National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry said he "mispronounced" the word migrants after accusations against him blew up online.
Lowry was talking to Megyn Kelly on Monday during a discussion about immigration in Springfield, Ohio on her SiriusXM show The Megyn Kelly Show.
Users leaped to attack Lowry, claiming he'd secretly used a different word while discussing the recent news.
The town has been the focus of a political messaging campaign led by the Republican party and its media allies over the past two weeks.
The campaign reached a fever pitch after the presidential debate last week when former President Donald Trump claimed that immigrants in the town were eating cats, dogs, and other pets.
Bomb threats followed in Springfield, as well as reports of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi groups recruiting following the spotlight suddenly turning on the town.
About 12,000 to 20,000 Haitians live in Springfield now, in a city with a population of around 60,000 in 2015.
Residents' complaints about the city's inability to upgrade infrastructure and services to keep pace with the growing population have been accompanied by some residents laying the blame firmly on the doorstep of Haitian immigrants, often in lurid and racist ways.
Those complaints included second and third-hand reports that Haitian immigrants are hunting ducks and geese for meat and stealing cats—and sparked a viral social media frenzy about Haitian immigrants.
Lowry, on Kelly's show, said that he thought the lack of police reports merely proved people weren't calling the cops on missing geese.
“[CNN’s] Dana Bash says that the police have gone through 11 months of recordings and calls, and they’ve only found two Springfield residents calling to complain about Haitian [unclear] um, migrants taking geese from ponds,” Lowry told Kelly. “Only two calls. I think one lesson of this whole story is: people don’t care about geese, ok? People really hate geese. You know, all things considered, I think people would prefer Haitian migrants to come and take the geese off the golf course. It’s the cats and dogs that have become the standard. Geese clearly don’t matter.”
“I read online they’re protected in Ohio,” Kelly replied without acknowledging Lowry’s possible stumble.
Left-wingers rushed to use the clip to back up their claims that the video was proof that the right-wing hullabaloo over the matter was steeped in racism.
“National Review's Rich Lowry inadvertently letting everyone know what the Republican lies about Haitians in Springfield are really about,” wrote one.
"Does anyone need anymore proof that many Republicans are targeting these folks because of their race???” added a prominent Democratic influencer.
Some even went full Zapruder film, slowing down the clip to divine his true intentions.
Conservative posters defending Lowry, claiming the framing of the video was clearly a smear and that he just misspoke.
“Ridiculous. @richlowry obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i) -- started mispronouncing 'migrants with short i; instantly corrected himself with no embarrassment because it was patently a mispronunciation. Geez,” wrote Andy McCarthy.
“Yep, this is exactly what happened,” Lowry said, responding to McCarty “I began to mispronounce the word 'migrants' and caught myself halfway through.”
The National Review didn’t immediately respond to questions about the video.
In a piece Lowry wrote for the magazine last Friday, he previewed the argument he’d make on Kelly’s show.
“No one has yet turned up evidence” that Trump’s claims about immigrants eating cats and dogs was true, Lowry acknowledged, adding that “everyone is always happy to see geese go someplace else” to explain why a police call about geese being poached from a pond didn’t cause a massive stir.
But, he wrote, the Biden administration’s “open-handed immigration policies” have made the entire country “subject to sudden, disruptive demographic change.”
“News reports often dismiss as ill-informed or xenophobic the concerns of residents. Their complaints about the costs and disorder associated with the wave of immigration are legitimate, though, and the sense that the town has undergone a large-scale change that no one was consulted about is very real,” Lowry added. “The cats and dogs may be safe and sound, but all is not right in Springfield.”
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