The woman behind the initial Facebook post has come forward.
Heather Cox Wilkinson writes in her blog:
More than two months ago, they wrote, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s vice presidential running mate, began to speak about Springfield at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to tie rising housing prices to immigrants. The next day, at the National Conservatism conference, Vance accused “illegals” of overwhelming the city.
On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city. Right-wing social media posters pushed the story, usually with “witnesses” to events in the city coming from elsewhere.
Except if you look at the post that started all this, it wasn’t just “Cat missing, blame Haitians”, they explicitly say the cat was found hanging from a tree ready to be butchered. This was never an actual cat that actually went missing. It’s pretty much bullshit all the way down.
And if you look at the details of where these people got this idea, well, it’s a near-perfect example of the old friend-of-a-friend thing that always drives urban legends.
NewsGuard identified and tracked down the two people central to the claim: Erika Lee, the Springfield resident who wrote the original Facebook post, and Kimberly Newton, the neighbor who had provided her with a third-hand account of the rumor, making Lee’s social media post a fourth-hand account: the alleged acquaintance/cat owner; Newton’s friend; Newton; and Lee, who posted it on Facebook.
I miss the days when these sort of stories just circulated around the schoolyard at recess instead of becoming topics of national discussion.
Very rapidly, have to load the van and go to farmers’ market:
Judging by both your link and the one a couple of posts above, that wasn’t the original post, but one at least somewhat further down the line. I don’t know whether it was the one that made the whole thing blow up, though.
Back when these types of stories circulated around, we knew they were just crazy, made-up stories. Did anyone really believe babysitters high on LSD were putting babies in microwaves?
Sure, a few people really believed. The difference was they tended to be isolated in a sea of more rational people which greatly diluted their influence.
These days everybody can find a “community” of like-minded individuals on line and form a committee/posse/political party to commit mischief as a group.
A little more information:
The rumor itself was started by on of those Blood Tribe Nazis. No, he didn’t put it on Facebook, but he did say it in a city council meeting, which is probably what got the rumor mill going that led to the Facebook post.
Here is where I learned this, and it includes citations:
We used to see posters in Portland for missing pets all the time, usually cats that were allowed to roam outside freely. This was because of urban predators of the non-human sort, like coyotes and eagles. This is often the fate of pets that are not properly tended.
Canada Geese, aka Cobra Chickens.
I recall it was the oven, from back before most people had microwaves.
Plus “I can fly” from the third floor window, etc. Or the cop pulling over the stoned driver on the Golden Gate bridge.
“Do you know how fast you were going?”
“Forty miles an hour?”
“Two miles an hour…!”
All apocryphal stories more joke than anything else.
My count of people I know IRL who believe this is literally happening, or “could have happened” is now in double digits.
Almost all Dragnet episodes.
A post was merged into an existing topic: The stupid rumors about Springfield Haitians
A boy at my high school did this, though. The first death of a peer I experienced.
Not eagles, really. Great Horned owls- they can take a cat up to 4 pounds or so (birds can not fly off with anything that weighs a significant amount more than they do).
I remember these same stories about Chinese immigrants forty years ago. Exactly the same. Told the same way. Identical.
It’s just so comically stupid.
A Canada goose could quite easily be hunted with a bat or a golf club, or your bare hands for that matter. (They can’t break your arm with their wings, contrary to the urban tale. Birds are very light and cannot hit you with that much force.) Canada geese are territorial and the males will often not back down or even walk away from a human. You could just blast them in the neck with a hand held weapon. If you walk up to a group there’s an excellent chance one or two will decide to fight.
Until they start shooting.
I had to break up a fight between a 60 lb dog and a domestic gander once (my dog blundered into the territory the gander was defending; his wife was setting on eggs). The gander had the dog’s ruff in his beak so he could not get away and was beating the shit out of him with his wings. I had bruises all up and down my arms and my dog didn’t feel so hot either. Nothing broken though.
Avian flu. No bullets required.