Why JD Vance’s new lies about immigrants are worse than ‘eating dogs and cats’

JD Vance won’t back down. Somehow, it was much, much better when Tom Petty sang it.

Because for the Ohio senator who’s now Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate, rebel defiance means doubling down on easily disprovable if not deliberate bottom-feeder lies about thousands of his own Haitian American constituents living in Springfield, who yet again this weekend he lambasted as “illegal aliens” despite knowing they are here lawfully.

Vance brought his tour of hyperbolic xenophobia to eastern Pennsylvania on Saturday, telling a gathering at the Berks County Fairgrounds: “I challenge you to go to Springfield, Ohio. which has been overwhelmed by 20,000 Haitians. Go to any community that has been overwhelmed by Kamala Harris’ illegal alien policies and tell me that these are stories made up by politicians.”

Where to start?

The two programs under which Haitians fleeing some of the worst political chaos and gang violence in the Western Hemisphere have been OK’d by the Biden administration to remain in the United States as protected refugees are perfectly legal, and if Vance thinks otherwise he should challenge the rulings in court, not by demagoguing it on the campaign trail. There’s considerable evidence that the 20,000 figure that Vance and other right-wingers have claimed is the number of Haitians who’ve moved to Springfield during the President Joe Biden years is a big exaggeration. And even local Republican politicians are calling out Vance’s lies, including a heartfelt essay by GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, who’s from the Springfield area.

Meanwhile, we keep learning new details about the Springfield misinformation campaign from Vance and Trump that show its over-the-top dishonesty. Indeed, by the moment that Trump on Sept. 10 shocked 67 million TV debate viewers by blurting out, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!” Vance’s Senate aides had already been told by city officials that internet posts about Haitians stealing and eating pets — a trope about immigrants or “out” groups that goes back a century or more — were simply not true. Vance not only didn’t apologize for his initial post, he then told lies that are arguably worse — even while area schools, colleges and hospitals were getting closed or disrupted by bomb threats.

Three days after the debate, Vance tweeted: “In Springfield, Ohio, there has been a massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates, and crime. This is what happens when you drop 20,000 people into a small community. Kamala Harris’s immigration policy aims to do this to every town in our country.”

There’s two big problems with this, and it’s hard to say which is worse. The first part is that much of this is utter baloney.

The claim about a massive rise in communicable disease in Springfield or surrounding Clark County is just a flat-out lie. To the contrary, county officials say 2023 was actually the lowest overall for contagious illnesses in eight years. Vance’s false claim hinges on a yearly rise in two specific diseases — tuberculosis and HIV injections — yet local officials note these numbers are so small they tend to fluctuate from year to year, and there’s no evidence Haitian Americans played any role. “If you look at all reportable diseases as a whole, they’re actually going down,” Chris Cook, the health commissioner of Clark County, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent.

On crime in Springfield, there are some conflicting statistics, but there has not been a “massive” increase, and if Vance or his aides would have bothered to check with local officials on this one, they would have learned the reality that Haitian Americans are currently just two of the 199 inmates in the county jail, or 1%. There’s no evidence of any link between Haitians and the murder rate, which peaked in 2018 when Trump was president.

But it’s clear now that JD Vance doesn’t want to know the truth.

That’s bad, but here’s what’s arguably worse. In intentionally trying to mislead voters about the recent influx in Springfield of Haitians, whose filling of factory jobs have revitalized a Midwestern city once ravaged by deindustrialization, Vance is laboring to echo not only the xenophobic rhetoric of the demagogue who picked him for the GOP ticket, in Trump, but which also sounds little different from the world’s most vile dictators of the last 100 years.

» READ MORE: Springfield, Trump, and the violent gyrations of the American dream

Struggling to woo voters in the middle, the 2024 iteration of Trump and now his mini-me in Vance have instead doubled down on hoping that the secret sauce of the 45th president’s 2016 upset victory — a blatant appeal to fear of “the Other,” focused on immigrants crossing the border and a “Muslim ban” (which he now wants to revive) — will excite the masses of low-information and low-propensity voters. It started nearly a year ago when Trump claimed to a right-wing website that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America — language that critics immediately cited as a callback to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany even as a Trump spokesman called this “a normal phrase that’s used in everyday life.” The Republican standard-bearer continues to insist, without evidence, that refugees crossing the border are bringing communicable diseases with them.

In Vance, Trump has found the perfect foil — a Yale Law School grad and best-selling author, soberly citing statistics that are complete fabrications — to provide some phony intellectual heft to claims that are actually just plagiarized from what Nazi propagandists said about Jewish people on the eve of World War II and the Holocaust. In 1940, Hitler’s information minister Joseph Goebbels oversaw the production of an antisemitic “documentary” called The Eternal Jew that drilled down on false claims of Eastern European Jews spreading disease and crime, comparing them to rodents. That this sounds little different from the 2024 Republican line on refugees is depressing, outrageous and alarming.

“Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th-century Europe,” Zach Beauchamp wrote recently in Vox. “Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged ‘low cultural level’ and ‘uncleanliness,’ part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.”

Today, the racist, xenophobic and dehumanizing lies of 2024 are aiming to prepare Americans for a Project 2025 agenda that openly calls for a mass deportation program that would send federal agents and probably federalized National Guard tanks into American cities for dead-of-night raids, with the goal of placing millions in detention camps — again, sound familiar? — on a path to deportation, or worse.

I’d like to report that we’ve never seen a U.S. senator with national aspirations lie so openly as JD Vance has done in recent days, but unfortunately that’s not true. On Feb. 9, 1950, Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy stood up before a friendly Republican crowd in Wheeling, W.Va., and lied that he was holding a list of 205 known Communists working in the U.S. State Department — every bit as false as Vance’s modern-day claims about Haitians in Springfield. That 1950 speech launched McCarthyism, a yearslong witch hunt that with no basis ruined the lives of public servants, Hollywood screenwriters, and many more.

What Vance and Trump are proposing here — including the notion that thousands of Haitian refugees who fled to America legally could be abruptly stripped of their status and shipped back to their violent, lawless homeland — is a kind of American pogrom that would be much, much worse than the lowest days of McCarthyism.

And yet today’s Republican Party has flooded the zone with so much raw sewage — look over there, a GOP candidate for governor in a large state called himself “a Black Nazi” on a porn site! — that it’s hard for the media and the rest of the national conversation to stay focused, even when the top of the ticket is mimicking the worst of 20th-century fascism.

It took a while, but McCarthy did eventually get his comeuppance. On Dec. 2, 1954, the Senate voted overwhelmingly (67-22) and in bipartisan fashion to censure the senator for the worst of his conduct, including defaming an Army general in a congressional hearing. When the dust of the 2024 campaign settles and — God willing — Vance is still the junior senator from Ohio, the Senate should consider a similar censure resolution for the deliberate and clearly racist nature of his lies about the Haitians of Springfield.

We shouldn’t just normalize the use of Nazi-invented propaganda tactics in American political campaigns. We need to decide as a nation if the United States is a place where life-or-death deliberate lies by the likes of JD Vance can have actual consequences — or else we face a very dark future.

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