A Failed Feline Gambit

The debate came and went, and all the while a man stood on stage and said his source was "TV"

A Failed Feline Gambit

Racism and misogyny blended together in a furious feline folly: the Republican strategy in the 2024 U.S. Presidential race has shifted towards cats.

JD Vance—a human being with skin—has previously made comments disparaging "childless cat ladies," drawing the ire of women across the country. Literally just going about their lives while being women while this jabronus maximus is out here trying to win over voters by insulting their life choices based on their reproductive systems.

I saw this picture that NPR used in their article about Vance and I had to take a quintuple-take.

This week, Vance started to echo another cat-related push from the far right: a deeply racist and false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating people's cats.

I was prepping to write about that with the story ending there, but then the debate happened last night, and Trump strongly reiterated that already-debunked story. He was (shockingly!) fact-checked immediately by the moderators, stating that there is no evidence for that, and that the city manager of Springfield, Ohio has already stated that there are no reports of that happening at all. Trumps response was that he saw it on TV, implying that means it must be true.

He has since taken to Truth Social to post a flurry of…truths? about the subject, trying to make it appear as though he was right after all, because he'd rather be racist than accurate.

Republican commentators and talking heads are now taking shots at the debate moderators, who fact checked Trump on some of his more absurd claims, including the "immigrants eating cats" thing, and his repeated claim that people are carrying babies to term and then "executing them" after they're born. His words: "executing the babies."

"There are no states in the country where executing babies is legal," said the moderators. "The city manager of Springfield Ohio states that there are no such reports of pets being stolen and eaten," said the moderators. These are the things that were fact checked.

Trump went on to continuously claim that "millions upon millions" of the most horrible criminals imaginable are flooding into our country and taking "jobs currently held by Black people," in a truly bizarre attempt to blend his xenophobia with an insultingly low effort appeal to Black voters.

I am not a Kamala Harris stan. I have no interest in using my platform to tell you who to vote for on your ballot. That's your ballot and your choice. Simultaneously, without even touching on Harris' words from last night, it is blatantly clear that Trump is fucking busted. Harris goaded him into talking about the dumbest shit imaginable by simply seeding the notion that people think his rallies are boring. Dude got more upset about that jab than anything else from the debate, and he started going off the damn rails from it.

For now, I'll just quote clipping in their song "Chapter 319":

Donald Trump is a white supremacist (full stop). If you vote for him again, you're a white supremacist (full stop).

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