Why has this election season featured so many stories about animal cruelty? The 2024 campaign has contained many remarkable moments—the Democrats’ sudden switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris; the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the emergence of Elon Musk as the MAGA minister for propaganda; the grimly racist “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden. But the bizarre run of stories about animal abuse has been one of the least discussed.

In late October, the National Rifle Association was supposed to hold a “Defend the 2nd” event with a keynote address by Trump, but it was canceled at the last minute, because of what the NRA described as “campaign scheduling changes.” Here’s another possible reason: Earlier last month, the NRA’s new chief executive, Doug Hamlin, was outed as an accessory to cat murder.

In 1980, according to contemporary news accounts unearthed by The Guardian, Hamlin and four buddies at the University of Michigan pleaded no contest to animal cruelty following the death of their fraternity’s cat, BK. The cat’s paws had been cut off before it was set on fire and strung up, allegedly for not using the litter box. “I took responsibility for this regrettable incident as chapter president although I wasn’t directly involved,” Hamlin wrote in a statement to media outlets after the Guardian report appeared.

In April, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s Republican governor, scuttled her chances of becoming Trump’s running mate when her memoir revealed that two decades ago, she shot her wirehaired pointer, Cricket, in a gravel pit after the puppy had attacked some chickens and then bit her. (“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, adding that she later killed an unruly goat in the same spot.) More recently, during his only debate with Harris, Trump painted immigrants as murderers of American cats and dogs, repeating unsubstantiated internet rumors that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating “the pets of the people that live there.”

[Read: The link between animal abuse and murder]

American political figures have long showcased their pets to humanize themselves—remember Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and Socks, Bill Clinton’s cat? But the relationship between animals and humans keeps growing in salience as our lifestyles change. Domestic animals have moved from being seen as ratcatchers, guards, and hunting companions to pampered lap dogs that get dressed up as pumpkins on Halloween. Half of American pet owners say that their animals are as much part of the family as any human, and many of us mainline cute videos of cats and dogs for hours every week. These shifting attitudes have made accusations of animal abuse a potent attack on political adversaries—and social media allows such claims to be amplified even when they are embellished or made up entirely.

At the same time, we make arbitrary distinctions between species on emotional grounds, treating some as friends, some as food, and some as sporting targets. Three-quarters of Americans support hunting and fishing, and the Democratic nominee for vice president, Tim Walz, was so keen to burnish his rural credentials that he took part in a pheasant shoot on the campaign trail. Similarly, only 3 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and 1 percent are vegan, but killing a pet—a member of the family—violates a deep taboo.

Noem, who seemed to view Cricket purely as a working dog, was clearly caught off guard by the reaction to her memoir. “The governor that killed the family pet was the one thing that united the extreme right and the extreme left,” Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor who studies human attitudes toward animals, told me. “There was this moral outrage. She was just oblivious.”

Herzog, the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, has been interested in how people think about animal cruelty since he researched illegal cockfighting rings for his doctorate several decades ago. He told me that the people who ran the fights, who made money by inflicting great pain on the roosters involved, “loved dogs and had families. But they had this one little quirk.” Politicians can trip over these categories—our deep-down feeling that some animals can be killed or hurt, and others cannot—without realizing it until it’s too late.

I had called Herzog to ask what he made of someone like the NRA’s Hamlin—a prominent man who was once involved in the torture of an animal. Should a history of animal cruelty or neglect—or just plain weirdness—be disqualifying for a politician, a corporate leader, or an activist? In his media statement, Hamlin maintained after the fraternity story came out that he had not done anything similar again. “Since that time I served my country, raised a family, volunteered in my community, started a business, worked with Gold Star families, and raised millions of dollars for charity,” he declared. “I’ve endeavored to live my life in a manner beyond reproach.” Could that be true—could someone be involved in such a sadistic act without it being evidence of wider moral depravity?

“What strikes me about animal cruelty is that most people that are cruel to animals are not sadists or sociopaths; they’re everyday people,” Herzog told me. A review of the literature showed that a third of violent offenders had a history of animal abuse—but so did a third of the members of the control group, he said. Then Herzog blew my mind. “To me, the greatest paradox of all is Nazi animal protection.”

