JD Vance loves a Sunday morning media blitz.

In his latest round of television interviews, it appears he will not be swayed by the mounting evidence that the racist lies he amplified about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—which former President Trump repeated on the debate stage this week to 67 million viewers—are demonstrably false. Instead, Trump’s historically unpopular running mate doubled down on his claims in a series of interviews on CNN, NBC, and CBS—even after the reporters fact-checked him.

Let’s start with Vance’s interview on CNN’s State of the Union, which saw the most time dedicated to the topic—and featured Vance’s most combative exchange.

Host Dana Bash asked Vance why he continues amplifying the claims, given that Springfield has received multiple bomb threats that led to two hospitals going into lockdown Saturday, plus several schools and the city hall being evacuated since Trump mentioned the lies at the debate. As Bash also pointed out, Springfield’s own mayor told a local television station, “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”

“These are your constituents,” Bash began, “so why are you putting them at risk by continuing to spread claims about Haitian immigrants, despite officials in your state saying that there’s no evidence and pleading for you to stop?”

Vance replied by insisting that he was amplifying the claims of “firsthand” accounts he heard from his constituents—even though, as Bash pointed out, they don’t appear to have any basis in reality.

On Friday, NBC News reported that the Springfield resident who first shared the false claims on Facebook about migrants eating pets—which she allegedly heard through the grapevine of her neighbor’s daughter’s friend—said she had no firsthand knowledge of any incident and regretted that her post sparked a national rumor, adding, “I feel for the Haitian community.” And as Bash noted, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office examined 11 months of 911 calls and found only one, on Aug. 26, that alleged four Haitians were carrying geese within the city of Springfield, according to a report in the Springfield News-Sun. The sheriff’s office directed the call to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, whose officials were not able to substantiate the claim—but that did not stop Donald Trump Jr. from posting audio of the 911 call to X this week.

But Vance, ultimately, did not seem to be interested in confronting these inconvenient facts. Instead, he called Bash’s implication that his words led to the threats in Springfield “disgusting” and said her question was “more appropriate for a democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist,” leaving Bash visibly shocked. “We can criticize violence,” Vance added later in the interview. “We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield, and we should be able to do both those things simultaneously.”

When Bash once again gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the rumors about migrants eating pets were unfounded, he did not save himself. “The evidence,” he told Bash, “is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.”

Things didn’t go much better for Vance on NBC or CBS. He made the same argument—that he believed the accounts he heard from unspecified constituents over fact-checks from officials and the media—to Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. When she asked why he couldn’t make his argument about immigration without amplifying these lies, he referenced yet another debunked rumor about migrants eating pets in the Ohio city of Dayton, about 30 miles southwest of Springfield.

On CBS the same morning, Vance told Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation, that while he condemned violence and the threats that have been phoned into Springfield, he did not believe the claims were “false rumors,” adding, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans…the American media is more interested in fact checking innocent people who are begging for relief than they are in investigating some of these claims.” (Again: Multiple officials have confirmed there is no evidence to support these claims, including the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.)

Predictably, Vance and his cronies on the right used the interviewers’ fact-checking of him as evidence of their alleged biases. Donald Trump Jr. lauded him in a post on X for “embarrassing the Fake News.”

As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, Springfield is dealing with real challenges as it seeks to accommodate roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a town of 60,000 people: Rent has gotten more expensive, in part due to landlords reducing the number of affordable housing units in the town, and schools are in need of more funding to support their growing numbers. And now, thanks to Vance and others involved in amplifying the falsehoods, there are new issues to worry about in Springfield: Schools and hospitals getting bomb threats, and Haitians are living in fear. But if Vance’s trio of Sunday interviews were any indication, none of this, apparently, is enough to stop him.

JD Vance loves a Sunday morning media blitz.

In his latest round of television interviews, it appears he will not be swayed by the mounting evidence that the racist lies he amplified about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—which former President Trump repeated on the debate stage this week to 67 million viewers—are demonstrably false. Instead, Trump’s historically unpopular running mate doubled down on his claims in a series of interviews on CNN, NBC, and CBS—even after the reporters fact-checked him.

Let’s start with Vance’s interview on CNN’s State of the Union, which saw the most time dedicated to the topic—and featured Vance’s most combative exchange.

Host Dana Bash asked Vance why he continues amplifying the claims, given that Springfield has received multiple bomb threats that led to two hospitals going into lockdown Saturday, plus several schools and the city hall being evacuated since Trump mentioned the lies at the debate. As Bash also pointed out, Springfield’s own mayor told a local television station, “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”

“These are your constituents,” Bash began, “so why are you putting them at risk by continuing to spread claims about Haitian immigrants, despite officials in your state saying that there’s no evidence and pleading for you to stop?”

