Republican vice-presidential candidate Senator JD Vance continues to stoke outrage against foreign-born members of his own constituency, sharing video footage with his 1.9 million social media followers that he claimed showed African migrants in Dayton, Ohio “eating cats” — but instead appears to show nothing more than poultry cooking on an outdoor grill.
“Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves,” Vance posted Saturday on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. “Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”
Vance has claimed, falsely, in recent days that Haitians — who are not Africans — living in Springfield — a town of 58,000 which is not Dayton — were stealing, killing, and consuming their neighbors’ pets.
Offering a $5000 bounty for video proof is the same as paying $5000 for someone to manufacture the proof. This is like a Cobra bounty in India only results in Cobra farms.
JD has a really weird fixation on cats. Cat ladies, grilling cats, cats cats cats. Has JD ever bummed a cat? We’ll never know but it makes me wonder
Well we know he’s gotten freaky with a dolphin so a cat seems plausible.
No, it isn’t a couch.
JD watches Backroom Casting Couch for a different reason than most of us.
Harvey Weinstein was so disappointed.
They are often found residing on or near couches though
Cats have been known to scratch up a couch. Hummmm.
O my god, it all cums full circle
this is the reason
(the reason I am going to be spreading from now on hahahah)
JFC, the person who started all this on Facebook says it’s false and these freaks are like “NOPE, THIS IS ALL WE CARE ABOUT NOW”
That person deserves some jail time
That person har indirectly gotten someone murdered.
Wow. They are really going over the deep end on this. How could this possibly help them win votes?
Backtracking equals flip-flopping, and then it’s a slippery slope to learning and growing and admitting you were wrong.
You’re probably right. And if they’re going to keep swimming towards the bottom of the pool, I really want journalists to start asking them why Haitians are eating pets. Because that’s the part that they haven’t actually made clear.
Haitians don’t eat dogs and cats in Haiti. The Haitians in Springfield aren’t starving, most of them have jobs. So why are they eating them, JD?
JD isn’t talking to people who think stuff through like that, he’s talking to racists and they don’t care if it’s true or not, it gives them an excuse to feel that way.
They need to send Jose Maria Del Pino, the reporter who kicked Stephen Miller right in his whataboutism. That dude was relentless and would not fall for his shit.
JD would be fucked.
Dude has an accent in his voice, ergo he’s “biased” according to the loonies.
They are too used to the typical news cycle where they bombard the public with lies to the point where everyone starts believing those are real. They’ve grown complacent.
Advisors in meeting: “We have a clear path to 270 as long as they focus on single issue voters who care most ab-”
Trump interrupts everyone to talk about how boring this meeting is, invites everyone to order McDonald’s with him.
JD rubs chin pensively, thinking about a single issue to focus on, something easy which does not involve walking into a donut shop
It’s a distraction, classic Trump move to get you to look at something else
I don’t think this is going to help at all. Black people are going to be pissed.
A distraction from what? What is overt, disgusting racism distract from in any helpful way?
The topic does not matter.
The assertion at hand does not matter.
Whether anyone believes the assertion does not matter.
The only thing that matters is: Are you playing offense or defense?
Cuz attacking looks like winning. And explaining looks like losing.
Okay? Well they’re being attacked. Massively. So I guess this distraction isn’t working out for them.
Who is defending? Not them, they are doubling down. Everyone else is calling the mayor and asking for a statement, or doing some vox pop with Haitians on the ground.
Yes, and all of those statements essentially are “Donald Trump and JD Vance are racist liars.”
Which you seem to think people shouldn’t say.
It “seems” you are wrong. I think they should go on the attack, and do that.
It gets them angry and supporting Republican anti-immigrant positions, instead of thinking about the issues that actually affect them, like why Steward Health Care was allowed to buy hospitals, squeeze as much money out of them as possible, give the CEO $250m, and then go bankrupt, leaving hundreds of people without healthcare.
You think people don’t think about the dire financial straits they are in because Trump and Vance are being racists? And somehow that helps Trump get elected?
None of that makes any sense.
