Late last month, a street brawl occurred in downtown Cincinnati. It could have been just another item in the police blotter. But it was captured on video by a crowd of onlookers and shared hours later on Facebook. It quickly went viral, thanks to right-wing influencers who shared it while pointing out the race of the fight’s participants. As the story picked up steam on Fox News and in local media, activists and Republicans here and across the country said the clip was evidence that violence in the Queen City was out of control.
Enter Vivek Ramaswamy – the Republican tech entrepreneur and gubernatorial hopeful who has made a political career out of a polished mix of media savvy and viral moments.
Ramaswamy held a 90-minute town hall meeting on Monday in Cincinnati, which I attended, to discuss the video and what he said were underlying public safety concerns in the city. The event rode the wave of the story while also breathing new life into it. It also showed what makes Ramaswamy such a unique Ohio political candidate.
Ramaswamy’s town hall could have easily just been a political rally taking advantage of a viral moment. But it ended up being much more. Attended by a cross section of people from Cincinnati, it was surprisingly raw and allowed participants to openly discuss race relations and vent frustrations about violence in the city. The unfiltered forum and Ramaswamy’s management of it was reminiscent of another notable Ohioan: Phil Donahue, the former TV talk show host who built a name by airing difficult conversations in front of a live audience.
The forum showed what makes Ramaswamy, 39, unique as an Ohio candidate. He’s adept in today’s modern political landscape that rewards viral moments and podcast-style, unfiltered weighty discussions.
His town hall also came at the expense of Cincinnati’s Democratic leaders, who accused Ramaswamy of harming the city’s reputation and inflaming racial tensions.
Ramaswamy makes his own viral videos from town hall
Shortly after Monday’s town hall wrapped, Ramaswamy’s campaign quickly spliced and spun out video excerpts from the meeting. The most-viewed clip, nearly nine minutes long, shows an older Black man named Robert asking Ramaswamy why the brawl video got widespread attention, while historical injustice against African-Americans gets “swept under the table.”
“You can go on YouTube, all around the nation and what do you see? Our people getting crucified. But nobody steps up and says anything about it. But when something happens like this, it’s a big uproar!” Robert said.
Some of the hundreds of people in the packed restaurant that hosted the event groaned. Ramaswamy urged the audience to let the man to speak and cut through the tension by joking that he clearly didn’t plant Robert’s question.
Ramaswamy also added that America hasn’t always lived up to its ideals; he then discussed Robert’s use of “our people.”
“I’m thinking about our people as everybody in this room, I see Black, white, brown, men, women. These are our people. America is our people. Ohio is our people. Cincinnati is our people,” Ramaswamy said to growing applause. “And I believe it is the God-given right of every person to be able to live a life free of violence and to be able to speak their mind in the open without fear of retaliation.”
The clip has been viewed at least briefly more than 1.9 million times on X, the social media network.
Video of viral brawl becomes political fodder
Around 3 a.m. on July 26, several groups of people got into a fight in downtown Cincinnati. A major music festival, a Cincinnati Reds game and a semi-pro basketball game had drawn tens of thousands to the area. Police said the dispute occurred just as bars closed.
One of the first of many videos filmed by onlookers captures what appears to be the end of the fight. It shows a chaotic scene: a white man fighting multiple Black people, some of whom kicked him on the ground while other onlookers tried to break up the fight. The video ends with a white woman getting sucker punched by a man whose race is hard to determine. The woman falls to the ground, dazed with blood trickling out of her nose.
By that afternoon, two prominent right-wing social media accounts posted the video and images from it, describing it as an attack on a white couple by a “black mob.” U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Westlake in Northeast Ohio, shared one of those posts before later threatening to cut off the city’s federal funding.
Two days later, Vice President JD Vance commented on the video during a campaign appearance in Canton, saying Moreno had shown him the video. He said the video shows why some people are fearful of going out for a night in Ohio’s big cities.
“I haven’t seen the full context,” Vance said. “But what I saw was a mob of lawless thugs beating up on an innocent person.”
