David Bloomberg and Spencer G Watson expose JD Vance’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—20,000 migrants never overwhelmed local resources, and his 81% murder spike allegation is false. Local officials debunked pet-eating rumors tied to Haitians, while housing data shows price hikes from general growth, not immigration. Vance’s refusal to apologize for politicizing Aiden Clark’s death mirrors Trump’s fear-mongering tactics, like the "birther" conspiracy, to stoke racial division ahead of November 5th, risking retaliatory violence as propaganda fuel. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that has not been yet endorsed by Taylor Swift.
Not yet.
Maybe someday.
I think it's going to happen soon.
Yeah, I think she's waiting for a critical moment, much like a debate of some kind.
Yeah.
Okay.
So anyway, while I sit here patiently waiting for my Taylor Swift endorsement and the slew of other celebrity endorsements that will undoubtedly follow once that happens, we're going to do this episode.
So back to back again today with David Bloomberg.
How you doing, David?
Good.
How are you?
Good.
Yeah.
So we are hot on the heels of just having done an episode yesterday and we want to do this one now right away because it's a hot topic.
We're going to talk about immigration lies.
Yeah.
So it's obvious.
Got a couple days.
It's obvious at this point that Trump and the Trump campaign plan to use fear about immigration and immigrant crime and all of this together as a wedge issue for the last bit of this election.
Sorry to stop you so quickly.
It's true to four.
I mean, he used similar, I mean, different, but similar.
I mean, remember the huge mass of a million, you know, illegals.
The migrant caravan that was on its way.
Yeah.
Yes.
Right.
That somehow disappeared on its way here.
We don't know where.
Yeah.
Much like he said in the debate, nobody knows where they go.
More than the population of New York City comes in, but nobody knows where they go.
Yeah.
So unless you were under a rock or otherwise not paying attention, you know that Trump mentioned Haitian immigrants in the debate on debate night just a few nights ago.
They're eating the dogs.
They're eating the cats.
Yes.
Yes.
And the town that he mentioned on debate night was Springfield, Ohio, that is inside JD Vance's senatorial district.
So this adds a different twist, I guess.
He's a U.S. senator, right?
Yeah.
He covers the whole state.
Okay.
Well, then, yeah.
I've seen people talk about because there's two senators per state, but yeah, but they cover the whole state.
Right.
But whenever he mentions it, he says, this is within my area, whatever.
So I'm like, okay, well, I don't know how it works.
So in case you want to change your terminology a little bit.
Yeah, I'm okay with it because in the clips, he's going to say pretty much that exact same thing.
So yeah.
This is a series of lies to create an entire unreality, like a series of interlocking lies to create an entire unreality.
As with most unrealities, there are separate parts that are true and they're sort of cobbled together.
But in every case involved with this, additional context makes the story more clear and is in almost every case also deliberately left out by the people who are trying to tell this unreality, this false story.
And we should look at this, David.
Should highlight the context that's been left out and show why this isn't really what it's being portrayed as.
What do you think?
Yeah, definitely.
Let me add my two cents about something here that really just annoys me more than anything.
Yeah.
I live in Springfield, Illinois, and I am so tired.
You know, normally when I'm reading Twitter, when I'm reading whatever, my brain is set to look for Springfield because that means it's local to me, at least in theory.
I am so tired of a different Springfield taking over the entire news cycle and timeline and just throwing me out of whack for that.
So I blame JD Vance for that too.
Springfield, Ohio gets the spotlight for like two weeks and your whole life is in disarray.
It is.
It is.
Wow.
This is a first world problem, David.
It is.
I have to tell you.
Yes.
Okay.
So just a few days ago, Dana Bash of CNN, maybe she's called Dana Bash.
I'm not sure.
She interviewed JD Vance on her program where she confronted him very pointedly about many aspects of this.
So we're going to go through some parts of this.
Smaller parts of this clip have been put online.
And some people have said that it has been edited deceptively to cut out itself, cut out critical context, to say that JD Vance said something that he didn't really say.
And in some ways, I agree with that.
So we're going to go through and we're going to show what he really said, what it really means, and the context it's missing.
And we're going to try to get a more clear story here.
So some background real quick.
On September 9th, so September 9th was the day before the debate.
The Trump campaign posted on social media.
Remember, 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed on his way to school by a Haitian migrant that Kamala Harris let into the country in Springfield, Ohio.
And then on Tuesday, JD Vance posted, Do you know what's confirmed?
That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here in reference to the boy, Aiden Clark.
So this isn't completely true.
It is true that a boy named Aiden Clark was 11 years old when he died, and he was on his way to school when it happened.
But Aiden Clark was on a school bus that was in a vehicle incident that involved a Haitian migrant.
I don't know all the details.
I've heard that maybe the Haitian turned left when he wasn't supposed to or something.
The father doesn't blame the Haitian migrant, doesn't feel that anyone should blame the Haitian migrant.
It was a traffic thing that happens.
Maybe we should have better ways to govern traffic.
