J.D. Vance Tried to See if Pet-Eating Rumor Was True—After Posting It

It turns out that J.D. Vance and the Trump campaign can only point to one already debunked case as proof of their false and racist conspiracy about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

The Wall Street Journal reports that one of Vance’s staffers reached out to Springfield, Ohio’s city manager, Bryan Heck, on September 9, one day before the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The staffer wanted to know if there was any truth behind rumors that Haitian Americans were capturing and eating pets, ducks, and geese in the town. By that time, Vance had already shared the conspiracy theory online.

Heck told the staffer that there was no “verifiable evidence or reports” and that the “claims were baseless.” But that didn’t stop Trump from repeating the false story at the debate, and Vance continued to spread the rumor even as his home state suffered the consequences.

In an attempt to back up the rumor, Vance’s campaign provided a police report to the Journal in which a Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, said that her cat was possibly taken by her Haitian neighbors. When a reporter went to the woman’s home last week, she said her cat came home only two days after she reported it missing, and was found safe in her basement.

Kilgore, a Trump supporter, said that she apologized to her neighbors with a translation app and her daughter’s help. Another Springfield resident who spurred on the rumor in a Facebook post has also admitted that she was wrong, and took down the post, according to The New York Times. Vance, meanwhile, has not apologized, instead trying to blame the media.

The Republican vice presidential nominee somehow sees a political advantage in pushing the debunked and racist story, even as it has resulted in violent threats against the town’s schools, hospitals, and government buildings. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has denounced the story but refused to blame Trump or Vance, but Springfield Mayor Rob Rue doesn’t want Trump anywhere near his town. Considering the threats, and the part that neo-Nazis have played in creating this problem, it’s easy to see why.

More than 100 former GOP officials have signed a public letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president and warning that Donald Trump is “unfit” for the presidency or “any office of public trust.”

Signatories include Republican national security officials who served in previous administrations—such as former Secretaries of Defense William Cohen and Chuck Hagel, former Bush Sr. official and World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster—as well as former members of Congress, including Barbara Comstock and Adam Kinzinger.

“We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues,” the letter says, “but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be President.” The letter contains a bulleted list of reasons for their endorsement of Harris, including some of her more hawkish foreign policy stances.

The letter calls Trump “unfit to serve” and notes his “dangerous qualities,” including his coziness with “authoritarian leaders,” “contempt” for ethical and legal norms, and “chaotic national security decision-making.” As commander in chief, it says, Trump “promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents.” The letter goes on to condemn Trump’s incitement of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In the penultimate paragraph of their letter, the authors acknowledge Republican voters’ “potential concerns” about Harris but say they “pale in comparison” to Trump’s record of “chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

This is just the latest showing of support for Harris by prominent Republicans. This week, over a dozen high-level alumni of the Reagan administration endorsed her presidential bid. The vice president has also been endorsed by other prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Harris-Walz campaign has been courting moderate red voters through a “Republicans for Harris” initiative.

After controversially flip-flopping his opinion on Donald Trump last month, Joe Rogan has shared an unexpected review of Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate strategy: “fucking amazing job.”

During Monday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the multimillionaire podcaster and former Fear Factor host celebrated Harris’s performance during last week’s debate, joking that the “puppet master” behind her campaign was absolutely crushing it.

“Whoever’s helping her. Whoever’s coaching her. Whoever’s the puppet master running the strings,” Rogan said, “fucking amazing job. They did an amazing job from the moment Biden drops out, forcing Biden to drop out. Whatever they’re doing, whoever is writing those speeches, getting her to deliver, coaching her. She’s nailing it.”

Rogan also argued that the debate—and the presidential race—had boiled down to which candidate had better prepared for the moment, and to Rogan, that choice was obvious.

“See, the difference in that debate was not a difference in, like, who’s gonna have better policies? Who’s gonna be better for the country?” Rogan told comedian Tom Segura. “The … debate, in my opinion, was who was better prepared. She was way better prepared.”

Rogan then continued to mock Trump for failing to work with his team, while praising Harris for building and landing effective sound bites and, effectively, being a “savvy politician.”

The podcaster shared an odd exchange with Trump in August, when Rogan appeared to side with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the MAGA leader, before the independent presidential candidate bent the knee to Trump. Trump then chose to clap back, writing on Truth Social that he was looking forward to Rogan getting “booed” at a UFC tournament.

Audiences online read between the lines of Rogan’s salute to Harris, noting that Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters.

