Springfield demonstrates murky ideological pipeline

What began as neo-Nazis stoking anti-Haitian sentiment in Springfield, Ohio, has led to bomb threats and children evacuated from their schools after the false allegations were given a national platform by the Trump-Vance campaign.

In the span of three months, Springfield moved into the spotlight while providing the backdrop for a spurious allegation about Haitians and pets to percolate from the dark corners of the internet to the highest stage of public discourse.

In that period, two issues — one real, one false — became intertwined.

Springfield’s population had peaked at more than 80,000 inhabitants in the 1970 Census, then declined to 58,000 people by the 2020 one.

Since that last count, around 15,000 Haitians — a broad majority of them with legal status to live and work in the United States — have chosen Springfield to settle, find jobs, raise their children and start businesses.

The city’s growth spurt came with both costs and benefits: Rent prices went up, but wage growth did too. Property crime remained flat, but vehicle accidents rose.

City officials called for help on a very real issue: Their infrastructure and services were not keeping up with demand.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, now the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, championed the issue.

At a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing July 9, Vance read from a letter from Springfield city manager Bryan Heck asking for federal assistance on housing to keep up with the growing population.

“On July 12, we see Libs of TikTok — really the first, the first far-right account, a huge following — draw attention to migrants in Springfield, and about a month later, on Aug. 10, when the neo-Nazi Blood Tribe held a small rally in March to amplify baseless claims,” said Jeff Tischauser, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

Three more incidents — a City Commission public hearing and two sets of social media posts — would turn the national immigration conversation on its head at Springfield’s expense.

In late August, the Springfield City Commission held a meeting where two men were among the speakers. One, a local resident who identified himself as a social media influencer, accused Haitian immigrants of harvesting ducks for food from a local park.

Another man identified himself as the leader of the Blood Tribe march, using a nickname alluding to a racial slur, and warned the officials there of negative consequences “for every Haitian you bring in.” Mayor Rob Rue expelled the man from the hearing for making threats.

A week later, a Facebook post accusing Haitians of butchering a cat — attributed to the poster’s neighbor’s daughter’s friend — went viral, alongside a video of a Black woman attacking a cat, and a photo of a Black man carrying a dead goose.

Neither the video nor the photo turned out to be from Springfield.

Four days after the Facebook post, Vance posted a video of the Banking Committee hearing with a caption, “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

The aftermath of that post included the meme-ification of former President Trump as a protector of ducks and kittens, before culminating with Trump directly accusing Haitians of eating pets at this week’s ABC presidential debate, which was watched by an estimated 67 million people, not counting online viewers.

At a different scale, that timeline, Tischauser said, is fairly common; ideas born or nurtured in the far-right corners of the internet often bubble up into public discourse.

“I’ve been watching this kind of — more or less a continuum or pipeline from what we would call, like MAGA- to semi-extremist Twitter accounts or social media performers, then you have these actual white supremacist groups, and then you have the GOP kind of falling for the rhetoric and the lies that both of these prior entities circulate,” he said.

In 2022, police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, arrested 31 people who were believed to be members of the Patriot Front hate group, preventing them from disrupting a drag festival in the town.

Days earlier, Libs of TikTok, a New York-based account, posted about the upcoming drag show.

The same pattern has played out in other cases, as anti-drag and anti-transgender rhetoric has become mainstream.

GOP officials nationwide in 2023 proposed more than 150 bills calling for restrictions on gender expression, from limitations on drag shows to bans on transition care.

Stark immigration restrictions, meanwhile, are at the core of Republican discourse and policy.

With Springfield’s Haitian community in fear and anti-Haitian rhetoric in the mainstream, groups such as Blood Tribe are taking a victory lap.

But the Springfield Facebook-post-to-bomb-threat pipeline also spotlights how far out of the mainstream those groups remain.

“There’s definitely a lot of room between the Blood Tribe and GOP officials, right? I mean, policywise, rhetoricwise, most of the time GOP officials do not just circulate Blood Tribe [materials], right?” Tischauser said.

“But there are some similarities. And, you know, the similarities are migrants. We’ll see similar rhetoric being used by Blood Tribe and GOP officials about migrants, about LGBTQ+ communities, and depending on, you know, the explicitness, sometimes you’ll see both the Blood Tribe and GOP officials circulate the ‘great replacement theory.’”

Vance, in a statement, strongly repudiated the bomb threats that rocked Springfield.

“Senator Vance condemns these threats and believes those responsible should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” said Luke Schroeder, a spokesperson.

But Vance doubled down over the weekend, defending his amplification of the widely refuted claims about Haitians and pets — a claim he said “turned out to have merit” while sharing a video and blog post sourced to unnamed witnesses alleging African immigrants in nearby Dayton had grilled a cat.

Vance’s hard stance came after pushback from city officials and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and a mix of reports from Springfield, with some highlighting the city’s challenges in onboarding a new population and others documenting the economic revitalization of a now-growing city — an angle Vance has mostly ignored.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

—Updated Sept. 17 at 10:03 a.m.

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