Maybe kids in school buses should have seatbelts.
No one knows any answers here, David.
No one knows why there's no seatbelts in school buses.
Yeah, I mean, well, someone knows, and there have been debates on that, but we don't want to go down that path.
Sure.
But the yes, the father has come out very strongly to say this was a traffic accident.
It was a terrible thing that happened.
Yeah.
But nobody should be using my child's name.
So we're going to play that clip.
We're just going to play it.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let's just, there, it's in a, figure my stuff out.
Share.
Include sound.
Share.
Okay.
Father said that's not true.
It was an accident.
Here's what he said to you.
Politicians, Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump, they have spoken my son's name and used his death for political gain.
This needs to stop now.
They are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.
I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies.
Senator, he's asking for you to apologize.
Will you?
Dana, first of all, my heart goes out to the Clark family, and I don't bring their son's name up because they've clearly expressed a preference for politicians to not bring their son's name up.
I wish them all the best.
I can't believe what kind of a tragedy they've experienced, but I'm still going to keep on talking about what the migrants have done to Springfield, Ohio, and what Kamala Harris's open border has done to Springfield, Ohio.
Okay.
So right there, I mean, Vance never apologizes for anything, first of all.
This is not the first time that someone has said, will you apologize?
I'll note the lack of the words apologize, apology, or sorry in any of what he said.
Well, not only that, he says, I wish the family the best.
That is just weird.
Yeah, all the best.
It is weird phrasing.
Hope it works out for you.
You wish someone the best when it's their birthday.
You wish someone the best when they're going on vacation.
You wish someone the best when they retire.
You don't wish them the best when their son has died.
You offer condolences.
You offer empathy, sympathy.
But he is so weirdly lacking in any understanding of human interaction.
Just no empathy, really.
Right.
Because, I mean, we talked about it in the election update.
He's possibly a sociopath.
And it's stuff like this that makes me think that he's faking what he believes people say or do because he doesn't understand.
He has no empathy for that person.
He has no empathy for their child, just like he has no empathy for the kids gunned down in schools.
It means nothing to him.
Right.
And so, you know, his pivot from fairly weak apology that doesn't even include the word apology to, you know, rhetorical exchange blaming Harris is the skill, the speaking skill that is probably what's got him to where he is in politics.
But it's also the thing I most hate about politicians.
It's, you know, it makes everything cheap.
It makes everything expendable.
It makes everything an opportunity rather than a human moment.
Why do we have to be here?
Because this is what he does.
He uses, he and Trump and other Republicans use these events.
I mean, like you said, it went from a traffic accident to a murder.
It wasn't a murder.
It was an accident.
It was a terrible accident.
I, if, if, heaven forbid, anything like this were to happen to me, you know, my children, I would not have been nearly as nice as him as the father.
I would have probably walked up to Vance, found him somewhere, and punched his lights out.
This is not a threat.
We'll deal with this.
Another day, David.
Yes.
But I'm going to say that.
As a separate episode, don't worry.
We'll do that.
But I don't know.
I mean, you know, the father is just, I don't know.
He goes above and beyond, even as he's saying, don't, you know, basically keep my son's name out of your mouth.
Yeah.
Now, is you know, we're going to talk a lot about immigration myths.
One thing that apparently, from what I've read, not so much a myth.
The Haitian drivers in Springfield, Ohio, maybe not the best in general.
You know, I read an article in the Dispatch about this whole situation.
And the one thing they talked about is, and this is even, you know, people in the community, people who deal with the community a lot, is, yeah, they're, you know, they may be coming.
They may have never driven a car before.
Apparently, Ohio has some very lax license laws.
You just have to pass the test.
You don't have to go through any driver's ed.
So if you can go through and pass the test, you got your license.
Sounds like the 90s, man.
I mean, I got my license before the 90s, and I still had to do driver's ed.
So well, in Canada, we didn't.
We decided to pass the test.
Okay, then fix that problem.
Yeah.
But of course, that problem is an overall problem of the way they give out licenses.
It's not specifically about Haitian immigrants or anyone else.
And trying to paint the Haitian immigrants as hateful creatures that have done this purposefully to kill a young boy.
That's, I mean, that's what someone could easily get from their version of the story.
Oh, yeah.
If you don't follow it up and they're saying he murdered a kid.
If you don't look into the context, yeah.
So let's carry on with the clip.
And Dana, I think this illustrates the entire contrast between how we're trying to go about this debate and how a lot of the Democrats are trying to go about this debate.
They're talking about 12 proud boys marching in Springfield, Ohio.
They're talking about the, frankly, fake debunkings of a lot of these stories that are out there.
I'm talking to my constituents and I'm hearing terrible things about what's going on in Springfield and Kamala Harris's open border policies have caused these problems.
The hospitals are overwhelmed, Dana.
The schools are overwhelmed.
The local services are completely overwhelmed.
You have people who can't afford housing.
Homelessness has gone up.
Murders are up by 81% because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen to this small community.
I'm going to keep on talking about that.
Now, of course, we can criticize violence.
