A quick explanation of how bomb threats work, to help JD Vance

It’s important to establish a timeline on what happened in Springfield, Ohio, so let’s begin there.

Over the summer, right-wing extremists and others began to promote baseless rumors that Haitian immigrants in that community were stealing and eating residents’ pets. Changes the city was undergoing were newsworthy, certainly; NPR and then the New York Times wrote stories about Springfield and the way in which it encapsulated one aspect of the immigration debate. A few days after the latter story, a Facebook post making a fourth-hand allegation about someone’s cat began going viral within the right-wing social media universe. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) quickly piled on, as did his running mate, former president Donald Trump, at last week’s presidential debate.

There was no evidence for the claims being made, just rumors and misrepresentations of photos or news stories. But as Vance argued on social media, the right shouldn’t “let the crybabies in the media dissuade you” from amplifying the false story, one that mirrors past racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Instead, he said, they should “keep the cat memes flowing.”

In Springfield, all of this landed differently. There was a spate of bomb threats that prompted the closure of schools and other facilities. A community festival was canceled. Individuals in the city were threatened.

“We’ve had bomb threats the last two days,” Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, told Politico. “We’ve had personal threats the last two days, and it’s increasing, because the national stage is swirling this up. Springfield, Ohio, is caught in a political vortex, and it is a bit out of control.”

As Vance said on CNN on Sunday, though, he sees political value in amplifying claims about Haitian immigrants story, regardless of their veracity. He’s tried to suggest that those stories are the only way the press would cover the real problem, in his estimation, which is the strain posed by the immigrants — and, he alleges, the deaths and disease they brought with them. That NPR and the Times were already reporting on the city before the memes is not something Vance usually mentions.

He is, however, frustrated at having people mention how the tumult described by Rue came only after he and Trump started amplifying Springfield as an example of the purported dangers of immigrants. So at an event in Sparta, Mich., on Tuesday, he seized upon a new report to suggest that none of the negative effects on Springfield — a town he represents in the Senate — were his fault.

“A lot of people who pretend to be fair journalists, you know what they’ve been saying?” Vance began. “For the last few days, Springfield has been experiencing an unbelievable number, something like 35, 40 bomb threats in Springfield in just the last few days.

“And you know what?” he continued. “The governor of Ohio came out yesterday and said every single one of those bomb threats was a hoax. And all of those bomb threats came from foreign countries. So the American media for three days has been lying and saying that Donald Trump and I are inciting bomb threats, when in reality the American media has been laundering foreign disinformation. It is disgusting. And every single one of them owes the residents of Springfield an apology.”

Like so much of what Vance has said about Springfield, this is flatly untrue.

First of all, bomb threats are often hoaxes. The entire point is to introduce stress and panic into the target of the threat, to force law enforcement to respond or to disrupt the plans of those targeted. Vance’s argument is akin to saying that a flurry of death threats against a prominent individual — such as, say, Mayor Rue — were fake or not newsworthy because the person wasn’t actually killed. It is certainly better that there were no bombs, but that doesn’t mean that the threats were innocuous.

Vance also seems to be trying to parlay the word “hoax” as applied to the threat to describe, instead, coverage of the threats by calling them “disinformation.” Those threats, though, aren’t akin to the pet-eating claims (which, like assertions about fraud in the 2020 election, prompted a desperate and unsuccessful search by Trump supporters for evidence to back up the baseless assertion). The threats actually happened.

Vance tries to wave that away by stating that all of the bomb threats came from foreign countries. (He didn’t address the other threats, you’ll notice.) His claim wasn’t true, as a representative of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R) office confirmed to The Washington Post and to the Associated Press; many or most originated overseas, but not all. It’s also not clear how this is supposed to be significantly better for Vance. So it’s foreign nationals who should be accused of following up on your rhetoric? All right, if you insist.

“What they’re doing,” Vance said a moment later of the media, “is trying to shut all of us up. They’re trying to say: How dare you, citizens of Springfield, complain about this migrant inflow because now these bomb threats are happening?”

Again, the issue of immigration in Springfield had already generated media attention before Vance’s beloved cat memes, even though Vance himself was hardly focused on the city. (His first mention of it on the social media site X was his first one attempting to leverage the initial claims about pets.) Nor is there any reason to think that the bomb threats were a response to city residents complaining about immigrants, given that they all followed the amplification of the story about pets, not the concerns that drew media attention in the first place.

Vance will probably chalk this article up as a success, given that we’re still here talking about Springfield and immigration. Except, of course, that we’re not talking only about that. We’re also talking about a senator who spreads false claims about legal residents of his state for political purposes and then tries to blame the negative repercussions of those claims on the media that’s covering them.

The media, unlike many in Springfield, is able to defend itself.