JD Vance, the republican vice-presidential nominee and the bomb threat that destroyed Springfield, Ohio, when Mr. Trump and Haitian migrants were eating pets

Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said Sunday that he stood by the debunked claims he and former President Donald J. Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets, saying that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

And Mr. Vance responded indignantly when asked about the bomb threats that have upended life in Springfield, Ohio, the city where he and Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the pets were being eaten.

The fact that Springfield is being overrun with Haitian migrants is irrefutable, but it is also true that the racist rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield are not true. This isn’t the first time he tried to have it both ways. The rumors were based on calls that he had gotten from his friends and acquaintances, before he acknowledged that the rumors might be false, and began to make a case for the real story being ignored by the media.

When the CNN host asked him about the word creating, he said that they were creating a story in the American media.

“This is what Kamala Harris wants to do to every town in this country,” Mr. Vance said on CBS. “Overwhelm them with migration, stress their municipal budgets, see communicable diseases on the rise. What is happening in Springfield is coming to every town and city in this country if Kamala Harris’s open border policies are allowed to continue.”

“All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” the mayor, Rob Rue, told WSYX, a local news station in Ohio.

“I want whoever made these threats to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he told Margaret Brennan of CBS. Margaret, we do not believe in a heckler’s veto in this country. He believes that we should ignore these ridiculous psychopaths who are threatening violence on a small Ohio town, and instead focus on what we have with a vice president who isn’t doing her job.

Mr. Vance denied that his and Mr. Trump’s words were connected to the threats that followed them.

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was “the first-hand accounts of my constituents.” He defended the dissemination of the false story.

Local Aurora police have said this is hyperbole after Trump said at a news conference that he would deport the Haitian migrants in Springfield.

“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”

In response to the recent influx of Haitian people, the governor of Ohio wants to send more law enforcement and health care assistance to the city.

“If you talk to people, particularly people who are working with the Haitians, what they’ll tell you is they’re very hard workers,” DeWine said. “We had one person the other day saying, I wish I had 100 more working for me … Look, these are good people. The people in Springfield are good people.”

The Haitian Grilling of a Black Cat by Christopher Vance and the Far-Right Echo Chamber: The Case Against Donald Trump and the Establishment

Rufo wrote that this one incident doesn’t confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. “But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its ‘fact checkers,’ who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism. It takes just one exception to make a hypothesis work and the next step is to ask if it’s happening more often.

A day before he went on CNN, Vance claimed that, despite the media’s claims that the rumors about Haitians were baseless, the story “turned out to have merit.” A video that depicted African migrants grilling cats in Dayton, Ohio was obtained from a post by Christopher Rufo, a member of the Manhattan Institute. The video has been disputed, and several people have noted that the animal on the grill appears to have six legs and is more likely to be three chickens than a mutated cat.

It’s worth emphasizing that all of this began with a handful of right-wing influencers’ posts on X — which were not only boosted by the platform’s algorithm and CEO but also amplified by Vance and former President Donald Trump on the debate stage. Racist jokes about Haitians have become a part of the far-right echo chamber and are putting real people in danger.