‘Clearly chicken you weirdo’: People respond to JD Vance sharing video he claims shows migrants grilling cats

Republican vice-presidential candidate Senator JD Vance continues to stoke outrage against foreign-born members of his own constituency, sharing video footage with his 1.9 million social media followers that he claimed showed African migrants in Dayton, Ohio “eating cats” — but instead appears to show nothing more than poultry cooking on an outdoor grill.

“Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves,” Vance posted Saturday on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. “Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”

Vance has claimed, falsely, in recent days that Haitians — who are not Africans — living in Springfield — a town of 58,000 which is not Dayton — were stealing, killing, and consuming their neighbors’ pets.

The video was originally posted by the right-wing Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who offered a $5,000 bounty to anyone that could provide “proof” of cat-eating immigrants in Ohio. The footage was filmed last year in Dayton, Rufo wrote in a companion article published Saturday on his personal website. He said he spoke with the person who shot the video, and that this person said the cat-eaters were “some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” according to Rufo’s piece, which insists the claims were verified by “multiple witnesses and visual cross-references.”

“One can make the case for migration, but one cannot, at the same time, deny that it comes with costs — which, in this case, seem to include a pair of flayed cats on a blue barbeque in Dayton, Ohio,” the article concludes.

Backlash was swift, with replies ranging from, “I find it strange that a self-professed ‘hillbilly’ doesn’t know what whole chickens look like,” to, “HOW DO YOU NOT