CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Was Not Ready for JD Vance’s Response When She Confronted Him About Cat Memes

When you come at JD Vance, you better get ready for a fight. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins certainly wasn’t. 

During a post-debate interview, Collins attempted to confront Vance on the thing currently making Democrats apoplectic — cat memes. 

The memes originated from reports in Springfield, Ohio, that Haitians were killing and consuming, geese and ducks from the park, as well as pets like cats. This was brought up during the debate by Trump in order to reinforce the fact that illegal immigration has gotten out of control. The clearly biased moderators who had been protecting Kamala Harris all night seemed to be ready for that, as they said they’d contacted the Springfield city manager, and were told nothing of the sort was happening. 

Quick aside: That’s not what residents are saying. 

Collins took the issue to Vance. 

“The other thing that he brought up, which I was kind of surprised by, I guess I would say, is he brought up this misleading, false claim that you yourself have talked about in recent days about Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio, abducting people’s pets and eating them, which officials there have said is not true. You yourself acknowledged it may be false on Twitter. You still told people to- to keep spreading it, but Trump just amplified it to tens of millions of people who were watching. Why push something that’s not true?

Vance corrected her, saying that the city officials have said it’s not true, which isn’t exactly a solid source of information in this case, since it’s pretty clear that city officials are very amenable to the Haitians. He told Collins that while the city officials might not be saying much, the residents are practically screaming it. 

“We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground. Kaitlan, who both firsthand and secondhand reports, saying this stuff is happening,” said Vance. So they very clearly, meaning the people on the ground dealing with this, think that it is happening.”

It was then that Vance turned this around on Collin. 

“I think that it’s important for journalists to actually get on the ground and uncover this stuff for themselves,” he said. “When you have a lot of people saying, “my pets are being abducted” or “geese at the city pond are being abducted and slaughtered right in front of us, this is crazy stuff.” 

“This town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in, health care costs are up, housing costs are up,” he continued. “Communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris’s border policies have done. And I think it’s interesting Kaitlan, that the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats and that speaks to the media’s failure to care about what’s going on in these communities. If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on doing it because the media could, should care about what’s going on.”

Collins tried to defend the media, saying they do care which is why the mainstream media is covering these stories, to which Vance noted it was only because of cat memes, and nobody would care about this story if the memes weren’t doing damage to the Democrats.

Collins then tried to say that if people were claiming they saw Bigfoot, if the Trump campaign would believe them, but Vance again had her number. 

“Kaitlan, it’s a totally fair point, but nobody’s calling my office and saying that they saw Bigfoot,” said Vance. “What they’re calling and saying is we’re seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats and city officials aren’t doing anything about it. Now again, I have a responsibility as a United States Senator. I think the media has a responsibility as an institution that cares about truth, to actually take people seriously when they say their lives have been ruined by this migrant crisis and again, if every single thing that the media says about this story is false, the verifiable facts are that this community has had their lives destroyed by 20,000 migrants coming in and uprooting life.” 

This moment from Vance highlights a very real and damning point about the media. They’re not just trying to disprove Trump’s claims, they’re trying to deny the complaints and eyewitness accounts from the people, the ones actually suffering. This is just another moment where the media truly exhibits its lack of concern or care for the people.