As the vile and false accusations about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating pets have continued to morph, it gives us an opportunity to see how bad actors on the Right are able to create an epistemological trap—where even the truth isn’t believed.
John Oliver had a whole breakdown of this on Sunday, where he traced not only the lie but also how the amplification of the lie on social media had Springfield residents believing the lie as truth, even when it contradicted their own experience.
There seem to be a couple of reasons for this. First, the ubiquity of social media has a kind of deafening effect where there’s just so much of it that it takes the place of our reality. Second, as we’ve seen from research on filter bubbles, ingesting a shallow pool of information can lead to radicalization. So proliferation is one reason, and the other has to do with believing what we read online as (more) real. I want to tackle this last idea today and focus on someone who I’ve been following for a while, Christopher Rufo. He has a Substack that I don’t recommend you follow.
Like a lot of people, I first encountered Rufo during the resignation of former Harvard President (and daughter of Haitian immigrants) Claudine Gay. Rufo was one of the leading critics of Gay, though not about her appearance before Congress regarding student protests. Rufo was focused on allegations that Gay’s dissertation was plagiarized. These allegations later played into her dismissal.
While Gay has been Rufo’s biggest “get,” it’s hardly his only one. Over the past five years, Rufo has proven himself to be one of the most effective Right-wing operatives. Rufo is not shy about his motives. He states, clearly and succinctly, "My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America." He’s someone who acts in bad faith against anyone who he sees as propagating or being hired as a result of DEI practices.
I wondered: Why are we listening to this guy about whether or not Gay plagiarized?
I won’t go into Rufo’s whole theory of why DEI is bad, outside of pointing to a Zach Beauchamp piece that breaks down Rufo’s bête noirs (tl;dr it’s Marxism). Rather, my interest is in how Rufo portrays himself as a credible source despite every indication that he’s not. A lot of that can be seen in a response that he recently posted to a story fact-checking him on some Springfield, Ohio, claims that he made. In this post, and in much of Rufo’s writing, he uses the markers of journalistic practice as a veneer for his political goals.
We’ll get to that in a second, but first, let’s talk about bullshit.
I want to distinguish between what Rufo (and Vance) are doing with this Springfield story and what Donald Trump is doing. The way I would draw the distinction is this—Rufo and Vance are lying. Trump is spewing bullshit.
Harry Frankfurt, who wrote the book On Bullshit (destined to forever grace the checkout counter of your favorite bookstore), says that the “essence” as the “lack of connection to a concern with truth.” I love that it’s not only lack of a concern with truth, but “lack of connection to a concern.” The bullshitter is twice removed from even caring about truth.
Bullshit and lying differ, because bullshit is more akin to a bluff, which is “more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery.” This nugget can also shed some light on why Trump was so angry with the moderators after his debate with Harris—they called him on his bullshit. They showed him to be phony.
Trump’s whole relation to the matter in Springfield is an ambivalent signal boost to Vance’s falsity. It’s not a lie, because Trump has, seemingly, no concern for the truth. The story simply exists to prop up his us vs. them; citizen vs. immigrant narrative.
So, if this story is bullshit, then how does it get to the level of reality so that actual residents of Springfield are believing bullshit rather than that they see? Here is where folks like Rufo come in. They present just enough of the appearance of veracity, in this case through aping journalistic ideas, to give the appearance of reality that takes bullshit and turns it into real shit.
To see this, let’s take a look at Rufo’s recent post, “Fact Checking the Fact Checkers” as an example.
We can start with the title. Rufo begins by positioning himself as the arbiter of fact and against the “propaganda” of the media all while using the media’s arbitrators of truth, fact checkers, as his guide.
The post’s body begins:
CBS News has published a response to the “Cat Eaters of Ohio” story. It’s a supremely dishonest and completely partisan report, but let’s break it down, to show exactly how the establishment media maintains its lines of propaganda.
The CBS report hinges on two arguments. First, CBS writes: “The video shows what appears to be animal carcasses on a grill. The man filming the footage alleges, without evidence, that they are cats.” Without evidence? The eyewitness directly observed the incident and took a video recording of it—both of which are firsthand evidence. But CBS’s apparent standard, when such evidence violates the establishment narrative, is: Don’t believe your lying eyes.
