Source: Dia Dipasupil / Getty

Welp, it happened. Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance has essentially admitted that while he and Trump have been shouting “fake news” at every headline that they don’t like, it’s them who actually “create” their own fake news in order to push a racist and xenophobic agenda.

OK, so Vance didn’t say that in so many words, but he did admit that the unverified stories he tweeted about regarding illegal immigrants from Haiti abducting and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio — which Trump then repeated during his nationally televised presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris — was a fabrication he conjured out of rumors from the MAGA world.

“[Trump] just said Haitians are eating dogs and cats. Can you affirmatively say now that that is a rumor that has no basis with evidence?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Vance during an interview Sunday.

“Dana, the evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened,” Vance responded, continuing to expect the American populace to take it at face value that he has received endless first and second-hand accounts about Springfield residents losing their pets to the appetites of immigrants. “And by the way, I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months, and the American media ignored it. There was a congressional hearing just last week of angel moms who lost children because Kamala Harris let criminal migrants into this country who then murdered their children.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” he continued before dropping the startling admission that he has no problem conjuring stories fresh out of the MAGA rumor mill as opposed to relying on facts and actual evidence to make a relevant point.

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

In reality, what Trump and Vance did was put a huge target on the backs of Haitian Americans and migrants in Ohio by spreading a bigoted story about them eating cats and dogs that was never true. It didn’t matter that the city planners in Springfield, the Springfield Police Department, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and the state’s Republican governor all stated there were no credible reports and no evidence of illegal immigrants in Springfield or anywhere in Ohio stealing and “eating the pets of the people that live there” as Trump erroneously claimed during the debate. Vance, Trump and their supporters just keep on defending and doubling down on what is effectively hate speech.

Suffice it to say, the fine folks on X are not buying Vance’s narrative that his dangerous and blatantly xenophobic dishonesty is justified because the ends justify the means. To anyone with a brain and the capacity for critical thought, what Vance has been doing is lying, not raising awareness.

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