Cowardly Ohio Governor Won’t Blame Trump or Vance for Bomb Threats

Despite openly refuting the Haitian migrant conspiracy that has plagued his state, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine still won’t come down on Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for their part in spreading the violent rhetoric.

After attempting to dodge a direct question on the issue during an interview Monday evening with CNN’s Pamela Brown, DeWine defended the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio—but wouldn’t combat the MAGA leaders.

“But my job, I think, is to reflect exactly what’s going on in Springfield,” DeWine said. “So, the mayor tells us and the chief of police tells us there’s been no evidence at all of anyone eating a dog or any Haitians doing any of that. These Haitians that are there are legal. They work very, very hard. I met this morning with a number of business people who employ these Haitians, and they tell me that they are really essential to them getting the job done.”

When pressed again by Brown to answer the question, DeWine finally fessed up that the town was facing “challenges,” but wouldn’t chalk up any of the blame for the city’s mass closures on the baseless allegations spewed by Trump and Vance.

“Look, I’m not here to place blame,” DeWine said. “I’m here to tell what we’re seeing on the ground. And look, there are challenges. We’ve got 15,000 extra people in a town of about 58,000.”

So far, the epicenter of the conspiracy theory—Springfield—has received at least 33 bomb threats since the top of the conservative ticket started pushing the idea that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets.

Springfield shut down two of its elementary schools Monday, while two local colleges switched to all virtual classes and activities. The city also canceled its annual CultureFest due to safety concerns.

The city saw even more closures last week. Springfield evacuated two elementary schools and closed a middle school on Friday after receiving information from the Springfield Police Division. The day before, several other schools and a significant portion of Springfield’s government facilities—including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School—were shut down due to bomb threats.

On Sunday, Vance effectively admitted that the anti-immigration conspiracy was bogus.

“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,” Vance told CNN.

A new report by the World Justice Project, an international group that assesses the rule of law in different countries, includes some startling findings regarding the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Nearly half of Republican respondents, 46 percent, “said they would not accept election results as legitimate if the other party’s candidate won.” In addition, 14.2 percent said they would “take action to overturn election results,” though “the type of action—whether legal or illegal—was not specified in the survey question.”

The numbers were lower for Democrats: 27 percent said they would not accept the election results if the other party’s candidate won, and 10.6 percent said they would take action to overturn them.

Republican respondents expressed significantly less faith than Democrats in electoral processes, results, and authorities. They lacked confidence, for example, in the trustworthiness of election officials and the legitimacy of vote counts. On a few electoral issues, namely voting rights, Democratic respondents’ concerns tended to exceed those of Republicans.

Overall, the report—for which 1,046 U.S. households were interviewed just over a month before Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential race—found that around one-third of respondents would not accept the legitimacy of the upcoming election results if their candidate lost. Commenting on the report, the executive director of the World Justice Project, Elizabeth Andersen, told USA Today that the survey results seem “like a recipe for potential conflict in the aftermath of the election.”

Indeed, the findings about Republicans’ unwillingness to accept the 2024 election results, in particular, conjure grim memories of Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, which culminated in the violence of January 6, 2021. And they’re hardly surprising, given Trump’s constant claims to his supporters, in this election cycle and throughout his political career, that electoral defeat is only possible in the event of foul play by his political opponents.

J.D. Vance published a lengthy screed Monday night blaming “out of control” Democratic rhetoric for the presence of a gunman on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, while simultaneously downplaying his own racist extremism that has incited bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio.

Vance wrote a 1,200-word diatribe on X in which he attempted to pin the potential violence on Democratic rhetoric and the American media.

“Here is what we know so far: Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump,” Vance wrote. “The gunman agreed, and used the exact same phrase. He had a Kamala Harris bumper sticker on his truck.”

Vance’s claim that the gunman, Ryan Routh, was motivated by his Democratic politics doesn’t entirely fit with the man’s own statements. In January, Routh (who voted for Trump in 2016) advocated for a Republican ticket of Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy as a means to keep Trump out of the White House.

“How do you think the Democrats and their media allies would respond if a 19-time Republican donor tried to kill a Democratic official? It’s a question that answers itself. For years, Kamala Harris’s campaign surrogates have said things like ‘Trump has to be eliminated,’” Vance wrote.

Of course, Vance’s argument about Democratic rhetoric falls flat for, well, anyone who has ever listened to Trump speak. In the last five days alone, Trump also called Harris a “threat to democracy” and warned repeatedly that she would bring mass “destruction” if elected to the White House.

Unsurprisingly, Trump and his extremist rhetoric have been directly linked to multiple acts of violence going back to his first presidential campaign and his election in 2016, which prompted an anomalous rise in hate crimes across the country. The former president’s anti-immigrant “invasion” rhetoric was used by a mass shooter in El Paso, Texas, who killed 22 people in 2019.

Vance also complained about the way the recent attempt on Trump’s life had been portrayed by the media.

“NBC News called the attempted assassination a ‘golf club incident.’ The LA Times told us ‘Trump Targeted at Golf Club.’ The USA Today’s top of the fold headline is ‘Hope in America,’ and they published a preposterous letter to the editor arguing that Trump ‘brings these assassination attempts on himself,’” Vance wrote.

The Trump campaign had already published a list of their least favorite coverage yesterday, which included these points, citing specific journalists they felt had inaccurately covered the near-attempt on Trump’s life.

Vance also refused to take any responsibility for inciting the 33 bomb threats that have created chaos in Springfield, a town he brought into the national spotlight when he falsely claimed Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets there.

“The double-standard is breathtaking,” Vance wrote. One can’t help but agree.

