"Just Asking Questions"

Propaganda, Disinformation, and Suspicion

This piece reflects on suspicion, propaganda, and disinformation.

The catalyst is the current (and dangerous) propaganda laid by JD Vance on the Haitian community in Ohio, who now find themselves at the center of the election news cycle.

Before we dive in, I will add: I’m wary of always commenting on every single thing. I’m preferring a more calculated approach these days, one that recognizes the responsibility to speak in hope and the need for cultivating a deep silence that dispels despair. These are, I think, two sides of the same coin.

So that being said, what follows is an analytic breakdown, with some broader theological reflections at the end on suspicion.

Analysis: The “Eating Pets” Conspiracy as Propaganda

Yesterday, GOP VP candidate JD Vance claimed there are reports from Springfield Ohio that show “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

Not long after, NBC News reported a statement given by the police division in Springfield, Ohio:

“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,”

After this and other pushback, Vance took to X this morning with a decidedly more passive approach:

It's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false. Do you know what's confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.

This situation is a window into the nature of disinformation, and the damage of propaganda.

First, Vance admits the claims of Haitian migrants “eating pets” are simply rumors not “reports” as he previously claimed. But this is not without a dehumanizing consequence. Again, this is how propaganda works.

In the 1950s, as health warnings on tobacco-use were made public, one tobacco executive prophetically stated, “our product is doubt.” The tobacco industry flooded the market with counter-arguments against established studies. They didn’t discredit the damning studies entirely, they sowed doubt and suspicion.

The propagandizing effect of Vance’s comments is already accomplished: doubt has been sowed. And it is doubt which affirms the dehumanization of the other. His words affirm the broader anti-immigrant narrative and sentiment held against all manner of minority populations in the United States.

But I want to emphasize, too, the logic of propaganda, i.e. how it casts itself as plausible in both an immediate sense and more broadly. What follows is a sleight-of-hand…

Vance pivots with a question, “do you know what is confirmed?” Vance sets the “pet-eating” rumors alongside the story of a “child was murdered by a Haitian immigrant” is an attempt to share rational authority through association. This is a propagandistic sleight of hand that attempts to pass off a spurious claim by associating it with something widely believe to be “factual.” Except even this is based in mis/disinformation.

The story he’s referencing occurred last year, when a Springfield boy was tragically killed in a school bus accident. Local Springfield reporting indicated the boy’s school bus driver swerved to avoid an oncoming car, resulting in the bus flipping on its side. After the accident, the “driver presented to law enforcement a driver’s license from Mexico, which was invalid due to his immigration status. He also had an Ohio identification card.”

Speaking with the local press, the boy’s parents condemned the racist, xenophobic reactions to the accident in the Springfield community. From the local press in the link above: “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same. Thank you to the community for the continued support.”

This was a tragic accident, one that bears all the marks of human complexity and fragility. This was not a scenario of cold-blooded murder, the kind which Vance’s framing (“child murdered by a Haitian migrant”) seeks to prop up.

But what gives this sort of claim plausibility? What gives it power?

At this point in the analysis, I believe this distinction is incredibly helpful:

1. Misinformation is a false fact

2. Disinformation is a weaponized fiction

This distinction matters. Disinformation is closer in form to propaganda. And often, they arise together.

What we are dealing with is not merely “false facts” but rather immediate, weaponized fictions that correspond at a deeper level to primal stories that have given Americans, particularly white Americans, their identity for generations. Propaganda is received as plausible (and powerful) when it aligns with the suspicion curated by deeply primal stories.

Reflection: Gateways to Conspiracism

This analysis brings me to reflect a bit on suspicion. My whole introduction into this moment was via Dr. Karen Prior on social media.

The Priory

is right. Many of the responses in support of Vance’s comments downplayed the consequence of this rhetoric and mistook propaganda for mere “fact claims.”

There is a lot of unchecked suspicion these days. It presents itself innocently, even critically, as “asking questions.” It wraps itself in the shroud of sentiment, of “wanting to know the truth” while entertaining every single counter-claim. It’s for good reason that James Baldwin observed, “sentimentality is the mark of dishonesty.”

But I’m also thinking theologically, and specially how Christians fail to ask ourselves what “good” suspicion, i.e. the kind that corresponds to the God of Jesus Christ, looks like. Instead, Christians look no different than anyone else, descending into sub-theological and more dangerous forms of suspicion.

There are many sorts of lesser-suspicion(s) that mark our present moment. And often, these sorts of suspicions emerge from disparate sources only to concentrate into a sort of fated cynicism. By this, I mean that suspicion can be…

1. Curated by ideologies

2. Charged by partisan rhetoric

3. Conditioned by digital infostructure

4. Catalyzed by failures of trust

5. And more…

When we lived in Aberdeen, Scotland, the city experienced an influx of immigration, especially from Ukraine and Nigeria. As you might expect, there was a concrete strain on material resources and the provision of social services. This invited political choices from Aberdeen leadership. It did not call for dehumanizing propaganda or suspicion. But tragically this is often what results from these situations. What is the responsibility of Christians then?

When the bodily dignity of human-beings is threatened by dehumanizing propaganda, the Christian must stand in solidarity with them. One way this solidarity expresses itself is a witness to the divine vocation to care for human life. The light of this witness will always expose the arbitrariness of assumed norms or “givens” (like existing policies and even political borders) that distort or deny our obligation to each other.

As Stanley Hauerwas observes, “the deepest and most painful divisions afflicting the church are those based on class, race, and nationality that we have sinfully accepted as written into the nature of things.”

Brian Brock is right to suggest that “the only thing Christians know that the world doesn’t, is who sustains it.” But we are practically closer in some respects to what Hannah Arendt observed in her Origins of Totalitarianism,

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

There is a massive epistemological crisis (for Christian and non-Christian alike) that corresponds with our increasing reliance on digital infostructure to generate a concept of reality. It fundamentally cannot do this. It only ever mediates reality. And this is why, to quote L.M. Sacassas at

The Convivial Society

, “all digital information is a form of disinformation.”

The damage here is beyond whether or not certain things actually happened. The words of the propagandist and the form our our digital infostruction create worlds. And in a sense, we might say that all our words create and construct worlds. What can be done?

There’s much more to say. But I’ll end with this: when it comes to interrogating our suspicion, there is no greater task than for the church to listen to the Word of Jesus Christ. Another way of putting it: worship matters. Christian worship always welcomes the visiting of destruction upon own rogue words, our golden calves. This happens positively, by the Spirit of Jesus at work in the proclamation of the Church which is decidedly set against partisan propaganda.

Hearing the Word of Jesus, this living Word, dispels and destroys the rogue words we endlessly construct and promote and deploy on our own, strategizing survival and political conquest. In place of despair, this Word generates hope that sees human beings for who they are, as beloved by God, in ways that resist their demonization, dehumanization, and abstraction.

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I hope you’ll consider joining me either online or in person on October 12 at The Micah Forum Baltimore for a workshop on theological responses to conspiracy theory, surveillance, algorithms, titled Christian Witness in Worlds of Despair. You can register for free here.