Prepare to be shocked: At around the time J.D. Vance started dissembling about Haitians eating people’s house pets, a Vance campaign staffer privately spoke with the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of Haitians have settled. The Wall Street Journal reports that the official informed Vance’s staffer that online rumors of pet-eating in the city were flatly false. But Vance then amplified the claim. Donald Trump followed suit, adding—because nobody out-embellishes Trump—that along with cats, Haitians are also consuming Springfield’s dogs.
They knew it was all a lie. But they kicked off this whole campaign of hate and demagoguery, anyway.
These revelations should prompt a reconsideration of one of this campaign’s ugliest moments: Vance’s defense of the pet-eating fabrication on CNN last Sunday. “If I have to create stories” to get the media to cover the impact of immigration, he said, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”
This move is really a form of what’s been called “sanewashing”—it repackages one of MAGA’s racist lies as merely an effort to prompt a good-faith policy debate. And it has been widely analyzed as damage control, as an attempt to put positive spin on a lie after getting caught out for it. But if Vance went into all this knowingly, then it’s time for more scrutiny of the underlying position he is self-consciously articulating here—that lying in this manner is acceptable to force discussion of a supposedly overlooked public problem—on its own terms, as its own act of grotesque public misconduct.
If it is okay to level such a despicable, dehumanizing smear at a vulnerable minority population to corral media attention in this fashion, then what sort of lying and propaganda about an exposed, assailable, encircled out-group would not be justified? Does Vance’s code of political ethics have any limiting principle that you can discern?
