J.D. Vance Tried to See if Pet-Eating Rumor Was True—After Posting It

It turns out that J.D. Vance and the Trump campaign can only point to one already debunked case as proof of their false and racist conspiracy about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

The Wall Street Journal reports that one of Vance’s staffers reached out to Springfield, Ohio’s city manager, Bryan Heck, on September 9, one day before the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The staffer wanted to know if there was any truth behind rumors that Haitian Americans were capturing and eating pets, ducks, and geese in the town. By that time, Vance had already shared the conspiracy theory online.

Heck told the staffer that there was no “verifiable evidence or reports” and that the “claims were baseless.” But that didn’t stop Trump from repeating the false story at the debate, and Vance continued to spread the rumor even as his home state suffered the consequences.

In an attempt to back up the rumor, Vance’s campaign provided a police report to the Journal in which a Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, said that her cat was possibly taken by her Haitian neighbors. When a reporter went to the woman’s home last week, she said her cat came home only two days after she reported it missing, and was found safe in her basement.

Kilgore, a Trump supporter, said that she apologized to her neighbors with a translation app and her daughter’s help. Another Springfield resident who spurred on the rumor in a Facebook post has also admitted that she was wrong, and took down the post, according to The New York Times. Vance, meanwhile, has not apologized, instead trying to blame the media.

The Republican vice presidential nominee somehow sees a political advantage in pushing the debunked and racist story, even as it has resulted in violent threats against the town’s schools, hospitals, and government buildings. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has denounced the story but refused to blame Trump or Vance, but Springfield Mayor Rob Rue doesn’t want Trump anywhere near his town. Considering the threats, and the part that neo-Nazis have played in creating this problem, it’s easy to see why.

More than 100 former GOP officials have signed a public letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president and warning that Donald Trump is “unfit” for the presidency or “any office of public trust.”

Signatories include Republican national security officials who served in previous administrations—such as former Secretaries of Defense William Cohen and Chuck Hagel, former Bush Sr. official and World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster—as well as former members of Congress, including Barbara Comstock and Adam Kinzinger.

“We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues,” the letter says, “but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be President.” The letter contains a bulleted list of reasons for their endorsement of Harris, including some of her more hawkish foreign policy stances.

The letter calls Trump “unfit to serve” and notes his “dangerous qualities,” including his coziness with “authoritarian leaders,” “contempt” for ethical and legal norms, and “chaotic national security decision-making.” As commander in chief, it says, Trump “promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents.” The letter goes on to condemn Trump’s incitement of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In the penultimate paragraph of their letter, the authors acknowledge Republican voters’ “potential concerns” about Harris but say they “pale in comparison” to Trump’s record of “chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

This is just the latest showing of support for Harris by prominent Republicans. This week, over a dozen high-level alumni of the Reagan administration endorsed her presidential bid. The vice president has also been endorsed by other prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Harris-Walz campaign has been courting moderate red voters through a “Republicans for Harris” initiative.

After controversially flip-flopping his opinion on Donald Trump last month, Joe Rogan has shared an unexpected review of Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate strategy: “fucking amazing job.”

During Monday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the multimillionaire podcaster and former Fear Factor host celebrated Harris’s performance during last week’s debate, joking that the “puppet master” behind her campaign was absolutely crushing it.

“Whoever’s helping her. Whoever’s coaching her. Whoever’s the puppet master running the strings,” Rogan said, “fucking amazing job. They did an amazing job from the moment Biden drops out, forcing Biden to drop out. Whatever they’re doing, whoever is writing those speeches, getting her to deliver, coaching her. She’s nailing it.”

Rogan also argued that the debate—and the presidential race—had boiled down to which candidate had better prepared for the moment, and to Rogan, that choice was obvious.

“See, the difference in that debate was not a difference in, like, who’s gonna have better policies? Who’s gonna be better for the country?” Rogan told comedian Tom Segura. “The … debate, in my opinion, was who was better prepared. She was way better prepared.”

Rogan then continued to mock Trump for failing to work with his team, while praising Harris for building and landing effective sound bites and, effectively, being a “savvy politician.”

The podcaster shared an odd exchange with Trump in August, when Rogan appeared to side with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the MAGA leader, before the independent presidential candidate bent the knee to Trump. Trump then chose to clap back, writing on Truth Social that he was looking forward to Rogan getting “booed” at a UFC tournament.