I’m sorry?

“The Nazis passed the world’s most progressive animal-rights legislation,” he continued, unfazed. The German regime banned hunting with dogs, the production of foie gras, and docking dogs’ tails without anesthetic. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, “wrote that he would put in a prison camp anyone who was cruel to an animal.” When the Nazis decreed that Jews could no longer own pets, the regime ensured that the animals were slaughtered humanely. It sent their owners to concentration camps.

[Read: A single male cat’s reign of terror]

The Nazis dehumanized their enemies and humanized their animals, but Herzog thinks that the reverse is more common: Many people who are good to other humans are often cruel to animals. And even those who claim to love animals are nonetheless capable of causing them pain. Circus trainers who whip their charges might dote on their pets. People who deliberately breed dogs with painfully flat faces to win competitions insist that they adore their teeny asthmatic fur babies. “These sorts of paradoxes are so common,” Herzog said.

The lines separating cruelty from the acceptable handling of animals have a way of shifting. I’m old enough to remember the 2012 election cycle, when Mitt Romney was reviled for having driven his station wagon with a kennel strapped to the top containing the family dog, Seamus. Midway through the 12-hour drive from Boston to Ontario, the dog suffered from diarrhea, obscuring the rear windshield. Like Noem, Romney was also blindsided by the scandal: Animal activists described his actions as cruelty, and a Facebook group called Dogs Against Romney attracted 38,000 fans. By the standards of a dozen years ago, Seamusgate was a big story, but it’s mild in comparison with this year’s headlines. When Romney was asked about Noem’s memoir earlier this year, he said the two incidents were not comparable: “I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.”

One of the most reliable sources of strange animal stories this cycle has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmentalist with a lifelong interest in keeping, training, and eating animals who has frequently transgressed the accepted Western boundaries of interaction with the natural world. In July, Vanity Fair published a photograph that it said Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, had sent to a friend. In it, he and an unidentified woman are holding a barbecued animal carcass up to their open mouths. The suggestion was that the animal was a dog. “The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness,” the magazine reported. (In response, Kennedy said that the animal was a goat.)

A month later, Kennedy admitted that he had once found a dead bear cub on the side of a road in upstate New York and put it in his trunk. He said he had intended to skin it and “put the meat in my refrigerator.” However, that never happened, because, in NPR’s glorious phrasing, Kennedy claimed to have been “waylaid by a busy day of falconry” and a steak dinner, and instead decided to deposit the carcass in Central Park. (He even posed the dead bear so that it appeared to have been run over by a cyclist.) “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he later told the comedian Roseanne Barr in a video that he released on X. He was 60 when the incident occurred. What made the idea of picking up a dead bear sound so strange to many commentators, when the falconry would have caused, at most, a raised eyebrow—and the steak dinner no comment at all?

Kennedy’s animal antics still weren’t finished. In September, he released a bizarre video in which he fondled an iguana and recounted how in some countries, people slit open the lizards’ stomachs to eat the eggs inside. Then another old anecdote surfaced: His daughter Kick recalled a trip home from the beach with parts of a dead whale strapped to the roof of the car. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told Town & Country. She added that this was “just normal day-to-day stuff” for her father. Not everyone was so quick to minimize Kennedy’s conduct. “These are behaviors you read about in news articles not about a candidate but about a suspect,” my colleague Caitlin Flanagan observed.

