About a month ago, as I was browsing twitter, I stumbled upon the following article by Cathy Young:
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-making-of-the-maga-hoax-about
At the time, talk about pet-eating Haitian immigrants was all over twitter. Donald Trump had just referenced it in the latest presidential debate, and his his running mate, J.D. Vance had tweeted about it. It was fascinating how the story played out. Every day, I would see a new story that supposedly validated the claim. Also every day, I would find that an earlier story had been debunked. Either it wasn’t about a Hatian, wasn’t about an immigrant, wasn’t in Springfield, or wasn’t about a pet getting eaten. The article seemed like it would be an interesting read.
Early on in the article, I came across the following paragraph:
It started with an X hatefest I happened to catch at the outset. On Sept. 7, a full three days before the debate, I saw left-wing-crank-turned-right-wing-loon Naomi Wolf share a post from misinformation superspreader End Wokeness (an account that may be run by far-right troll and Pizzagater Jack Posobiec), containing what seemed like an obviously made-up story: “ducks and pets” in Springfield, Ohio being gobbled up by Haitian migrants. The evidence: an anonymized Facebook post about a “neighbor’s friend’s daughter” who had seen her lost cat being carved up by the Haitians next door. I decided to post a sarcastic comment, unaware that I was wading into a dumpster fire.
Nothing about this paragraph is factually incorrect as far as I know, but something in there caught my eye: “Misinformation superspreader End Wokeness”
I am familiar with the End Wokeness twitter account. They’re pretty prominent on twitter, and they are not exactly what I would call trustworthy. I can understand why they might be described as an misinformation superspreader. That characterization isn’t entirely wrong, but even so, it put me on alert.
I think what I’m sensitive to is the way this pattern judges a thing at the same time it’s introduced. It wants me to make up my mind about who End Wokeness is before I’ve had the chance to evaluate them and come to my own conclusion.
When I see that pattern, it always puts me on alert. I’m so sensitive to it, that it sticks out like a sore thumb even in articles that I’m predisposed to agree with (like this one). “Misinformation superspreader” isn’t the only example of it here; “hatefest” “left-wing-crank-turned-right-wing-loon” and “far-right troll” are all examples of this pattern.
Furthermore, it’s trying to persuade me of something without being an actual argument. It’s like when a movie plays sinister music just to let me know that a character supposed to be bad. If I didn’t already know who End Wokeness was, I shouldn’t just take Cathy’s word for it that they’re a misinformation superspreader. Any writer can introduce someone with whatever label they want to, regardless of whether or not it’s accurate.
It also indicates bias. It makes Cathy seem predisposed to be against them. With an introduction like that, it seem unlikely that she would give them a fair shake. It may be that they don’t deserve a fair shake, but I still need to get my bearings as a reader. I can’t always be expected to already know who they are, and I need a way to validate their trustworthiness for myself.
Right-wing publications do this too. I think that Cathy herself would be sensitive to it in these cases. Take this passage for instance:
Just when you think the barrel-bottom standards at Politico cannot get any more bottomer or barreler, the disgraced outlet publishes talking points from a man who is not only facing murder charges, but who is alleged to have tried to commit one of the worst crimes imaginable: assassinating an individual who represents the will, hope, and future of tens of millions of Americans — and I would say the same about Kamala Harris had she been a target.
Does that seem like a reliable narrator to you? Do you think they’ll accurately present what the Politico really said? I know I wouldn’t trust them after reading the above paragraph. You can read the full article here.
I’m sure this sort priming is persuasive to some people. That’s probably why It’s so common. Still, it makes me feel skeptical, and I think for good reason. When I get skeptical like this, I’ll occasionally have the patience to go thorough the article, validating and double-checking the whole way through. Most of the time, however, I’m not that motivated, and I will probably decide the article isn’t worth engaging with.
This is a phenomenon I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. I don’t have anything against Cathy young, but when I read the article, the pattern really just jumped out at me, and it seemed like a good anchor point for this article. It’s an even more interesting case due to the fact that it’s an article that I essentially agree with, which means my aversion to it was pure sensitivity to the pattern, and not bias against the content itself.
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Notes -
You know, a fascinating post-script to the whole "Haitian are ruining Springfield Ohio" claim...
Yes, what started off with salacious stories about immigrants eating pets morphed into more defensible claims about mass migration overrunning local institutions and destroying the quality of life for residents who've been attached to the area for generations.