We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield.
And we should be able to do both those things simultaneously, Dana.
Okay.
So there's a lot to unpack there, most of which is baloney.
First to put it in the future.
Did you catch the real big lie there, David?
The false debunking?
It was subtle.
I didn't even catch it the first time I heard it either.
I mean, that was a lie, but it wasn't the really, really big lie, David.
There were lots of lies.
The really, really, really big lie that isn't even mentioned by Dana Bash when she goes through it and says yes and no and blah, blah, blah.
That the murder rate has increased 81%.
That's true.
I mean, there's so many.
You know, he talks about the hospitals being overwhelmed.
You know, well, he talked about other things like that.
Right.
Well, I mean, in other interviews, he talked in more detail, or maybe later in this one, with more specific claims that certain illnesses have gone up, which the Ohio Department of Public Health is like, no.
Right.
Yeah, they'll try to say that there's an AIDS epidemic now because of Haitians.
Yeah, right.
Which, I mean, which is part of other racist tropes that have been.
I mean, yeah, that goes back to the beginning of AIDS.
You know, the beginning of AIDS, it was if you were gay or Haitian, those were your two, you know, risk factors.
It also reflects the fact that foreigners are often cast for centuries now have been cast as disease carriers into the new society, right?
Right.
And that that's a very, very old thing that's trotted out many, many times by many, many divisive politicians.
To be fair, white Europeans were disease carriers when they came to the continent.
Yes.
So.
Yes, they were.
In that case, it was absolutely true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, Kevin Williamson from the dispatch in that article I mentioned, you know, he specifically addresses some of this.
Contrary to the rhetoric you hear from Vance et al., employment went up.
Yeah.
Wages went up.
Some of this is quotes, some of this is paraphrasing.
Springfield handily outperformed nearby Dayton and the country as a whole in wage growth coming out of the COVID-19 downturn.
Now, here's the thing.
Here's where he talks about homelessness and housing prices.
As Williamson points out, where population is increasing and wages are rising, some things, notably housing, will typically get more expensive.
And so, but the thing is also, as someone who has a son living in Ohio, not in any of those areas, and that son was just house hunting and had friends who were house hunting, all houses in metro areas in Ohio have skyrocketed.
They have probably skyrocketed nearly every metro area across North America.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, then I think, I can't remember if it was in this clip that we just heard or other things about, that they're supposedly overwhelming social services.
But yes, a lot of immigrants do use social services.
And those who are eligible use programs like Medicaid.
Again, a lot of this is from the dispatch.
But they also work a lot of hours, put a lot of money into the economy.
They buy houses.
They buy commercial properties.
They start businesses.
They are supporting this economy that even the mayor has said this town was withering before they came here.
Yeah, this whole, the whole bit is stupid and terrible.
But regardless, let's carry on with it.
Just once and for all, you again started this in part by saying that, which Donald Trump repeated on the debate stage that, and he didn't say anything about the policies that you're talking about.
He just said Haitians are eating dogs and cats.
Can you affirmatively say now that that is a rumor that has no basis with evidence?
Dana, the evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.
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.
Okay, quick note.
That congressional hearing, angel moms, that's the Texas Congress at the border.
And many, if not all of those children who died were from fentanyl overdose.
It's a completely different set of problems in a completely different state, completely unrelated to Ohio, which is a very long way away from Texas.
Just wanted to put that in before we continue.
Who then murdered their children?
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.
If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.
So that little clip there, that's mostly what's been shared where he mentions creating stories.
So we're going to carry on.
Then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.
You had one interview with her.
You talk about pushing back against me, Dana.
You didn't push back against the fact that she casts the deciding vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which is why a lot of Americans can't afford food and housing.
You just said that you should be talking about public policy.
Sorry, you just said that you're creating the story.
What's that, Dana?
You just said that this is a story that you created.
So that eating dogs and tax thing is not.
We are creating.
Dana, it comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents.
I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it.
I didn't create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris's policies.
Her policies did that.
But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris's policies.
Okay.
Well, first of all, he actually did create the 20,000 illegal migrants coming in because they're legal.
Right.
So recasting them as illegal rather than legal.
But I think that the point that I come back to in my head when I think about it all the time is that, yeah, he tries to reframe this away from Haitians eating cats and dogs because he knows that it's not true.
He says that there are people who have constituents, his constituents, that have come to him in his office, which would, by the way, mean that because everyone else who's tried to confirm this story, the first thing they do is they don't send people to the ground.
They make phone calls.
They call the sheriff's office in Clark County where this occurs.
They call the local police.
They call the mayor's office.
And the only answers they get from all of those are that they can't confirm anything.
They have no evidence that anything's happening, which would mean that a couple, you know, it either means that the sheriff's office and the police and the mayor's office and the local SBCA and the dog catcher and anyone else who might have any knowledge about this, who is any kind of official, are completely clueless.
And then JD Vance is more informed than them.
Or it means that they're all colluding, probably, to or weirdly, independently doing it without collusion To not to stifle this as a story, to what, for what reason?
