This story has been making news for days with the local mayor putting blame on President Trump and JD Vance for dozens of bomb threats which shut down schools in Springfield, Ohio. Trump was asked about it and said he didn't know anything about it.

The national media has been covering this the same way. Here's an NBC News report from two days ago.

Springfield is a town on edge. It’s been five days since it was thrust into the national spotlight by baseless — and to many, racist — rumors of Haitian residents killing and eating wildlife and pets, and its economic comeback has been dramatically overshadowed by tensions that once rarely reached beyond city council meetings. The city has been forced to close schools, City Hall and other municipal buildings because of bomb threats and safety fears tied to the rumors, and Haitian immigrants are afraid to leave their homes because of anger directed at them.

On Saturday, nearby Wittenberg University canceled all on-campus activities for the following day after receiving a threat of a potential shooting targeting the Haitian community.

Mayor Rob Rue says the city of nearly 59,000 is being “torn apart” by hate and vitriol.

Personally, I thought the claims about people eating dogs and cats was an own goal. The memes were funny but JD Vance has already admitted this could be seen as a fake but accurate argument to focus media attention on mass immigration, what the left would call "consciousness raising."

The left makes those sorts of arguments all the time and I usually give them hell for it so I'm not inclined to give this one a pass just because I agree that the impact of migrants on US towns has largely been ignored by the national media.

Putting that aside, there's another issue here that definitely deserves attention. The media loves to play the climate of hate game with Republican rhetoric. If any act of violence or any threat can be tied to GOP rhetoric, they run with it. The lie connecting Sarah Palin to the Tucson shooting is just one of the best known examples but the left/media has done this sort of thing many times. 

But as we've seen this week, when acts of violence implicate left-wing rhetoric, their standard suddenly changes. The media doesn't rush to ask Biden and Harris if they feel responsible for the assassination attempts against Trump. On the contrary, the media blasts Trump for daring to make this same argument. Here's how NBC News was reporting this yesterday.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies are fanning political flames after his Secret Service detail thwarted what is, according to the FBI, the apparent second attempt to assassinate him in less than 10 weeks.

In a message posted to multiple social media platforms Monday, Trump accused his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden of taking "politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred." He said their rhetoric is responsible for threats and violence against him, even though they routinely denounce political violence and did so on Sunday.

So Trump is directly responsible for bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, but it's just crazy to connect progressives to assassination attempts against Trump. In both cases Trump is wrong. It's is a heads I win, tails you lose game the media is playing. Indeed, many progressives spent yesterday trying to square this circle by arguing that Trump's own rhetoric was somehow responsible for the attacks against him rather than the heated rhetoric of his opponents. 

Bottom line: The climate of hate argument always operates in only one direction.

Yesterday, Gov. Mike DeWine revealed some additional information about the threats Trump and Vance are being blamed for. It turns out most of those bomb threats have been coming from overseas. The Associated Press has a story out today which puts this news in the headline and the opening paragraph.

Ohio stationed state police at Springfield schools Tuesday in response to a rash of bomb threats — the vast majority that officials said came from overseas —- after former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance falsely said legal Haitian immigrants in the small city were eating dogs and cats...

“The vast majority of the bomb threats came from foreign countries. Not 100%, but it’s the vast majority,” Dan Tierney, DeWine’s spokesperson, said Tuesday...

“These are largely foreign actors, not folks in the community or another part of the United States,” he said. “We think it’s useful in part because it shows that it’s, you know, false, that it’s safe to send your kids to school. And we’re providing extra patrol support to make sure people feel safe at school.”

That's certainly an interesting turn of events. It suggests that some of these threats, maybe most of them, are coming from people outside the country looking to mess with a US presidential election. No one has revealed which country is sending these but I think we all know who the usual suspects are.

But if you look at some of the stories published yesterday when Gov. DeWine made this announcement, the focus was still on blaming Trump. NBC News finally gets around to mentioning that the threats are coming from overseas in paragraph 10 of this story. But the NY Times' take is even worse. It's not until paragraph 13 that you learn where the threats are coming from. Hopefully we'll learn more over time, but for the moment it sounds like this is part of some foreign actor's election interference budget. 

Meanwhile, the media would love to have it both ways but they need to make a choice here. If heated rhetoric leads to bomb threats in Springfield and that's a worthy topic for multiple stories connecting the threats to Trump, then political rhetoric also leads to assassination attempts and we should see just as many stories confidently pinning what happened in Florida on Democratic rhetoric about Trump being a danger to democracy, etc. Where are those stories?

On the other hand, if the media won't connect the assassination attempts to Democratic rhetoric, then they need to stop connecting fake bomb threats emailed from overseas to Trump and Vance who, after all, didn't suggest that anyone should make bomb threats. 

The media needs to pick one standard and stick with it. Anything else is an in-kind donation to the Harris campaign. Here's what Gov. DeWine said yesterday about the bomb threats coming from overseas. "We think that this is one more opportunity to mess with the United States and they're continuing to do that," he said.