“This is a huge problem for Donald Trump,” wrote Obama-era Democratic strategist Tim Fullerton on X. “If Joe Rogan turns on him and starts praising Kamala Harris like he is here—Trump is toast.”

Right-wing pundit Tim Pool announced that he is suing Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign for interfering with his business by posting a false statement.

Pool declared on his podcast Tuesday night that he had filed a lawsuit in West Virginia against Harris’s presidential campaign alleging that the campaign had committed defamation and bad-faith misconduct.

Pool’s lawsuit is in response to a post on the KamalaHQ account, the campaign’s press account, that includes a clip of Pool speaking with right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in late August.

“Trump operatives say their Project 2025 plan is to give Trump total, unchecked legal power so they can jail and execute those who don’t support Trump if he wins (They have since scrubbed this video from YouTube),” the post said, without referring to either Pool or Loomer by name.

“Should Democrats be in jail? No question,” Pool said in the clip. “When Donald Trump gets elected, should he start locking them up? No question. Should there be lists of Democrats that need to go to jail, one hundred percent. And the reason for that is they committed crimes.”

The right-wing pundit then went on to say that he wanted Trump loyalists as the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and the heads of the FBI and CIA.

“Not just jail—they should get the death penalty!” chirped Loomer.

The KamalaHQ account had originally posted the clip of Pool speaking with Loomer in June, when Joe Biden was still at the top of the Democratic ticket and the account was called BidenHQ, with a similar caption. Pool didn’t seem to take issue with that post, only the one in late August.

“I have engaged legal counsel,” he wrote on X in response to the August post. “We are preparing to take action. More to come.”

In a response video, Pool pushed back at the claims that he was a Donald Trump operative and that he had anything to do with Project 2025. He seemed most offended by the implication that he personally was calling for Trump’s political opponents to be killed.

“I am opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. I have argued against the death penalty in every circumstance,” Pool ranted. He claimed that the video had cut off his response arguing with Loomer’s extremist view. Unfortunately for Pool, it’s unclear whether he actually “argued against” Loomer in this particular circumstance because, again, the video can no longer be found on the internet.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department alleged that Russian state media had funneled $10 million to an unnamed Tennessee-based media company, which was quickly determined to be Tenet Media, Pool’s employer. Tenet Media allegedly produced propaganda that aligned with the Russian government’s interests, and its employees were supposedly unwitting fonts of disinformation. The company has since shuttered, and Pool has claimed that if the allegations prove to be true, then he was “deceived.”

Still, the right-wing YouTuber has insisted that his business was directly affected by the Harris campaign’s post. It’s unclear why Pool would believe that his work was affected by the post and not, say, the revelation that he may have been an unwitting Russian operative.

Pool also claimed that there had been trespassers at his home and his neighbor’s home. It’s unclear why he believes the alleged trespassers to be in response to the Harris post, and not any of the other legal issues in which he’s found himself embroiled.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s future hold on the speakership is looking tenuous as a government funding bill, tied to MAGA-backed legislation to address the already illegal and “vanishingly rare” phenomenon of noncitizen voting, is expected to fail on Wednesday.

Between opposition from several House Republicans and the Democratic Senate’s staunch opposition to the controversial legislation attached to the spending bill, Johnson’s efforts to pass the package appear futile.

As the House speaker endures this government funding debacle and faces harsh criticisms of his leadership from fellow House Republicans, NOTUS reports that his speakership in the next Congress hangs in the balance, “assuming Republicans hang on to the majority and Johnson even tries to be speaker again.”

Per a report in NOTUS Wednesday, Representative Ralph Norman said that Republican lawmakers hoping to gain the speakership are “jockeying into positions.”

“There’s a lot of members that are frustrated,” Representative Greg Steube told NOTUS last week, when Mike Johnson pulled the package from the House floor as it became clear the votes just weren’t there. “Depending on what the majority looks like in January or after November, I certainly think it’s going to be challenging for him to get 218 on the floor.”

Representative Clay Higgins, who is “sympathetic to Johnson’s efforts” and authored the government funding and noncitizen voting legislation, waxed somewhat poetic about the package and Johnson’s predicament: “Basically, like, the shifting sands of the conference did not ultimately create perhaps the beach that we prefer.… This town is trying to eat that man alive.”

An anonymous lawmaker put it more plainly. “I think he’s cooked.”

The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, doesn’t want Donald Trump anywhere near the town.