What?
To allow Haitians to eat more dogs and cats?
Like, like, or it means that the constituents, you know, are closer to JD Vance than they are to all these other layers of government that are more immediately available to them.
And they go to JD Vance's office before they ever go to the mayor and the police and the sheriff and the dog catcher and the SBC and all that, right?
Yeah, that's that's what I was all of this is, you know, once you see more of that context, it becomes more like, why would you have a situation where none of the local people that would be on, you know, the boots on the ground, as they say, and he's trying to cast it as my constituents are the boots on the ground that are reporting this to me.
But that's not how this works, right?
Like a person whose dog actually goes missing goes to the police and complains about it and they investigate.
And then you have paperwork that shows an investigation and you can look into that.
That becomes a public record.
They track it down.
They find out what happened.
They look at all the other context clues because that's what the police are supposed to do.
And that's how this is meant to work.
A conspiracy that involves multiple different offices that all work in all different ways and all have different goals to try to accomplish this one thing is fairly insane.
But that's what you have to imagine is happening in order to imagine this is happening.
Right.
And that's, I mean, yeah, if I had, I mean, I don't have a dog or a cat, but, you know, my sons both have dogs.
And if one of them went missing, they're not calling their senator.
No.
No.
You know, if just like any other crime, you know, if someone comes in and breaks a window on my car, I'm not calling Dick Durbin.
Brian, a one who's younger than 40 years old.
I believe that was an old-timey detective, right?
No, he's my senator.
Oh, he's your senator?
He's not an old-timey detective.
Oh.
Dick Turpin was a British TV outlaw.
Okay.
All right.
That's why I got that confused.
Good thing we got this fact-finding mission here, David.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Don't mix up Dick Durbin with Dick Turpin.
Right.
That's a mistake.
Okay.
So, yeah, I mean, it's insane, but, you know, this is what Vance and Trump and other MAGA Republicans do.
They just keep stating falsehoods and pile one on top of the other.
Like, here is what I'm going to say.
Oh, you think you've debunked it?
No, I'm just going to call it a false debunking.
And, oh, where's my evidence?
It's from the people I've talked to, who, by the way, I won't give you their names.
You'll just have to trust me.
And that's where it comes from.
And you either have to believe this weirdo or you have to look at the facts.
And it's so frustrating to try to deal with someone like that.
And then even when he is called out, when he slipped and talked about creating a story, you know, that pause, that long pause after Bash says, you just said this.
You created it.
You could almost, yeah, you could almost hear the wheels turning, the little hamsters running in his head, like, oh, crap.
How do I get out of this one?
Yeah.
And of course, he dances around it and tries to backtrack.
I can understand why people didn't bother clipping the rest of it because all it is is him trying to backtrack.
Well, I mean, creating the media focus.
Right.
Well, you can double down on the media, right?
He does double down back on it, though, right?
So I can see why some people say that it's maybe a clip out of context because he does attempt to clarify that, no, no, I definitely meant also that.
But then as soon as he's talking about it again, he's again not mentioning those.
So this is a bait and switch, right?
He justifies the cat eating rhetoric by saying that it puts attention on the other issues, which he says are strained resources and blah, blah, blah.
And also he'll throw in a real, you know, real big one of, you know, increased murder rate by 81%, almost double, which is not even close to true.
The murder rate in Ohio and across the nation did increase in 2019 while Trump was still president.
But, you know, and it in starting about 2022, it has started to come down nationwide.
And I don't have this.
I looked it up this morning, but I don't have the stats up to this year for Ohio.
But this is just clearly not true based on historic data.
But they don't care.
They have shown that they don't care.
They, you know, I mean, it grew up.
They're never going to let facts get in the way.
Yeah, the migrant caravan or, you know, babies being killed after they're born or whatever.
They, they literally don't care.
And then he has the nerve to complain that Bash didn't push back and fact check Harrison Walls.
It's like, well, she wasn't, they weren't making up complete and utter nonsense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we have a name for this situation, don't we, David?
This one where he tries to say one thing and mean another.
Of course, we do.
We call it Schrodinger's meaning.
For one audience, he wants this to be about strained resources and the fact that you have a community that has to deal with a new situation.
And he'll add, if you press him on it, that it's definitely not racist.
I haven't heard him say that, but I know that that's what he'd say.
And for another audience, he wants them to spread memes about cats and revel in their base racist feelings.
He even said a few days ago, keep them cat memes rolling because he wants it to be about the grossest part of this that will, you know, make people feel this bad feeling in the pit of their stomach about supporting the other side as visceral as possible.
And yeah, absolutely.
That's what he wants, right?
Yeah.
And it goes back to the overall issue.
And I, you know, I know we've got more to discuss here, but I do want to get this from, again, you know, this, it's close to a conclusion from the dispatch article.
Yeah.
Because I think it goes to the heart of the matter.
It says the case against the Haitians isn't that they are welfare malingerers or cat eaters, or even that they are illegal immigrants who came here thanks to Joe Biden's lax border enforcement, which most of them aren't.
