CNN —

Republicans including vice presidential candidate JD Vance fueled a firestorm of misinformation this month when they spread false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, injecting the town with chaos.

The claims, which have been widely discredited, have made their way onto the national stage. Former President Donald Trump further pushed the false narrative during his first debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, when he falsely claimed, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”

Vance, meanwhile, has only doubled down, defending the baseless rumor on Sunday.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. 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,” the Ohio senator told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

Here is how the misinformation spread from a Facebook post to national news in a matter of days, and how officials are looking to lower the temperature as Springfield deals with the fallout.

How did the rumors start?

A post in a Springfield Facebook group recently claimed that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend found their missing cat hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home and that the cat was being prepared to be eaten, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Those rumors were picked up by conservative...

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