Can’t kill pussy. I wasn’t surprised when I heard the news. Another crazy person trying to kill the former president? Must be Sunday. The paranoia’s in the air, now, and on some level we probably all felt it coming. But I was surprised by how quickly we pivoted from this second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, and “the price of violent rhetoric,” back to cat memes.

Sure, following the attempted assassination there was plenty of block-and-tackle from Kamala’s unofficial PR team, which we colloquially refer to as “the press.” TIME, for example, insisted it wasn’t clear the would-be shooter — a registered Democrat with a Biden / Harris bumper sticker on the back of his truck, and a highly-public life on social media where he shared his eerily robotic anti-Trump opinions (including such actual famous DNC bangers as “democracy is on the ballot”) — was a registered Democrat with a Biden / Harris bumper sticker on the back of his truck. Might this man, who just tried to kill Trump, be voting for Trump? Maybe! And yes, after a (very) brief spell of respectable Sunday coverage from MSNBC, network operatives argued the real culprit here was Trump’s own rhetoric, a perspective echoed by CNN, as well as the New York Times, which produced a story on Trump’s history of violent rhetoric that quickly dominated the major news networks. Here, the Times skirted the media’s years-long, earnest insistence, parroted from DNC leadership, that Trump is attempting to dissolve democracy and seize the country in a Hitleresque dictatorship — an act of treason punishable in this country by death — and implicitly argued he kinda / sorta had it coming given a violent culture he himself produced. By Tuesday morning, the perspective that Trump was mostly himself responsible for assassination attempts on Trump’s life had coalesced into the dominant media narrative. But on some level anchors seemed to understand that this perspective tends to strike the average person as totally insane, and so they once again retreated, as if hypnotized, as if mesmerized, to the subject of Haitians eating cats.

As early as Monday morning, less than 24 hours after the attempted assassination of a former president and current presidential candidate, almost every major media outlet (CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post) concurrently covered, with front page prominence directly beside news of the shooter, a week-old disinformation story: Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were not, they insisted, eating cats. CBS directly followed their morning news segment on the second attempted Trump assassination with continued coverage of the memes, implying, by my ear, some kind of link between the two. Over the following 24 hours, through Tuesday morning, the link was made explicit — on both MSNBC, and, to a lesser but still consistent degree, CNN. Did I miss a memo?

At the time of my writing, Hillary Clinton has still not publicly posted about the attempted assassination. But Monday morning, she did have time to share a post alleging JD Vance admitted he lied about migrants in Springfield (a straightforward piece of disinformation, which had already been debunked multiple times before she boosted the distortion).

The story these people are all obsessed with is, of course, the story of Springfield, Ohio, a town of less than 60,000 people made home, in just a few short years, to over 20,000 Haitian migrants. But it’s the memes about the story with which they’re now obsessed. Not because the memes are wrong, or “fake,” but because they’ve been effective. Sort of.

While Springfield has been a decently popular story in right-of-center media since a Haitian man accidentally killed a small local boy in a car crash last August, it only recently evolved beyond the “why won’t people talk about this” stage of right wing discourse a little earlier this month, when the New York Times, presumably sensing a growing Kamala weakness, published a profile of the town that argued Haitians largely “revitalized” the area. In at least one economic sense, that is certainly true. Tax revenue in 2024 is up from 2020. Local leadership successfully attracted a handful of manufacturers to the region. Then, as the Times characterizes it, area losers and drug addicts simply didn’t want to work those jobs. Hardworking immigrants moved in, resentment built, and then came the racism.

Last week, the memes were born amidst a perfect storm of viral stories: a photo of a migrant in Ohio carrying a dead Canada goose (home from the park, where it was gutted, commenters hysterically posted); multiple viral videos of Springfield residents demanding action before their local government (on the problem of dangerous Haitian drivers, Haitians eating food out of the container at the grocery store, and Haitians eating local parkland animals); and then, most importantly, a woman shared a post to Facebook explaining a neighbor told her… that her daughter told her… that her friend’s cat was stolen and eaten by her Haitian neighbor (she has since walked back the claim). From here, and from no apparent direction — as if the trend were birthed from the turbulent internet seas like some kind of fucked up Botticelli’s Venus — Kamala was cast the catricidal villain in a national story on Haitian migrants, Trump was cast the hero of the tiny animals they were eating, and a meme-ing followed that was so prodigious it will likely be recorded in the pages of our history books.

A brief sampling (call me “Professor”):

Reaction from the conservative political establishment was immediate: JD Vance, Don Jr., Ted Cruz, and Congressman Mike Collins — among many — shared the memes. X was on fire for days, and our group chats exploded. No other story seemed to matter. By the eve of our (second) first presidential debate of the season, Haitian cats had entirely seized our Nation of the Too Online. But then, on stage, Donald Trump took the meme global: “In Springfield,” he said, “they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” Naturally, in keeping with the law of Clown World, this led to several musical remixes.