“Donald Trump and I are, by their account, directly responsible for bomb threats from foreign countries. Why? Because we had the audacity to repeat what residents told us about the problems in their town. Meanwhile, Harris allies call for Trump to be eliminated as the media publishes arguments that he deserved to be shot,” Vance wrote.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said that Springfield has received at least 33 bomb threats since last week, when Vance took up the task of helping his constituents by spreading disinformation. His newest screed was no exception.

Vance continued to claim that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “illegal” even though they are not. Vance also continued to claim there have been “rising rates of disease” and an “HIV uptick” as a result of the city’s new Haitian residents. The Clark County Combined Health District Commissioner Chris Cook said Friday that Vance’s claims that cases of HIV and tuberculosis had risen were completely false.

“Overall, we have not seen a substantial increase in all reportable communicable diseases,” Cook said, according to NBC News. “In fact, if you look at all reportable communicable diseases together (minus Covid) for the year ending 2023, you will see that we are at our lowest rate in Clark County since 2016.”

But to Vance, whether or not Haitian immigrants are spreading disease or eating their neighbors’ pets isn’t a matter of fact; it’s a matter of opinion.

“It is one thing to say that pets are not, in fact being eaten, and another thing to say that anyone who disagrees is trying to murder people. Dissent, even vigorous dissent, is a great tradition of the United States. Censorship is not,” Vance said.

For someone writing ad nauseam, Vance seemed strangely concerned with the threat of being censored. He then conflated the spread of disinformation with simply sharing his opinion.

“Their next move with these stories is censorship. In Springfield, a psychopath (or a foreign government) calls in a bomb threat, so they blame that on President Trump (and me). The threat of violence is disgraceful of course, yet the media seems to relish it. They cover a bomb threat, but not the rise in murders. They cover the threat, but not the HIV uptick. They cover the threat, not the schools overwhelmed with new kids who don’t speak English.”

“The message is always the same: Don’t you dare express an opinion on the public affairs of your nation. The message is: Shut up,” Vance said.

Vance then encouraged his supporters to say whatever they want, true or untrue, dangerous or not. “I’m asking all of us to reject censorship. Reject the idea that you can control what other people think and say,” he wrote after whining for 1,100 words about trying to control what Democrats or the media say.

“Embrace persuasion of your fellow citizens over silencing them—either through the powers of Big Tech or through moral blackmail,” Vance wrote. “I think this will make our public debate much better.”

Taking things to their logical extreme, Vance concluded, “The reason is simple. The logic of censorship leads directly to one place, for there is only one way to permanently silence a human being: put a bullet in his brain.”

A Trump-appointed judge upended labor law Tuesday in granting an injunction in favor of a company arguing that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional.

Judge Mark Pittman in Texas issued the injunction for Findhelp, a tech company headquartered in Austin accused of unfair labor practices. The NLRB is a federal government agency that enforces labor law practices as well as collective bargaining.

The preliminary injunction cites the recent Supreme Court decision in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which weakened federal regulatory agencies. Findhelp argued that the NLRB’s judge system, which hears cases, violates the separation of powers, and Pittman agreed in granting the injunction. This does not bode well for the NLRB, and signals a long legal fight between big business and unions, divided along ideological lines between conservatives and liberals. The case could go all the way to the Supreme Court, where it would meet a pro-business majority handpicked by Donald Trump himself.

Conservatives and their corporate allies have been attacking the NLRB for quite some time, with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s all mounting legal cases against the agency in an attempt to destroy it. Trump’s time as president was four years of pro-business practices, appointing corporate-aligned attorneys to the Department of Labor and weakening laws that would have expanded worker pay and strengthened unions.

Donald Trump is back on the crypto grind, even though he doesn’t seem to understand it.

On Monday, the Republican presidential nominee used the buzz of his campaign to formally announce a cryptocurrency project that he and his sons have been teasing since August: World Liberty Financial.

The decentralized finance, or DeFi, project has been likened to a get-rich-quick scheme for the former president should he retake the White House in November. But when asked directly about it on Monday, Trump seemed to lack for details—not just on World Liberty Financial but also on what cryptocurrency is in general.

“Why is it so important for America to lead in cryptocurrency adoption and innovation?” asked an audience member on the far-right streaming network Real America’s Voice.

“It’s A.I., it’s so many other things. You know, A.I., speaking of an interest in future, it needs tremendous electricity capability beyond anything I’ve ever heard,” Trump started. “If you take all the electricity coming out of the U.S., in order to have it to be dominant in A.I. you need twice that amount. Just for this one thing. Who would make that? You need twice the electricity we already have.

“China is already building electric plants,” he continued, completely dodging the question. “They want to build them for the A.I., and it’s very important, but you need tremendous electric—and in this country, because of our strong environmental impact statement problems that we have, you know, China doesn’t have those problems.”

Trump allies have decried the slow rollout of World Liberty Financial as a “mistake.” The DeFi project, spearheaded by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, has ushered in an onslaught of misinformation. Fraudsters have relentlessly attacked it, compromising the social media accounts of Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump, and sending supporters to fake websites with inaccurate details about the platform.

False Telegram channels posing as the official World Liberty Financial channel have also drawn thousands of users to a host of misinformation, thwarted only by the Trump brothers’ loose warnings not to click on unaffiliated links and avoid scams.

Trump has increasingly tried to frame himself as a pro-crypto candidate in this election cycle. At a bitcoin conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk. But the former president’s recent investments would show that his change of heart on the digital assets isn’t all an act. Financial disclosures released in August show that Trump has $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. He’s also kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.