Responding to Moreno’s tweets, conservative media personality Charlie Kirk and other right-wing activists called for the FBI to investigate the incident as a hate crime. Benny Johnson, a right-wing YouTuber, pivoted into fundraising for the woman, attracting a contribution from Charlie Sheen, the actor with Cincinnati ties. Harmeet Dhillon, a high-ranking Justice Department official, said the DOJ will be monitoring the local investigation carefully, implying it could be a hate crime.
Ramaswamy then announced the town hall meeting last Wednesday, six days after the brawl. He said he’d invited any victims who wanted to participate.
“Everyday Americans shouldn’t have to think twice before enjoying a nice Friday night, for fear of being assaulted or killed. A greater police presence in our cities during well-known high-risk night hours is basic common sense,” Ramaswamy said in one post on X.
Dr. Amy Acton, the lone Democrat currently running for governor in next year’s election, did not comment on the fight on social media until Tuesday. But in a statement provided for this story, Acton called the brawl “horrific and unacceptable.” She also criticized Republicans for funding cuts that she said led to fewer police resources, and said Ramaswamy supports those types of policies.
“I’m relieved to see that those culpable have been arrested and charged, and am sending my best to the victims as they recover and heal,” she said. “I also await the results of the full investigation.”
Some saw town hall as race baiting
I spoke to people who attended the event as well as those who protested across the street from the venue. People on both sides agreed the video made the city look bad, but disagreed on exactly how and why that was.
People standing across the street from the event accused Republicans, including Ramaswamy, of pushing the video for political gain. Vance’s brother, Cory Bowman is mounting a longshot challenge of Cincinnati’s Democratic mayor in the November election, and was among the speakers at the event.
Some, like Hamilton County Democratic Party Chair Alex Linser, criticized Ramaswamy, who grew up in the Cincinnati area, for not speaking up about previous negative events in the community, like a neo-Nazi rally that occurred in a city suburb in February.
“It’s one thing to talk abstractly about violence, but when you do, when it does show up on tape, and certainly people have an emotional reaction,” Linser said. “Where I have an objection is when a figure like Vivek Ramaswamy tries to exploit that trauma and turn it into something just to further his own ambition.”
When asked why she thought the video blew up, Celeste Treece, who protested with her two young daughters, accused Ramaswamy and other Republicans of race-baiting. She also referenced the notorious false claims Vance and others made during last year’s presidential election that accused Haitian immigrants of eating cats and dogs in Springfield.
Similar to this week’s event, Ramaswamy held a town hall in Springfield last October about community immigration concerns, which he tried to steer away from talk of eating pets.
“There is an incentive for people running in Ohio, just like we saw with the ‘cats situation’ … And I think that this is just one of those things that they’re using once again, because they know how powerful it is,” Treece said.
At Cincinnati’s event, a Black protestor who identified himself as “Z, added this: ”“You know, we had one incident. It was unfair that the lady got caught between bad decisions and bad behavior and intoxication by adults. It wasn’t a race war. We’re past all that.”
Those waiting in line to attend the event said the video showed a brutal assault, singling out the image of the woman. Some also said the video illustrates how Cincinnati, which has seen a string of violent crimes in its downtown area over the summer, has an existing safety problem.
Gary Bryson, who is white, said the city is fundamentally safe, but trending in the wrong direction.
“You don’t just slap people, especially a man that hit a woman when she’s not even looking at someone,” Bryson said. “And that’s just emblematic of the bad people that are running around town that haven’t been incarcerated like they should be.”
In a brief interview following the event, Ramaswamy said the underlying truth of the video — rising violent crime rates this year in downtown Cincinnati — justified his scheduling of the event and explained why it struck a chord with a broader audience.
“If that were an isolated, one-off incident, it wouldn’t merit this type of conversation,” Ramaswamy said. ‘But it’s not an isolated incident, which is why we need to actually confront the problem and address actual solutions.”
