My attention while watching the debate was focused on how Trump would talk about Springfield, Ohio. He mixed up his words and messed up badly. It was his worst gaffe of the debate. It was a mistake to mention Springfield at all, though it could have been done better. I was focused on Springfield because it went viral on X only a couple days ago. Trump didn't learn about the viral story out of Springfield until less than a day before the debate. This was not enough time, obviously, for him to process the information and formulate a plan to exploit it. I was curious to see if Kamala knew about the Springfield "cat hoax", but she never had to respond because the moderator gave a thorough rebuttal to Donald Trump in her stead.
Why? He's not trying to get a good grade in debate class. He's trying to frame the election in advantageous terms. The more people talk about this, the better for Trump.
It hits on a visceral level: a town being destroyed by Biden's policies. The cat is just the hook to get the media to report it. "Rust Belt town goes to shit" will never get airtime. "People hunting cats" is irresistible. The media won't be able to help themselves.
is a factually incorrect statement, but there are multiple factually correct permutations which can made by swapping out the nouns. A nimble orator can insinuate that Haitians in Springfield eat cats—without saying it directly—by stringing together all the factually correct permutations. Donald Trump is a talented orator, and I think he could have figured out the right way to present the argument given enough time. I think he faceplanted because he only learned about the story literally the day of the debate and didn't have time to process it.
Sufficiently debunked? In what way? The debunkings have seemingly confirmed that Haitians are poaching waterfowl and have killed at least one person's cat and were in the process of butchering it when police intervened. Whether or not that was for food is unconfirmed, but no one should take official sources seriously regarding that.
Here's one alleged debunking. When I look at the evidence they present I believe the citizen accounts over the "authorities" because the latter are far more incentivized to lie. So IDK. If you are inclined to believe the city manager, then I suppose it is dubunked. I think that if you ask a guy if he's doing a bad job, hes unlikely to say yes.
I haven't seen any citizen accounts of a Haitian having killed a person's cat, though, just an account of an account of an account. A screenshot of a private Facebook post about a report from a neighbor about what a daughter's friend saw ... is technically evidence, but it's approximately the same quality of evidence as a typical urban legend, the sort of "Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Watch Out!" material that used to spread virally back when the only way we had to spread things virally was email. Today you can read a hundred of them en masse if you prefer.
Recorded evidence would be nice, too, now that we live in a country where 90+% of the population habitually carry video cameras in our pockets. How does someone see something shocking, something ongoing (like a hanging cat corpse) rather than instant, and not be on the ball enough to get photo and video evidence? Even if you're just going to call the police, and you don't anticipate the need to get independent evidence in case the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, wouldn't it be a good idea to get evidence to give to the police in case the criminals mess with the crime scene while you're waiting for a cop to arrive?
Obviously nobody will care about this at all since it's happening in Shelbyville Dayton instead of Springfield, and appears to be a Congolese guy rather than a Haitian!
I mean, sure, we haven't seen them eating cats. We have photos of them carrying waterfowl and at least one police recording reporting 4 poached waterfowl. We have some citizen reports of missing cats. We know cat is a Hatian dish.
There is a reason there is a full court press in the media to try to discredit the accusation. Its shocking. Its highly plausible, 20k poor people who are seemingly not being policed by local authorities (who seem both partisan and overwhelmed, the latter seemingly intentionally by higher levels of government) are going to get up to messed up shit.
This is also happening with the migrants in big cities, including the one in which I work. There are huge sex crimes issues in the shelters, and mostly the people running them are overwhelmed, and there is no reports coming from the migrants. So nearly every prosecution is stemming from a 12-16 year old girl getting an abortion or giving birth.
it'll be interesting to see if this story sticks around and gets more attention, leading to more investigation, or if the media can just quietly sweep it away. Trump might have accidentally stumbled upon a winning move in that debate by bringing it up, even as clumsily as he did.
It's honestly a classic Trump move. He starts off by making a ridiculous claim "they're in here eating cats!" but then when you try to debunk that claim, it ends up looking almost as bad. "OK, they do eat cats in Haiti, but not here." "Oh, they're just eating waterfowl." "All 20k of them are peaceful, lawabiding folks who have perfectly adapted to American culture." "Yeah btw we dumped 20k migrants in this one random town in the midwest, but it'll be fine."
At least with most 90's hearsay there wasn't any obvious reason beyond shock value for someone to make it up to spread, yet it got made up and spread anyway. With the Springfield, OH hearsay it's quite likely that people like "Nate Higgers" (videoed at an earlier town meeting) are inventing more than just awful aliases, in which case we need higher epistemic standards than a game of telephone.
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Notes -
My attention while watching the debate was focused on how Trump would talk about Springfield, Ohio. He mixed up his words and messed up badly. It was his worst gaffe of the debate. It was a mistake to mention Springfield at all, though it could have been done better. I was focused on Springfield because it went viral on X only a couple days ago. Trump didn't learn about the viral story out of Springfield until less than a day before the debate. This was not enough time, obviously, for him to process the information and formulate a plan to exploit it. I was curious to see if Kamala knew about the Springfield "cat hoax", but she never had to respond because the moderator gave a thorough rebuttal to Donald Trump in her stead.
