J.D. VANCE AND CHRIS RUFO'S PET-EATING "EVIDENCE": I CALL BULLSHIT

A few days ago, one of the worst people in America, Christopher Rufo, offered a "bounty" for evidence that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

(Original tweets here, here, and here.)

Rufo now claims to have his hard evidence -- except that his claim doesn't involve Haitians, doesn't involve an incident in Springfield ... and looks a lot like bullshit.

EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer.https://t.co/8QveTJy4Vp pic.twitter.com/PxuJQ7fJc9

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 14, 2024

None of which prevented J.D. Vance from retweeting the claim and adding:

Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves.

Another "debunked" story that turned out to have merit.

Now, let's examine the "evidence" as described on Rufo's Substack:

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!” ...

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

According to the original witness, whose son was friendly with the neighbors, there was no doubt about what happened last summer. “They was barbecuing the damn cat!” he said. His son’s mother had previously witnessed the family butchering a mammal on the street, but the cats on the barbeque put him in such a state of shock, he felt the need to film it.

A reminder: The Democratic Republic of the Congo is not Haiti. It's not even on the same continent as Haiti. But hey, Those People all look alike, right?

So this allegedly took place in the wrong city, with migrants from the wrong continent. The sources are two anonymous witnesses, and the documentary "evidence" is a social media video that isn't linked to a contemporaneous post. Seems like a solid story so far!

Now, have you noticed anything unusual about the cooking technique demonstrated in the video? Try to suppress your revulsion at the possibility that cats are being cooked. Think about how we cook other animals on a grill. (My apologies -- I'm going to talk about the idea of cat grilling for the next several paragraphs.)

If you were cooking a chicken on a grill, or maybe a game animal like a rabbit, would you cook it with the legs up in the air?

You wouldn't. You'd separate the pieces, or maybe spatchcock the animal, flattening it so the legs would get grilled as well as the body.

That's what you'd do to cats if you were actually grilling them. But if you were making a phony video about cat grilling, this is how you'd depict it. You'd want it to look as if you just happened upon the barbaric practice taking place in someone else's yard and had to film it from some distance. How would you get the animals on the grill to look like cats if all the pieces were flat on the grill? It would be impossible. So they're depicted this way, with legs in the air, a way no one would ever actually cook them.

And even if you think the griller didn't think the legs were worth grilling, maybe because they don't have enough meat, answer me this: How would you flip these cats over to grill the other side?

So this video is fake. Maybe it was legitimately posted on social media last year or maybe it was a fake recently created, but it was created to slander immigrants either last year or a couple of days ago. That won't prevent J.D. Vance from citing it as genuine, probably all the way to November.