'Utterly stupid': Top MAGA influencers throw cold water on conspiracy about cats and dogs
14 September 2024
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While former President Donald Trump debated Vice President Kamala Harris at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, more than a dozen hand-selected right-wing influencers hunched over laptops in a conference room to churn out social media posts designed to amplify Trump’s messaging.
Heading up the effort was Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz, a political consultant with 448,200 followers on X. Bruesewitz played a key role in the “Stop the Steal” movement that mobilized Trump supporters to converge on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, following the 2020 election.
The right-wing influencers assembled for the “war room” have collectively promoted a conspiracy theory falsely claiming that high-level Democrats are involved in a child sex trafficking network, demonized transgender people and, like Bruesewitz, mobilized Trump supporters to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021.
But in a campaign in which Trump and his running-mate, JD Vance, are brazenly stoking fear about immigration by pushing a debunked claim that Haitians are eating pets or suggesting government collusion in the attempt on Trump’s life, the flurry of X posts produced by the influencers on Tuesday might not have made a huge impression.
In the hours before the debate, Chaya Raichik, creator of the Libs of TikTok account, made a handful of posts on X with memes that showed variations of Trump holding cats and ducks, and in one case showed the former president pointing a pistol while a militia of house cats wielding assault rifles massed behind him. She also posted a link to a story by the Federalist that purported to substantiate the claims by citing a single phone call to a police dispatcher reporting that he saw “a group of Haitian people” with “geese in their hands.” Local officials have since said that there's no evidence of Haitians harming geese.
Whether desperate or unimaginative, the posts about Haitians eating pets have come in for criticism from some surprising sources. The hits are not coming just from progressives and moderate Republicans, but also from at least two figures further to the right than MAGA who are no strangers to online provocation.
Ali Alexander, who organized the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign alongside Bruesewitz, leveled criticism at “right-wing influencers” during an extended commentary for a livestream on his Telegram channel on Wednesday. He didn’t mention any of the pro-Trump influencers by name, but he took aim at one of their central preoccupations.
“If you watch the Republicans on Twitter, you’re dumb,” Alexander said. “You’re just uninformed and dumb. You think that Haitians are eating all kinds of people’s cats. Okay. So, you’re just kind of dumb, and you know, I can’t control that.”
Following the political and legal fallout over Jan. 6, Alexander has struggled to rebuild his stature in MAGA, and was largely exiled in 2023 following a revelation that he asked teenage boys to send him nude pictures.
Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who helped organize the 2017 Unite the Right neo-Nazi gathering in Charlottesville, Va., in which an antiracist activist was murdered in a car attack by a rally attendee, also ridiculed the memes.
“The ‘Haitians eating cats’ thing is utterly stupid,” he wrote on X three hours before the debate. “It’s crude and easily debunked and thus easily turned around and used to make the Right look bad.”
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In November 2016, Spencer and his nonprofit National Policy Institute attempted to ride the coattails of Trump’s electoral victory in an effort to inject white nationalism into the political mainstream. But following Unite the Right, which eventually led to a $25 million judgement against the organizers, Spencer’s influence rapidly waned.
On the day of the presidential debate, Spencer reflected that outlandish and overtly racist claims about Haitians eating cats would have been confined to the fringe in 2016, when he led the so-called “alt-right” movement, but are now being embraced by mainstream GOP figures including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“The alt-right methodology and ‘vibe’ has been fully integrated into the GOP,” he wrote on X. “At this point, online racism is just another chapter of the ‘Southern strategy.’”
‘We’re doing the influencer war room thing — whatever’
About an hour before the start of the debate, Trump spoke to the influencers through a cell phone call with Bruesewitz, his campaign advisor, according to a video posted by one of the influencers, CJ Pearson.
Bruesewitz boasted to his boss that the 16 influencers seated around a long row of tables in the conference room would be reaching a combined 50 million followers on X.
“They’re big deals,” he said.
Trump seemed unimpressed.
“Have a good time,” he said. “They’re going to have 200 million watching this.” (Later estimates by the media analytics company Nielsen would peg the number of viewers at 67.1 million.)
Another video posted by Jack Posobiec, who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory holding that Democratic Party elites were running a child sex ring from a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, shows him in the conference room saying, “All right. We’re doing the influencer war room thing — whatever.”
Then, Posobiec turns the camera towards Bruesewitz and asks, “What is this called?”
“No clue,” Bruesewitz responds. “But there’s a lot of influence here.”
Shannon McGregor, an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, told Raw Story that the near complete alignment between Trump and the social-media influencers to push extremist messaging means that influencers are likely not “drawing in heaps of new people.”
But that doesn’t mean their influence should be discounted.
The false claim about Haitians eating cats, which appears to have originated on Facebook, is a case study in how right-wing influencers with large social-media followings find and amplify individual stories, she said, that resonate “across mainstream Republican politics, which is this deep white nationalist story.”
Whether the influencers or Republican politicians are driving extremist radicalization, McGregor said the people shouldn’t underestimate the ability of influencers to mobilize followers to commit political violence on Trump’s behalf.
“To me, what’s most unsettling is that people who have not just media power, but real political power that they share this sort of deep story that ‘our’ way of life is under attack,” McGregor said. “By our, I mean a white nationalist identity. That’s scary from the point of view of the health of our democracy.
“I do think where the danger, in particular with some of these right-wing accounts that are huge, is being able to whip up thousands of people into political action and political violence,” she added. “We saw that already on January 6th and we saw it in Charlottesville.”
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