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It’s like deja vu all over again.
As part of his comments during the Sept. 10 presidential debate, former President Donald Trump went from the general issue of immigrants in the U.S. to those specifically in Springfield, Ohio, and said, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live in Springfield, Ohio.”
This is so reminiscent of Minnesota’s 2022 gubernatorial race, during which Republican candidate Scott Jensen said at a Hutchinson rally: “What are they doing to our kids? … Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so they can pee in them because they identify as a ‘furry’? We’ve lost our minds … .”
Jensen was feeding into the fear of gay and transgender students to gain votes, much like Trump feeding into voter fears of immigrants. In both cases, they created myths to justify bad behavior and to gain the votes of those believing the lie.
Republicans pushed the lie of furries all during 2022, despite no one ever finding a furry — someone who identifies as an animal — in our schools or anywhere else. No school admitted to having a litter box. I even called my old high school’s superintendent to find out if those lurid rumors of children hissing and barking in class were true. A very indignant administrator yelled at me: “There are no furries in this school!”
So it is with the vicious rumors of Haitian immigrants killing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, a city of about 59,000 in southwestern Ohio. Once a bustling manufacturing city producing agricultural machinery, Springfield since the 1960s had lost a quarter of its population. Its economy was sluggish. Empty neighborhoods dotted the landscape.