At a news conference Tuesday, Mayor Rob Rue said that a visit from the former president and convicted felon would be too much for local authorities to handle as they grapple with the fallout from false rumors about Haitian immigrants capturing and eatings pets, ducks, and geese.

“It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Mayor Rob Rue said, commenting on a report that Trump was planning to visit the town in the near future. Even Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, who visited Springfield Tuesday, said that while a campaign visit from a former president is “generally very, very welcomed,” he had misgivings about a possible Trump visit.

“I have to state the reality, though, that resources are really, really stretched here,” DeWine said. Neither Trump nor his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, have spoken to DeWine about visiting the town, he said.

Trump and Vance have continued to defend their part in spreading and amplifying the conspiracy, with the Republican vice presidential nominee even admitting that he was using the story for political purposes. Trump brought up the story in last week’s presidential debate and refused to back down, even when fact-checked by ABC News moderators.

Responding to Trump’s words at the debate, Rue warned last week that “we don’t need this pushback that is hurting our citizens and hurting our community—I would say that to anybody who would take a mic and say those things.”

Indeed, the rhetoric from the right, led by the former president and his running mate, has led to schools, government buildings, hospitals, and even a local festival receiving violent threats. What Springfield needs is solution and calm, not more political opportunism at the expense of an innocent populace.

Donald Trump may want to take one more geography lesson before he decides to shutter the Department of Education.

During a Fox News town hall in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday, the Republican presidential nominee routinely mixed up two places that could not be more different: Alaska and Afghanistan.

While speaking about domestic oil reserves and the potential for U.S. energy independence, Trump incorrectly claimed that “we have Bagram” in Alaska—which is, actually, a military base in Afghanistan.

“We were energy independent, we were soon going to be energy dominant, and we would’ve been now having so much money coming out of the energy. We just have the best,” Trump said. “We have Bagram in Alaska. They say it might be as big, might be bigger than, all of Saudi Arabia. I got it approved. Ronald Reagan couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it. I got it done.”

But Trump appeared to realize that he had made a mistake, suddenly swapping Bagram for the name of an arctic national wildlife refuge in the Last Frontier known as ANWR.

“Check that one out, Bagram. Check that one out. It’s, it’s—no, think about this: Between Bagram, between—you go to ANWR, you take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up. We should be—we should have that air base. We should have that oil,” Trump said.

Politicos caught the weighty mistake, deriding Trump as “clueless” for mixing up the name of a foreign site that he had considerable influence over.

“Bagram was the airbase he had in Afghanistan—the same base where we kept hundreds of Taliban and ISIS prisoners that Trump released back out into Afghanistan in his final year in office,” wrote Marine veteran and former Kentucky Democratic political candidate Amy McGrath on X. “He is CLUELESS folks.”

J.D. Vance made a new claim about why he isn’t responsible for spreading false rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that have led to nearly three dozen bomb threats.

During a rally Tuesday in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, CBS’s Katrina Coffman asked Vance about whether he had a responsibility not to spread racist lies if he could help it.

“So, a woman who was behind an early Facebook post about the Haitian migrants in Springfield has now apologized for spreading false rumors,” said Kaufman. “You say that you have a responsibility to share what your constituents tell you, but don’t you also have a responsibility to fact-check them first?”

“Well I think the media has a responsibility to fact-check the residents of Springfield, not lie about them,” Vance said, as the crowd roared in response.

It’s not entirely clear what this response even means, considering the fact that the media has fact-checked the residents who claimed to have had pets abducted by immigrants, and found pretty much every claim Vance has made to be as hollow as his Never-Trump convictions.

The woman Kaufman referred to was Erika Lee, who wrote a Facebook post in the summer elevating the rumors that Haitian neighbors had stolen her other neighbor’s pets. Lee has since taken down the post after she realized she had no actual information about the incident, which, it turns out, hadn’t even happened to her neighbor, according to The New York Times.

Anna Kilgore, another woman who claimed that her pet was abducted and eaten by her neighbors in a police report obtained by the Vance campaign, told The Wall Street Journal that her cat returned to her just days later.

Vance actually did bother to fact-check—he just didn’t actually care about what he found. Vance’s team was told as early as September 9 by Springfield City Manager Ryan Heck that there was no “verifiable evidence” of Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. But by that point Vance had already posted about it, and the Ohio senator continued to spread the racist lies anyway.

Vance’s other claim, that cases of tuberculosis and HIV are on the rise in Springfield, has also met a similar fact-checking fate. The Clark County Combined Health District Commissioner Chris Cook said Friday that Vance’s claims were completely false.

