J.D. Vance Under Fire Yet Again for More Racist Comments
Vice presidential candidate and Ohio senator J.D. Vance has now made racist comments toward Haitian immigrants on two separate occasions, proliferating false information about kidnapping of pets, and now, the spreading of disease —notably HIV/AIDS.
The first of these racist claims came on September 10 via X (Twitter), when Vance posted that while his office has received potentially false complaints about Haitian immigrants abducting pets and wildlife, he has confirmed that the overwhelming amount of hospitals in the area with rising cases of tuberculosis and HIV can be attributed to Haitian migrants. He vocalized this fabrication on national news, saying to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins that “communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris’ border policies have done.” He thendoubled down on it on Face the Nation, citing Harris’ “open border” as the reason for the rise in disease and, apparently, an 81% increase in murders in Springfield, Ohio.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Vance’s comments are driven by a smear campaign against Haitian immigrants within the state of Ohio. Trump infamously said in his debate with Harris on September 10, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats,” and continued to repeat this debunked nonsense throughout the debate and further on into his campaign. Vance has since admitted that the claims about eating pets have been proven to be false, and health records from Clark County, which includes Springfield, show that cases of HIV and tuberculosis have actually decreased since Trump was in office. The strain on health resources that Vance keeps yapping about are actually just a result of a 12,000-15,0000 person population increase in the county—It has absolutely zero relation to the country of origin for these immigrants.
However, Trump has been pushing this horrific narrative, though not to such ridiculous extremes, for a long time. In 2017 and 2018, respectively, he said that Haitian immigrants to the United States “all have AIDS” and called Haiti a “shithole” country. In a painfully ironic twist, it’s actually right-wing policies that have led to some of the worst HIV outbreaks in America as of late—The worst HIV breakout in the history of the state of Indiana happened under gubernatorial health policies from Trump’s former VP Mike Pence. Unsurprisingly, Vance, his new VP pick, has a history of being anti-LGBTQ+, so his outrage for the supposed rise in HIV cases is not shocking.
About 15,000 Haitian immigrants reside in the city of Springfield, Ohio, and have faced barrages of racist and xenophobic violence from the conservative right. Neo-Nazi groups in the area have desecrated their churches, and a man recently was sentenced to 20 years in prison after attacking eight Haitian individuals in the area. Since the Trump-Vance campaign has been pushing these false racist claims, two schools in the area have had to shut down over a period of two days due to bomb threats, and Wittenburg University, a college in the area, had to take safety measures after receiving a shooting threat specifically against Haitian students. Black locals of Springfield have reported harassment due to the assumption that they’d immigrated from Haiti.
The xenophobic tomfoolery promoted by Trump and Vance is having real, profound effects on not just Haitians who have every right to live in America (despite repeated claims by the campaign that they’re here illegally) without fear of being harassed or murdered.
Photo courtesy of social media