Vance replied by insisting that he was amplifying the claims of “firsthand” accounts he heard from his constituents—even though, as Bash pointed out, they don’t appear to have any basis in reality.

On Friday, NBC News reported that the Springfield resident who first shared the false claims on Facebook about migrants eating pets—which she allegedly heard through the grapevine of her neighbor’s daughter’s friend—said she had no firsthand knowledge of any incident and regretted that her post sparked a national rumor, adding, “I feel for the Haitian community.” And as Bash noted, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office examined 11 months of 911 calls and found only one, on Aug. 26, that alleged four Haitians were carrying geese within the city of Springfield, according to a report in the Springfield News-Sun. The sheriff’s office directed the call to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, whose officials were not able to substantiate the claim—but that did not stop Donald Trump Jr. from posting audio of the 911 call to X this week.

But Vance, ultimately, did not seem to be interested in confronting these inconvenient facts. Instead, he called Bash’s implication that his words led to the threats in Springfield “disgusting” and said her question was “more appropriate for a democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist,” leaving Bash visibly shocked. “We can criticize violence,” Vance added later in the interview. “We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield, and we should be able to do both those things simultaneously.”

When Bash once again gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the rumors about migrants eating pets were unfounded, he did not save himself. “The evidence,” he told Bash, “is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.”

Things didn’t go much better for Vance on NBC or CBS. He made the same argument—that he believed the accounts he heard from unspecified constituents over fact-checks from officials and the media—to Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. When she asked why he couldn’t make his argument about immigration without amplifying these lies, he referenced yet another debunked rumor about migrants eating pets in the Ohio city of Dayton, about 30 miles southwest of Springfield.

On CBS the same morning, Vance told Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation, that while he condemned violence and the threats that have been phoned into Springfield, he did not believe the claims were “false rumors,” adding, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans…the American media is more interested in fact checking innocent people who are begging for relief than they are in investigating some of these claims.” (Again: Multiple officials have confirmed there is no evidence to support these claims, including the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.)

Predictably, Vance and his cronies on the right used the interviewers’ fact-checking of him as evidence of their alleged biases. Donald Trump Jr. lauded him in a post on X for “embarrassing the Fake News.”

As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, Springfield is dealing with real challenges as it seeks to accommodate roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a town of 60,000 people: Rent has gotten more expensive, in part due to landlords reducing the number of affordable housing units in the town, and schools are in need of more funding to support their growing numbers. And now, thanks to Vance and others involved in amplifying the falsehoods, there are new issues to worry about in Springfield: Schools and hospitals getting bomb threats, and Haitians are living in fear. But if Vance’s trio of Sunday interviews were any indication, none of this, apparently, is enough to stop him.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

As far back as 2016, work on AI-based chatbots revealed that they have a disturbing tendency to reflect some of the worst biases of the society that trained them. But as large language models have become ever larger and subjected to more sophisticated training, a lot of that problematic behavior has been ironed out. For example, I asked the current iteration of ChatGPT for five words it associated with African Americans, and it responded with things like "resilience" and "creativity."

But a lot of research has turned up examples where implicit biases can persist in people long after outward behavior has changed. So some researchers decided to test whether the same might be true of LLMs. And was it ever.

By interacting with a series of LLMs using examples of the African American English sociolect, they found that the AI's had an extremely negative view of its speakers—something that wasn't true of speakers of another American English variant. And that bias bled over into decisions the LLMs were asked to make about those who use African American English.

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Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said a lot of wild things during his Sunday morning media blitz. But one of his comments has received far less attention than the others: Vance described a federal program that has distributed nearly $2 billion to mostly Black farmers who experienced discrimination as “disgraceful,” suggesting that it is racist against white people.

And now, the head of the largest group of Black farmers across the country is condemning Vance’s assertions.

“He owes us an apology,” John Boyd, Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told me. The remarks, Boyd added, were “disgraceful, deplorable, dumb, degrading, and disrespectful to the nation’s Black farmers, the oldest occupation in history for Black people.”

A spokesperson for Vance also did not respond to questions from Mother Jones beyond requesting that we include the senator’s full remarks, which came during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, during which Vance was asked about the racist attacks against his wife, Usha Vance. After condemning them, he added:

I frankly think that unfortunately, a lot of people on the left have leaned into this by trying to categorize people by skin color and then give special benefits or special amounts of discrimination. The Harris Administration, for example, handed out farm benefits to people based on skin color. I think that’s disgraceful. I don’t think we should say, you get farm benefits if you’re a Black farmer, you don’t get farm benefits if you’re a white farmer. All farmers, we want to thrive, and that’s certainly the President Trump and JD Vance view of the situation.

