The day after the presidential debate at which former President Donald Trump spread a false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Christopher Pohlhaus, leader of the national neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, took to his Telegram channel to take credit.
Pohlhaus, a Marine-turned-tattoo artist known as “Hammer” to his hundreds of followers, wrote Blood Tribe had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.”
Members of his hate group agreed. “The president is talking about it now,” a member wrote on Gab, a Twitter-like service popular with extremists. “This is what real power looks like.”
Trump’s line at the debate was the culmination of a weekslong rumor mill that appears to have at least been amplified by Blood Tribe, which has sought to demonize the local Haitian community online and in person. The debate drew more than 67 million viewers, according to the media analytics company Nielsen.
As with most rumors, the beginning of the baseless claims about Haitians eating pets in Springfield is hard to pinpoint, but Blood Tribe undoubtedly helped spread it.
Starting in late June, people in local Facebook groups had been posting about Haitian children chasing ducks and geese. Around the same time, conservative media was characterizing Springfield as being “flooded” with Haitian immigrants. Over the next few weeks, the Facebook complaints, still without evidence, got darker, with anonymous posters claiming they were hearing that ducks and geese were going missing, perhaps even being eaten by their immigrant neighbors.
The Springfield Police Division told NBC News that “there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
The rumor began to grow legs in the private local groups as the blue-collar city’s immigration-driven population growth became national news in an election year.
Blood Tribe latched on last month when it started posting to Telegram and Gab about Springfield, stoking racist rumors about Haitians and Black people in general eating domestic animals. In a hate-filled Gab post from early September that included multiple racial epithets, the group claimed Haitians “eat the ducks out of the city parks.” The reach of Blood Tribe’s isn’t clear, as its Gab and Telegram accounts have fewer than 1,000 followers.
In response to a request for comment sent to Pohlhaus, Blood Tribe said in an email that it stood by its claims and that it would continue its activism, “making sure” Haitian immigrants “are all repatriated.”
The claims also began circulating in more mainstream conservative spaces, most notably on social media.
A few days after Blood Tribe’s Gab post, an X account not affiliated with Blood Tribe that is popular in conservative circles, @EndWokeness, posted a screenshot of a message board post and a picture of a man appearing to hold a goose. The screenshot purports that Haitians had stolen and eaten a neighbor’s cat, and the message from the X account adds that “ducks and pets are disappearing.” That post has been viewed 4.9 million times, according to X’s public metrics.
The man who originally posted the photo said that it was taken in Columbus, Ohio, and that he didn’t know the person’s ethnicity and he said he didn’t believe the photo should have been used to spread false rumors.
Even so, the post sparked a major jump for the rumor. What had been steady conversation that spread in August was beginning to die out early this month, according to data from Peak Metrics, a company that tracks online threats. But the goose post led to a second wave of virality.
From there, the rumors snowballed. Claims of residents’ pets being stolen, animal sacrifice and voodoo worshiping, as well as discussions about the “great replacement” conspiracy, began to circulate, according to an analysis by Memetica, a digital investigations company.
The memes followed. Artificial intelligence-generated images first circulated on 4chan and then in MAGA communities on X of pets and waterfowl being embraced and protected by Trump, which pushed the conspiracy theories even further into the mainstream. At the height of the spread this week, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, promoted the baseless rumors on his own X account.
“It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” Vance posted. But he told his followers, without proof that the rumors weren’t true, they shouldn’t “let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”
As the rumors gained steam in conservative online spaces, Blood Tribe was planning real-world actions.
On Aug. 10, about a dozen masked Blood Tribe members carrying banners adorned with swastikas marched in downtown Springfield, labeling the event an “anti-Haitian Immigration march.” On Facebook, Mayor Rob Rue said: “There was an attempt to disrupt our community by an outside hate group. Nothing happened, except they expressed their First Amendment rights.”
Blood Tribe’s Gab account shot back and invited its followers to harass the mayor. “Hello, Springfield Ohio! We hear you have a real problem with Haitian ‘refugees.’”
On Aug. 27, Drake Berentz, the only Blood Tribe member apart from Pohlhaus who marches with his face shown, stood before the Springfield City Commission. Identifying himself by his online moniker, Berentz offered “a word of warning” before his mic was cut off for threatening the commission. He was escorted out by police.
Springfield isn’t Blood Tribe’s first target, and it’s not likely to be its last, said Jeff Tischauser, a senior researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center who monitors hate groups. Blood Tribe and other hate groups have used the real-world actions for recruitment, attention and intimidation.
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Last year, armed Blood Tribe members rallied at drag events in Columbus and Wadsworth, Ohio, chanting Nazi slogans and waving Nazi salutes. They marched at a Pride event in Watertown, Wisconsin and at the capitol in Madison, and they shouted “Heil Hitler” outside Disney World. This year, abandoning LGBTQ issues for immigration, they have protested in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Nashville, Tennessee; Pierre, South Dakota; and Springfield.
“They aim to stoke fear among local communities that they view as potentially friendly to their ideas,” Tischauser said. “Goal No. 1 is psychological trauma, to keep folks out of public life that they disagree with. Number 2 is to create these viral moments for their group to get attention on Gab and on Telegram.”
Blood Tribe, like other white nationalist groups, also seeks to normalize extremist ideas and symbols, Tischauser said. With Trump’s and the wider conservative embrace of the Haitians-eating-pets rumor, Springfield has been a success for the hate groups.
“The GOP seems to be falling into their trap,” Tischauser said. “Groups like Blood Tribe truly see themselves as pushing the GOP further to their position on policy, but also on rhetoric.”
The threat from such a mainstreaming of extremist ideas was on display in Springfield on Thursday. Blood Tribe has used its Gab account to dox Springfield residents and government employees who have spoken out against the recent rumors. City Hall had to close down Thursday after multiple government agencies there got bomb threats.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