The real issue is that by working overtime and investing in the community, they have made life more challenging for a reliable Trump voting constituents.
Let's see, marginally employed white people on the dole.
Well, I'm gonna give a hot take here.
Drop the bomb, David, and I'm gonna sort of disagree there.
Okay.
Because the rhetoric as posed by JD Vance, and I haven't heard most of Trump's rhetoric for the last few days.
I've been blissfully ignorant of it.
Luckily you, yeah.
Yeah, I need a break every once in a while.
Plus, I need to get some yard work done.
Whenever he circles back to it being a problem, the problem when he mentions that is that they exist inside the town.
Like when you listen to it, that's what it is.
And for him and the way he frames it, the problem isn't that they're taking anything necessarily.
It isn't really that like he'll mention that they, there's a strain on resources and that, okay, and then there's cats and there's people reporting.
But whenever you listen to it, he says the problem is that they're there.
Yeah, that's the subtext of what he's saying.
The problem is that they're there at all.
And that's the message he wants to get out to the racists of the world.
Right.
That he recognizes that the problem is that they exist at all.
Yeah.
I think, you know, Kevin Williamson here was just saying what the real issue is.
Oh, right.
Some people will get on board because they've been put out by this.
Yeah.
Right.
And that, and also those are the ones, you know, who are most likely to go to JD Vance and say, hey, I have a problem with these Haitians here.
Now, they're not going to say it for the same reason we were talking about, but they're the ones most likely to communicate and say, yes, you're right.
It's terrible.
And so it's, you know, it's interesting because the Haitians are coming in.
They're working these jobs.
They're working hard.
Wasn't Trump just talking about being concerned about illegal immigrants taking black jobs?
You know, he should be concerned about these Haitian legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, if anything that he said at all was true, which, of course, none of it is.
Yeah.
But I think that's the point that I really want to make is that when he says it, that's the way it's left for someone to fill in the blanks on, is that the problem really is that they exist at all.
And that's the part that needs to be underlined.
And that's the part that everyone's sort of saying, but they're not really underlying and saying explicitly is that JD Vance is saying that they're a problem because they exist.
Yeah.
And that's that's equivalent to the words he's using.
Like that I'm not making that up.
Yeah.
But moving on, we need to go over a couple more bits of context here because there are people who point things out about things that are happening in Ohio that they say are related to this.
So there is a person who went to Facebook a few months ago and they essentially started this rumor that Haitians were eating cats.
They didn't mean to start this rumor, but they had heard this from a neighbor who had in turn heard it from someone else's friend.
So you're obviously already four points on the line before this person on Facebook puts this on Facebook.
But it's so, and I don't have the exact quote from Facebook.
I just have the article where they talk to the woman and she's, you know, didn't mean for this to happen.
It just sort of blew up.
She didn't realize somehow, remarkably, she didn't realize she was in a potentially racially, politically charged environment.
I don't know, you know, I mean, she didn't have the internet in Springfield, Ohio.
I'm not sure.
She was on lots of people post stuff on Facebook without just thinking it's a whatever thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, but it did blow up.
And this was seems to be the start of the big part of the chatter about this happening in Ohio, in Springfield, Ohio, specifically.
So many people have looked into it.
Local authorities of all stripes have looked into it and have found no corroboration despite looking into it repeatedly.
It's just because these Haitians, they're so good at it.
They're so stealthy that they just get away with it all the time.
It's part of the conspiracy, obviously.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, this Schrödinger's conspiracy, the conspiracy that's so obvious everyone should see it, but that also the people conducting it are so good, you can't find any evidence for it.
Right.
Except for the men on the street, you know, the constituents reporting it.
They know all the evidence.
It's kind of like the person with the random YouTube channel who has, who knows all the information about whatever topic it is.
Yeah.
The government won't tell you.
They have the they live sunglasses and they can see the people who are the evil ones.
Yeah, right.
And they're all out of bubblegum.
So there's another, there's a few other bits here that we need to make sure we add context to that's appropriate because right away, just in this first week here of this mania, there's there's people who are pointing to this and saying things like, you know, a conversation I already had with a guy on Twitter.
We know the Haitians are already killing geese.
How much of a stretch do you think it is to imagine they might be killing cats and dogs as well?
And this is a dishonest framing of a question.
It assumes facts that aren't established.
There is a picture of a dark-skinned man holding a dead goose that's being used for this.
It's like, yes, you see, they're killing geese for what they're doing here.
They're, you know, but this was in Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield.
It was several months ago.
This man wasn't Haitian.
People have already looked into this, so we know all these facts.
Right.
He was not a Haitian man.
He didn't kill that goose.
It was hit by a car.
He was removing it from the road.
That's why he'd picked it up.
So, you know, as soon as you add in all the extra context, it's just not related to this.
Well, and let me tell you, you know, my grandparents lived in Florida and they lived near, you know, right on a little pond lake where, of course, geese came.
