Greg Sargent: J.D. Vance's Weak Excuse for "Pet Eating" Lie Just Blew Up In His Face [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

Link to tweet

Greg Sargent
JD Vance is also claiming that because of Haitians, communicable diseases in Springfield have "skyrocketed."

I talked to the health commissioner in Clark County, where Springfield is located. Vance's claim is nonsense.

Details here:
https://newrepublic.com/series/48/jd-vances-weak-excuse-pet-eating-lie-just-blew-face

J.D. Vance’s Weak Excuse for “Pet Eating” Lie Just Blew Up In His Face

At bottom, Vance’s whole purpose of running with this grotesque scam about Haitians has not been to draw attention to the story of Springfield, but to rewrite it.

Greg Sargent
September 19, 2024



Prepare to be shocked: At around the time J.D. Vance started dissembling about Haitians eating people’s house pets, a Vance campaign staffer privately spoke with the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of Haitians have settled. The Wall Street Journal reports that the official informed Vance’s staffer that online rumors of pet-eating in the city were flatly false. But Vance then amplified the claim. Donald Trump followed suit, adding—because nobody out-embellishes Trump—that along with cats, Haitians are also consuming Springfield’s dogs.

They knew it was all a lie. But they kicked off this whole campaign of hate and demagoguery, anyway.

These revelations should prompt a reconsideration of one of this campaign’s ugliest moments: Vance’s defense of the pet-eating fabrication on CNN last Sunday. “If I have to create stories” to get the media to cover the impact of immigration, he said, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”

This move is really a form of what’s been called “sanewashing”—it repackages one of MAGA’s racist lies as merely an effort to prompt a good-faith policy debate. And it has been widely analyzed as damage control, as an attempt to put positive spin on a lie after getting caught out for it. But if Vance went into all this knowingly, then it’s time for more scrutiny of the underlying position he is self-consciously articulating here—that lying in this manner is acceptable to force discussion of a supposedly overlooked public problem—on its own terms, as its own act of grotesque public misconduct.

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