Does a viral video prove that someone in the audience at a Kennedy Center concert yelled "Kill that Vice!" at U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance as he entered the concert hall? No, that's not true: The sentence in question is not clearly audible in the viral recording. When played at a reduced speed, it appears to end with "light" or "lights", not "vice". The reporter who published the recording and covered the event said nothing about members of the audience calling for acts of physical violence against Vance in the resulting article, reporting only that some in the crowd booed.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on March 14, 2025. It opened:
Democrats can be such sick bastards
When JD Vance walked into the Kennedy Center, someone said "Kill that Vice" and people cheered
SICK EVIL PEOPLE
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of this writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Mar 14 16:53:52 2025 UTC)
At the 00:06 mark in the shared video, as Vice President J.D. Vance seen taking his seat, someone yells a sentence that begins with "Kill that...".
However, the PinPoint transcriber (archived here) did not confirm that the phrase continued with the word "vice":
(Source: PinPoint screenshot taken on Fri Mar 14 15:53 2025 UTC)
When the clip played at the 0.75 or 0.5 reduced speed, the sentence appears to end with "light" or "lights".
When a Lead Stories reporter applied a noise reduction plugin in Audacity, the word sounded like "lights".
The video was originally published (archived here) on March 13, 2025, by Andrew Roth (archived here), who is a Guardian reporter in Washington, D.C. He also published an article about Vance attending event at the Kennedy Center (archived here). The piece was titled: "'Ruined this place': chorus of boos against JD Vance at Washington concert". It said nothing about a call to kill the sitting vice president. What the article did mention was that "audience members had undergone a full Secret Service security check as Vance's motorcade drew up at the US's national performing arts centre, delaying the start of the concert by 25 minutes."
Lead Stories reached out to Roth for additional comments but did not receive an immediate response.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning J.D. Vance are here.
