A litter box of half-truths

Feline arroz caldo. Puss-filet sandwich. Kitten nuggets. Grilled cat-fish combo. Steamed siomeow. Cattail salad.

You name it, they have it.

A purry-sidential menu, er, debate that purry-minently featured the purry-mitive taste of a race of cat-eating people in the US heartland was no laughing matter.

Or maybe it was.

Last week, during the much-anticipated debate between VP Kamala “Laugher” Harris and MAGA Supreme Leader Donald Trump, the latter lambasted the former’s immigration record as a Joe Biden surrogate by alleging, without proof, that Haitian immigrants living in Ohio were abducting and eating the pets in their neighborhood, the feline variety included.

“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.” Or words to that effect.

Words that were uttered pointedly without the slightest modicum of doubt.

This, despite the Ohio local officials’ express denials of such unverified claims.

Long before these racist rants, Trump and his MAGA allies have been mocking and racially stereotyping Latino and African immigrants in the US, calling them rapists, criminals, and in the case of the latter, coming from “s…hole” countries.

Thus, it was no coincidence that immediately before the debate, the MAGA Supremo posted a couple of pussy-themed images on his Truth Social media platform, including a photo of himself surrounded by hairy, er, thick-furred pussies and dark-eyed widgeons as well as a picture of rifle-toting cats in MAGA hats.

(Surprisingly absent, however, was a photo of him grabbing a woman’s pussy-cat — pardon the puns, please).

Not to be outdone, loyal MAGA cat’s paws quickly latched on to Trump’s anti-immigrant diatribes, including Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance who shared an unverified re-tweet of pet-eating rumors in Springfield, Ohio involving Haitian immigrants, and the “winter-storm-is-coming-Cancun-here-I-come” escape artist Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who posted a photo of twin titties, er, kitties with a caption exhorting his followers to vote for Trump so that “Haitian immigrants don’t eat (the kitties).”

Where did all these bizarre stories come from?

A little bit of online sleuthing points to a confluence of unrelated social media postings, including an odd but apolitical Reddit photo of a black man walking along a Columbus, Ohio street holding a moribund-looking goose by its feet. The Reddit poster has since apologized and clarified that he had no idea what the real story behind the photo was.

Another possible culprit was an unverified, reposted X tweet coming out of Springfield, Ohio about a person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” allegedly witnessing a cat hanging from a tree about to be butchered and feasted on in a property allegedly owned by a Haitian immigrant. The original post has since been deleted.

But the most likely source was a recent news report coming out of Canton, Ohio about a 27-year-old local black woman who “did torture, kill, and eat a cat in a residential area in front of multiple people,” per the police report. While unmistakably a bizarre case bordering on the macat-bre, it turned out that the perpetrator was a lifelong Canton resident and not a Haitian immigrant.

Of course, given the MAGA leadership’s vitriolic obsession with anything cat-related, as headlined by the Supremo’s “grab ‘em by the p….y” remark in 2016 and punctuated by Mr. Vance’s comment about the country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies,” it is no wonder the nation’s Numero Uno political endorser, Ms. Taylor Swift, chose a feline pet to help deliver a paw-litically electrifying endorsement of Trump’s opponent.

What’s next? Rants about Filipino immigrants butchering and eating dogs in Hawaii?