When Trump brought the cat and dog thing up at the debate, I thought he was cooked and that nobody in the right frame of mind, not even the average chud, would believe it, but the next day people at my work were talking about how true it is and that it needs to be stopped. It's amazing and scary how easily people are quick to believe something without a shred of evidence.
Even my mom texted me a mugshot of a woman who was arrested for killing and trying to eat a cat. But when I replied that it happened in a completely different city and the suspect was a US born citizen with mental issues, she said that the suspect was actually Haitian, it happened in Springfield and the police are pretending it happened somewhere else to make their town look good.
I don't even know how to respond to a take like that. Just a year or so ago she was happy to see Alex Jones getting canceled for threatening families of the kids who died at Sandy Hook. Now she's believing and forwarding Jones-grade conspiracy shit, and she couldn't care less about school shootings anymore. It's depressing as fuck.
Absolutely. This hooked into preexisting urban legends. I heard this stuff over and over growing up. A pet never just runs away in the suburbs, it's always poisoned by dark forces, captured for food, or stolen for fights.
It's a continuation of the maga strategy has been hooking into these types of conspiratorial trends that were previously not tapped as voting blocks. They're called "fringe groups" or "fringe ideas" a lot but they're not really fringe, just unorganized and untapped.