But Vance’s assertions here are an inaccurate portrayal of the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, the federal program established through the Inflation Reduction Act. Contrary to Vance’s claim, applicants were not limited to Black farmers; Any farmer who had experienced discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture—including based on sexual orientation or gender identity, religion, age, or disability—was eligible to apply. Last month, the USDA announced it had distributed payments to more than 43,000 people in all 50 states through the program, which Congress allocated $2.2 billion for.

While the USDA has not released data on the racial breakdown of farmers who received money through DFAP, Boyd said 85 percent of the funds went to Black farmers “because it’s obvious we were treated the worst.” The history of the government’s discrimination against Black farmers specifically is well-documented, including in Mother Jones‘ recent award-winning investigation, “40 Acres and a Lie“—done in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal—which documents how the federal government stole land it gave to Black farmers following the Civil War. Black farmers also faced barriers to receiving loans, credit, and support compared to white farmers.

Still, that hasn’t stopped some white people—including Vance and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—from trying to claim federal aid to Black farmers perpetuates “reverse racism.” White farmers have also filed lawsuits against promised debt relief for Black farmers that Congress approved in 2021, claiming it discriminated against them.

Supporting the Trump-Vance ticket was now “off the table,” Boyd said in response to Vance’s remarks. Though he called Vice President Kamala Harris a “breath of fresh air,” Boyd called on Harris to commit support to Black farmers before the election—specifically, through debt relief for Black farmers. The Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

In the meantime, Boyd is still waiting for an apology from Vance—but he’s not holding his breath. “We got the money,” Boyd said. DFAP, he added, was “a huge victory for Black farmers.”

In late June, I was at a candidate forum in Sun City West, a sprawling retirement community northwest of Phoenix, when an Arizona Republican sitting next to me leaned over and offered a suggestion.

“You need to do a story,” she said, “about the ads Masters is running against Hamadeh.”

The primary, which ends on July 30, features both Blake Masters, the party’s 2022 nominee for US Senate, and Abe Hamadeh, the party’s 2022 nominee for attorney general. The candidates were close allies two years ago, touring the state as part of a slate with election-denying gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. This time it’s a different story. The Republican primary to fill Rep. Debbie Lesko’s seat in the eighth congressional district is one of the ugliest I’ve seen in 15 years covering conservative politics.

And, as the voter at Sun City West noted, a large part of that is because of the bigoted campaign Masters and his allies have waged against Hamadeh. One ad in question, which actually was paid for not by Masters himself but by an outside group called the American Principles Project that’s supporting him, asks viewers if they “think America was founded on Islamic principles,” before informing them “that’s what dishonest Abe Hamdeh thinks.” It features a photo of Hamadeh in a white robe standing in Mecca. It goes on to say that Hamadeh rejected “the Judeo-Christian values that made America great.”

“We have enough terrorist sympathizers in Congress,” it continues. “On Election Day, never forget what’s at stake.”

The source for Hamadeh’s comment is a post at “RonPaulForums.com” from 2009. As the Arizona Republic explained, Hamadeh was responding to an Islamophobic poster by arguing that “our own Constitution of the United States was based off of Abrahamic religions, including Islam.” The photo of Hamadeh was taken during a visit to Saudi Arabia while he was serving in the US Army. His parents are Druze and Muslim, and he currently describes his faith as “non-denominational.”

Another ad, from Masters’ campaign says that Hamadeh was “born to two Syrian parents who were here illegally.” According to the Republic, his father faced deportation for overstaying his visa. The ad goes on to feature the same photo of a young Hamadeh in Mecca, with the same quote about “Islamic principles.” 

Masters didn’t just plaster the airwaves with the Islamophobic attacks. His campaign also put up signs around the district with the photo of Hamadeh in Mecca:

Masters also sought to use the two candidates’ past friendship against his political rival. Earlier this year, the Republic also published text messages Hamadeh exchanged with Masters in which they discussed the fallout from the 2022 election. Hamadeh, who lost to Democrat Kris Mayes by 280 votes and—like Lake—is still challenging his loss in court a year-and-a-half later, acknowledged to Masters that “the crazies love me because they see me fighting.”

