Whom Jupiter Destroys, He First Makes Mad
How 4chan gave us the cat-eating Haitian Fright
When the alarm went up, the people of Uxbridge were already primed for panic.
“Rise, arm! Arm! The Irish are cutting throats!”
Years prior, an army of Irish dragoons had been pressed into service for King James II. They had fought, and died, for the British, but amid widespread anti-Irish sentiment, they were due to be shipped off as conscripts for the Holy Roman Empire.
In the dead of a December night, 1688, word began to spread: The garrisoned Irish had decided to rise up. They probably numbered no more than 15,000, but they were battle-hardened, well-equipped, and prone to wanton violence. They were savages, the English believed.
The alarm pulled the Englishmen into the streets. Within hours, some 100,000 had amassed into a makeshift militia to put down the threat. Bridges were barricaded, scythes were sharpened into weapons. Word came that the Irish were headed for London, burning everything in their wake.
With the prospect of a revolution on their hands, the House of Lords hastily assembled at 3 a.m. Cities devolved into panic as their local dukes and earls fled. Claims that the king himself had been spirited away from Whitehall only heightened the tension.
By foot, rail1, and horseback, reports pinged from around the London countryside. It seemed like the Irish were everywhere all at once. Over more than a week, the panic washed over England in waves, spurring locals into frenzy before fading into nervous unease.
It turns out, the Irish were nowhere at all. There was no insurrection. Nothing had been burned, pillaged, or ransacked, except by the Brits themselves. It was in the panic that at least one man, thought to be an Irish rebel, was cut down.
This was, as we know it now, The Irish Fright.
In the ensuing months and years, historians turned into classical disinformation-hunters, determined to figured out what had seized the English citizens into such an imagined fright. Bishop Gilbert Burnet, writing in a 1746 compendium “of above 500 reports, lies, and stories,”2 tried to investigate the source of the ordeal.
Burnet zoomed in on a contemporaneous account, which told a story of “money-less” Irish troops, “incapable of subsiding in a country where they were so generally hated” who decided to storm a country house to feed themselves. The owner of the pub raced out the door upon their arrival, screaming that the Irish were marauding towards London. Perhaps it was a very real threat, just blown way out of proportion?
It’s certainly one explanation, but Burnet wasn’t convinced. “Supposing the intelligence diffused itself from London, how could the men of Berkshire, Lincolnshire, Sussex, have from thence an account that the Irish were in their neighborhood? And how could this happen so exactly at the same time in all places, with one day's difference only?”
Burnet stumbled onto a considerably “more probable account” in the notes of Hugh Speke, a local political agitator keen to stoke anti-Irish sentiment and sow chaos in King James’ court. In the diary, Speke mused how he “could easily send letters to all the different parts of England so that they should all arrive at the same day.” England’s incredible expanding postal service was, the Bishop concluded, awfully “convenient for the trumping-up of an Irish massacre.”
Modern historians are slightly more skeptical of the theory that a single man was responsible for such a massive freak-out. Instead, Historian George Hilton Jones posits, different actors conspired to take advantage of the events as they arose. In Gloucestershire, for example, “a tight knot of mostly related people seem to have been responsible for spreading the alarm and raising armed men.”
Jones explains: “The Irish fright, that is to say, was an instrument for the acquisition of power.”3
At the bottom of Burnet’s account, written nearly three centuries ago, he ends on a fashionable Latin phrase of the time:
Jupiter quos vult perdere dementet
Jupiter makes mad those whom he wishes to destroy.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we investigate bizarre claims of immigrants eating cats, dogs, ducks, and geese. We set out to find the origins of The Haitian Fright.
Springfield, Ohio has had a complicated relationship with immigration for the past few years.
An influx of Haitian migrants had come to Clark County during the pandemic, many of them fleeing natural disaster and conflict that had basically destroyed the state in their home country. These asylum seekers had been welcomed into the United States under Barack Obama, before having the door slammed shut by Donald Trump, then re-opened Joe Biden. Springfield was, at least at first, eager to invite them to town. The Haitians quickly filled vacancies in local warehouses, factories, restaurants, and even started their own businesses.
Still, an influx of new people, particularly those fleeing conflict, is tough on any new town. The town’s population swelled by about a fifth. The services locals had come to rely on — healthcare, schooling, welfare supports — were not ready for the new arrivals, particularly not amid the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Springfield’s growing pains were first thrust into the national spotlight when tragedy struck. A minivan, driven by a Haitian immigrant without a valid driver’s license, crossed over the median and collided head-on with an oncoming school bus. The crash killed 11-year-old Aiden Clark.
The driver was ultimately prosecuted and found guilty for the crash. But the tragedy quickly became a political talking point. Far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene proclaimed last year that “this 11-year-old American boy would be alive today if it weren’t for Joe Biden‘s wide-open border invasion.” It fit into Donald Trump’s emerging fear-mongering around “migrant crime.”
But the town seemed uncomfortable having its local problems conscripted into the national culture war. When some locals tried to use Clark’s death to vilify the Haitians, his parent’s begged them to stop. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate,” Clark’s grieving mom and dad wrote in a statement.
