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JD Vance’s latest cat flub is bizarre misinformation about migrants eating them


Tracing the spread of a racist right-wing rumor.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance — a vocal proponent of conspiracy theories about immigrants “replacing” Americans — is now spreading misinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio killing family pets and protected wildlife. Both publications reference a Facebook post in which someone claims their neighbor’s daughter’s friend lost her cat — and later found it “hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering,” outside a house “where Haitians live.” Local police, however, tell the Springfield News-Sun that there are no reports of pets being stolen and eaten in the community. The rumor, which reports suggest had been spreading locally for at least a month, was amplified by conservative influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers — and then mainstreamed by politicians including Vance and Sen. Ted Cruz(R-TX), and immigration obsessives like Elon Musk.

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