One man’s opinion
Ohio is on a fast track to officially rename (or, more technically, add an additional acceptable official reference to) a state wildlife area.
The “Charles O. Trump Wildlife Area,” a plot of land named after a man who deeded his acreage to the state of Ohio, will soon also be legally recognized as “Trump Wildlife Area.”
Readers can decide for themselves which Trump comes to mind with a title like that.
The change is happening by administrative rule, a lower-profile approach than previous attempts from Republicans to pass legislation to name publicly owned lands after President Donald Trump. (Lawmakers were explicit about which Trump they were going for.)
The state Wildlife Council held a public hearing about the matter last week within a broader set of rules proposed by the wildlife division of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. No members of the public addressed the Trump issue – most attendees addressed only the technical changes to state hunting and trapping laws.
So whose idea was it to give Trump an “area” in Ohio? Not me, said Gov. Mike DeWine to reporters on Monday.
As far as he’s concerned, “we should keep all the original names.” And the park signs should stay the same too.
“This is not anything to do with me,” he said. “This was done way down the bureaucracy. I’m simply telling you as governor of the state what I think it should be.”
Nothing will change as a result of the amendments to the state administrative code, according to ODNR spokesperson Karina Cheung.
“This rule change is adding another option for the naming of the wildlife area to Ohio Administrative Code,” she said. “ODNR does not intend to change the name of the wildlife area as used by ODNR, and The Charles O. Trump Wildlife Area name and sign will remain the same.”
An edgy campus speaker and his Nazi salutes
Within minutes of 36-year-old podcaster and provocateur Myron Gaines starting his event at Ohio University, he had led a “let’s go Nazis” chant with a Sieg Heil salute to boot; said half of all Black people are criminals; called specific students a “f-g” or a “dreidel spinner;” called to bring back “sl-t shaming;” and suggested that historians have deliberately inflated the death toll of the Holocaust, a common antisemitic trope.
He addressed a crowd of mostly male students on the university’s College Green, speaking from the steps of the same Memorial Auditorium that once hosted President Lyndon B. Johnson.
All told, Gaines’ two principal targets were Jews and women. This is hardly surprising to anyone familiar with his podcasts, his tour of campuses around the U.S., or his books, like “Why Women Deserve Less.”
“We simply cannot tolerate this,” said Gov. Mike DeWine, who mentioned the speech at OU at a Holocaust memorial speech on Monday.
Jake Zuckerman and Amy Morona took a look at the student organization that invited the podcaster to campus; the university officials that seemingly allowed him to come and refused to say whether his words amounted to harassment; the business model that can turn incendiary comments and outrage into attention and into dollars; and what a Jewish organization on campus thinks of it all.
Gaines’ controversial remarks pose the first major test of free speech on campus under Senate Bill 1. The Republican-backed higher education policy overhaul, passed last year, requires schools to let students reach their own conclusions about all “controversial beliefs or policies” and prohibits schools from trying to “indoctrinate” them politically.
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The theme continues
A Columbus-area restaurant has canceled a fundraiser for Republican governor candidate Casey Putsch, citing his comments regarding “Adolf Hitler, Nazis, and the Holocaust.”
In a Facebook post, La Chatelaine’s owners said their relatives were survivors from countries that Nazi Germany invaded and occupied during World War II. It said its owners didn’t adequately vet Putsch, who has a history of making winking allusions to Nazism and Hitler, before it agreed to host the event.
Putsch has attracted controversy and attention from the far right during his long-shot campaign against Vivek Ramaswamy in the May 5 Republican primary election. As Andrew reports, Putsch in a recent podcast interview positively described the support his campaign has received from followers of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who has vowed to help defeat Ramaswamy – the son of Indian immigrants – in Ohio.
Poppa DeWine, the liberator
Since we’re on the subject, we learned something new about the DeWine family this week.
During DeWine’s speech at the Holocaust memorial event, he told the story of his late father’s military service, which included liberating the concentration camps in Dachau, Germany as a private in the U.S. Army in 1945.
Richard “Dick” DeWine gave a 35-minute interview in 2007 to PBS before he died. The governor quoted his late father’s words of Dachau to a crowd on Monday that included a former prisoner there.
“It was beyond description,” DeWine said. “Bodies everywhere that had been starved to death. Nothing but bones and little skin on them. And the gas chambers, where they would tell them they were going to give them a shower. And instead of giving them a shower, they’d turn the gas on and kill them.”
In the news
Ohio’s nursing homes are dumping patients at homeless shelters. Long-term care facilities in Ohio are increasingly discharging their residents to homeless shelters, according to federal inspection reports, resident advocates, and the industry itself. Jake Zuckerman digs into the reports and talks to experts.
A bet on GOP candidates: DraftKings-linked super PAC bets $1M on ads backing favorite Ohio GOP candidates, by Jeremy Pelzer of Cleveland.com.
Acton responds: Acton says Ramaswamy allies using ‘domestic dispute’ to smear her, by Jessie Balmert of the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau.
