Woof — JD Vance inadvertently compared Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to Jeffrey Dahmer and Freddy Krueger.
On Wednesday, the vice president said on a podcast that only a “really terrible person” would mistreat a dog — but conveniently forgot that his Cabinet colleague Noem bragged about executing a puppy in her memoir just last year.
The topic came up during Vance’s appearance on the New York Post podcast “Pod Force One with Miranda Devine.” Devine was complimenting Vance on how well-behaved his German shepherd, Atlas, was when she entered his home in Washington, D.C., for their interview. She then immediately compared Atlas to former President Joe Biden’s dog, Commander, who had a reputation of being pretty nippy around Secret Service personnel.
After the two used the comparisons between the two dogs to bash Biden, Devine then brought up another person on the left she felt inclined to vilify — Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
The left-wing influencer sparked controversy earlier this month when a video went viral of Piker possibly using a shock collar on his dog when she got up during a livestream. Piker denied it was a shock collar, saying it was “a vibration collar for reinforcing her training.”
“Wasn’t that disgusting?” Devine asked Vance of Piker nearly seven minutes into the episode, before asking the vice president what he believed a willingness to hurt dogs said about an owner.
“I think it tells you that they’re bad people,” he answered. “If you can actually cause suffering to an innocent animal, you’re probably the kind of person who doesn’t worry about suffering in people as well, and that’s been my experience. If you mistreat dogs, that’s almost a 100% sign that you’re gonna be a really terrible person.”
“You know, it’s like the Jeffrey Dahmer thing. Like every serial killer ever has actually been really bad to animals, that’s sort of how they started,” Vance continued. “I remember the Freddy Krueger movies when I was a kid… Well how did Freddy Krueger [get] his start? One of the things they show is young Freddy Krueger torturing animals.”
He concluded: “If you’re not taking care of God’s creatures then you are certainly going to be, I think, a pretty bad person in other ways too.”
When Devine asked Vance how Atlas behaved when President Donald Trump came to his house, Vance said he keeps Atlas upstairs, presumably because dogs can smell evil.
But, by Vance’s logic, this makes Noem a pretty bad girl.
Last year, when Noem was the governor of South Dakota, she published a memoir in which she went into detail about killing her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer puppy Cricket because she was “less than worthless” as a hunting dog. Noem attempted several times to train her puppy, and even used an electric collar, but was fed up after Cricket killed a local family’s chickens.
So, she shot Cricket in a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote. “But it had to be done.”