Try explaining that headline in 2019!
Despite it featuring in Donald Trump's disastrous debate performance on Tuesday, Republicans appear to be committing to "immigrants are eating your pets!" as a central part of their campaign message. What a wild time to live in.
One thing I've heard in response to this is that "cat eating" is just the GOP version of the "J.D. Vance fucks couches" meme that bounced around the liberal blogosphere a few weeks ago. In either case, the argument went, it was a "humorous" falsehood that speaks to an overall decay in our informational climate, and so if you're uncomfortable with the one, you have no grounds to justify the other.
This comparison seems too cute. For starters, as others have noted, one extremely important difference between the two memes is that nobody is worried about extremists deciding to go out and terrorize Ikea shoppers based on misinformation about sofa sex acts occurring therein. That alone is enough to work as a distinction.
But also, the more fundamental difference is that nobody -- left, right, or center -- ever purported to believe J.D. Vance actually had sex with couches. It was self-conscious absurdism from the get-go. If there was a progressive out there who earnestly, genuinely believed J.D. Vance copulated with a couch, that person would be viewed with contempt by everyone else sharing the meme -- it was not meant to be believed, and there was no effort to make it something that would be believed.
By contrast, conservatives can't quite decide whether they believe the "cat eating" stories are real or not. The neo-Nazis who initially promulgated the claim certainly hoped and expected people would believe it. And Vance himself described the potential truth of the claim in deliberately waffling fashion "It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false" -- a formulation which indicates a comparably strong possibility that these "rumors" are in fact true. Comparing the two "stories" is like saying an Onion article and 2024 election trutherism are both examples of "misinformation".
What we're seeing from the right here isn't self-conscious absurdism but rather a sort of empirical edgelording -- dancing around the edge of "do I believe it/am I joking" to try and get the best of all worlds. If the listener is shocked, then they're just messing around; if the listener buys in, well, then they're being totally serious. People often cite Sartre's remarks on the way Nazis like to "play" with words, but the comparison that immediately jumped to my mind is Nelly suggesting to a female friend that he has a "pole in the basement". The shocked "what?" from said friend is met with "I'm just kiddin' ... Unless you're gon' do it." It's not a serious statement, except for those who take it seriously.
The irony, though, is that precisely because Republicans can't fully commit to "cat eating" being obviously made up, it can't serve the function they want from it -- which is to be the counter to the "Republicans are weird" narrative Democrats have been so effectively impressing upon them (and of which couch fucking was a satirical encapsulation of). They're hoping for "you think we're weird -- well you eat cats!" The problem, though, is that the sort of person who actually thinks (or even is unsure) whether gangs of immigrants are abducting and devouring household pets in Ohio is ... a weird person! That is a weird thing to think, and it comes off as a weird thing to think. When Donald Trump publicly promotes cat-eating conspiracies in a debate, the response isn't "ooh, what a great zinger", it's "what on earth is he babbling about?" If you're not already in the fever swamp, it's a line that just reinforces that Trump is profoundly abnormal. He actually seems to believe too many things that regular Americans, at a gut-level, view as ridiculous.
Today's Republicans may be alarmingly good at stoking hate and fear and xenophobia. But they are very bad at avoiding being weird. Their commitment to spreading absurd nonsense about immigrants eating pets, more than anything else, just accentuates that weirdness.
