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Political storytelling
When, in a presidential debate in 2024, Donald Trump repeated the absurd lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating pets, he was drawing on a myth that has long been used to denigrate people who are racially or culturally different. Underpinning this myth is a common script – that is, a small narrative sequence: foreign people enter a community, beloved animal companions begin to disappear, and these pets are found to have been cooked and eaten in a restaurant serving foreign food.
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Mythocracy: How stories shape our worlds
by Yves Citton, translated from French by David Broder
Verso, £19.99 pb, 229 pp
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