Yes, many local political leaders came out, even Republican political leaders, to denounce the claims that Haitians are eating pets.
Springfield Ohio also flipped red in the election in a major way.. Biggest Republican margin in 40 years, and that's only because the records only go back to 1984 when Reagan won 49/50 states, and Trump had a bigger margin than that in Clark County.
So, when we are trying to decide who the liars are, it seems likely that Trump and Vance were speaking closer to the truth, even if the specifics were off, than everyone else screaming "THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE! Actually everyone loves that one out of every three people in their town is now a 70 IQ third worlder on welfare!"
That's generally my impression of Trump and the Maga phenomenon in general. Most of what they say is technically false, but an exaggerated version of something true and important. The Truth is 1, Trump says 2, his supporters say 3, and the Democrats/media say -3.
You can't literally take them at their word, but as tentative allies we might make some progress in that direction, which is better than the opposite.
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The most common type of Democrat position isn't that Springfieldians overwhelmingly love the Haitian immigrants, it's that those Springfieldians who dislike the immigrants should change their minds and like them because the immigrants are objectively good for the community and in any case, even if they weren't, it is still good to let them into the country.
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Your understanding of ‘the truth’ probably came from another guy’s statement where ‘the specifics were off’ too and it didn’t matter to him either. You denounce democrats when they lie, make their lies responsible for loss of trust in their institutions and their electoral defeat, but lying in favour of your side, that just works?
I honestly don't even understand what you are attempting to say. Let me make myself as clear as possible.
The Republican position was "having almost 30% of your town become third worlders on welfare overnight sucks" and the Democrat position was "Having almost 30% of your town become third worlders on welfare overnight is awesome!"
The people in the town who can vote, voted by a nearly unprecedented margin "Yeah nah, it sucks". Like, that's not a lie with the specifics off. There was an actual vote, with actual numbers! We can check!
Were the stories about specific ways it sucks to have your town overrun by barbarians from a distant country inaccurate? Yeah. Were the stories about how totally well adjusted and harmonious everything is also inaccurate? Clearly. But the fundamental question of "Does this suck?" was overwhelmingly answered.
You’re grasping for the truth, clamoring for something to hold on to. It doesn’t prove that having haitians sucks. Springfield just voted that way, allegedly. And the legitimacy of the vote is something Trump has repeatedly attacked. He claimed ‘the actual numbers we can check’ were false. In that lie, those were the specifics that were off, which you dismiss here. In order to justify one lie, to diminish the truth-value of one statement, you have to rely on on the truth value of another statement, which your side has already destroyed. Lying’s been sawing the branch you’re sitting on.
I’m not a fan of haitian immigration. I’d just like to understand what you two (deep blue and deep red) are doing. You both apparently think lying is fine and advantageous for you, but immoral or counterproductive for the other.
I can't talk for deeply red or blue people, but I can talk for myself, as a big fan of the truth. I felt like I was lied to so much over the past decade that I barely know what truth is any longer. And it turned out I was right, the people in charge of information at every level were lying to everyone about almost everything. They lied about covid, about the economy, about Jan 6, about the laptop, about Biden's health, about immigration, about Kamala's chances of winning. How exactly do you find the truth when the people in charge of collecting data refuse to give it to you?
At least the lies Trump told uncovered an inconvenient truth being hidden by the democrat government, and yes, that is a better lie. When Trump starts lying to cover things up, I will be disappointed but unsurprised, I am a pessimist at heart and as everyone knows, politicians always lie. But all this talk about transparency and accountability gives me some hope we can course correct. It is at the very least better than the previous administration's open disdain for transparency and accountability.
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I suppose we'll never know, but I wonder if in sum the "Eating the pets" thing helped or hurt Trump. My inclination is that it was brilliant subversion of the whole "debunking" culture, weaponizing it against unwitting Democrats, very possibly knowingly by Vance. You tell a salacious story that is intentionally in part false, knowing that it will be simply irresistible to Deboonkers who will only aid you in spreading the story which has a kernel of truth that ultimately helps you. At the end of the day, even if they didn't eat the cats, I think the idea that some random NGO can dump 20,000 Haitians on your small middle-America town is extremely disturbing and ultimately the debunkers only helped spread this fact.
I wanted to write something about this, maybe it's still worth doing a retrospective.
When the news first got out the left went into full "delay, deny, denounce" mode as they fell back. Noah Smith was claiming the Haitians didn't even exist, then that there's no way that many of them were on welfare, and finally anyway why do you care racist?!