And the geese, as geese are, are very annoying and they crap all over everything and they come after you if you come too near them.
And someone killed them.
And you know who it turned out to be?
Some old white dude who was tired of them doing that.
It wasn't Haitians.
Yeah.
It was, you know.
The mere fact that they disappear doesn't mean that the one you suspected all along was the one that did it.
Right.
Right.
So there's another few bits that people add in to try to loop this in.
So well, can I add on to what you were just saying too?
Because in addition to, let's say for a minute, I mean, let's talk about the guy who was, you know, lived by my grandparents who was killing the geese.
He wasn't killing cats and dogs.
You can't assume, you know, that how much of a stretch is it?
Yeah.
You know, and that's that big assumption thing.
You know, if you let in legal immigrants, how much of a stretch is it to think you're going to let in illegal immigrants?
If you and then on top of that, how much of a stretch is it that they'll be committing the same crimes here that people in their country commit?
Yeah, those crimes are committed there.
They're going to be committing those same crimes here.
I mean, yeah, it goes back to if you allow gay marriage, then what?
What's next?
You're going to allow them to marry children?
They're going to be allowed to marry geese?
Yeah.
They're going to be allowed, you know, I mean, it just goes crazier and crazier.
Right.
And that's a slippery slope argument, right?
Yeah.
Whenever you say how much of a stretch is it, well, it's a huge stretch.
There are people who go duck hunting, I presume goose hunting, turkey hunting.
That doesn't mean they go dog hunting and cat hunting.
Yeah.
So incidentally, in my research for this, I did find there is a Wikipedia article that discusses cat meat.
My wife is not allowed to read that article as a cat lover.
It's not disgusting, but it does detail some places in history that have consumed cats for meat.
And, you know, a lot of them were European countries.
There's other countries and other continents that are involved as well.
Haiti isn't mentioned, though that isn't specifically evidence that it doesn't happen in Haiti.
I don't know what happens in Haiti.
I've never been there and I can't get enough details from this far away to know.
You know what does happen in some countries, though?
What's that?
Rich sons of former presidents go to these other countries and they go on expeditions and they shoot cats.
Endangered cats, yes.
Yes.
You know, like lions and tigers.
I mean, I don't know if they're doing it.
She does.
Yeah.
You know, and they take pictures with, you know, their there's no use in doing such a thing if you don't have proof that it happened, David.
Right.
But that's, you know, somehow different.
That's okay.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
So there was a woman in Canton, Ohio, 172 miles away from Springfield, who was, there's an audio of this.
She was eating a cat on August 16th.
The audio is from, I believe, a police confrontation with her.
So again, people have looked into this.
The woman was not Haitian and there was mental illness and drugs involved in that case.
It's a sad case.
You have people who are mentally ill and sometimes also on drugs at the same time.
I think it's interesting, though, that these first two that are brought up were also from Ohio.
I I worry that we're getting a case of sort of spontaneously occurring propaganda here, in that it wasn't that there's like a group that really wants to sort of nail the Haitians or frame a immigrant population with a terrible thing so as to create a political fur,
as much as we have a sequence of events that that have sort of occurred within a certain time frame in a region that have been cobbled together by more or less local people, where maybe someone in Columbus, Ohio, where the goose was who saw the picture on Facebook or something is like, oh, and there's a thing in Springfield with this because there's big rumors of cats or something of a Facebook post.
Maybe this is related and then adds the picture into the mix and then it swirls and people go off with it.
And then a person in Canton, Ohio says, oh, well, you know, this woman was eating cats and blah, blah, blah.
And it's maybe not a perfect fit, but it also adds and they throw it in the mix and it gets swirled in.
And there are other pictures.
There's a bunch of pictures and we're not going to go through them exhaustively because there's just too many.
But there's a bunch of pictures of people who have animals who have been skinned and they're roasting them in like backyards and whatnot.
And they're claimed that they're dogs or cats or whatever.
And all the ones I've seen have been debunked.
They've been not dogs, but sheep.
They've been not cats, but chickens, that sort of thing.
It's been, you know, just a lot of people who are trying to add in.
Some of them, maybe even innocently, but I doubt it at this point.
I think everyone adding something in is trying purposefully to find an image that looks bad because most of those images aren't from Ohio.
They're, you know, people who do proper image searches and this sort of thing find where they're really from and they were really previously posted somewhere else and they find where they were originally posted and what timeframe and where they were from.
And so you have now the grifters who are trying to come in to get more engagement.
But I think what you had before this was you had people who were uninformed, probably innocently just trying to add little bits in to be like, what about this?
And maybe they also have racist tendencies.
Maybe they don't.
It's difficult to say.
But they were just trying to see, you know, what was really happening and they're they're not able to see it from their angle.
So, you know, the man who sees someone in Columbus, Ohio carrying a goose and thinks to himself, maybe this is related to that.
I mean, that seems innocent, but it still adds to the greater picture of unreality in that it gives people a reason to say things like, we know that they're killing beasts.
So how far of a stretch is it to say they're killing cats and dogs?