For context, here’s the CBS News story. Rufo doesn’t even bother to hyperlink it, which isn’t new. Rufo’s “reporting” is often filled with errors. Taking the time to actually read the story, you see that CBS also reached out to the person who shared the video (with no response), but also that there was a fair amount of skepticism (including what was being grilled and where the people were from).
Rufo’s attack, though, is calculated and clear. He quotes, breaks down their logic, and lays it out. To be honest, it’s not that far off from what I’m doing here. But, Rufo grossly misrepresents the story and so without reference, he’s able to conceal and cherrypick to stoke skepticism.
Rufo’s next paragraph follows a similar pattern:
The report also quotes Dayton’s Democratic mayor, who says there have been “absolutely zero reports of this type of activity.” Which is true, but does not contradict the evidence at all. Nobody filed a police report, so there would be no police report—and the absence of a police report does not mean that something did not happen. This is a convenient way of ignoring the evidence, and laundering lies through friendly media apparatus.
Rufo’s stylistic asides—speaking directly to the reader—suggest that the reader be skeptical as well. He has a “gotcha” that the absence of a police report doesn’t mean something didn’t happen. His logic is pedantic at best, but all he’s looking for is the ability to sow doubt in the story. Once he can do that, then he can push forward his own story.
Rufo rewrites the narrative once he’s able to open up this distrust. Here is why he says that his version of the story is the right one. My quick commentary after every quote.
An individual in my personal social network reached out with a tip and a link to the social media post with the video. (This source neither requested, nor received, the monetary prize I had posted on social media a few days prior.)
So, he received a video.
The eyewitness was familiar with the African families in the housing complex (his son played with their children) and his child’s mother, who lived next door to the Africans, had observed them on at least one occasion butchering a large mammal on the street.
An unverifiable person who is “familiar” with Africans saw them butchering an animal. None of this has anything to do with cats or anything, really, but does play into racist tropes.
We also made the following direct observations on the scene: we matched the visuals in the video to the location; we found an abandoned grill that matched the make, model, and color in the video and the descriptions in the interviews; we noticed that there were at least ten cats on the property, which appeared to be strays and were very comfortable with the residents, coming onto the porches and milling around the exterior of the house.
Grill + cats = grilling cats.
You may feel stupider for having read those. Honestly, they seem to be written in a kind of journalistic cosplay. But, I think it’s really important to see the type of writing that Rufo does, because they are journalistic cosplay. He takes aspects of journalistic sourcing, puts them into a blender, and spits them back out, and uses the form of an expose to peddle falsehoods.
Look back through those sections again. Block quote one talks about a leaked tape. Block quote two there’s an explosive eyewitness account. Block three: the smoking grill. It’s enough to wait for the promo to your local affiliate’s news at 11.
But, Rufo includes no names, no sourcing, no nothing. It’s like an urban legend—a friend of a friend saw…
Not to mention easily explainable. Cats hanging around a grill? Hmm…Rufo does know that cats eat meat, right?
Let me say here that the CBS story says that they are unable to ascertain what was going on because of the quality of the video (something that Rufo is happy to do), but that the reasonable hypothesis is that the animals being shown were chickens. The people who shared the video seem to be, in a generous reading, blowing something up for the sake of hijinks and in a more cynical reading, provoking xenophobic and racist stereotypes.
Rufo wasn’t always a Right wing sycophant. Before he took on this guise, he was a documentarian and worked on several projects for PBS. As such, Rufo understands what journalistic standards are, and he certainly knows that this is malpractice. He just prefers to remix what could pass as journalism for his agenda.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t pay any attention to Rufo. But, as the Claudine Gay episode shows, Rufo’s ability to pitch his “investigations” into the mainstream can have serious consequences. As Michael Schaffer writes, it’s when ideas like Rufo’s find traction, especially on the center Left, that they can be dangerous.
In the case of this story, Rufo expands Trump’s bullshit—the story takes place in Dayton, not Springfield, and attacks Congolese folk who have settled there—while also providing traction for these false claims. The faux-journalism that Rufo peddles has all the look of real journalism, but none of the actual standards and facts. It’s a lie, and by that I mean, it knows what the truth is and wants to present a different reality.
Operatives like Rufo, exist in the Trump ecosystem to enable Trump’s bullshit to become real. These are the people he refers to when he says “I saw it on TV” or “may people are saying.” Trump obviously doesn’t care what the truth is, but the liars do. And that’s what helps Trump’s bullshit to become real for some. Because bullshit is just bullshit, but a lie has to know and be willing to distort the truth.