J.D. Vance Gives Unhinged Defense of Migrants Conspiracy in Wild Rant

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.

MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert thinks she knows someone who can get her answers about the assassination attempts on Donald Trump: failing social media executive, and right-wing extremist shill, Elon Musk.

She suggested bringing Musk into the federal fold during an interview on Newsmax Monday evening.

“Do you have confidence that the Secret Service can keep Donald Trump safe?” asked the host.

“I am a member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, and I do not have any such confidence,” replied Boebert.

“We had Director [Kimberly] Cheatle in the day before she resigned. She refused to answer any of our questions. She lied before us, you know, or just simply acted like she didn’t have the answers, and only the FBI did, when she absolutely saw the details that we were requesting from her. And we have not seen any accountability since.

“Now,” said Boebert, “President Trump says that he’s going to create a commission when he’s president, a Commission to Oversee the Federal Government, hold them accountable, whether it’s for their spending or their actions, and have, possibly, Elon Musk as the director of this commission.

“You know, we used to call this Congress, but unfortunately, the agencies that Congress has allocated taxpayer money to and has authorized to exist refuses to answer to us.”

“I do not have confidence in the leadership of the Secret Service,” Boebert said, noting that she also didn’t trust Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Boebert, a democratically elected official, is seemingly hopeful that Musk’s commission can serve as a replacement for one of the essential branches of government and improve the state’s ability to keep its authoritarian head safe.

In the aftermath of the arrest of a gunman at Mar-a-Lago Sunday, Musk issued an alarming tweet questioning why Trump had been targeted by violence but there had been no such attempt against Vice President Kamala Harris. He later said it was a joke.

Donald Trump has already found a new town to harass with racist claims that immigrants have overrun it, and it’s in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

At a rally in Tucson, Arizona, last week, Trump railed about immigrants in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, which he said had “experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.”

“So Pennsylvania, remember this when you have to go to vote,” Trump said.

“It’s a small town, all of a sudden they got thousands of people!” he continued. “The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak not a word of English, costing local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.” 

The former president also claimed that the town had been rendered “virtually bankrupt” and that the increased immigrant population had led to an increase in crime.

Like with Springfield, local officials have had to come forward to combat the former president’s fearmongering. The borough manager of Charleroi, Joe Manning, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that many of the president’s claims about the town were blatantly untrue.

Manning said that the town’s Haitian residents were “not the burden on the local government or any of our resources or anything that’s being portrayed.”

“It’s no different than, you know, people moved to here from Tucson, Arizona, you’d have to deal with it,” Manning said.

While Charleroi’s population had increased by 2,000 percent as a result of immigration, that number was relative, Manning explained, because the town’s population had been so small. Charleroi had a population of 4,324 in 2022, according to the most recent census estimates.

Charleroi Area School District Superintendent Ed Zelich said that immigrant students were “not necessarily” costing taxpayers “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” as Trump had claimed. As enrollment rose, so did the reimbursement from the state’s Department of Education, he explained—but the new classmates didn’t present that much of a strain.  

“We have that in place. We have teachers in place,” Zelich told the Inquirer. “There was a language barrier at first for the younger students when they come, but it’s not insurmountable.”

“I just want to say there’s a cost associated with all parts of education,” Zelich added. “But these students are blending into classrooms.”

Charleroi Borough President Kristin R. Hopkins released a statement on behalf of the borough, expressing “deep concern” over Trump’s comments about the town. 

“Trump chose to exploit our town for political purposes, using divisive rhetoric to unfairly target the Haitian immigrant community,” Hopkins wrote. 

“Rather than acknowledging the real economic issues the town is facing, some have chosen to unfairly target the Haitian community, judging the entire group based on misinformation and fear of outsiders.”

Hopkins’s statement sparked considerable backlash from the Republican Party of Washington County and City Council Member Larry Celaschi, who said he had not signed off on the statement. 

Celaschi told right-wing propaganda site Breitbart News that the town’s budget was “suffering.”

“The impact of the immigrants has affected our school district tremendously, and so from the borough standpoint, it’s impacted our budget to where and the school districts. We weren’t prepared for any of this. We did not get any help from the federal government or the state government,” he said. 

The Haitian immigrants whom Trump has chosen to deride are in the United States legally under Temporary Protected Status. They pay taxes, own property, and work. Now Trump is counting on his attacks against a vulnerable group to persuade voters in swing states to support him.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced Monday that the state would implement additional Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers in Springfield schools to conduct daily sweeps amid the mounting bomb threats against government buildings, schools, and hospitals.

J.D. Vance said Monday that to even suggest that the Republican ticket’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was responsible for inciting the bomb threats was “disgusting.”