So yeah, like, are people ever going, I know it's a stupid question, but are people ever going to think before they post things?
Are people ever going to veer towards the kinder side rather than veer towards the this will really get them going side?
What do you think, David?
I mean, I'd like to hope so.
That's, you know, why people watch Star Trek for, you know, that view of future humanity where people don't act like this in general.
But I still have a good time in Star Trek, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, the posting pictures of things that are from a completely different thing, that happens all the time.
You could find that on Twitter all the time.
They will post something from a completely different country and be like, oh my God, this is terrible.
This country bombed this other country and look at all these dead children.
And it turns out, no, that was from seven years ago in a completely different part of the world.
Right.
But I think a lot of that is engagement.
Like, when it's in a hot topic, like a really big whirlwind thing.
I think most of those are engagement farming on purpose to try to get more eyeballs on their absolute, right?
Before it's a big, big deal, I think it's more of the first group where it's just people that are naively adding unuseful bits to this, you know, stew that makes a bad situation for a Haitian population that's otherwise just trying to get by.
Well, and sometimes it is people not necessarily engagement farming, but sometimes people are just trolls.
Well, yeah.
And they'll throw that in there.
And then they'll be like, oh, look what I've done.
I've managed to get this picture circulating.
Ha ha ha.
You know, I mean, you and I have talked before.
I've thought of conspiracies where it's like, wow, this would be funny to spread.
That's something someone might come up with.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
And C, and then later we could come up and say, ha, we were the ones who came up with this.
But no, we won't do it because I'm afraid it will spread and be taken seriously.
Yeah.
Some other general facts, not specific event facts, but more in general, is that accusations of foreign people eating treasured or precious animals in their new country, this phenomenon isn't new.
This has been happening for hundreds of years already, both in the U.S. and every other country that has had a newspaper.
I mean, it goes back to the blood libel against Jews.
Yeah, well, Jews use the blood of children in their matzah, you know, or whatever else.
Which is a lot of what's being leveled at the Haitians because they'll say that in their voodoo, they're using the cats and the dogs and the geese and whatever in their voodoo rituals.
I don't know much about voodoo and I was already too busy looking up other things related to this to try to also research voodoo.
I don't know enough about it to know for sure, but I think the answer here is a secular attitude, which isn't also wouldn't be a solution that JD Vance would be about because he doesn't want a secular approach to anything.
he wants it to be about the bible right um but i think that honestly he doesn't care what it's about as long as it promotes himself Well, yeah, but his whole shtick right now, the storyline he's currently enmeshed in, is all about how it's a traditional life and, you know, the women should be in the household and, you know, except for his wife, who's a high-powered lawyer.
Well, rules for thee and not for me.
Of color and a woman of color, I might note.
Oh, he'll wield that.
Later in that same interview, he, we don't show the clip, but he wields that as a reason why he doesn't like the proud boys and whatever.
But yeah, sure.
Sure.
So the distortion of public attention and trust with the use of fear is a time-honored tactic of desperate and shameless politicians, of which Trump is definitely one.
This is meant, and this is why I'm sure we're going to hear more of this more often.
And it won't just be Haitians in Ohio.
It will also be other populations in other places.
It will be more sly references where he's trying to dog whistle to one audience while saying something that seems to be on the up and up to another.
Because that's where we are.
He needs to bring as much fear to the table as possible.
He needs all the white people to vote for him.
He has doubled down on this.
It's all about the white straight people.
Doesn't want any of the other people involved.
He needs them all.
Right.
But you also wonder, like, I have seen it quoted.
I did not research this.
I do not stand by these numbers.
I have seen it quoted that there's like 300,000 Haitian American citizens in Florida.
Yeah.
I would hope that they are looking at this and saying, well, we can't vote for that guy.
Well, maybe.
Plus, let's face it, Trump Advance, they are already talking about things to denaturalize immigrants.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's.
And so if they're saying this in relation to Kamala Harris's to potentially undermine her candidacy in particular, this is this is actually there.
There was a, I think it may have not made it any further based on any kind of standing, but they, there was a group that wanted to bring forth a lawsuit that tried to say that Kamala Harris was not eligible to be president because her parents were not born in the United States.
Yeah.
Which isn't how natural lies citizenship works.
She was born in the United States.
And furthermore, her parents were U.S. citizens when she was born.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you'd have to change all of those rules.
It doesn't make any sense.
The same birther law, you know, birther lies.
Yeah.
That goes back to, you know, Obama.
Yeah.
I failed to take traction.
Yeah.
They also try to say that Obama was not really a citizen.
I mean, they went even further, said he wasn't even born in the U.S.
Yeah.
Show your long-form birth certificate or we won't.
Yeah, right.
But yeah, he wants all the white votes.
And he needs them.
He needs them.
He needs them.
But I'm just going to say it.
And I don't want to speak for anyone else.
I will just say I do not.
Well, I don't understand how anyone votes for Trump.
