JD Vance explains the political utility of anti-immigrant hostility

Just about every part of Sen. JD Vance’s efforts on Sunday to defend his relentless fearmongering about Haitian immigrants was dishonest.

To hear Vance (R-Ohio) tell it — as he told CNN’s Dana Bash and NBC’s Kristen Welker in separate news show appearances — the senator and running mate to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was simply highlighting long-standing concerns that had been ignored by the media. But those concerns hadn’t been ignored, and his focus on the Ohio city of Springfield and its population that came from Haiti was demonstrably a function of the presidential campaign. Which, Vance admitted to Bash, was the point.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said, “then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

Bash noted that Vance had just admitted that he “created” these stories, ones asserting (without reliable evidence) that the immigrants were eating people’s pets in an echo of long-standing racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it,” Vance insisted. But, again, that’s not true.

Over and over, to both Bash and Welker, Vance insisted that it was necessary for him to talk about Springfield because no one else was. Two weeks ago, though, the New York Times ran a front-page story about Springfield and the challenges posed by the increase in population from Haitian immigrants. The story noted that Vance had mentioned housing shortages in Springfield during a July Senate hearing, a complaint prompted by a letter the city manager sent to his senators.

Less than a week later, a right-wing social media account shared a screenshot of a post to a Springfield-based Facebook group from a woman who alleged that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend lost a cat, and that immigrants from Haiti had been preparing to eat it. It was paired with a photo of a man in Columbus carrying a goose on a city street and, later, purportedly bolstered by other dubious or unrelated stories of alleged animal-eating.

The story caught fire on pro-Trump social media platforms, with various images generated by artificial intelligence showing Trump saving cats and ducks from people with dark skin. By the time Vance first weighed in, the story was already rampant.

His social media post noted that he’d mentioned Springfield at that hearing, coupling the claim with the update that “[r]eports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” Vance had not mentioned Springfield on X (formerly Twitter) before his post piggybacking on the pet-eating claim.

The woman and her neighbor who drove that initial frenzy subsequently admitted that they had no evidence that the story was true. Based on the evolution of the story since the first flurry of claims, it seems clear that rumors about pet-eating — again, a long-standing bit of anti-immigrant rhetoric — were just rumors, ones circulating throughout the small city.

“Why have I talked about some of the things that I have been talking about?” Vance told Bash. “Let me just say this. My constituents have brought approximately a dozen separate concerns to me. Ten of them are verifiable and confirmable” — though, of course, he never mentioned them until his allies focused on making stolen pets a vehicle for casting immigrants as dangerous.

He didn’t articulate what the 10 verifiable (though not verified) stories were, instead pointing to other stories that were circulating in the right-wing media bubble, including one from conservative activist Chris Rufo. As with the initial stories of pets being taken in Springfield, Rufo’s story, which allegedly occurred in a different city, was flatly rejected by law enforcement.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson articulated the value of these false claims succinctly during recent comments.

“First of all,” Carlson said, “it makes all the right people mad.” Later, he added a second positive effect: “Now we’re talking about eating pets.”

This is precisely Vance’s approach. When his initial comments about Springfield were met with pushback, he insisted that his allies “keep the cat memes flowing” — rejecting the “crybabies” in the media who insisted on pointing out that his elevation of the stories was dishonest and baseless, if not dangerous.

The danger caused by the stories soon manifested. Bomb threats were made against city facilities and schools in Springfield. The Proud Boys showed up, though somewhat belatedly; neo-Nazis had shown up in the city and made baseless claims about pets back in August. On Monday, the city announced that it was canceling an annual festival out of concern over the onslaught of threats.

“Donald Trump is the only person who brought Springfield to national attention,” Vance insisted to Welker, “and he’s the only president who’s going to fight for the residents, not just their right to live safely in their communities, but for their right to complain about what’s going on in their own community.”

Trump, who once disparaged Haiti with an expletive during a meeting with legislators, and Vance are apparently not concerned about all residents of Springfield living safely in the community. They are, however, very concerned that anyone interested in complaining about immigrants should have those complaints heard loudly, however valid they happen to be.

Particularly when, to Carlson’s point, it drowns out other topics of conversation during the campaign. If the media is “letting Harris coast,” in Vance’s estimation, he’ll need to “create a story” for them to talk about instead.

Better to have the nation debating whether Black immigrants are or are not semi-human killers than to have it focusing on areas where Harris might have an advantage. So keep those “cat memes” flowing, Trump supporters, whatever the cost to those immigrants and to a community that Vance represents.