JD Vance based his telling of the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pets on a single debunked police report from a Trump supporter.
And get this: that lady’s cat, which, according to her police report, she suspected had been taken by Haitian immigrant neighbors, had not actually gone missing.
“I had no idea where she was, but she never left the house,” the woman, identified by the Wall Street Journal as Anna Kilgore, told a reporter, admitting that the cat, Miss Sassy, had been found hiding in her basement.
Well, don’t that beat all.
I mean, you know, cats will be cats.
What a cute story.
Well, except for the part about it involving a Trump supporter just assuming that her “missing” cat had been taken and eaten by the black immigrant people next door.
ICYMI
It was this lone police report that the Trump-Vance campaign cited in response to a request from the Journal for evidence backing the claims of the Republican ticket about Haitian immigrants, which both Trump and Vance continue to stand behind.
The immigrants-eating-pets stories have been tracked to a woman posting to a private Facebook group with a fourth-hand telling, which was picked up by a neo-Nazi blogger.
The woman behind the original Facebook post, identified as Erika Lee, is now using the “I’m not a racist” defense, and claims that she has pulled her daughter out of school out of concerns for her safety.
Her sob story there rings hollow against the backdrop of the MAGA-fueled bomb threats that have closed schools, government buildings and hospitals in Springfield, because the MAGAs are upset that city officials aren’t feeding into the narrative about pet-eating immigrants that Trump and Vance are continuing to try to sell, in the face of what have to be embarrassing fact-checks from all corners.
That the obviously false stories reached the presidential-race level is due to the utter gullibility of Trump, who, in response to a dig from Vice President Kamala Harris in their Sept. 10 ABC News debate about his boring campaign rallies, shouted into the ether:
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, 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.”
It’s notable that, a day earlier, a Vance campaign aide had reached out to the city manager in Springfield, Bryan Heck, to ask “point-blank, Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?”
Heck recounted the phone call in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, which noted that his response was “unequivocal.
“I told him no, there was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true,” Heck said.
Basically, they knew, and went with the lie anyway, and the result of that is, they’ve shut down a city of 58,106 people for a week, or until the next nonsense lie gets their people who call in bomb threats to focus their attention elsewhere.
Video: Hey, JD, the cat was found in the basement
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Chris Graham