Those delaying tactics work if they make you haggle over every step, proving the Haitians are really there, spending another six weeks digging up docs on who brought them, and whoops the public lost interest a month ago and Noah Smith is sneering about how you're so obsessed with this Haitian thing.
This is a pattern that played out millions of times fighting the left between 2008 and now. "It's not happening and anyway you deserved it" is just a specific form of the general mode of propaganda warfare they perfected with their dominance over the media.
Trump was the guy who discovered that you can ram a lance right into the center of the boil so everyone can watch it burst. Suddenly the enemy are dug in defending territory you bypassed hours ago, still doggedly insisting that "no reliable sources admit X", even as their reinforcements have shifted to a "Republicans pounce on X" counter-offensive, abandoning the old front line entirely. Night after night their newscasters have that panicked Baghdad Bob look as they back peddle while lashing out in frustration. Their lies become obvious, and more importantly they look weak.
It's a wonderful way of exploiting the distributed hive-mind nature of the left. Even when all their journalists are coordinating messaging on JournoList, they can't react fast enough because their command network is so bloated and cobbled together out of the rotting remains of skinsuited institutions, often still working at cross-purposes to each other. Sometimes a biological component whose still half-digested brain was hiding shreds of journalistic integrity will even throw a foot out and stagger the beast.
I think we're already seeing evolution towards a new, centralized party-controlled media in response. For example, the Dems have put billions into that network of fake "local news" sites that all publish AI-written variations on the same press release, which in turn get posted to reddit and bluesky for bots to comment on. This bypasses existing institutions that they can only influence rather than control outright in real time, such as the New York Times (which the left have now turned on savagely). At least in the short run this will make them much stronger and more agile, and they will become as adept at parrying Trump-like attacks as late-WW2 armies were at countering blitzkrieg tactics.
It follows the general theme of the cathedral shifting from soft power to directly-wielded hard power as challengers arise.
Just saw some supporting quotes from semafor:
Always feels like you're well-calibrated when the monster you've been analyzing turns round and describes its behavior the exact same way you did, but with a smiley face drawn on the shoggoth mask.
Jesus Christ.
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I think this is an underappreciated point, and I suspect it even reflects a psychological difference between the right and left wing's approach to empiricism.
I'll even 'steelman' Pizzagate, for that matter.
We've seen plenty of credible reports and even some actual convictions showing that Politicians do in fact get up to all kinds of sexual deviancy, up to and including in the halls of congress.
And now we're seeing the various dominoes falling with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell (remember they found her hanging out in New Hampshire surrounded by armed guards?), Diddy, and Jay-Z, and we can be all but certain there's celebs and politicians caught up in all this. The biggest hit song of the summer was by Kendrick Lamar accusing one of the most popular musical artists alive right now of being a pedophile.
Pizzagate gets the specifics wrong (there's probably no child dungeon underneath a pizza restaurant) but is still getting at the 'shape' of the truth. And if they kept fumbling around in a very misguided attempt to uncover these truths, they'd probably grab hold of the actual conspiracies eventually, and bring some heinous stuff to light.
Whereas the lefty impulse seems to be to reject the existence of a given conspiracy simply because some aspect of it is debunked or proven false. "Haha silly Qanon thinks there's a Pedo ring operating out of a Pizza shop, how stupid to believe that politicians would be hiding an organized child sex operation." And thus they don't have to follow that thought any further and can return to blissful ignorance, which would allow whatever hidden activities are occurring to continue along.
This was especially blatant with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff. Its utterly obvious the Biden family is covering up some serious stuff, and the more recent pardons are almost tacit admissions of such, but the liberals have their head jammed so deep in the sand that they denied Biden's senility, let alone his potential corruption, for so long it may have just cost them control of government.
Likewise, maybe there are at best isolated incidents of Haitian immigrants taking animals they find outdoors and cooking them up in Ohio. But the larger point that they're causing, e.g. increased traffic accidents and increased burden on social services and possibly crowding out the locals for employment is likely more true than not.
it seems obvious that Haitians really do eat dogs and cats in Haiti (Those links are SFL, but there ARE videos out there if you wish to be convinced further), so the larger point the righties are making is getting at the shape of the truth.
The lefties, of course, will use the debunking of individual incidents to claim that Haitian immigrants are causing no issues whatsoever and we should be inviting more of them in.
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