During last week’s Presidential debate, Donald Trump brought up a fake Internet rumor about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets. Later in the week, he promised to do “large deportations” in Springfield and accused Haitian immigrants of “destroying” the city. After news organizations debunked the claim, Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator J. D. Vance, told CNN, “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” (There are currently some twelve to twenty thousand Haitian immigrants in Springfield, the majority of whom arrived legally; they came largely at the request of groups like the local Chamber of Commerce, which were struggling with job vacancies and a declining population.)

To better understand Trump’s rhetoric and its precedents in American history, I spoke by phone with Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, who’s an expert on white nationalism. (She is also the author of the book “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what makes Trump’s specific attack so disturbing, how America has dealt with previous panics about immigrants, and how much the white-nationalist movement is dependent on Trump’s political success.

What is it about this latest rhetoric that feels new to you, and to what degree does it feel like more of the same, especially since Trump came onto the scene a decade ago?

I think the closest historical parallel from the recent past had to do with the arrival of large numbers of Vietnamese immigrants during and after the Vietnam War. Those immigrants were sometimes colloquially referred to as “boat people,” and there were major misinformation campaigns around whether they were eating rats. People reported that they were eating rats caught in peanut-baited traps.

This was used to paint that community as being not only unassimilable but also dangerous, as vectors of disease or vectors of uncleanliness. And particularly it was used in very material ways by the Klan, for instance, in Galveston Bay, Texas, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, to wage targeted campaigns of harassment against Vietnamese immigrants that entailed ginning up anti-immigrant sentiment, creating paramilitary training camps, and training white fishermen to target the Vietnamese immigrants with paramilitary violence. So this is connected in history not only to anti-immigrant animus but to direct targeted harassment, threats, and violence.

Was this type of rhetoric taken up by politicians, or was it more just happening with anti-immigrant groups, like the Klan, on the ground?

I think that’s where it is very, very different. In this time period, there was anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians, but it was never something targeted like the way this latest rhetoric about Haitians has been.

What we see here is the clear circulation of ideas about Haitian immigrants from troll accounts to white-power groups to mainstream Republican talking points, and then back to the base and back to white-power movements again. The attachment of this kind of demonizing rhetoric to actual Presidential candidates is just beyond the pale. And we are already seeing a string of bomb threats in Springfield, and we’re seeing white-power and white-nationalist groups return to Springfield to do marches. These statements by Trump are likely not consigned to the realm of rhetoric, and these are things that can have real violent consequences for immigrant communities.

As a nonexpert, the focus on what people eat—which, again, is in fact false in this case—there is something that feels very, very creepy about it.

The idea of immigrants as being unassimilable or even dangerous to American cultural norms goes back a very long time. We can look back and see people being demonized for eating different foods. There’s a substantial body of work on immigrant children being teased over what they bring to school for lunch—for instance, smells, tastes, and visuals—that people aren’t used to, and how that shows some kind of inexorable difference.

But I think the thing that’s interesting here is that the kind of “They’re not like us” discourse is colliding with a demonizing discourse, which is, to my mind, a level up. So I’m thinking more of the language that holds that an entire immigrant population is unclean, unhealthy, or dangerous, or how we often see immigrant populations described as a flood, a surge, or a plague. Scholars have found that these kinds of linguistic markers correspond with real violence against immigrant communities. And that’s been true all the way through the twentieth century.

The other interesting thing about the pet stuff, in particular, is that there’s this implication within it that not only are such immigrants unassimilable and fundamentally at odds with American culture but also that they’re a threat to the American home. It’s very similar to how people have talked about immigrants as threats to the American body politic, whether it’s as sexual threats to American white women or by being threats to children in various ways. It’s mobilizing a set of fears that has to do with defensiveness around the home.

Those fears are linked to other rhetoric we have been seeing recently, like the ones around medical care for trans children, around school-board and library policy regarding gender and sexuality. I think all of these things are attached to a deep-seated fear about changes to what home and family might look like in a new political moment. That fear gets articulated in a wide variety of tenors, and this is one of the very loud, scary versions.

Right, kids being teased for what food they bring, or the idea that people are unclean, or that they’re vectors of disease—which are all gross and bigoted—also don’t have the angle that this has, and that’s “Literally, these people are going to come and steal your pets, and eat them.”

Yeah, I agree. And I think that it is a step up to think about people purportedly eating pets instead of purportedly eating vermin, like valued versus non-valued animals. Some of the rumors have expanded to be about geese at parks, so this is now an idea that is on the ground, taking different forms, as it basically goes through a game of telephone from ideologues and activists to regular people who are just spreading this around through their social media.

You said that this comes up from the grassroots and then politicians use it, and then it filters back down. Can you talk about how that process works?

Yeah, this one is really interesting and multidirectional, because it came out of Twitter accounts. One posted information about this, purportedly, and later on it got picked up by a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe, the founder of which has been in the news for trying to buy land to start paramilitary training camps in Maine. Another member of that group took this to the city council and made a claim about it on camera. And then that got picked up as a usable sound bite for politicians who want to draw our attention to immigration.

J. D. Vance is telling us very clearly that what they’re doing is using an on-the-ground story with a lot of momentum behind it, basically a viral moment, to direct attention to the broader issue of immigration. It was striking during the debate, too, how many of Trump’s answers went back to immigration, even when that was not what he was asked. The moment when he said “They’re eating the pets” was just one of them. It’s an example of people at the highest levels grabbing these viral, grassroots pieces of misinformation and using them for their own purposes.

And then, after that happens on a national debate stage, other white-nationalist groups pick up on it, and then the Proud Boys and other groups go march in Springfield. A whole bunch of different groups and activists will turn up. There’s going to be a range, from public-facing demonstrations and marches to flyering and bomb threats.