When someone is out of work, and the media tells them it’s because of immigrants stealing their jobs, and not because of private equity squeezing companies to death for profit, yes, it helps Trump and the Republicans get elected.
The media isn’t telling them that. The media is telling them that isn’t true. Trump and Vance and their surrogates are telling them that. Trump was literally corrected in the debate.
Here, an instance of media, in the “immigrants are taking your jobs” category. It demonizes Tyson while conveniently ignoring that Republicans haven’t done a damn thing for labor in my lifetime.
I do not have the spoons necessary to bring you up to speed on everything that’s happened in politics in the past few decades that you should already know. Honestly, I feel like I’m getting sealioned here.
His dithering, weak, incoherent performance in the debate? Or is that already forgotten?
But he literally talked about this in the debate…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Stochastic terrorism is political violence that has been instigated by hostile public rhetoric which is directed at a group or an individual. Unlike incitement to terrorism, stochastic terrorism is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence.[1] A key element is the use of social media and other distributed forms of communications where the person who carries out the violence has no direct connection to the users of violent rhetoric.[2]
They’re also purposefully leaning into this to keep the conversation about immigration, because it’s pretty much the only issue they have had an advantage on. Without Trump talking about eating pets, we’d all be talking about his abortion stance right now, which is deeply unpopular.
This is it. If were talking about immigrants not eating pets, we’re not talking about how Harris whooped trumps ass.
Baffling to think that such blatant and easily disproven lies can be beneficial to their cause.
Democrats need to respond by making the story about why Trump killed the bipartisan immigration bill.
Exactly. Those ads should be in every commercial break in the swing states.
That bill was a super republican bill, I honestly do not know why the Democrats keep bragging about this as if every “bipartisan” bill has merit. The Overton Window continues to shift right. Just because the vociferous Republicans spouted incorrect information about the bill, that doesn’t make the quality of actual bill have any merit. I’m ashamed that any democrat thought this"immigration" reform bill was something worth fighting for. It is an anti immigration package that gives significantly more money and power to homeland security. It focused on funding border walls, detention centers, increasing the burden of proof required for asylum seekers, among others. It is a horrendous bill that cares little for immigrants.
The point is that it was agreed to by both parties and Trump still had it killed so the mere concept of cooperatively working with the other party got thrown out the window.
It is important to keep reminding people that Trump refuses to do anything (or even allow things to be done) that doesn’t serve his own personal goals . He will actively prevent things from happening if that serves him better, regardless of the consequences to anyone else.
That only underscores the point of advertising their refusal to pass it: it should have fully satisfied Republicans and given them most of what they want, but the Orange Shit Stain said not to pass it so they could complain about immigration during the election.
Democrats should use it as a loud and constant example of how Republicans are not leaders and have no solutions for America.
Yeah, because advertising that you used a social murder bill to bluff with makes you sound SUPER sympathetic to the people who would have died if fascists had called your bluff 🙄
I don’t think it was a bluff, unfortunately. Neither do I think they should not criticize the Republicans for their behavior.
Yeah, you shouldn’t work with them on such heinous human rights abusing packages. That is what it underscores to me. If anyone actually read the bill, we might critically push back on the Democrats and make positive change instead of this bipartisan rivalry nonsense. It serves the status quo, not any of us. If the bill had any merit , I’d be totally with you on that point.
You’re not understanding me. Yes, the bill was awful and should not have had their support.
So given that, what exactly is the Republican justification for not supporting it? That needs to be highlighted so that perhaps enough GOP voters just stay home on election day - especially in swing states.
Like it or not, Republicans must not win this election so that our democracy survives. We will have lots of work to do after the election to push the Democrats back to supporting the average person and not the rich, but that’s the next fight and not this one!
Hold your nose and vote for democracy.
Oh I understand you. I don’t think you understand that voting for Democratics and criticizing them is more than OK, it is necessary.
I honestly do not know why the Democrats keep bragging about this as if every “bipartisan” bill has merit
Because they do. To the Dem leadership, bipartisanship is the highest achievement in politics, no matter how awful the actual content.
