How (Not) To Make Fun of Bigots
How (Not) To Make Fun of Bigots
On pets, Poe's Law, and the limits of humor-as-activism.
Real quick up top: I’m now giving all my Substack income to help Ghazal and her family survive in Gaza. In August 2024, we raised over $100! Thank you so much to my paid subscribers! If you want to help too, consider upgrading to the paid tier; if you do, you’ll get four hot takes per month instead of two!
During the last Presidential debate, former president Donald Trump told an egregious, racist lie about Haitian people. Parroting a rumor he heard from his running mate JD Vance, the claim was that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH are “eating the cats and dogs” of Real Americans. This is a classic from the white supremacist playbook: saying that people of another race are more savage / less civilized than us, that their lifestyles are inherently a threat to our way of life, and therefore the members of that race need to be… well, you get it.
The anatomy of this lie is incredibly interesting and is easily worth its own essay. While social media has become synonymous with misinformation, according to this breakdown from misinformation watchdog NewsGuard, the originator of the claim may not have been a social media user at all. Erika Lee, who first posted about the false rumor on Facebook, has even come out and said that she regrets sharing it in the first place (she never thought that spreading a racist lie would actually, you know, hurt people!) Whatever the case, it’s too late now: Springfield schools shut down for several days thanks to bomb threats, KKK fliers are lining the streets, and anti-Haitian violence has reached pogrom levels in Ohio and elsewhere.
Republicans are inciting race riots, which is an escalation (though not much of one) from the rhetoric they’ve been using for years: they wave signs reading “mass deportation now”, repeat the lie that violent crime is on the rise (it’s actually at an all-time low), and mischaracterize “legal immigration” as something incredibly easy to do (it’s not). My take on immigration, by the way, can be summarized as follows:
Perhaps the most alarming piece of this story is not Republicans’ willingness to lie, but rather their willingness to lie and then immediately admit that they lied: in an interview with Dana Bash a few days after the debate, JD Vance admitted that he completely made the story up to get media attention. This mirrors another recent story where Trump claimed that teenagers were literally going off to school and coming home having received bottom surgery, and anti-trans activists responding by saying “Okay, so THAT isn’t happening, but we’re glad he exaggerated because it brought attention to the issue.”
Clearly, there is something to be said about how there is no bottom when it comes to certain politician’s willingness to lie and harm others to accrue power. I’m here, however, to talk about what happened next: people starting making jokes about the situation.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Videos like the one above flooded social media the day after the debate: videos of pets seemingly “reacting” to the “news” that Haitians are eating people’s pets. Now, if you’re a left-leaning person, perhaps you thought this video was a satirical send-up of what Donald Trump said in the debate last week. “Haitian people are eating pets? What an obvious lie that’s obviously racist! How silly of him!”
But put yourself in the shoes of a Trump supporter and rewatch that video: couldn’t you just as easily interpret it to mean that Haitian people are eating pets, that this dog is concerned about this phenomena, and so you should be as well? The videos using this audio of Trump’s words are presented without deeper commentary nor a winking nudge to the audience that the claim is racist or wrong. They merely parrot the lie and leave it up to the audience to discern whether they’re satire or taking the threat of “evil migrants” completely seriously.
Here on the Internet, we have something called Poe’s Law, which originated in 2005 to describe how, unless you provide some form of blatant indication that you’re doing satire, your post will be indistinguishable from a sincere expression of the view being expressed. The original version was coined in a forum about creationism (remember when people believing in intelligent design was our biggest problem? or a problem at all?) when the original poster made an anti-evolution talking point but ended the post with a winky face to let readers know that the comment was parody. It’s hard to indicate tone here on the Internet, so you need to make your intentions incredibly clear, especially if you’re going to make a joke about something as serious as violent racism.
To illustrate this problem further, this TikTok user made a video with a *sigh* Trump pet-eating trap remix (see below). In a video that has since been taken down, she was baffled to find that her video was “used in a Trump campaign ad”, presumably sincerely. I assume she meant that it was used in a high-profile right-wing influencer’s post or some other video, since I couldn’t find an official Trump campaign ad with her video. Still, it points to the idea that without a clear indication of your actual beliefs, your words can be twisted either way. For yet another example of humor being used incorrectly: in my home state of Connecticut, a man dressed himself in a KKK outfit and attended a Trump rally with a sign that read “Trump Endorsed By The KKK!” Apparently, the man was a troll and the point was to make a “satire” about the state of the Republican Party. All it ended up doing was terrifying and traumatizing Black people. Great satire, dude! Very funny!
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
We should be clear about something though: it is still possible, in fact encouraged, to make fun of racists. Mel Brooks famously dresses down Hitler and other Nazis specifically because doing so robs them of their gravitas and importance. Brooks once said, “Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.” In other words, once you start taking fascists seriously, you’ve already lost, because you’ve implied that their opinions are worth taking seriously. (You know who wants you to take Nazis seriously? Nazis.) Humor can not only provide marginalized people with a coping mechanism for their marginalization, it can “punch up” to provide a satirical deconstruction that’s more effective at tackling harmful ideologies than any robust analysis.
But we need to be smart about how we mock the hateful. Take for instance this video, which notably does not use audio of Trump’s words. Instead, it juxtaposes a Haitian man with a Korean man with the caption “just two cultures that get told we eat pets”. The key word here is “told”, which signals that it’s a false accusation and thereby removes the possibility that the claim will be taken seriously. The tone is both comical and deconstructive. Plus, as a fun bonus, it builds inter-racial solidarity between seemingly disparate groups, putting this new racist claim in context with other racist claims from the past. Brilliant!
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
For two more examples, take this video which directly confronts JD Vance’s lies, or this video which opens by affirming that there is a group that’s killing around 10,000 dogs per year before revealing that the group in question is police officers. You can be funny and provide good commentary! More importantly, if you’re not completely clear on where you stand, you run the risk of your words being misinterpreted and causing further violence to Haitian people. Or at the very least, you can further traumatize Haitian people regardless of whether they’re in immediate physical danger.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Much like how the first person to share the cat-eating claim to Facebook had no idea that it would eventually be seen by the former President of the United States, you should assume that everything you post online might be seen by millions of people and tailor your messaging as such. It’s an amount of responsibility that can, admittedly, be pretty paralyzing, but we have to try.
I’ll end with these two action items: First, learn about Haitian culture! Try some Haitian food and learn about the complexities of Afro-Latinx culture. It will be worth it to learn new things, especially if you’re a political commentator who needs to know the shape of anti-Haitian racism and where it fits in the greater context of western white supremacy.
Second, please get registered to vote so that Donald Trump does not become president again. I have my criticisms of Kamala Harris (I’ve also written about a more reasonable timeline for a left-wing government presence), but I feel comfortable saying that a Kamala Harris presidency would be better than a second Trump term. If you can read through this timeline of Trump’s first term and tell me with a straight face that a Kamala Harris presidency would be “the same as” or even worse than a second Trump term, then feel free to vote for whoever you like. But if Thee Angela Davis is saying that a Kamala presidency would buy us time to keep organizing for bigger struggles, then I’m taking the lib pill, at least between now and November. White supremacy needs to lose by a landslide.
Currently Reading
An excellent Substack piece from a Massachusetts neighbor about election anxiety.
For some good news, MIT just partially divested from the war machine! The group Scientists Against Genocide (SAGE) got the school to end its MISTI-Israel Lockheed Martin Fund, a program that began in 2019. An incredible win for the BDS movement and a sign that other engineering schools can change too!
Watch History
Even more reasons to vote in your local elections.
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
“TIMELESS” by KAYTRANADA is a strong AOTY contender!
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna