Rapper Flavor Flav went viral after sharing a joke warning to some of his fellow musicians after former President Donald Trump's bizarre claim during the presidential debate that immigrants are eating people's pets.
On Tuesday night, Trump promoted the unfounded allegation that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were consuming dogs and other household pets in response to a question about immigration:
"They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."
Moderator David Muir swiftly corrected Trump when he repeated the debunked claim that gained traction online after right-wing social media accounts spread the unsourced story, despite no actual evidence supporting it. Muir pointed out that officials in Springfield, Ohio, including the city manager, confirmed no such incidents of cat-eating had occurred.
Flavor Flav chose to run with this—and issued a "warning" to a few musical artists who happen to have pet-inspired names:
"Pet Shop Boys better stay inside and lock the doors. You too Snoop Dogg. And Pitbull."
You can see his post below.
The responses were hilarious.
On Monday, Springfield police said that they had received no reports of pets being stolen and eaten, following a viral social media post originally from a Springfield Facebook group, according to the Springfield News-Sun. The post claimed that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat, only to find it hanging at a Haitian neighbor’s home, allegedly being prepared for a meal. Immigrants were also falsely accused of eating ducks and geese at local parks.
That same day, Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, spread the false story across social media, just after the Trump campaign released a statement titled, “Kamala Migrants Ravage Ohio City — And It’s Coming to Your City Next,” which falsely claimed that “20,000 Haitian migrants were dumped in the city.”
Vance later conceded the possibility “all of these rumors will turn out to be false" but nonetheless urged "fellow patriots" not to let "the crybabies in the media dissuade you."
But this is only the latest example of the Trump campaign employing racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric in an attempt to convince voters that a vote for Harris would be a vote for higher crime rates.
The campaign was criticized last month after sharing a racist meme claiming Harris will ruin "your neighborhood" by "importing the third world." Side-by-side images, labeled “Your Neighborhood Under Trump” and “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala,” respectively, depicted a peaceful residential street alongside a 2023 Getty photo of recent migrants to the U.S. sitting outside New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, awaiting temporary housing.
Racism is of course nothing new for Trump, who last year claimed that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country," echoing fascists like genocidal Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, who wrote about "blood poisoning" in his book Mein Kampf.
Harris's supporters have accused the Trump campaign of leaning into racist tropes due to her Tamil Indian and Afro-Jamaican ancestry and Harris recently called out Trump for claiming she "happened to turn Black” and suggesting that “all of a sudden, she made a turn” in her racial identity in remarks he made at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention in Chicago.
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