The crew on MSNBC’s Morning Joe slammed JD Vance on Tuesday for pushing a bizarre claim that illegal immigrants are eating people’s cats in his state.
The bizarre conspiracy spread like wildfire online as MAGA figures pushed the claims, which appear to stem from a post in a Facebook group for Springfield, Ohio, residents that said Haitians in the area were hunting animals including cats and ducks. In an X post Monday, Vance said he’d complained months ago about the impact of “Haitian illegal immigrants” in Springfield and that unspecified “[r]eports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”
Police in Springfield quickly debunked the viral rumors, confirming they hadn’t received reports of pets going missing or being eaten, adding that the purported issue is “not something that’s on our radar right now.”
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On Tuesday, Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said she didn’t “even know where to begin” with the story.
“In 2018, 2020, the lie about immigrants and illegal immigrants [...] was that they were bringing leprosy to America,” co-host Joe Scarborough said with a laugh. “Which of course they were not. Now, it is that they are eating your dogs.”
“Cats,” appositely named co-host Katty Kay corrected. “This is absolutely ridiculous and scraping the bottom of the barrel,” she added. “And JD Vance has been amplifying this.”
Scarborough expressed dismay that we now have “people on the presidential ticket actually spreading these lies.”
“Now you have JD Vance running around going: ‘They are eating your cats,’” Scarborough said. “What’s this guy’s obsession about cats? First he hates them, then he likes them, he’s trying to save them [...] I don’t get it.” The comment appeared to be a reference to the Ohio senator’s previous controversial remarks about “childless cat ladies.”
Scarborough also slammed those boosting the “complete lie” about cat-eating and later in the show singled out Vance for particular criticism.
“The guy who has this singular obsession with cats—first talking about childless cat ladies, and now talking about the eating of cats—JD Vance knows better than anybody else the contributions immigrants have made to this country,” he said. “The immeasurable contributions. Because he worked with them for years in Silicon Valley and got rich doing it. And so he knows he’s lying, he knows this is nonsense, he knows he’s playing to the lowest common denominator.”
Later on Tuesday, Vance doubled down in a post on X, saying his office had received “many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield” over the last several weeks saying “their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.”
“It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he added.
