Who's more likely to eat your cat? An investigation.
JD Vance says Haitian immigrants in Ohio are kidnapping and eating pets. This is false. It’s been debunked by the police department, of Springfield, Ohio, who say they have received no complaints of immigrants stealing and eating pets.
However, I am 100% certain that if Vance were at Mar-a-Largo, and Donald Trump was like, “Let’s steal a cat and eat it,” Vance would go, “Raw? Or wait wait, deep-fried?”
The one bright spot in what will likely be an unpleasant campaign and election is that Trump must be seething with rage that he let his idiot sons convince him to pick this abject weirdo, who can’t open his mouth without being strange or alienating every woman in a bid to play to the incel crowd.
His derision of “childless cat ladies?” It’s just … so. fucking politically dumb. Republican women also have infertility issues. Everyone has friends who didn’t have biological kids for various reasons.
Would you trust this man with your cat?
The hilarious thing about Vance, and his precursor Ron DeSantis, is they try to be as mean as Trump—particularly over immigration—but they lack his humor and charisma (yes Blue MAGA, he’s funny, sorry).
This cunt has immigrant parents-in-law. As he’s previously admitted, they are helping raise his children, as is often the case in immigrant families. This is one of the reasons crime is lower in immigrant communities—deep social and familial ties. I have many questions for his Indian-American wife, such as when she plans to divorce this weirdo before she alienates all of her (obviously) liberal friends.
“Notice the difference? NOTICE THE DIFFERENCE!? NOTICE THE DIFFERENCE!?” the racists will undoubtedly react. Yes, elderly Indian immigrants are not the same as newly arrived Haitian refugees. So? This country should be paying refugees and immigrants to come. So should Western Europe, which is instead going around electing Nazis for fear of immigrants. “We have some bad bad people and we have to get them out,” Trump announced ahead of today’s debate.
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Yesterday, I had lunch with my friend Humada. He’s a sweet 23-year-old from Syria working to make money to send back to his family, who are still in Idlib, Syria. His parents are too old, his siblings are too young, to make the trip and settle in a new place. 23 though. What a good age to do that. So he’s largely cheerful, optimistic and curious about Bulgarian culture.
Except, he did three weeks of heavy construction, and the guy who took him to the site disappeared and blocked him without paying him his wages. “Now I can’t send money back to my family.”
After lunch (at a Happy restaurant, duh), I took him to Sveta Nedelya. It’s a historic Church. It was built in the 10th century. Historic, also, because of an event, that I swear was plagiarized by Game of Thrones.
In 1925, Bulgarian Communists killed a prominent general. The assassination was a ruse. His funeral drew hundreds to Svetya Nedelya, military and political elite. The Communists had panted a bomb at the church, killing 150 and injuring 500.
King Boris had been running late. Even though he deplored the death penalty, he had the perpetrators hanged (he’d later meet his end, likely poisoning by the Third Reich, after refusing to deport Bulgaria’s Jews to the death camps. King-wise, he was overall pretty good).
“Huh. That’s very interesting,” Humada goes after I stop my history lesson (over Google translate). I invite him to come in; I want to share a nice Greek-Orthodox ritual. You buy two candles from the ancient lady in the booth. You light one and say a prayer for the living, then another for the dead.
“Are you sure I’m allowed to come in?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Will they let me come in,” he repeats, worried. It occurs to me that people are so fucking racist he’s worried about being thrown out of a Church. “Of course you can!”
It goes without incident—if anything I get side-eye because it’s a warm day so I’m dressed like a whore. But still, he thought that.
I can’t imagine why Bulgarians don’t want him here. I can’t imagine why Western Europe and America are committing suicide by electing fascists to keep out people like him.
Think about your average American 23-year-old man. Someone raised right. But, your average 23-year-old upper middle-class 23-year-old. He probably spends a lot of time on video games and Tinder and maybe works in finance.
Can you imagine him undertaking, penniless, a journey to another country, where he has no place to live and doesn’t speak the language, and people think he’s a criminal, but he has to do it because otherwise his parents and little sister can’t eat? I actually thought Humada was a decade older.
Talk to me like I’m five and explain why you wouldn’t want someone this exceptional in your country?
Amen again and again to this. It never seems to dawn on these grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants who are now neo-Know Nothings that immigrants are the lifeblood of America and the sustainers of the American project. And it's not just because they're willing to work the jobs no one else wants in order to establish their families in a better place where they can make a life for themselves. It's because the American Dream is more real to them than to those fourth- and fifth- and tenth-generation Americans (white Americans, inevitably) who have become complacent and take opportunity for granted.
And so you have fascist morons like Ken Cuccinelli who try to claim that Emma Lazarus' stirring words on the Statue of Liberty were meant only for Northern and Western Europeans (as if Cuccinelli somehow imagines that his olive-skinned Mediterranean forebears came over on the Mayflower rather than a ship full of other desperate immigrants who looked up with awe at the "mighty woman with a torch" as they sailed into New York Harbor).
The America that aspires to the ideal that all persons, created equal, have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness says to the world: "We welcome your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." It says: "Send these, your homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door." It is not so much about "Liberty Enlightening the World," as the French originally named the statue, as "Liberty INVITING the world."
But that's not the America that MAGA aspires to be. And if they win this year, they should at least have the honesty to tear down the statue that stands in opposition to everything J.D. Vance and his miserable cohorts espouse.