JD Vance Doubles Down on Evidence-Free Pet-Eating Story, Says He’s Also Heard Geese Are Being Abducted and Slaughtered

Earlier this week, vice presidential hopeful JD Vance spread a racist, debunked claim that Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, had been stealing people’s pets and eating them. Donald Trump then amplified that claim to millions of people during Tuesday night’s debate. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs” he said, sounding like someone’s crazy uncle. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

Considering that Trump’s line about “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” was the low point of the night—in that it cemented the Republican candidate’s status as an unserious, unhinged individual who should not be allowed anywhere near the nuclear codes—you might have thought Vance would have decided to back off the pet story for now. But, surprise! The Ohio senator has instead doubled down.

Following the debate, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins interviewed Vance, asking, “why push something that’s not true?” He responded: “First of all, city officials have not said it’s not true, they’ve said they don’t have all the evidence.… We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground, Kaitlan, who—both firsthand and secondhand reports—saying this stuff is happening, so they very clearly…think that it is happening. And I think that it’s important for journalists to actually get on the ground and uncover this for themselves when you have a lot of people saying, ‘my pets are being abducted’ or ‘geese at the city pond are being abducted and slaughtered right in front of us.’”

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Confronted by NBC News’s Yamiche Alcindor, who asked the senator what he had to say to Haitian Americans and Haitian immigrants who say his false claims have put their lives at risk, Vance responded similarly, insisting, “No one has spread false claims. What they’ve said is that a small migrant community…has caused a lot of problems…. It’s led to animals disappearing, many of my constituents have said that has been happening.”

When Alcindor noted that city officials have said there’s no evidence immigrants are eating animals, Vance responded: “The city manager said there’s no verifiable evidence—a lot of residents on the ground have said that there is. That just means the city manager, I think, isn’t fully in touch with what’s on the ground there. I have heard from many of my own constituents who have seen these things with their own eyes, who have seen these abductions with their own eyes, who have seen geese being taken out of local parks and slaughtered in front of their own eyes.”

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Incidentally, neither Vance nor Trump have acknowledged that an individual whom the ex-president has asked to help guide his transition has gone on the record about his plans to eat bear flesh. We speak, of course, of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose admission to Roseanne Barr re: the bear was made while telling a story concerning his bizarre decision to stage an elaborate bear-murder scene in Central Park 10 years ago. That story came after Vanity Fair published a photo of Kennedy gleefully posing with an animal carcass, and before an 2012 interview with one of his daughters resurfaced in which she recounted the time he beheaded a whale.