When former President Donald Trump told 67 million Americans last week that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets, he was repeating a racist conspiracy theory that was years in the making — if not even longer.

Since 2020, thousands of Haitian immigrants moved to the Rust Belt town in southwestern Ohio to take advantage of new manufacturing jobs there. As Vox’s Li Zhou has reported, “while the growth in population has helped rejuvenate the town, it’s also put pressure on social services in the form of longer wait times at medical clinics and more competition for affordable housing, fueling some animosity toward the newcomers.”

That animosity morphed into something entirely different in the days leading up to a presidential debate thanks to right-wing social media accounts, which seized on baseless rumors about immigrants in Springfield — conflated with a story about a Canton, Ohio, woman, who is not Haitian and was accused of killing and eating a cat — to create an online frenzy. Since then, members of Springfield’s Haitian community tell reporters they are nervous about leaving their homes as the town remains on high alert after a series of bomb threats, while Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance and others continue to double down on the made-up story.

Gaby Del Valle, a reporter for The Verge, talked with Today, Explained host Noel King about an ecosystem of right-wing influencers that turned a lie about immigrants in a small town into a Republican campaign talking point.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Let’s look back in time to when this was just an online rumor. Where does it start?

One of the earliest tweets that I saw was from an account called End Wokeness, which posted on September 6 a screenshot of that Facebook post that was like, my friend’s neighbor’s sister’s cousin or whatever got her cat kidnapped and she found it outside a house where Haitians live. And also posted a picture of a man holding a goose, and said that ducks and pets are disappearing in Springfield, Ohio, a place where there are a lot of Haitian migrants. And then on September 8, Charlie Kirk posted the same screenshot from Facebook and Elon Musk replied to it, saying, apparently people’s cats are being eaten. The original End Wokeness post right now has 4.9 million views. Musk’s reply to Charlie Kirk has 1.6 million views. Charlie Kirk’s post was viewed at least 4 million times. This kind of left the ecosystem of right-wing Twitter partially because Elon Musk got involved.

What happens, generally and in this case, when Elon Musk gets involved? Why does he matter?

In addition to owning Twitter and letting go of the content moderation team, the Trust and Safety Council… I can’t speak with certainty here, but I will say that Elon Musk has several pet causes that he posts about a lot. One of which is immigration, another one of which is quote-unquote “wokeness.” And there is a sense that what Elon cares about gets pushed out to users on the app. And even if there’s not an algorithmic change that is putting content that Elon cares about in front of everybody, he has a lot of influence, a lot of followers, and a lot of power.

All right. So this is not true. It is not true in Springfield. It is not true in the way it’s being presented. And then we hear it again on the debate stage. Again, there’s a round of debunking, this isn’t true. Has the debunking had any impact on this rumor’s staying power?

The debunking has done absolutely nothing in terms of the rumor’s staying power. In some senses, it actually kind of fueled the narrative because the narrative on the right is not just, like, people are eating cats in Springfield. It’s well, you know, maybe actually this isn’t happening. But even if it’s not happening, why is the media so focused on debunking whether people are eating cats in Springfield? And why are they not talking about the Haitian immigrant invasion of Springfield? Why are they not looking at that? On Truth Social, Trump has posted a bunch of different images of him saving cats, of cats and ducks watching the presidential debate. The Republican Party of Arizona put out 12 billboards in the Phoenix area that say “Eat less kittens, vote Republican.” This has become the new Republican Party rallying cry.

The cat memes are almost like a shorthand for this overall belief about not only Springfield, but communities across America supposedly being taken over by migrants. It’s like a visual representation of what is called the Great Replacement Theory, which is this conspiracy theory that there is an outside force replacing local, often white populations with imported migrants of color. Sometimes the proponents of that theory claim that Democrats are turning a blind eye to illegal immigration and allowing undocumented people to vote so that they have staying power. Sometimes a conspiracy theory is about how Democrats or other elites want to foment demographic change. But the underlying premise is always local American populations, which almost always means white populations, are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric and the kind of, at times, really outlandish lies that accompany it are part of a pretty familiar playbook for Donald Trump. Does 2024 feel different to you than, for example, 2020 or 2016?

I would say yes and no. Like, Trump’s 2016 campaign famously began with these racist claims about Mexican immigrants being rapists and murderers, very bad people, etc., etc. So I think that this is kind of the logical outcome of that. It’s pure, unvarnished racism. And the point is to dehumanize Haitians. But it’s definitely escalated. It’s gone further than before. [In] some circles of right-wing Twitter, people are talking about, like, the links between race and IQ. And there’s this implication and sometimes just outright statements that migrants from Haiti and elsewhere are not intelligent enough to be assimilated into American society. And for them, it’s about more than culture. It’s about more than even skin color. It’s this kind of biological hatred. And that’s the extreme rhetoric that has not only gone unchallenged, but has gotten more and more extreme as the years have gone on.