NYT Changes ‘Blood-and-Soil’ Headline That Seemingly Linked JD Vance to Nazism
AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin
The New York Times updated a headline in a Saturday opinion piece that sparked controversy after it appeared to link Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) to Nazism and White Supremacy.
A story published Saturday morning by Jamelle Bouie was headlined “JD Vance’s Blood-and-Soil Nationalism Finds Its Target.” Bouie touched on the Trump campaign’s false claims that Haitian migrants were eating the pets of people who live in Springfield, Ohio.
Bouie wrote, “The main impact of those [Springfiled lies] and smears — which began Monday when Vance told his followers on X that ‘reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and continued Tuesday when Donald Trump told an audience of 67 million people that ‘they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats’ — has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.”
The columnist additionally called on Vance to resign from the Senate, “leave the presidential race and retire from public life.”
Bouie’s headline sparked outrage among conservatives who took to social media to attack the newspaper for, as they argued, connecting the Ohio Republican to White supremacy.
Saturday afternoon, the Times changed the headline of Bouie’s piece to read, “Shouldn’t JD Vance Represent All of Ohio?”
As the United States Holocaust Museum notes, “Blood and Soil” is language connected to the origins of Nazism:
“Blood and Soil” (Blut und Boden) was an early Nazi slogan used in Germany to evoke the idea of a pure “Aryan” race and the territory it wanted to conquer. The concept was foundational to Nazi ideology and its appeal, though it predates the Nazi regime. Blood referred to the goal of a “racially pure” Aryan people. Soil invoked a mystical vision of the special relationship between the Germanic people and their land. It was also a tool to justify land seizures in eastern Europe and the forced expulsion of local populations in favor of ethnic Germans. The term was a rallying cry during the 1920s and early 30s when the Nazis and other far right political parties were in opposition to the fledgling Weimar democracy.