Both before Clark’s death and particularly after, Springfield City Commission meetings became a place to air grievances, real and imagined, about the state of the town and the difficulties posed by their new neighbors. Like so many small towns trying to navigate change, these town meetings were a useful, cathartic, messy way to untangle these problems.
Some who arrived to deputize blamed the migrants, some blamed the city for being unprepared or under-funded, some blamed everyone. But, for the most part, locals showed up to those town meetings with some pretty tangible things they wanted fixed. Better road safety training for the new arrivals, for example. Or more robust police enforcement of vehicle insurance. Maybe they weren’t happy about the new Springfielders, but they wanted to make it work.
This summer, a longtime Springfield resident got up at such a meeting to suggest that things weren’t as bad for the post-industrial town as others made it sound. “I've seen [the Haitians] rebuild these houses — I've seen them get them clean, put in walls doors, windows, everything,” she told the council. “I see improvement with them being here.”
But the idea that Springfield was in crisis was just too good a political prop to put down. Earlier this summer, at a senate committee hearing, JD Vance suddenly began blaming the Haitians for housing shortages and depressed wages in Springfield. Within days, Fox News invited on city officials who quickly expanded the concern, warning that the Haitians were “overwhelming our safety services.”
At a City Commission hearing a few days later, one citizen was perplexed:
You want to go on national TV to tell all of America that our city's safety forces are overwhelmed? So I suppose you asked the police chief and the fire chief for the numbers? You know, the stats that show a sharp increase in Haitian immigrant initiated crime in the city? About the flood of drugs that the Haitians have brought into our community? Of the sprawling tent cities that are popping up all around town, of homeless Haitian immigrants?
Of course you'll need to ask. Because you and I know that none of that is happening.
The local shamed the city manager and the mayor, proclaimed those Haitians as members of his community, dropped a few words of Creole, and walked off to a round of applause from other citizens.
But this national panic started having a clear impact on these community meetings. One woman got up to insist that “we don't need proof” of the terrible things happening in their community. They experienced it. Not personally, per se, but they were being inundated by an influx of messages from Twitter and right-wing community portal Locals. “They’re looking at human trafficking, they’re looking at child slavery,” she said. The world’s eyes were on Springfield, she said.
Far-right agitators, smelling fear and desperate to put their stamp on the town where immigration ran amok, descended on the town.
“Springfield, Ohio, belongs to Blood Tribe,” boasted one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi group. A sad gang, waving actual swastikas, showed up in Springfield and did a little parade around town. In a diatribe to an empty plaza, Drake Berentz, one of the group’s leaders, called the Haitians “subhuman…criminals, thugs, cannibals.” He himself went to a Springfield City Commission hearing to do some self-promotion. He didn’t get far into his little speech before a local hero interrupted to let everyone know “he’s a literal Nazi, he marched with swastikas!” Not long after, the Commission asked the police to escort him out of the building. (Some tough guy, eh?) Another cosplay Nazi group, Patriot Front, swept into the town to deliver an equally racist speech to an equally empty sidewalk.
With all this heat, it was a matter of time before Springfield became ground zero for some kind of misinformation-fuelled panic. And it began at a late August meeting of the Commission, with a local Tiktoker.
Anthony Harris, a 28-year-old self-described social media influencer, took to the podium wearing his own bright-red campaign merch for his upcoming bid for mayor.
“I think it's kind of odd that like a guy like me has to come out from doing what I do on a daily basis — having fun — because I see what's going on in these streets…I'm getting out here every day and I'm broadcasting this,” Harris said, insisting the city was being destroyed by the Haitians.
Harris, it’s worth noting, has not broadcast anything about the Haitians’ supposed destruction of his city. Under his handles @AlfredoPastaDon and @RedFlaggedPodcast, he uploads awkward man-on-the-street videos, poses math problems to local teens, and forays into gonzo prank videos by accosting people in a local Kroger’s to ask if they would sign a petition to make Black Lives Matter a national holiday. It’s clear he wants to go viral, and he hasn’t yet gotten there.
The closest thing I can find to his claim of documentary exposé, having watched through a brain-numbing number of these videos, is a stilted interview he conducts with a local guy — in a video titled “trolling & community talks” — where he says the city already has too many immigrants.
So Harris, desperate for fame, showed up to the City Commission hearing with a story to tell.
Inbetween some complaints about the Haitians’ driving, a suggestion that someone “is getting paid” to import the Haitians into Springfield, Harris makes a bold claim: “They're in the park grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and eating them.”
The comment may have spread around Facebook, but went generally unremarked upon until a week later, when someone started a thread on 4chan:
BREAKING: The federal government has dumped [racial slur] from haiti into springfield ohio and reports are starting to leak out that they have ate all the geese from the local lake and cats and dogs are starting to go missing. with one being found strung up like a deer and butchered for food
The 4chan troll attached a photo, ripped from Facebook (which had been, in turn, ripped from Reddit) claiming to show a Haitian migrant in Springfield holding one of these dead geese.
