fit with the anti-immigrant narrative that the Trump-Vance campaign is pushing is that the concern wasn’t that someone’s pets had gone missing, but that the men in question had killed the Geese out of the appropriate hunting season. The concern was found to be baseless; but these stories form the nucleus of the conspiracy. Since then there have been bomb threats to Springfield’s city hall, elementary, and high school.
The border claims are different. As I wrote in the introduction, Trump’s position has been that the border needs be “secure.” This is because, as he claimed during the debate that the populations coming through the Southern border are nothing more than criminals, terrorists, and people who have recently been let out of “insane asylums.” For the last one I’m sure he’s trying to evoke images of Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum and not an actual mental health facility.
The tendency to those opposed to these ideas is that this is, again, par for the course for anti-immigrant racism. However, this go around the language is more extreme. Over the last few years, the talk from the MAM has not been about immigrants stealing US jobs, rather to characterise immigration as an invasion. It’s no longer people willing to work for less pay than the average American, but ‘military aged’ men who are trained and waiting to destroy the country. It’s no longer an economic worry, it’s now the same claims that we hear from “Great Replacement” conspiracy theorists online.
Since 2020 Alex Jones has pivoted from a general hate for immigrants to specific fear-mongering that Democrats are brainwashing foreign populations, bringing them into the US, and then forcing them to vote. This is nothing more than the talking points that Tucker Carlson has provided when he talks about immigrants destroying the “normal” America and directly citing the “Great Replacement Conspiracy” theory. Trump is just smart enough to stop talking before he begins blaming Klaus Schwab and George Soros; but not enough to never make these claims to begin with.
He’s getting this information from news sources that he trusts, but none of these sources are what we should think of as mainstream. This is part of a disturbing feedback loop the former president is involved in. He makes an immigration claim, and someone like Alex Jones repeats it but looks for some story – any story, which tangentially is related to that claim. In this case we get a triple hearsay story about a dead cat in a tree which is then amplified through anti-immigrant conspiracy theorists like Charlie Kirk and Alex Jones. Jones discussed the story in his coverage of the debate the next day with a caller from a different county, completely unrelated to the “pet” situation, which again, did not happen. It’s only purpose is to inflame racial prejudices, which vice-presidential candidate JD Vance openly admitted to.
The third clue is that of his reference to Aurora, Colorado. Trump said this:
“You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns, they are taking over buildings They are going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country, and they are destroying our country. They are at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out — we have to get them out fast.”
The criticism over his immigration rants has been focused on pets, probably because it seems more absurd, and it is certainly more personal to pet owners. However, the Aurora claim is that a Venezuelan prison gang has taken over the apartment complex and claimed it like some kind of feudal lord, or perhaps one of two excellent action movies where gangs have taken over the totality of a residential area.
The claim Trump is repeating concerns an apartment building was turned into a stronghold for the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. While city officials have reported that there has been some gang activity in the city, crime in Aurora is down and the building in question was closed by officials for safety and health reasons. The owner of the building, who has been fighting numerous complaints, claimed that the gang’s control over the building made it impossible to make repairs. The story seems to be that a slumlord is pretending that his negligence is the result of immigrants rather than anything else.
The story has been circulating in conspiracy theorists’ anti-immigration rants for a while now. It was only a few weeks ago that I became aware of it on Jones’ show (via Knowledge Fight). It’s one of those stories that seems too good to be true if you are touting the fears of immigrant invasions.
The next clue, in the words of Vox, is Trump’s reference to the failed coup attempt as “J6.” This is the term used online for the assault on the US Capitol when Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was being certified. No one, outside the internet, refers to it as “J6.” As Levitz points out J6 is an “abbreviation that few who have never been subject to a microblogging platform’s character limit would have any reason to use or even recognize.” In other words, it gets called “J6” on Trump’s social media platform and Twitter in order to save on the character limit. No one abbreviates it like that, other than conspiracy theorists who believes the contradictory notion that the failed coup was actually a “false flag” by the deep state but also that the incompetent insurrectionists did nothing wrong. Trump’s further reference to “Ashli Babbit,” the conspiracy theorists’ martyr of the failed coup attempt, rather than the police officers that were killed, is a stark display that the conspiracy theorists’ telling of the event is the one which he prefers.
We’re entering into a difficult and dangerous period where the most extreme conspiracy theories are getting traction with a person who once was the US President and could very possibly return to that office. While the stark comments about the murdered and eaten pets are getting some of the more mainstream conservatives to condemn those statements, that does little to call them back. It certainly doesn’t stem the aforementioned bomb threats to those communities nor does it lessen anti-immigrant feelings. These conspiracy theories are only getting more extreme as conspiracy theorists can justify their position with the Trump campaign’s endorsement, an endorsement they helped create.
