The Ugly Historical Echoes in JD Vance’s Pet Stories

What’s with JD Vance and pets? The world was still reeling and leering over his attack on “childless cat ladies” as agents of civilizational collapse and the core of the Democratic Party. Now he has gone even weirder, spreading a baseless, debunked claim that Haitian immigrants were sweeping up and barbecuing pets in Springfield, Ohio. 

Called out on this lunacy, he did what any good Trump bro would do. He simultaneously weaseled and doubled down, first saying he was just asking questions and foregrounding his constituents’ concerns—conspiracy theory redefined as constituent service. Then he admitted that he and Trump “created” the story based on supposed “firsthand accounts from my constituents.” And he defended it as a noble lie: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash, “because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.” Never repent, never apologize, never make sense.

We’ve seen this movie before. During the 2016 presidential campaign, such dedicated truth seekers as 4chan, Alex Jones, and QAnon spread allegations that a Democratic death cult, including Hillary Clinton, abused and murdered young children in a DC pizzeria. One stooge went in and shot off an AR15, trying to break into the storage room where the child sacrifices were supposedly conducted. Others made death threats. Things quieted down until young TikTokkers revived Pizzagate mania in 2020.

Luckily, no one got killed. But Vance’s Petgate-mongering may have more serious consequences. Hospitals, schools, college, even Springfield City Hall have vacated, shut down, or gone virtual as the threats pour in. 

We saw this movie long before Pizzagate—long before movies, in fact. Vance and QAnon have reprised, in petty, clownish, and in Vance’s case furry, four-footed form, the mother of all conspiracy theories: the blood libel, which holds that Jews kidnap and sacrifice Christian children in order to use their blood in secret rituals and matzo recipes. 

The libel seems to have originated in the late Roman Empire, when it was directed against persecuted Christians. Christians revived it in medieval England, this time against their Jewish neighbors. It spread from there to France and Germany, flared up in neighboring countries, and in the 19^th century oozed across Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Thousands of innocent Jews were tortured, burned and otherwise killed. Bad parents and other real child killers got away with murder.

The libel’s most famous expression is of course the 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pastiche of earlier texts that was widely translated and disseminated. These lies were liberally quoted in Henry Ford’s Detroit Independent, embraced by the Nazis, and taught in German schools even after it was exposed as a Czarist forgery.

The Protocols are still frequently extolled, and not just in neo-Nazi and online conspiracy circles. The only known U.S. case of full-on blood libel occurred back in 1928, but in later years the Saudi Education Ministry, King Faisal, the Hamas Charter, Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, and a Greek Golden Dawn parliamentarian have reportedly endorsed the Protocols, along with Jordanian, Iranian, Lebanese, and Belarussian television programs.

Now Vance has dipped one toe in the bloody waters, demonstrating Karl Marx’s famous dictum in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

And so J.D. Vance helps keep Marxist thought alive.