[Pagan Kennedy: New York’s grand dame of dog poisoning]

I’m as guilty as anyone of making illogical distinctions—though I would like to stress that I have never murdered a cat or dismembered a dead whale. Having recently driven across Pennsylvania, where I counted three dead deer by the side of the road on a single trip, I support the right to hunt—population control is essential. Yet the infamous photograph of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump posing with a dead leopard on a safari trip more than a decade ago disturbs me far more than the unproven assertion that one immigrant, somewhere, has eaten a dog or cat for sustenance. You can tell from the Trump sons’ expressions that they are extremely proud of having killed a rare and beautiful creature purely for their own entertainment. The image is grotesque. It reminds me of Atticus Finch’s instruction that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, because “mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

As it happens, hunters, many of them animal lovers in their everyday life, have a complicated code of ethics about what counts as a fair chase. Hence the backlash over the former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s support for shooting Alaskan wolves from an aircraft. Most of us are okay with killing animals—or having them killed on our behalf—as long as the process does not involve unnecessary cruelty or excessive enjoyment.

In the end, arbitrary categories can license or restrict our capacity for cruelty and allow us to entertain two contradictory thoughts at once. We love animals and we kill animals. We create boundaries around an us and a them, and treat transgressors of each limit very differently. In a similar way, some of Donald Trump’s crowds applaud his racist rumors about migrants—when they might not dream of being rude to their neighbor who was born abroad. “What we see in animals,” Herzog told me, “is a microcosm of the big issue of how humans make moral decisions.” In other words, illogically and inconsistently. The same individual is capable of great humanity—and great cruelty or indifference.

The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website with a history of spreading lies about election fraud, recently posted something out of the ordinary. It took a break from its coverage of the 2024 presidential election (sample headlines: “KAMALA IS KOLLAPSING,” “KAMALA FUNDS NAZIS”) to post a three-sentence note from the site’s founder and editor, Jim Hoft, offering some factual information about the previous presidential election.

In his brief statement, presented without any particular fanfare, Hoft writes that election officials in Georgia concluded that no widespread voter fraud took place at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020. He notes specifically that they concluded that two election workers processing votes that night, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, had not engaged “in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.” And he explains that “a legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”  

Indeed, the blog post appeared just days after the Gateway Pundit settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Freeman and Moss, who sued the outlet for promoting false claims that they had participated in mass voter fraud. (These claims, quickly debunked, were focused on video footage of the mother-daughter pair storing ballots in their appropriate carriers—conspiracy theorists had claimed that they were instead packing them into suitcases for some wicked purpose.) The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but after it was announced, almost 70 articles previously published on the Gateway Pundit, and cited in the lawsuit, were no longer available, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

Even so, the site—which has promoted numerous lies and conspiracy theories in the past, and which still faces a lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former executive at Dominion Voting Systems, for pushing false claims that he helped rig the 2020 election—shows no signs of retreat. (The Gateway Pundit has fought this lawsuit, including by filing a motion to dismiss. Although the site filed for bankruptcy in April, a judge tossed it out, concluding that the filing was in “bad faith.”) The site has continued to post with impunity, promoting on a number of occasions the conspiracy that Democrats are “openly stealing” the 2024 election with fraudulent overseas votes. A political-science professor recently told my colleague Matteo Wong that this particular claim has been one of the “dominant narratives” this year, as Donald Trump’s supporters seek ways to undermine faith in the democratic process.  

This is to be expected: The Gateway Pundit has been around since 2004, and it has always been a destination for those disaffected by the “establishment media.” Comment sections—on any website, let alone those that explicitly cater to the far-right fringe—have never had a reputation for sobriety and thoughtfulness. And the Gateway Pundit’s is particularly vivid. One recent commenter described a desire to see Democratic officials “stripped naked and sprayed down with a firehose like Rambo in First Blood.” Even so, data recently shared with me by the Center for Countering Digital Hate—a nonprofit that studies disinformation and online abuse, and which reports on companies that it believes allow such content to spread—show just how nasty these communities can get. Despite the fracturing of online ecosystems in recent years—namely, the rise and fall of various social platforms and the restructuring of Google Search, both of which have resulted in an overall downturn in traffic to news sites—the Gateway Pundit has remained strikingly relevant on social media, according to the CCDH. And its user base, as seen in the comments, has regularly endorsed political violence in the past few months, despite the site’s own policies forbidding such posts.