Over the weekend, Vance said he had to “create stories” so the media would focus on the real ones. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said there had been “at least 33 bomb threats” in Springfield as of Tuesday.

Senate Republicans for the second time blocked a measure on Tuesday to protect in vitro fertilization, with only two members of the party backing the bill.

Hard-line abortion opponents on the right have sought to restrict and even ban IVF ever since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos are children. Republicans have openly supported restrictions to IVF alongside a national abortion ban.

The Right to IVF Act also failed to pass two months ago in a 48–47 vote. In a dismal sign of progress, the bill on Tuesday failed by a 51–44 measure. Like the last time, only two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted for the bill Tuesday, with every single Democrat present voting in support.

This time, five senators were listed as “not voting” by the Senate website: Democrat Cory Booker (New Jersey), independent Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Republican Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Republican Thom Tillis (North Carolina), and Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance (Ohio).

Here’s the full list of Republicans who voted against the bill:

• John Barrasso—Wyoming
• Marsha Blackburn—Tennessee
• John Boozman—Arkansas
• Mike Braun—Indiana
• Katie Britt—Alabama
• Ted Budd—North Carolina
• Shelley Moore Capito—West Virginia
• Bill Cassidy—Louisiana
• John Cornyn—Texas
• Tom Cotton—Arkansas
• Kevin Cramer—North Dakota
• Mike Crapo—Idaho
• Ted Cruz—Texas
• Steve Daines—Montana
• Joni Ernst—Iowa
• Deb Fischer—Nebraska
• Lindsey Graham—South Carolina
• Chuck Grassley—Iowa
• Bill Hagerty—Tennessee
• Josh Hawley—Missouri
• John Hoeven—North Dakota
• Cindy Hyde-Smith—Mississippi
• Ron Johnson—Wisconsin
• John Neely Kennedy—Louisiana
• James Lankford—Oklahoma
• Mike Lee—Utah
• Cynthia Lummis—Wyoming
• Roger Marshall—Kansas
• Mitch McConnell—Kentucky
• Jerry Moran—Kansas
• Markwayne Mullin—Oklahoma
• Rand Paul—Kentucky
• Pete Ricketts—Nebraska
• James E. Risch—Idaho
• Mitt Romney—Utah
• Marco Rubio—Florida
• Eric Schmitt—Missouri
• Rick Scott—Florida
• Tim Scott—South Carolina
• Dan Sullivan—Alaska
• John Thune—South Dakota
• Tommy Tuberville—Alabama
• Roger Wicker—Mississippi
• Todd Young—Indiana

During a congressional hearing on hate crimes Tuesday, Republican Senator John Kennedy accused Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, of supporting terrorism.

Berry was invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the rise in hate crimes against Arab and Jewish Americans since October 7. Instead of hearing her thoughts, the Louisiana senator advanced an antagonistic and acrid line of questioning.

“You support Hamas, do you not?” asked Kennedy. Berry replied, to the applause of some in attendance, “Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support, but you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.”

Kennedy continued, “You support Hezbollah too, don’t you?” Over interjections from the senator, Berry said, “Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing, Senator. You have Arab American constituents that you represent.… The answer is I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other entity that invokes it.”

“You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?” Kennedy persisted. “Do you support or oppose Iran, and their hatred of Jews?” Berry’s response was again interrupted by Kennedy, who cast aspersions on her for having previously criticized Congress’s decision to cut funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides relief to Palestinians.

The move to defund UNRWA, which was based on unconfirmed Israeli allegations that 12 of its staff had been involved in the October 7 Hamas attack, was widely criticized by Palestinian rights activists, including Berry—who began explaining that her criticism was based on foreign policy. Kennedy again cut in: “Let me ask you one more time, you support Hamas don’t you? You support UNRWA and Hamas, don’t you?”

“Sir, I think it’s exceptionally disappointing that you’re looking at an Arab American witness before you, and saying, ‘You support Hamas.’ I do not support Hamas,” Berry responded, before another interruption from Kennedy. “You know what’s disappointing to me,” the senator said. “You can’t bring yourself to say you don’t support UNRWA, you don’t support Hamas, you don’t support Hezbollah, and you don’t support Iran. You should hide your head in a bag”—a comment that elicited gasps from attendees.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned Kennedy for his display of anti-Arab bigotry and deployment of “common anti-Arab and Islamophobic stereotypes during his questioning.”