The Violent Aftermath

You really can't make this stuff up!

If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.

Ever since Kamala Harris trounced Donald Trump at that debate more and more weird things are happening and it has led to violence. I'm sure that Trump's biggest benefactor, Vladimir Putin, is sitting in Moscow enjoying the news but to Americans like myself who remembers a more polite civil society from the past, it has become increasingly been alarming and upsetting.

The worst is happening in Springfield, Ohio. Several far-right Republicans, including Senator (and current Vice President candidate) J.D. Vance and Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, fanned the flames about this since-debunked story claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating pets. If that weren't enough, Donald Trump actually repeated that rumor at that debate.

Thanks to that rumor Wittenberg University in Springfield received bomb threats. Two elementary schools were evacuated due to threats. Haitian immigrants are now fearing for their safety.

What's even worse is that J.D. Vance admitted that he only spread those rumors after his constituents brought those claims before him and he didn't bother to check the accuracy of those claims before he started talking about them. He defended his actions in an interview with Dana Bash on CNN by saying “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, Dana.”

Create stories?!? Really?!? I know Vance wrote that Hillbilly Elegy memoir, which has caused controversy in Appalachia where Vance's family originally came from. But Vance has gone too far with his story creation to the point where schools are getting bomb threats and people are literally afraid of being attacked by loyal Trump supporters. It's very fortunate that no one has been killed so far but that could change at any moment. There are calls for Vance's resignation from the Senate but if he won't step down, the Senate needs to at least censure Vance (although I would prefer to see him get expelled) just to send a message that deliberately spreading libelous rumors won't be tolerated by any elected official.

While that pet-eating Haitians rumors continue to spread, Donald Trump was the target of a second assassination attempt in two months. He had gone golfing at his club in Florida when shots rang out. Unlike the previous assassination attempt, when that shooter was shot dead, this time the Secret Service managed to capture the shooter alive.

The details about that shooting are starting to come out and they are a bit strange to say the least, starting with how the story initially broke with a statement from the Trump campaign. The media didn't do its own reporting but had instead relied on a press release for the assassination story. Then there are the details about the shooter himself.

The shooter's name is Ryan Routh and he had traveled to Ukraine in 2022 in an effort to join the International Legion to help Ukraine fight the invading Russians. He arrived at the Polish border town of Medyka only to get rejected because he was 56 years old and lacked fighting experience. He went on to Kyiv to work on recruiting and coordinating volunteers to fight. He pitched a tent at Maidan Square as part of his work with recruiting volunteers. Here's an interview he gave to a Ukrainian media outlet during his time in Kyiv.

He also hung flyers around Kyiv’s central square offering $1,200 to foreigners who took up arms against Russia. The contact information on the flyers was his own and military recruiters at the time said he had no official connection to Ukraine’s burgeoning International Legion. He was also turned down by an arm of the International Legion that was linked to Ukraine’s military intelligence known as GUR citing erratic behavior.

Apparently other people also noticed Routh's erratic behavior as he criticized Donald Trump and threatened to kill Vladimir Putin. One American nurse who served in Kyiv had tried to alert US authorities about her concerns after she returned to the US but to no avail.

A 2023 New York Times article mentioned that Routh claimed that he was in Pakistan and Iran seeking recruits among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban who would travel to Ukraine to fight the Russians.

Routh had even set up a website called Fight For Ukraine where he was recruiting international soldiers to go into battle against the Russians. According to cybersecurity expert Jackie Singh, that website is actually a psyop campaign on behalf of Russia that's disguised as a soldier recruitment site for Ukraine. Why would Russia want a pro-Russia sympathsizer to recruit solders to fight on behalf of Ukraine? According to Singh, it is to create chaos, which would benefit the invading Russians in the long run. She wrote a long thread on Twitter/X explaining how and why she came to that conclusion.

Routh's antics in Ukraine along with his assassination attempt had led Ukraine’s International Legion to release this statement saying that Routh had never served in that unit. They said that Routh had offered to recruit soldiers from other countries but they turned him down because they felt that his goals weren't realistic.

Routh was also caught on video at a rally by the Azov Brigade, a former militia that is now part of Ukraine’s National Guard, which prompted the Azov Brigade to put out its own statement denying that Routh was ever connected to them.

He was on Twitter/X but his account was shut down after the assassination attempt. Plenty of people managed to take screenshots of his tweets before his account disappeared. It was full of revelations. As for his politics, he was mostly a Republican. He admitted that he voted for Trump in 2016 but had become disillusioned with him by 2020 (which was also the year that the COVID-19 pandemic first arrived). He tweeted that he couldn't wait to see Trump gone.

He supported Tulsi Gabbard's short-lived presidential campaign in 2020 to the point where he begged her on Twitter to let him help her.

By 2024 Routh had decided to support Nikki Haley in the Republican primary where he begged her to join forces with one of her Republican primary rivals, Vivek Ramaswamy, to create a winning ticket against Donald Trump in the primary and against the Democrats in the general election.

He also begged the same to Ramaswamy.

It's apparent that, like Trump’s first attempted assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, Routh is also a Republican who wanted to kill the leading Republican candidate before the November election.

This latest assassination attempt had led to Twitter/X owner Elon Musk making a tweet on Twitter/X about why no one is even trying to assassinate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In a later tweet Musk complained about how something he told to a group in real life that led the group to laugh wasn't as funny when he turned it into a tweet. He then issued another tweet complaining about how jokes are far less funny people don't know the context and the delivery was made in plain text.

So many people had forwarded Musk's statement about assassinating Biden and Harris to both the Secret Service and the FBI that the FBI made this tweet while retweeting a screenshot of Musk’s so-called “joke”: “Unlike his kids, we're gonna visit him for this.”

The Republican Party needs to reflect on the possibility that there are Republicans who are dissatisfied with nominating Donald Trump for president and a few of them are even willing to use assassination to make their feelings known. At this point it's too late to replace Trump with another candidate but they need to realize that they had allowed Trump to become the main focus of the GOP while being too spineless to challenge him on his increasing violent rhetoric or to directly deal with the violent reactions of certain Republicans to Trump. If Trump loses in a huge landslide, it will be the GOP's own fault for letting this debacle happen.

My blog is free to subscribe but if you want to make a comment, you’ll need to take out a paid subscription. Click on the button below for more details.