Gary McCullough/AP
On Monday, I encountered this image posted by Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee:
It wasn’t particularly interesting, so I shrugged and accepted ignorance. With the GOP having transformed into a party of shitposters, I assumed I was out on a joke that, with God’s grace, would pass before my job required me to learn about something either racist or stupid—or probably both.
But, shortly after, a clue arrived in the form of a meme. Ah, I realized looking at an image Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) posted on X, it would be both—racist and stupid—and I was going to have to understand it.
To start, it’s critical to note that the origins of these posts, from some of the highest levels of the US government, can seemingly be traced to a single falsehood. Here’s what happened. A participant of a random (exceedingly obscure) Facebook group that discusses local criminal activity in Springfield, Ohio, warned that a friend of their neighbor’s daughter had recently lost her cat, before describing an unfounded trend of Haitians eating cats they had found on the street. From there, a rumor started claiming that Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating cats—a claim police have since roundly debunked—and quickly spread to the screenshots of some of the far-right’s most prominent figures, including Charlie Kirk, before landing in Elon Musk’s universe. (How no one stopped to question whether to believe a random Facebook post from the girlfriend-in-Canada telephone lineage of “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” is beyond my understanding.)
From there, it was JD Vance, the most embarrassingly online vice presidential candidate in history—with his long record of vilifying Haitian immigrants in his home state—who proved to be the accelerant in mainstreaming the lie within the GOP:
Now, it’s wholly unsurprising to see Donald Trump’s running mate seizing upon a racist lie; such behavior is effectively a requirement of Trump’s White House. But even after years of Republican fealty, the party’s gleeful embrace of it is something to behold. Do they truly believe that Haitian immigrants are roaming the streets in search of cats to eat? Of course they don’t. But this is what happens when a party funnels its ambitions into blatant racism.
It’s worth revisiting an old piece from my colleague Tim Murphy, on how the modern GOP has moved far past the dog whistle to pure racism:
Our politicians aren’t dog-whistling racism to win racist votes in a calculated game. They’re just racist. And realizing that is for the best. After all, the euphemisms politicians use are never just euphemisms. When racist white people talk about “the schools” or “the neighborhood,” those aren’t stand-ins for something deeper and more nefarious: Those are the deeper and more nefarious things, the load-bearing pillars of structural racism. This speech isn’t coded so much as it’s loaded.
