J.D. Vance is bearing false witness against his neighbors in Ohio, spreading a racist lie that even he doesn't believe.
This is a blood-libel level absurdity that no one believes any more than they actually believe that the CEO of Procter & Gamble said “Hail Satan” on Donahue or that Pepsi is made with dead babies. Yes, lots of people claim to believe such things, and they enjoy pretending to believe them. But it’s all pretense and duplicity, as Satanic baby-killerism always is.
Because Trump and J.D. Vance have spent several days repeating this KKK-level racist lie, it has been thoroughly investigated and debunked by reporters everywhere from the local paper in Springfield, to larger Ohio news outlets, national papers, and all the big cable news stations. That reporting revealed Vance’s source for this nonsense — a post on a white-people anti-immigrant Facebook group that said her “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” had warned her that Haitian immigrants were trying to eat her cat.
Again, no one believes this lie. We know this. How can we know? Because after reporters spoke with Springfield law enforcement, the mayor’s office, pet shelters and the local SPCA, confirming that no pets are missing and no one is eating cats in Springfield, none of the people supposedly believing this lie were relieved. They were, instead, angrily disappointed at responsible journalists and fact-checkers who were ruining their game by debunking their racist fantasy.
Trump and Vance’s luridly racist urban legends echo similarly bizarre tall tales that anti-immigrant white Americans claimed and pretended to believe during earlier waves of violent anti-immigration hysteria. Last summer, we talked about the Ursuline Convent Panic and the best-selling fraudulence of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. That discussion is relevant here, again, not just because Trump and Vance are proudly embracing the legacy of the Know Nothings, but because it gets at the way this vicious bearing of false witness is evidence of the liars’ struggling conscience — evidence that they know better, and cannot bear to know what that means about themselves.
