The whole “Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets” thing isn’t working out quite the way JD Vance would like.
At first, he clearly thought it was going to help him win over the nation’s cat fanciers, whom he’d previously offended with his stupid “childless cat ladies” nonsense. You know he did. When it was quickly debunked, he thought he was going to get to turn it into his and Trump’s version of the “JD Vance fucked a couch” meme. Right-wing accounts on social media answered the call, posting myriad AI memes of Donald Trump heroically saving cats and ducks and what have you. That didn’t work either.
Ever since then, he’s been desperately searching for a way to spin the whole thing in his favor or make it go away. When’s the last time a news cycle lasted weeks? And yet he doesn’t seem happy he got the attention he wanted. At a campaign rally on Monday, he even went so far as to plead with reporters to stop paying attention to his big gross lie instead of the real problems in Springfield, Ohio.
Via HuffPost:
“I wish the American media was half as interested in the stress on the local schools, the stress on the hospitals and unaffordable housing as they are in debunking a story that comes from the residents of Springfield,” Vance told a rally.
He said constituents from Springfield who say “this thing’s going on” were afraid to give their names because the media will “descend” on them.
Then directly addressing reporters, he said: “Did you ever think about listening to people instead of harassing them? … Did you ever think about listening to people speak their truth instead of listening to some bureaucrat and assuming that everything that they tell you is true?”
Ah yes, “their” truth. Which is, of course, very different from “the” truth, especially in this case.
“It’s about investigating the truth, and unfortunately far too few reporters do that today,” Vance said.
So he’s mad about reporters investigating the truth of his statements but also mad that they’re not “investigating the truth” in general?
We now live in a world where, were this true, it would be unbelievably easy to prove. Everyone has cameras now. Everyone has social media. If this were happening, you’d see pictures. There would be myriad social media posts, videos, etc. of people crying about their deceased pets. There would be first person evidence and lots of it. Instead, we have but one social media post from one lady who started the whole thing and now deeply regrets it because she’s now quite sure it wasn’t true.
Even Vivek Ramaswamy went to Ohio and was unable to find any evidence of this either.
As far as the people who say “this thing’s going on,” but are afraid to come forward because reporters might ask them to prove it … are they in the room with us now?
I could just as well say “There are tons of people out there who say JD Vance is a serial killer, but they are all too afraid to come forward for fear he will bludgeon them to death and feast on their entrails, as he has been known to do.”
That being said, if what JD Vance really wanted to talk about was “the stress on the local schools, the stress on the hospitals and unaffordable housing” in Springfield right now, why did he open with “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country?”
Is it perhaps because Republicans have no solutions for those problems beyond “I don’t know, deport some people”? Or, really, beyond just telling people “All of your problems are due to immigrants being here!” and hoping they go along with it?
Or is it because he wanted to start out by dehumanizing this group of people from the outset, so that people would be less inclined to have empathy towards them? These same “urban legends” were wielded against Asian immigrants in the past, particularly the Vietnamese refugees who came here after the war. Other variations have been used against other minority groups that people have sought to oppress in the past — most notably, accusing Jewish people of drinking the blood of children. It’s what’s called a “blood libel,” and Jewish people haven’t been shy about noting that’s what JD Vance and Donald Trump have been doing here.
It’s a very serious, very deliberately cruel and fucked up thing to attempt to do to a group of people and the media is not wrong to take it seriously. This is some real bad shit.
What Vance wanted was for his base to be riled up and angry, but for the media to “sanewash” it for him as “really” being more about the other problems Springfield is facing right now, to take him “seriously but not literally,” and to then just let it blow over. It’s not blowing over, and it’s becoming more and more awkward that they do not have any proof of this — so Vance is just straight up begging reporters to stop covering it and bringing it up.
And … that’s probably not going to happen.
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