There is no "proving a negative" here. He admitted to telling a story he knew was false. That's called admitting to lying. You're not very good at this gaslighting thing.

WSJ: How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio—City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.

“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/springfi...rants-04598d48

There was no evidence of the rumors being true, he kept posting the rumors, isn't the same as "he lied".

If Vance is on record claiming "we have proof haitians in Springfield have eaten pets and this is the proof", that would be a lie.

Did he do that, or did he simply keep telling people "there are rumors that xyz"? because you can claim there are rumors without it being a lie even if the rumors are unproven.

And i mean, you guys do it all the ****ing time about everything

He was told the story was false by a direct source in local government yet chose to not only repeat the story but add additional false claims to it. He had conciseness that what he was saying was untrue yet continued to say it.

Merriam Webster definition of lying:

to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive

to create a false or misleading impression

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dict...to%2520deceive

Glenn Kirschner testifies before Congress about Donald Trump
and the Republican's rule-of-law busting Project 2025.

The challenge: in a five-minute-long opening statement, I had to highlight
and summarize why Project 2025 represents Trump's blueprint for autocracy.
Here is how it went.

can confirm from my time in tech that we were constantly asked to work with pr firms to "create stories" which would then be pitched to journalists

most journalism is lazy prepackaged stuff

they are just trying to hit a deadline and boom a taylor made and crafted story comes to them - flush with infographics and quotable sound bites

sometimes this comes in the form of partinship from ownership as found here



other times it's because journalist who covers tech has a deadline or a morning show needs to fill a 30 second segment gap and a pr firm - often through a former employee of that newspaper or tv station, will call them up and make the pitch


i was pretty immune to that stuff as i worked a foreign desk convering politics and economic stuff but for most journalists it's the reality that a lot of their stories are fed to them

in fact, even those who aren't prominent/connected enough to receive personal story pitches go out and find their own pitches on prnewswire.com looking for something to craft into an article or snippet


it was incredibly eye opening how we had zero coverage despite being one of the most popular apps in the world, then we hire a sf pr firm and boom, hundreds of articles and tv segments are made about us each month - but of course it wasn't them saying "hey there's a cool app rickroll is working on that you should cover" we always had to "create a story" where we'd brainstorm with the pr team about what it is we do, what insights we can provide, etc and then from there the pr team would give us a checklist of things to provide them, which they'd then push into infographics and snippets - they'd even write down statements as if i made them because they knew better than i what would increase chance of publishing etc

we absolutely "created the story" and that's the exact phrase we used - we'd then hand those to journalists and boom we'd find it all get printed - and even then, despite being had fed everything, the journalists still got loads of stuff wrong because they'd want to slightly rephrase something to make it their own and then in the process end up publishing something absolutely wrong

like we had dozens of reviews of our app that very clearly showed they never used the app because the way they rephrased what we gave them led them to saying things which were not physically possible

he was told it wasn't proven (yet?), not false. very hard to prove a negative you know

btw the above is not approval for what vance did


it's just that the "created a story" is by no means an admission to have made it up but rather him saying that they packaged the immigration problem in a manner that would capture the attention


but to be fair, it certainly just sounds like they just ran with the rumors that sold the story the best



when in my car i basically listen to audiobooks or npr and npr was talking about the eating the pets and one of the panelists made a really good point that one of the main problems with this is that immigration is very real issue, and an issue that america has always had - this is not new nor is it going to magically go away - immigration and backlash towards new waves of immigrants is a tale as old as time in america so while the republicans are definitely wrong to spin half truths into major events, it's also extremely tone deaf for democrats to act like immigration is amazing and anyone who has issues with it is a hateful bigot who needs to get with the program and adapt

springfield ohio has about 20k immigrants and 40k native citizens and all those immigrants are new from the last few years


it's extremely understandable to understand why people would be upset that their communities and neighborhoods have been completely changed into something new and foreign to them

idk i feel like npr is usually really good at those things, while they are definitely hard to the left, it's always within reason where they can understand the nuance and human nature - expecting a population of 40k elderly americans to suddenly throw parties in celebration of 20k haitians arriving or they are pure evil is just pure virtue signaling - most people around the world would not respond very well to that kind of massive demographic change

He admitted to creating stories. Or said that he was willing to do that to promote his political views. I don’t think knowingly creating stories is somehow hugely different from knowingly spreading lies. It might not be illegal to even knowingly lie about this. But lol at your attempt to spin a defense of him. I wish you were his lawyer.

If you watch the clip, it's evident that he realizes he let something slip that he shouldn't have. He froze up because he didn't know how to respond. If by "creating a story" he actually meant "bringing attention to a story that wasn't getting enough attention," he would have been able to clarify that almost instantaneously, but he had to take time to figure out how he was going to wiggle out of it.

Nope:

“I told them these claims were baseless.”

Source: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/springfi...rants-04598d48

baseless: having no basis in reason or fact

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/baseless

the 3:30ish mark is the first time they talk over each other. there was about a 1ish sec satellite delay prior to 'the pause' in their conversation. talk-over doubles that minimum depending on reaction.

once he started talking, he said enough dumb **** that i don't really care why the delay took place, fake or not.

you guys argue about really stupid **** sometimes

Let’s ignore the fact that you’re wrong

You seriously ended your post by holding a sitting United States Senator and potential vice president of the country to the same standards you hold an Internet forum poster

Cool dude

Can't believe there are still people defending this racist crap from Trump and Vance about the pets.

looks like he ninja deleted it, appears he's in a pretty safe district so it'll be interesting to see if that's enough for him to lose re-election

he's pretty fortunate that it's too late for him to get primaried out by his own party

I say they should become even more racist. It’s obviously a winning campaign strategy.