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The least funny joke told during the most recent presidential debate was former President Donald Trump falsely accusing Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating people's dogs and cats.

Oh, sure, it was hilarious at first. Vice President Kamala Harris even laughed when he said it.

I mean, how could anyone think immigrants are stealing people's dogs and barbecuing them? The funny memes came rolling out. There were fake restaurant menus featuring kitten casseroles, photos of Snoop Dogg saying he was canceling his Springfield concert -- even President Joe Biden got in on the action, telling a man in Pennsylvania not to go eating any cats or dogs.

We all got a good chuckle out of the idea that there's a pet-ingestion epidemic.

Soon enough, though, we started to wake up to the profound lack of humor in the situation.

Springfield officials had to debunk the absurd rumors, saying there were no credible reports of pets being abducted or eaten.

Right-wing nutjobs doubled down on Trump's "eating pets" accusation, posting videos they say proved the asinine claim. In one shared widely, mostly white Springfield residents share a mountain of grievances with immigration in their town -- one man who appears to be under the influence calls his Haitian neighbors "sand monkeys," and another man claims he saw a Haitian person driving a van around with "100 cats" in it.

The video also shows numerous Haitians in Springfield (and several of their sane neighbors) saying they've heard nothing about any pet-eating, but those parts are conveniently ignored.

Laura Loomer, an unhinged conspiracy theorist who believes school shootings are fake and the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, has been flying around with Trump on his plane and attending events with him like the presidential debate and, strangely, a 9/11 memorial.

Loomer has been posting like mad about the dogs and cats nonsense, taking occasional breaks to say racist things like that if Harris wins the election, the White House will "smell like curry."

Elon Musk tweeted out a video of a woman (not from Springfield) with an estranged Haitian father who said that cat-eating is a part of the Voodoo religion, and that poor people will eat any food they can get. MAGAs say the immigrants have food stamps that "never run out," but for some reason the Haitians are passing up steak at the grocery store for their neighbors' rangy tabby cats.

A couple of days after the debate, a bomb threat was called in that forced the closure of Springfield City Hall and numerous other buildings in the town. The mayor told The Washington Post that the threat specifically referenced Haitians and immigrants, using hateful language to target them. Schools with large populations of Haitian children were evacuated. Parents became fearful.

This isn't quite as funny as it was on debate night.

Primary blame for the frenzy can be laid at the feet of Trump. GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance also has been amplifying the accusations, saying that even if they weren't true, he wanted to draw attention to them so they could be checked out.

But the real problem didn't start or end during the debate.

For years, Trump, Vance and the broader Republican political class have been stoking racial tensions for their own benefit. They have been feeding the fire, rumor by rumor, hint by hint, couching their words in vagaries and "jokes" intended to hide the cruelty and bigotry underneath.

These panderers saw Springfield, a place suffering from real growing pains, with a huge influx of immigrants for which the town was unprepared, and instead of offering help or demanding it from the federal government, they have leveraged the anger to score points in a political campaign. They have made irresponsible and baseless accusations to spur anger among their electorate, and it's working.

Now the Haitian residents of Springfield -- people who left their country to escape war and instability, people who are in the process of legally immigrating to the United States -- are in real danger.

Meanwhile, political profiteers post AI-generated images of Trump cuddling kittens and of geese wearing red MAGA hats. To them, it's all so very, very funny.

But the joke has gotten stale. And no one with a heart is still laughing.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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