How Russia uses race and migration to divide the West

One week after the U.S. Department of Justice dropped an indictment on two Russian propagandists accused of coordinating a disinformation campaign aimed at exacerbating racial tensions in the United States, one particularly bizarre meme associated with that effort appeared to trip up its intended beneficiary at a critical moment.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs," Donald Trump announced during his debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Tuesday night. "The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating — they're eating the pets of the people that live there."

Trump was widely ridiculed for repeating the claim — already debunked by the city manager and police in Springfield, Ohio, and by the state's Republican governor — that Haitian immigrants have been hunting and eating pet cats and wild ducks and geese (Trump appears to have thrown dogs into the mix on his own initiative).

But Trump — who continued to post about cats on his Truth Social account following the debate — had reason to believe the claim might work for him. After all, his party had spent the previous 36 hours pumping the story through its social media channels, complete with a torrent of AI-generated memes showing Donald Trump saving cats from black Haitians.

Individual senators and congressmen jumped on the save-the-cats bandwagon. A tweet by the House Judiciary GOP garnered over 70 million views.

We may never know exactly how the false story first began to circulate. A white supremacist account on X tweeted a police video labelled "Black woman eats the neighbor's cat" on Saturday morning — she was not Haitian and the events took place in Canton, Ohio, not Springfield.

By that evening, the story had come to the attention of Malaysia-based RT (formerly Russia Today) columnist and online influencer Ian Miles Cheong, whose work appears in Canadian outlets such as Rebel News and the Post Millennial.

Cheong soon connected cat-eating to a different Ohio town that has experienced an influx of Haitian migrants, and the story was off to the races, with an assist from other channels of amplification strongly associated with Russia.

It was quickly echoed, with AI-generated memes, by Benny Johnson, one of the right-wing commenters employed by Tenet Media, which was paid large amounts of Russian money through Canadian influencer Lauren Chen.

Soon, Elon Musk — a superspreader of Russian propaganda themes — was fully on board with numerous tweets and retweets over a 48-hour period.

Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance warned that "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 story performed a full circle through the