For his part, Hamadeh has attempted to take down Masters with his own bit of culture-war politics. In one digital ad, his campaign called Masters a “Leftist,” and charged that “Blake lived in a nudist vegan commune” and “played on the women’s basketball team at Stanford.” They also featured a photo of Masters wearing faux-warpaint. (All of these details were reported, as it happens, by my colleague Noah Lanard in a 2022 Mother Jones profile.) Both candidates are billing themselves as intensely anti-immigrant. Masters’ other campaign signs say “Deport Illegals” in big letters, and “Now! Now! Now!” above that; Hamadeh, nonetheless, accused Masters of being soft on border security, citing an old LiveJournal post.

Masters and Hamadeh are not the only candidates running, although they are the favorites. The field also includes state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was indicted earlier this year for serving as a fake elector following the 2020 election and was on the Capitol grounds during the January 6th insurrection. (Kern’s campaign offers t-shirts with his mug shot on it.) There’s also former Rep. Trent Franks, an extremely anti-abortion conservative Christian who represented the area in Washington for parts of seven terms before resigning in 2017 after admitting to having asked several female staffers to bear his children.

In early February 2017, just as Donald Trump was settling into the White House, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics snagged a special guest for an event: JD Vance. His bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy had been published the previous summer, and in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, Vance was widely seen in political and media circles as someone who could explain Trump’s surprising win and the Americans who had supported the former reality TV star. As part of IOP’s series called “America in the Trump Era,” journalist Alex Kotlowitz posed questions to Vance, who at that point was positioning himself as a center-right public intellectual who, as an Appalachian native, had emerged from Trump land and could be a guide for those mystified by Trump’s success.

Kotlowitz began with queries focused on the book. Then he shifted to the 2016 election and asked Vance, “Where do you think race played into all this? Because I think the sort of myth is that all these Trump supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you think it played?”

Vance replied:

Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election. I think race will always play a role in our country, It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons.

Vance was unequivocal on this point: an undetermined amount of Trump voters were racists.

But he added that he did not believe that racial animus motivated all of Trump’s voters and that he thought the country had become less racist:

I always resist the idea that the real thing driving most Trump voters was racial anxiety or racial animus, partially because I didn’t see it. I mean, the thing that really motivated people to vote for Trump, first in the primary and then in the general election, was three words: jobs, jobs, jobs. Right?… And so it strikes me as a little bizarre to chalk it up to sort of racial animus because, one, the country is less racist now than it was 15 years ago, and we weren’t electing Donald Trump 15 years ago. And, two, that wasn’t the core part of his message and that wasn’t what a lot of his voters were really connecting with.

Still, Vance conceded that the 2016 election had been “hyper-racialized.” Yet he didn’t blame Trump or his electorate for that. Instead, he pointed a finger at extremists within the conservative movement.

There were all these alt-right people, and I’m in an interracial marriage, and I got a lot of stuff directed at me and my wife on online message boards and Twitter and so forth. So I definitely buy this was a racialized discourse unlike any that we’ve had in a really long time. But I don’t blame Trump’s voters for that. The people that I blame for that are actually typically well-educated coastal elitists, people like [avowed white nationalist] Richard Spencer and the alt-right. It’s telling that the alt-right is driven by primarily very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Michelle Obama in these really nasty ways. It’s 2,500, I mean whatever the number of people is, I’ve heard estimates up to like 100,000. But these are people who are really well educated and are cognitive elites in their own weird way.

“Like Steve Bannon?” Kotlowitz asked. Vance replied, “Right.”

Vance did not spell out how Bannon and this small band of conservatives had injected racism into the 2016 campaign. (In 2016, before Bannon joined Trump’s campaign as a strategist, he was running Breitbart News and referred to it as the “platform for the alt-right.”) But it was odd that Vance held only the alt-right responsible, rather than Trump, whose rhetoric had appealed to racists and other extremists.

Vance also noted that he was no fan of the “Muslim ban” that Trump proposed during the 2016 campaign: “As soon as he talked about a Muslim ban, all of a sudden a lot of voters actually supported the idea of a Muslim ban. I just don’t think that’s surprising because, again, people follow the rhetoric of their politicians. And so I did worry about that. I continue to worry about that.”

Vance’s remarks at the IOP event were in keeping with his general stance at that time. He was a moderate Never Trumper who had told NPR in 2016 that Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He had written that Trump was “cultural heroin.” Privately, he had compared Trump to Hitler.

Vance was walking a fine line those days. He was a Trump critic but wouldn’t go too far in blasting Trump in public. His value was his ability to interpret Trump and his voters for those puzzled by Trump’s win. And he often talked about the need to respect Trump voters.

But on this occasion, Vance acknowledged that a portion of Trump’s base was comprised of racists. And he slammed the alt-right, a slice of the conservative movement long accused of racism that had enthusiastically embraced Trump.