If you could demonstrate bipartisan backing, they’d gladly declare this flag from Community the new national flag of the United States:
In fact, both that flag and the “Human Being” mascot (pictured below, middle) of the school’s football team are parodies of the way Dem leadership operates.
I guess this will be the new birth certificate thing for them.
That, at least, had a vague air of plausibility. People do come to the U.S. illegally and people do have faked identification documents. It also only attacked one person. This is attacking a whole group of people with a ludicrous (and very obviously racist) charge. I realize there are a lot of idiots in this country, but I have a feeling this is going beyond the pale for some people who were going to vote for Trump. I don’t know that they’ll vote for Harris, but they might sit this one out.
Given most of the stuff right wingers complain about is projection, maybe we need to check this guy’s myfitnesspal
I don’t know about JD, but RFK, Jr. once literally got accused of eating a dog, so you think he at least would be out there calling them on this bullshit.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4753486-rfk-jr-vanity-fair-article/
Apparently not though. Guess it’s okay when the accusation is against black immigrants.
We are a handful of days away from some right wing weirdo showing a video of a non-white person sneezing and captioning it with “wtf they firing guns in the street”. And that will become a popular talking point, and people will demand the death penalty.
JD Vance said he was Making the Story up so as a Free Thinking Republican I need to wait until Fox News tells me what to think!
Where’s dave chappelle in all of this? Isnt this in his backyard? Isnt he a trump supporter now?
There is no such thing as an “honest conservative”. No such thing.
Grilling chicken in Ohio, eh? Hmm, I hear there’s a huge orange chicken who is scared to have a second debate because he got so badly humiliated in the first one. He might want to stay away from Ohio since they are grilling his kind.
You know what would be great, would be to hold these weirdos liable for the time and expense that public agencies have incurred to deal with the bomb threats and idiots they’ve directly incited.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
“Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”
This is the most infuriating thing they do. They assume that any developing story is actually the most extreme version that favors their side. Then they ignore all evidence to the contrary and fish for any evidence that they can claim as confirmation, even if it doesn’t pass the laugh test. But they assert “It was confirmed!” with such confidence and shamelessness that it becomes easier for people to believe them, and eventually the media stops trying to debunk them.
Definitely not the first time this happened. If you wanna find other examples, look at anything where experts on the topic believe one thing but a majority of the American people believe the other. It’s pretty much guaranteed that the thing the American people believe originated as GOP propaganda.
I wish I had told myself that from 25 years ago before I went online and was exposed to these people with all the naivety of the socially underdeveloped autistic 17 year old that I was at the time. I often have to learn things in the hardest way imaginable.
A nutjob conservative on Lemmy has been telling me that babies are being executed in post-birth abortions using these same tactics.
This whole “weirdo” thing is idiotic. It’s handling them with kid gloves rather than underscoring they are fucking evil and want to do evil things.
It’s been massively effective and has put them on the defensive in a way no other criticism ever has.
I view it as a great insult for them. Conservatives want nothing more than to be “normal.” They rely so much on the feeling of safety they get by being part of the “normal” crowd. If you called me weird I would embrace that label. I am weird! I’m not like everyone else and I like that about myself! For them that is not at all the case. The more we can make them think that what they are doing is NOT accepted by society and that we all think they are weird the more likely they are to stop doing it.
In their ideology, if you’re not “normal”, you’re in one of the othered groups and your face becomes a fair target for their favorite face-eating leopards.
No, you see, they project about everything.
They absolutely hope they are “normal.”
Their whole ideology is based on group conformity.
weirdo is good, us stressing about their evil isn’t getting us anywhere
People have spent close to a decade trying to convince everyone that Trump is evil and wants to do evil things. How well has that worked out?
Also, as a huge weirdo myself, I had kind of thought that most people stopped caring how weird I am after high school, and I thought that was pretty neat. Now that it has become a favorite insult to use against fascists, I get the feeling that people only refrain from remarking on it because they’re being polite to me, but they definitely still care and would wield it as a weapon given half a reason to.