Audiences online read between the lines of Rogan’s salute to Harris, noting that Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters.

“This is a huge problem for Donald Trump,” wrote Obama-era Democratic strategist Tim Fullerton on X. “If Joe Rogan turns on him and starts praising Kamala Harris like he is here—Trump is toast.”

Right-wing pundit Tim Pool announced that he is suing Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign for interfering with his business by posting a false statement.

Pool declared on his podcast Tuesday night that he had filed a lawsuit in West Virginia against Harris’s presidential campaign alleging that the campaign had committed defamation and bad-faith misconduct.

Pool’s lawsuit is in response to a post on the KamalaHQ account, the campaign’s press account, that includes a clip of Pool speaking with right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in late August.

“Trump operatives say their Project 2025 plan is to give Trump total, unchecked legal power so they can jail and execute those who don’t support Trump if he wins (They have since scrubbed this video from YouTube),” the post said, without referring to either Pool or Loomer by name.

“Should Democrats be in jail? No question,” Pool said in the clip. “When Donald Trump gets elected, should he start locking them up? No question. Should there be lists of Democrats that need to go to jail, one hundred percent. And the reason for that is they committed crimes.”

The right-wing pundit then went on to say that he wanted Trump loyalists as the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and the heads of the FBI and CIA.

“Not just jail—they should get the death penalty!” chirped Loomer.

The KamalaHQ account had originally posted the clip of Pool speaking with Loomer in June, when Joe Biden was still at the top of the Democratic ticket and the account was called BidenHQ, with a similar caption. Pool didn’t seem to take issue with that post, only the one in late August.

“I have engaged legal counsel,” he wrote on X in response to the August post. “We are preparing to take action. More to come.”

In a response video, Pool pushed back at the claims that he was a Donald Trump operative and that he had anything to do with Project 2025. He seemed most offended by the implication that he personally was calling for Trump’s political opponents to be killed.

“I am opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. I have argued against the death penalty in every circumstance,” Pool ranted. He claimed that the video had cut off his response arguing with Loomer’s extremist view. Unfortunately for Pool, it’s unclear whether he actually “argued against” Loomer in this particular circumstance because, again, the video can no longer be found on the internet.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department alleged that Russian state media had funneled $10 million to an unnamed Tennessee-based media company, which was quickly determined to be Tenet Media, Pool’s employer. Tenet Media allegedly produced propaganda that aligned with the Russian government’s interests, and its employees were supposedly unwitting fonts of disinformation. The company has since shuttered, and Pool has claimed that if the allegations prove to be true, then he was “deceived.”

Still, the right-wing YouTuber has insisted that his business was directly affected by the Harris campaign’s post. It’s unclear why Pool would believe that his work was affected by the post and not, say, the revelation that he may have been an unwitting Russian operative.

Pool also claimed that there had been trespassers at his home and his neighbor’s home. It’s unclear why he believes the alleged trespassers to be in response to the Harris post, and not any of the other legal issues in which he’s found himself embroiled.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s future hold on the speakership is looking tenuous as a government funding bill, tied to MAGA-backed legislation to address the already illegal and “vanishingly rare” phenomenon of noncitizen voting, is expected to fail on Wednesday.

Between opposition from several House Republicans and the Democratic Senate’s staunch opposition to the controversial legislation attached to the spending bill, Johnson’s efforts to pass the package appear futile.

As the House speaker endures this government funding debacle and faces harsh criticisms of his leadership from fellow House Republicans, NOTUS reports that his speakership in the next Congress hangs in the balance, “assuming Republicans hang on to the majority and Johnson even tries to be speaker again.”

Per a report in NOTUS Wednesday, Representative Ralph Norman said that Republican lawmakers hoping to gain the speakership are “jockeying into positions.”

“There’s a lot of members that are frustrated,” Representative Greg Steube told NOTUS last week, when Mike Johnson pulled the package from the House floor as it became clear the votes just weren’t there. “Depending on what the majority looks like in January or after November, I certainly think it’s going to be challenging for him to get 218 on the floor.”

Representative Clay Higgins, who is “sympathetic to Johnson’s efforts” and authored the government funding and noncitizen voting legislation, waxed somewhat poetic about the package and Johnson’s predicament: “Basically, like, the shifting sands of the conference did not ultimately create perhaps the beach that we prefer.… This town is trying to eat that man alive.”

An anonymous lawmaker put it more plainly. “I think he’s cooked.”