The photo, in fact, was taken in Columbus and has nothing to do with anyone from Haiti. No matter. Someone replied with a screenshot of a different Facebook thread, of a Columbus resident reporting that "my neighbor informed me that her daughters friend had lost her cat” — she accused the Haitians of eating it.
About two hours later, the same picture and the same screenshot was posted by @EndWokeness, a white supremacist Twitter account beloved by the Trump campaign and Elon Musk.
And it went, as we know, mega-viral. It made its way back to Vance, who dutifully posted it to Twitter. Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, recently exposed for allegedly having taken millions in Russian propaganda cash, dutifully hopped on. While it’s hard to say if the 4chan troll saw Harris’ speech, the video of his duck tale was quickly put out as evidence that this was no mere rumor. Someone else dredged up a story about a woman, American-born and in a different city, killing and eating a cat. Even the death of 11-year-old Aiden Clark was resurfaced, by Trump himself, to the anguished dismay of his parents.
Springfield’s mayor and city manager, who unintentionally contributed to the initial panic, quickly tried to put it back in the bottle by insisting that there was no evidence for any of these wild claims. But it was too late. Vance came out to reject the idea that facts should get in the way of a good narrative, instructing his supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing.”
Then to Donald Trump, who — unprompted — claimed during the debate Tuesday night: “In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there.” When pressed to back up the allegation, Trump replied:
“The people on television say: ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’”
There is nothing particularly interesting about how this racist hoax was created. It is a lie no more clever than “the Irish are cutting throats!” Nor is it particularly novel that Trump is inclined to repeat whatever he hears on Fox News.
What is interesting are the various actors willing to use this instrument to acquire power. It is fascinating how the speed with which information can travels enables the worsening of it. It is unnerving that we have created a system that not tolerates but rewards the trumping-up of these invented claims. It is depressing that there are no consequences, no downsides or pitfalls, to inciting a would-be pogrom based on little more than a 4chan post.
Once, I thought that merely debunking this stuff would be enough. Watching that tactic fail and fail again, I evolved my thinking: Maybe if we help people understand how and why these lies get spread, they will be inclined to ignore the next fabulism. That has certainly worked on those still partisans for the truth, but the nonsense keeps coming and millions keep believing it.
It will take, maybe, decades or centuries for historians to figure out just how we could be so smart and yet so inclined to fall for the same old tricks again and again.
In the meantime, I’ve adopted a new bit of optimism to replace my hope that we can beat this misinformation panic. I have to believe that Burnet — borrowing from Plato, who was in turn borrowing from Sophocles — was right. Jupiter quos vult perdere dementet.
This kind of madness cannot sustain itself. It will cannibalize those who trade in it every day. It may be sooner, it may be later, but this rage will eventually consume those who wield it, turning them into paranoid, unhappy, distrustful, alienating weirdos.
I can’t wait until it does.
That’s it for this extra dispatch, as I climb out of my publishing deficit.
I wrote a very Bug-eyed and Shameless-y piece for the Star this week, on the promise and peril of Jordan B. Peterson’s brand of pop-philosophy. I was also on CBC’s Front Burner to talk about the recent indictment of several RT employees who were, allegedly, funnelling Russian money into right-wing influencers.
Until next week!
Some eagle-eyed readers took issue with my mention of “rail” here. And they might be right. In Bishp Burnet’s account, he reports word moving by “train.” We know that can’t be the steam train, as the UK’s rail network didn’t exist in any major way until the 19th century. But we do know that the towns around London were connected by a patchwork of rail lines, which used horse-drawn wagons to connect the coalmines and factories. I assumed Burnet was referring to that network — but he may have been referencing stagecoaches instead. Hard to say. Either way, mea culpa for this slight inaccuracy!
The Irish Fright of 1688 : Real Violence and Imagined Massacre, George Hilton Jones
Many years ago, a colleague of mind at the times, was a fascinating individual and the most inspiring Physics instructor I’ve ever encountered in forty plus years of teaching and education.
I can recall quite vividly one day he was visiting my office about some student concerns and we veered into the areas of philosophy, psychology and how it all connected to Physics. There was chatter about theories of social contagion and he introduced the idea of inertia and a typical slide at any playground.
You can push yourself off the starting point, and can actually halt the forward momentum if you correct
quickly and soon enough. Otherwise, once your mass starts moving the forward momentum cannot be halted and you’re headed to the “ bottom” of the equipment.
I’ve often thought about and have considered the timelessness of the illustration, and as much as I choose to remain optimistic and strength based, I also hold in my thoughts that “we” are on this trajectory and
there is little to correct and stop it, short of a massive force acting on it, either internally or externally.
As always, thanks for the fascinating history that introduces the main article, always appreciate these little known stories that have profound significance.
There is a good book that talks to that valuable point about using hatred to obtain power; it is called "Hope For Cynics". I will be reviewing it next Monday. In the meantime, I collected some memes that reflect the reaction to the debate...
https://barrygander.substack.com/p/a-sweet-echo-a-chorus-of-rejoicing