Researchers from the CCDH recently examined the comment sections beneath 120 Gateway Pundit articles about alleged election fraud published between May and September. They found that 75 percent of those sections contained “threats or calls for violence.” One comment cited in the report reads: “Beat the hell out of any Democrat you come across today just for the hell of it.”

Another: “They could show/televise the hangings or lined up and executed by firing squad and have that be a reminder not to try to overthrow our constitution.” Overall, the researchers found more than 200 comments with violent content hosted on the Gateway Pundit.

Sites like the Gateway Pundit often attempt to justify the vitriol they host on their platforms by arguing in free-speech terms. But even free-speech absolutists can understand legitimate concerns about incitements to violence. Local election officials in Georgia and Arizona have blamed the site and its comment section for election-violence threats in the past. A 2021 Reuters report found links between the site and more than 80 “menacing” messages sent to election workers. According to Reuters, after the Gateway Pundit published a fake report about ballot fraud in Wisconsin, one election official found herself identified in the comment section, along with calls for her to be killed. “She found one post especially unnerving,” the Reuters reporters Peter Eisler and Jason Szep write. “It recommended a specific bullet for killing her—a 7.62 millimeter round for an AK-47 assault rifle.”

The CCDH researchers used data from a social-media monitoring tool called Newswhip to measure social-media engagement with election-related content from Gateway Pundit and similar sites. Although Gateway Pundit was second to Breitbart as a source for election misinformation on social media overall, the researchers found that the Gateway Pundit was actually the most popular on X, where its content was shared more than 800,000 times from the start of the year through October 2.  

In response to a request for comment, John Burns, a lawyer representing Hoft and the Gateway Pundit, told me that the site relies on users reporting “offending” comments, including those expressing violence or threats. “If a few slipped through the cracks, we’ll look into it,” Burns said. He did not comment on the specifics of the CCDH report, nor the recent lawsuits against the company.

The site uses a popular third-party commenting platform called Disqus, which has taken a hands-off approach to policing far-right, racist content in the past. Disqus offers clients AI-powered, customizable moderation tools that allow them to filter out toxic or inappropriate comments from their site, or ban users. The CCDH report points out that violent comments are against Disqus’s own terms of service. “Publishers monitor and enforce their own community rules,” a Disqus spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “Only if a comment is flagged directly to the Disqus team do we review it against our terms of service. Once flagged, we aim to review within 24 hours and determine whether or not action is required based on our rules and terms of service.”

The Gateway Pundit is just one of a constellation of right-wing sites that offer readers an alternate reality. Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told me that these sites pushed the range of what’s considered acceptable speech “quite a long way to the right,” and in some cases, away from traditional, “fact-based” media. They started to grow more popular with the rise of the social web, in which algorithmic recommendation systems and conservative influencers pushed their articles to legions of users.

The real power of these sites may come not in their broad reach, but in how they shape the opinions of a relatively small, radical subset of people. According to a paper published in Nature this summer, false and inflammatory content tends to reach “a narrow fringe” of highly motivated users. Sites like the Gateway Pundit are “influential in a very small niche,” Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the paper, told me over email. As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

I asked Pasha Dashtgard, the director of research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, what exactly the relationship is between sites like Gateway Pundit and political violence. “That is such a million-dollar question,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.” By that, he means that it’s hard for researchers and law enforcement to know when online threats will translate into armed vigilantes descending on government buildings. Social-media platforms have only gotten less transparent with their data since the previous cycle, making it more difficult for researchers to suss out what’s happening on them.

“The pathway to radicalization is not linear,” Dashtgard explained. “Certainly I would want to disabuse anyone of the idea that it’s like, you go on this website and that makes you want to kill people.” People could have other risk factors that make them more likely to commit violence, such as feeling alienated or depressed, he said. These sites just represent another potential push mechanism.

And they don’t seem to be slowing down. Three hours after Hoft posted his blog post correcting the record in the case of Freeman and Moss, he posted another statement. This one was addressed to readers. “Many of you may be aware that The Gateway Pundit was in the news this week. We settled an ongoing lawsuit against us,” the post reads in part. “Despite their best efforts, we are still standing.”