From the beginning, there wasn’t much evidence supporting the actual story of Haitian migrants eating cats, which I stated at the time. This, given the gravity of the charges, made for perfect “fact checking” fodder. By debate night, debunking the narrow claim of vanished pets, rather than arguing on behalf of the benefits of mass migration from the third world (there actually are a few, by the way, which the neolibs on X are more than happy to point out), was an entire genre of content. Nonetheless, JD Vance insisted — and continues to insist — he was flooded with calls about the behavior from his constituents. Elsewhere, Chris Rufo fact checked the fact checkers with evidence of African migrants eating cats in Ohio. But Haitians are not Africans, “Ohio” is not necessarily Springfield, and the fact checkers fact checked him back (basically, the migrants were grilling what looked like a cat on a barbecue, and witnesses claimed it was a cat, but we have no actual proof it was, in fact, a cat).

My personal opinion? Probably one or two people in Ohio have eaten a cat. I mean, it’s Ohio. Let’s just be honest. But is there specifically an epidemic of Haitians, in Springfield, eating cats? There is no evidence for that. The original story is therefore pretty clearly bigoted, which is the only shred of rhetorical defense Democrats can wield against the popularity of this meme, which is not strictly about Haitians eating cats, but implicitly about the impact of mass migration on the country.

To the bane of substantive discussion, however, both sides of the immigration issue are now utterly mesmerized by the prospect of Haitian cats — left wingers because they feel the meme proves all criticism of their open borders philosophy is racist, and right wingers because the meme forced every media entity, and every Democratic politician in the country, to talk about immigration. I’d argue everyone miscalculated, but I don’t think there was any calculation. I think the cat appeared online, as the cat has been known to do, and bewitched the nation like some cursed, pagan idol. Players on both sides of the fence believed, stupidly, they could use the cat to their advantage. But you can’t control a meme.

Now, Democrats have raised immigration, their weakest issue, to their highest media priority, while Republicans, who want nothing more than a facts-based look at immigration in the country, are stuck defending a pretty obviously bigoted story about Haitians eating cats. This is no longer a matter of who will win, but who will lose the most. My sense? Democrats are in the biggest loser lead, but it’s still any man’s game.

Obviously, Vance and company assumed Americans would follow the memes back to Springfield, where they would learn about the many issues in that town: an unsustainable increase in the cost of housing, for example, and the unambiguous fact that millions of migrants in this country are receiving government benefits for housing, food, and medical care that the average working class family is not. In claiming the cat, I think Republicans probably also hoped Americans would wonder why, if truly the growth in Springfield is exclusively due to immigrants following word of good work (underpaid) and cheap housing (that doesn’t exist), they’re almost exclusively, in a country of at least 20 million recent migrants from around the world, Haitian. Might there be an NGO or two involved? And I certainly think Republicans want us to face the fact that any local culture, when its population grows by a third — and all of that growth comes from a single, foreign country — will change.

It’s a strange thing, the expectation we should cherish, nearly to the point of worship, foreign cultures for their vibrancy, their enduring strength, and all of their amazing differences. But then, at the same time, when a third of a small town’s population is suddenly Haitian, we’re told this couldn’t possibly change that town in any meaningful sense. Springfield is just an economy, that economy is growing, and any other questions here are racist. An interesting perspective. But has anyone checked in with the Muslim immigrants in Michigan? Because, to me, it doesn’t look like they’re particularly excited about adopting American cultural norms. It looks like Michigan is simply becoming Muslim. Up in Hamtramck, gay pride hits a little differently these days.

The reality of immigration is it changes culture, which people who like their culture, or even love their culture, tend to reject out of hand — no matter how positive that change may be in any other dimension. Another reality of immigration, or at least as the system is presently designed, is it increases competition for low-skilled and working class labor, which low-skilled laborers and members of the working class tend to really hate (and their bosses tend to really love). This is often difficult for more niche laborers like journalists, artists, and technologists living in highly-transient cities, which tend to lack enduring culture, to understand, which is why the press was so confounded by the rise of Bernie Sanders (who, at the zenith of his influence, referred to open borders as an evil “Koch brothers proposal”). But America’s “high-skilled laborers” certainly seemed capable of understanding the problem when AI threatened to replace journalists, artists, and technologists a couple years ago, and we were thrust into a global conversation on the dangers of automating intelligence (aka competition).

These are all, perhaps, the conversations we could be having now. Instead: was that really a cat on the barbecue, or was it something else?

The power of a meme is its ability to dominate a story, and the problem with the meme is everything it obscures. In the case of immigration, we’re dragged into the question of whether Haitians really do eat cats, a topic so polarizing it is now being used by the media to justify the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Memes are a powerful tool (weapon?) for hacking narratives, and certainly it’s possible a meme might lead a man to further information on a topic. But it can’t deliver information. Memes are, necessarily, information-light. Generally, they’re funny, which is how they spread, and how they so easily penetrate the old guard press. Journalists intuitively understand the momentum of a meme, but are not at all prepared to fight them — how do you battle a joke? You can either laugh along, or ignore it. But explaining it? Contextualizing it? Debating it? Just makes it funnier.

A trend of AI-generated images of Donald Trump saving kittens is now the most important development in this entire election season — an election season in which not only one, but two attempts have been made on the life of a candidate. And we still can’t parse the issue. The Haitian cats somehow both allow us to observe Springfield after something like a year of media obfuscation, and prevent us from discussing it on any kind of substantive level. It’s a discourse apocalypse. Apocalypse meow.

Be careful what you wish for in the presence of a pagan idol. A month ago we were blind, but now we’re mute.

-SOLANA