Why? He's not trying to get a good grade in debate class. He's trying to frame the election in advantageous terms. The more people talk about this, the better for Trump.
It hits on a visceral level: a town being destroyed by Biden's policies. The cat is just the hook to get the media to report it. "Rust Belt town goes to shit" will never get airtime. "People hunting cats" is irresistible. The media won't be able to help themselves.
"HAITIANS in SPRINGFIELD were caught eating CATS"
is a factually incorrect statement, but there are multiple factually correct permutations which can made by swapping out the nouns. A nimble orator can insinuate that Haitians in Springfield eat cats—without saying it directly—by stringing together all the factually correct permutations. Donald Trump is a talented orator, and I think he could have figured out the right way to present the argument given enough time. I think he faceplanted because he only learned about the story literally the day of the debate and didn't have time to process it.
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Reports of people eating pets were sufficiently debunked, and him rambling on about an obviously fake story made him look uninformed and weak.
We’ve investigated ourselves and found out we did everything perfect isn’t really debunking.
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Sufficiently debunked? In what way? The debunkings have seemingly confirmed that Haitians are poaching waterfowl and have killed at least one person's cat and were in the process of butchering it when police intervened. Whether or not that was for food is unconfirmed, but no one should take official sources seriously regarding that.
Links?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/sep/09/social-media/authorities-rebut-claims-that-haitian-immigrants-a/
Here's one alleged debunking. When I look at the evidence they present I believe the citizen accounts over the "authorities" because the latter are far more incentivized to lie. So IDK. If you are inclined to believe the city manager, then I suppose it is dubunked. I think that if you ask a guy if he's doing a bad job, hes unlikely to say yes.
I haven't seen any citizen accounts of a Haitian having killed a person's cat, though, just an account of an account of an account. A screenshot of a private Facebook post about a report from a neighbor about what a daughter's friend saw ... is technically evidence, but it's approximately the same quality of evidence as a typical urban legend, the sort of "Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Watch Out!" material that used to spread virally back when the only way we had to spread things virally was email. Today you can read a hundred of them en masse if you prefer.
I wouldn't consider this debunked, but we're going to need to trace the gossip chain back a few more links before I'd consider it confirmed either.
Recorded evidence would be nice, too, now that we live in a country where 90+% of the population habitually carry video cameras in our pockets. How does someone see something shocking, something ongoing (like a hanging cat corpse) rather than instant, and not be on the ball enough to get photo and video evidence? Even if you're just going to call the police, and you don't anticipate the need to get independent evidence in case the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, wouldn't it be a good idea to get evidence to give to the police in case the criminals mess with the crime scene while you're waiting for a cop to arrive?
Looks like Rufo has found a pretty well validated case of cats on the grill:
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1834926318883852543
Obviously nobody will care about this at all since it's happening in
ShelbyvilleDayton instead of Springfield, and appears to be a Congolese guy rather than a Haitian!More options
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I mean, sure, we haven't seen them eating cats. We have photos of them carrying waterfowl and at least one police recording reporting 4 poached waterfowl. We have some citizen reports of missing cats. We know cat is a Hatian dish.
There is a reason there is a full court press in the media to try to discredit the accusation. Its shocking. Its highly plausible, 20k poor people who are seemingly not being policed by local authorities (who seem both partisan and overwhelmed, the latter seemingly intentionally by higher levels of government) are going to get up to messed up shit.
This is also happening with the migrants in big cities, including the one in which I work. There are huge sex crimes issues in the shelters, and mostly the people running them are overwhelmed, and there is no reports coming from the migrants. So nearly every prosecution is stemming from a 12-16 year old girl getting an abortion or giving birth.
it'll be interesting to see if this story sticks around and gets more attention, leading to more investigation, or if the media can just quietly sweep it away. Trump might have accidentally stumbled upon a winning move in that debate by bringing it up, even as clumsily as he did.
It's honestly a classic Trump move. He starts off by making a ridiculous claim "they're in here eating cats!" but then when you try to debunk that claim, it ends up looking almost as bad. "OK, they do eat cats in Haiti, but not here." "Oh, they're just eating waterfowl." "All 20k of them are peaceful, lawabiding folks who have perfectly adapted to American culture." "Yeah btw we dumped 20k migrants in this one random town in the midwest, but it'll be fine."
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At least with most 90's hearsay there wasn't any obvious reason beyond shock value for someone to make it up to spread, yet it got made up and spread anyway. With the Springfield, OH hearsay it's quite likely that people like "Nate Higgers" (videoed at an earlier town meeting) are inventing more than just awful aliases, in which case we need higher epistemic standards than a game of telephone.
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We also need to consider that white suburban liberals absolutely love cats and dogs in general.
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