“Keep the cat memes flowing.”

by Noah Lanard

On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”

“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health.

City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)

These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.

Just gonna leave this here … @ericswalwell pic.twitter.com/nDTqN0IZ6Y
— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) September 10, 2024

In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.

The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?&rdquo opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?” He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.

Are you a racist? pic.twitter.com/Fdknxld39i
— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 5, 2022

Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.

Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020.

That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.

Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”

In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home.

One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.

Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firm was “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.

The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”

Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”

It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.

Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.

Dorsainvil, who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.

The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”

It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.

Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heck appeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.&rdquo

Springfield also began to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)

Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral.

Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.

When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark.

Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”

Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 11, 2024

That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school.

On Friday morning, Springfield received new bomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools. A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.

Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”