I especially don't understand how any person of color, how any Jewish person, how any woman, how any immigrant, migrant, you know, I don't understand all these people that he has targeted over the years.
I do not understand how they vote for Trump.
I don't get it.
And yet there is a certain percentage of all of those groups who will do so.
And not to mention others that I forgot, you know.
Right.
There's going to be some portion of white people who will step into that voting booth on November 5th and they're going to stop and think.
And maybe they already did thinking before, but just for the sake of this metaphor, they're going to step in that booth and they're going to stop and think, what if all that fear-mongering rhetoric is true?
Can I afford to vote for a candidate if any of that is true?
And that's why he needs that fear to be as loud and as all-encompassing as possible to put that little bit of doubt into the minds of the people he's going to claim to be protecting, which I hope I get to do an episode on Nick Fuentes before the election, but it might shock people to see the hear the actual real things he actually really says because that's the constituency that Trump is after.
Yeah, he wants this to be constantly in the news, like Vance said.
They are creating the stories.
Yeah, wants it to be loud as possible.
Yeah, they want it repeated all the time.
That's why he wants the cat memes going.
Yeah.
He wants it in people's head, ringing in their ears at all times.
Even, you know, the Republican elected officials, I think it was county commissioners of the area for where Springfield is in.
They said that they cannot now say that they will vote for Trump, which, you know, I understand that's a good first step.
But notice they didn't say they wouldn't.
Even though they know he's lying, he and Vance are lying and impugning their whole county and town.
The best they can come up with is, well, I'm not sure that we'll vote for him now.
Well, as far as I can tell, Ohio is a deeply red state, right?
A lot of it is, but one of the senators there right now is a Democrat.
Yeah, but it's gone Republican for a very long time on the but there's also, you know, there's cities.
The cities tend to be bluer.
Yeah.
You know, and so, you know, it just it depends.
I mean, they did pass a, you know, and a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion laws.
Now, the certain abortion laws, the Republican House and Senate have said, well, we're going to ignore that.
I don't know what the current status of it is, but there are people there, but I also know people in Ohio who voted for that amendment, but also will vote for Trump.
Yeah.
So I have a little wrap-up piece here, just to put a cherry on top of this thing.
So there's one last thing to note.
The Proud Boys have been seen marching through Springfield, Ohio.
They'll likely also make visits to other hotspots of racial controversy between now and Election Day.
Their goal will be to disrupt and antagonize.
This situation will become far worse if they pick a fight with a Haitian migrant in Springfield and that Haitian person fights back.
They'll have cameras out from every angle and they'll use every act of Haitian violence, even if it's only in retaliation, as a new piece of propaganda for their bent cause.
The most effective solution would be for white people to protect the Haitian population and then for white people to protect every other visibly different minority that gets caught up in what will likely be a very busy media whirlwind between now and November 5th.
The best defense against bullies is for the bystanders to stand up and tell them to go home.
Yeah, they will absolutely use it.
It's, you know, like you said, if they do something in retaliation, if the Proud Boys gets in, one of the Proud Boys gets in someone's face, some person of color, and they shove that person of color and the person of color does what I said I wanted to do to, you know, what I would have done with JD Vance if I were in that situation, then they'll get that on camera.
And it's like in football where that would be the U.S. football.
Right.
You know, where so often one player after a play is over will shove another player and then the player who is shoved pushes back and they're the one who gets seen and called for the penalty.
Yeah.
And so we're left with hoping that hoping that the minority populations that have now been and will eventually be targeted by the national Trump campaign have more magnanimity than the people who support Trump.
That's really what we're hoping for, that they can weather whatever level of indignity is thrust upon them in such a way that they don't, you know, in retaliation, make this worse.
It's a difficult thing for me to try to tell people to not protect yourselves because I believe people should protect themselves.
Like I, you know, if someone were to push me, I, you know, now I would maybe think about it.
But when I was younger, I would have pushed back.
Yeah, when I was younger, I mean, I did not get in fights, but when someone fought with me, they lost usually.
I mean, there were some, let me, let me get that straight.
In high school, no, there were bullies who definitely were bigger than me and everything else.
But earlier, yeah, someone would pick a fight with me because, you know, oh, let's pick a fight with the nerd.
And they'd end up with the bloody nose and, you know, the bloody shirt, you know, from that bloody nose.
Now, you know, well, I can think of one time in my adult life when, you know, there was a bully situation.
All I did was dump a bucket of ice over their head, you know, and then, you know, we were restrained, but and it wasn't a football celebration.
But yeah, it is a hard situation when emotions flare like that.
And, you know, I can only imagine.
Yeah.
And so that's my hope that we can find a way to not make this worse because it won't just be worse for the minority populations.
It will also be worse for everyone else.
Yes.
Anything that can push this election closer to a Trump victory, we really need to avoid.
It has to be.
So, yeah.
With that, I'm done.
Where can people find you, David?
People can find me at on Twitter at David Bloomberg.
Same with Blue Sky on Threads.
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Right.
So if anyone has any comments, questions, complaints, concerns about this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
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