Eating Crow

By now this story has done the rounds and I really wanted to ignore it, given how vacuous the entire thing was right from the get-go.

But then I saw clips of this interview which is mentioned by The Wall Street Journal:

Vance insisted on CNN this past Sunday that he had firsthand accounts of the incidents from constituents, but the media had paid no attention to migrant problems in American cities “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” He added, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Emphasis mine.

I mean, sure, admit you made the thing up despite earlier claiming it was fact.

At the end of Trump’s first term I recall a discussion that took hold of my social network feeds and perhaps I caught it in a few news articles, which claimed that while the US had averted major disaster this time because Trump was such a dolt who couldn’t properly orchestrate the levers of high government office to effect his most unhinged ideas, well, the next time around it would be someone smart who would know how to tell the right lies and not say the quiet parts out loud. And here we find ourselves with JD Vance. The clown car keeps right on rolling.¹

As a summary of this pet-eating nonsense, the WSJ article explains where the rumor began:

The cat-eating rumors, started with a post by a Springfield woman on a private Facebook page, turned out to be third-hand and were subsequently disavowed by the original poster, according to NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation.

The “third-hand” is because it was posted by the mother of a young girl, and that young girl heard it from one of her similarly aged friends. If your kids come home with wild stories about people eating animals…uh, don’t immediately believe them?

The economic impact of the Haitian immigrants was celebrated initially:

The local economy boomed. Business owners said they were grateful to have workers eager to work long shifts and do what it took to meet production goals. New subdivisions sprung up in the cornfields outside town. New restaurants opened. The Haitian flag flew at City Hall.

Of course there were growing pains. Increasing rents, because more people moving to a town which isn’t building enough new homes will have increasing prices; supply and demand at work.

A school bus crash in town which killed a young child was caused by a bad driver, who happened to be Haitian. Once the story blew up nationally, the father of that child stated:

Nathan Clark—the father of Aiden, the boy who had been killed in the bus crash—spoke during the public-comment portion of the Springfield City Commission meeting. Visibly shaking, he referenced GOP politicians, including Vance, and said they had used his son’s death “for political gain.”

“I wish that my son Aiden Clark was killed by a 60 year-old white man,” he said. “I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt.”

Along with lots of other nonsense:

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

Vance continues to spread rumors. He’s a Senator for Ohio, couldn’t he have given this woman a call to ask about her missing cat, or at least directed one of his staff to do so? He shows no indication of caring about the truth or reality of the world, just “creating stories” in his words which feed the narrative he happens to believe. Or, I suspect, the narrative he expects will get him elected.

Proven wrong again, might as well triple-down!

Vance has also added to his claims about Haitians, saying on social media that communicable diseases have been on the rise in Springfield because of the Haitian migration.

Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015. The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.

Facts don’t matter, and liars lie.