Back to School Bomb Threats
The evacuation of Springfield, Ohio schools this week marks the return of a tactic that recently targeted schools for LGBTQ-friendly books.
On Friday morning, two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio were evacuated over undisclosed threats. A local middle school was also closed for the day on police advisory. Two nearby schools were closed the previous day for bomb threats.
The shutdowns came days after Springfield was thrust into the national spotlight by leading Republican politicians—Donald Trump and JD Vance among them—who falsely claimed Haitian immigrants were eating Springfield-area pets.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump alleged in his Tuesday presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Vance expanded the attack on Friday, linking Springfield’s immigrant community to “communicable diseases” and “crime,” in an immigration omen for “every town in our country.” Even from a campaign that built its brand on xenophobia, this is pretty fascist shit. It’s borderline blood libel, and creates a very frightening opening for attacks on migrants in Ohio and elsewhere.
But first, as recent far-right panics go, it’s hurting kids.
The morning after the presidential debate, some Haitian families in Springfield kept their children home for safety, the Haitian Times reports. School closures soon followed as local districts and municipal buildings received bomb threats.
School bomb threats are not new to America’s political scene. Threats and outright school burnings targeted Black students’ education in the Reconstruction era and again during desegregation. But they’ve seen a resurgence in recent years, especially as part of an anti-LGBTQ+ reaction. Last September I counted at least 47 cases of schools and libraries closing due to violent threats over the previous year. Many of those threats explicitly referenced books (usually for children) about gender, sexuality, and sometimes race.
K-12 schools are probably America’s most visible public institutions. On a purely cynical level, anonymous school bomb threats make some sense from bigots who want to put the public in an ideological stranglehold. A threat to a school is frightening, memorable, and stands to disrupt an entire town’s schedule if classes are canceled for the day.
But there’s something more at play when homophobes shut down a school over a queer-friendly comic book, or even when Donald Trump falsely claims that immigrants will eat your dog. These attacks are corruptions of care that prey on adult notions of protecting one’s charge (one’s child or one’s hypothetical child or even one’s labradoodle). They warp parental obligations into ideas of possession and paranoia.
School SWATters on the right might claim—and even believe it themselves!—that they’re protecting kids. Their justification comes in describing rival races and ideologies as polluting schools or neighborhoods, just by their presence. Just look at the way Vance describes Springfield’s Haitian community in the terms of an infection, or the way book-banners describe LGBTQ-friendly books as “indoctrination.” The right tells followers that they have a responsibility to fight for children. Conveniently, that crusade means traumatizing and controlling very young people who cannot fight back.
On Tuesday, shortly before the presidential debate, the parents of Aiden Clark spoke at a Springfield town meeting. Clark was 11 last year when he died in a traffic crash with a Haitian immigrant. The boy’s death received renewed attention this month, with Vance claiming on Twitter that Clark had been murdered (he wasn’t).
In brief remarks, Clark’s father condemned “morally bankrupt” politicians who have weaponized their family tragedy. “They have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain,” the boy’s father said.
“I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.
“The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem that our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate.”