Some criticize the City of Cincinnati
Ramaswamy’s town hall included an emotional speech from a crime victim whose story didn’t generate any broader political attention – much less Ramaswamy’s intervention – when it happened earlier this summer.
Sarah Heringer admonished city leaders for not doing more to stem crime before her husband, a military veteran who owned a gym in a core inner-city neighborhood, was killed by an intruder in his home in June.
Local media has reported the man charged with killing Patrick Heringer had committed multiple parole violations, including cutting off his ankle monitor, months before the murder.
“We’re done watching the city die at the hands of cowards. We need leaders. And we know the difference now, don’t we?” Heringer said.
Heringer served as a bridge speaker between local Republican officials and the Q&A portion of the event. Ramaswamy’s co-host for the event was Chris Smitherman, a former local NAACP leader and ex-vice mayor who unsuccessfully ran for county commissioner as an independent in 2021.
Besides the conversation about racial relations, Ramaswamy heard from a broad swath of people who described their experiences with violent crime. This included a downtown resident who said she feared walking to work, a woman who said her son was murdered, a man who described a teenage nephew getting off easy for a serious gun and drug-related crime, and a nonprofit CEO who works with low-income people.
Ramaswamy listened to questions before answering them, sometimes clearly falling back on campaign talking points, including describing his plan to toughen bail conditions as part of his criminal-justice platform.
At one point, Ramaswamy described meeting with Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval and city police hours before the town hall. But he said he had promised skeptical city leaders he wouldn’t describe his conversations publicly.
Ramaswamy concluded the event after taking questions for about 75 minutes, wrapping up in time for a live national TV appearance on Fox News.
But before he did, Ramaswamy said he might hold more similar events in big cities elsewhere in the state.
“There’s a lot of underlying issues that even came up in this discussion, including tough issues relating to race, relating to history,” Ramaswamy said. “We’re not going to solve those problems by hiding from them. We’re going to solve them by confronting those problems directly.”
What police and city officials say happened
In their response to growing furor over the incident, Cincinnati officials have towed the line between denouncing and investigating the incident while portraying it as an unfortunate fact of life in a large city.
Police Chief Teresa Theetge said alcohol was a factor in the fights, which involved multiple groups of people, and said police responded within six minutes of being called. Officials one of the biggest failures of the whole incident is how, despite many people witnessing the brawl, only a single person called 911.
Several city officials and community members have said the national commentary and news coverage of the incident has inflamed racial tensions in the city.
“There are overt racial tensions that have been inflamed by irresponsible leaders who unfortunately have cynically tried to take advantage of this awful fight and tried to divide us,” Purval said during a news conference last Friday. Through a spokesperson, he didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Still, Pureval announced a raft of measures meant to increase police visibility in neighborhoods near where the fight occurred.
“We’re meeting this moment with urgency,” Pureval said.
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Six people have been charged for their roles in the fight
Meanwhile, local police have investigated the crime. Six people have been charged and arrested. A lawyer for one of the people who were charged said one white man involved in the fight used a racial slur, calling someone else in the crowd the N-word. Local and national media have published a clip depicting this, which some in the community have said puts the video into context. Another video shows that man later being punched before falling and hitting his head on a nearby vehicle’s bumper.
City officials say they want to charge everyone who was involved with the fight once they are identified.
Ken Kober, president of the city police union, said in an interview that the area where the fight occurred is usually lightly staffed late at night, part of a broader understaffing issue he said exists in the city. He said he’s glad the city has responded with increasing police presence.
Kober also said there’s no evidence yet that the crime was definitely racially motivated – an element he said is hard to prove in court. He confirmed the FBI is monitoring the investigation, although he downplayed that as not necessarily unusual, given how local and federal law enforcement frequently work together.
Asked why he thinks the video went viral, Kober said it’s the culmination of multiple factors: the way the video was initially perceived as a racial attack, rising violent downtown crime levels and the fact that it’s an election year in the city.
“It certainly has become polarizing. Which is why I’m sure it’s gotten so much national attention,” Kober said.