These days, Vance, now a Republican senator from Ohio and Trump’s running mate, is fully aligned with the extreme far right (including whatever remains of the alt-right) and Bannon, the imprisoned former Trump aide who serves as an informal strategist and cheerleader for the Trump movement. It’s inconceivable that Vance would now characterize a chunk of Trump’s voters as racists or badmouth Bannon and his followers. That’s not because the dynamics of Trump’s electorate have changed. It’s because Vance has.

In early February 2017, just as Donald Trump was settling into the White House, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics snagged a special guest for an event: JD Vance. His bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy had been published the previous summer, and in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, Vance was widely seen in political and media circles as someone who could explain Trump’s surprising win and the Americans who had supported the former reality TV star. As part of IOP’s series called “America in the Trump Era,” journalist Alex Kotlowitz posed questions to Vance, who at that point was positioning himself as a center-right public intellectual who, as an Appalachian native, had emerged from Trump land and could be a guide for those mystified by Trump’s success.

Kotlowitz began with queries focused on the book. Then he shifted to the 2016 election and asked Vance, “Where do you think race played into all this? Because I think the sort of myth is that all these Trump supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you think it played?”

Vance replied:

Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election. I think race will always play a role in our country, It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons.

Vance was unequivocal on this point: an undetermined amount of Trump voters were racists.

But he added that he did not believe that racial animus motivated all of Trump’s voters and that he thought the country had become less racist:

I always resist the idea that the real thing driving most Trump voters was racial anxiety or racial animus, partially because I didn’t see it. I mean, the thing that really motivated people to vote for Trump, first in the primary and then in the general election, was three words: jobs, jobs, jobs. Right?… And so it strikes me as a little bizarre to chalk it up to sort of racial animus because, one, the country is less racist now than it was 15 years ago, and we weren’t electing Donald Trump 15 years ago. And, two, that wasn’t the core part of his message and that wasn’t what a lot of his voters were really connecting with.

Still, Vance conceded that the 2016 election had been “hyper-racialized.” Yet he didn’t blame Trump or his electorate for that. Instead, he pointed a finger at extremists within the conservative movement.

There were all these alt-right people, and I’m in an interracial marriage, and I got a lot of stuff directed at me and my wife on online message boards and Twitter and so forth. So I definitely buy this was a racialized discourse unlike any that we’ve had in a really long time. But I don’t blame Trump’s voters for that. The people that I blame for that are actually typically well-educated coastal elitists, people like [avowed white nationalist] Richard Spencer and the alt-right. It’s telling that the alt-right is driven by primarily very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Michelle Obama in these really nasty ways. It’s 2,500, I mean whatever the number of people is, I’ve heard estimates up to like 100,000. But these are people who are really well educated and are cognitive elites in their own weird way.

“Like Steve Bannon?” Kotlowitz asked. Vance replied, “Right.”

Vance did not spell out how Bannon and this small band of conservatives had injected racism into the 2016 campaign. (In 2016, before Bannon joined Trump’s campaign as a strategist, he was running Breitbart News and referred to it as the “platform for the alt-right.”) But it was odd that Vance held only the alt-right responsible, rather than Trump, whose rhetoric had appealed to racists and other extremists.

Vance also noted that he was no fan of the “Muslim ban” that Trump proposed during the 2016 campaign: “As soon as he talked about a Muslim ban, all of a sudden a lot of voters actually supported the idea of a Muslim ban. I just don’t think that’s surprising because, again, people follow the rhetoric of their politicians. And so I did worry about that. I continue to worry about that.”

Vance’s remarks at the IOP event were in keeping with his general stance at that time. He was a moderate Never Trumper who had told NPR in 2016 that Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He had written that Trump was “cultural heroin.” Privately, he had compared Trump to Hitler.

Vance was walking a fine line those days. He was a Trump critic but wouldn’t go too far in blasting Trump in public. His value was his ability to interpret Trump and his voters for those puzzled by Trump’s win. And he often talked about the need to respect Trump voters.

But on this occasion, Vance acknowledged that a portion of Trump’s base was comprised of racists. And he slammed the alt-right, a slice of the conservative movement long accused of racism that had enthusiastically embraced Trump.

These days, Vance, now a Republican senator from Ohio and Trump’s running mate, is fully aligned with the extreme far right (including whatever remains of the alt-right) and Bannon, the imprisoned former Trump aide who serves as an informal strategist and cheerleader for the Trump movement. It’s inconceivable that Vance would now characterize a chunk of Trump’s voters as racists or badmouth Bannon and his followers. That’s not because the dynamics of Trump’s electorate have changed. It’s because Vance has.