Gov. McKee wants you to know that you’re deplorable.
The 199,922 Rhode Islanders who voted for President Trump (and probably tens of thousands more who supported him but did not vote) have good cause to wonder whether the governor of the State of Rhode Island cares about their lives and interests.
When Dan McKee found out that somebody hosting a fundraiser for him, Jerry Zarrella, had been a Rhode Island chair of the Trump campaign — or at least when somebody made an issue of it — he didn’t just gracefully bow out so as to disassociate himself from Trump while remaining respectful of one-fifth or more of his constituents. (Forget about a unifying statement about representing all Rhode Islanders and welcoming a broad coalition of support.) He put out the following extremely aggressive statement, as John DePetro reports:
Once I became aware on Friday afternoon of the details of a fundraising event set for next Wednesday, I asked that the event be cancelled.
I do not want to be associated with Donald Trump in any way, shape, or form. I do not like Trump…he is dishonest, divisive, and his “Big Lie” is a threat to our democracy.
There is no place for a Trump spokesperson to co-host any event I am involved in.
Hey, McKee: you’re the governor; everything isn’t about you. You know who’s “divisive?” Daniel McKee. Zarrella isn’t Trump, and McKee is participating in one of the most destructive tendencies of “cancel culture” — criminalizing ordinary political engagement.
What other events that the governor of Rhode Island is “involved in” count, by the way? If a Rhode Islander accomplishes something that attracts recognition — a business expands, say, or a student achieves something spectacular — and progressive journalists ferret out incriminating evidence that he or she supported President Trump, will they no longer count as worthy of his Eminence’s presence at an event?
Just to be safe, Rhode Islanders should begin refusing to participate in any events involving McKee.
None of these words fairly describe the situation.
I’ll concede that “criminalizing” was an early-morning-vocabulary overstatement, but co-chairing a state’s campaign for a sitting United States President is definitely “ordinary political engagement.”
What we’ll never see is the alternate scenario where that campaign ends gracefully, with Trump accepting his defeat and supporting a peaceful transfer of power. Maybe McKee would have said the same thing anyway, but we don’t live in that world and it’s important to recognize it.
The thing is… McKee didn’t back out of an event with Donald Trump, but with Rhode Islander Jerry Zarrella, who actually took some heat from other Trump supporters for opposing the post-election-day activities.
This is the problem with the governor’s inappropriately aggressive stance. A leader who believes his job, though in a partisan system, makes him responsible for the government’s relationship with every resident would not have been maximally aggressive. So, you’re saying it doesn’t matter that Zarella broke with Trump on the post-election activities, because he was co-chair beforehand. If it’s just the association with Trump, at all, then it covers every Trump supporter.
Zarella’s involvement was (and remains?) considerably more than a simple supporter, and as far as I know the extent of his opposition was saying that he should concede back in November. I think under the circumstances we should expect a little more than that.
This isn’t about the Governor’s job or access to basic services, this is about a political campaign and the image the Governor wants to project about himself. I don’t think there is anything outrageous in telling people that you can’t simply pivot cleanly from Trump to McKee without losing a step. You always have the option to not flip back and forth between parties based on the prevailing winds. A good faith effort at a mea culpa should be respected, and if someone tried and was shutdown anyway you’d have a point, but you can’t expect forgiveness without contrition.
Even by your reply, you’re illustrating the sloppy, divisive politics of Dan McKee. His statement was not at all about Zarella and certainly didn’t offer any hint of “forgiveness.” (That, in itself is problematic, but we’ll put that aside for now.)
As you say, “this is about a political campaign.” As I suggested, McKee has made it clear that anybody who might have supported President Trump should be wary of getting involved with him in any way, because the slightest bit of pressure will result in a denunciation in the strongest terms.
You can’t dismiss the idea that people would be forgiven until you find a Trump supporter who is willing to own up to their mistakes. It is very interesting that you use the word “divisive,” because it’s the same charge they lob at Liz Cheney. It seems to mean, “we’re going to pretend nothing happened, and you’re being a bully if you don’t play along.” The consistent theme is absolving Trump supporters of any accountability for their choices.
The Trump movement attempted to violently overthrow the constitutional order because an election didn’t go their way, and there’s a very good chance they’ll try again. You can’t expect everyone else to just pretend it didn’t happen, or accept that one of the major American parties simply has a paramilitary wing now. Denouncing that movement and those tactics is not a lot to ask before someone is accepted back into mainstream politics.
“Divisive” isn’t my word. It’s McKee’s.
I’m not sure what to say, here. You’re simply declining to acknowledge my point that McKee’s response was poorly done in a way contrary to unity.
I’d also suggest that your characterization of President Trump and his supporters is exactly how I’d characterize the Democrats over the past five years. Hoaxes and lies to undermine an American President… riots in the streets… police state tactics. Personally, that’s not a “mainstream” I care to be a part of.
Indeed, it all sounds a bit like “We had to become full-on fascists because we didn’t want those other people to beat us to it!”
We know the points of mine that you are declining to acknowledge, so I won’t rehash them. I’m saying that the calls for unity only go one way, the onus is only ever on them, never on Trump supporters. You expect to be cooperated to, never with. You have to lump all of the left and center-left together to build up an equally objectionable record of behavior, and I’d suggest you not only fail to reach equity (indeed many of the things you think are hoaxes and lies remain as true as ever), you kind of look foolish acting like Dan McKee and Joe Biden are one and the same with the most radical members of their own party, let alone every green party loony and ANTIFA anarchist. You can’t just put everyone slightly to the left of yourself in one big lump and pretend it’s a coherent movement.
I think what you are seeing is more a product of a persecution complex than full-on fascism, and, believe it or not, what you describe is exactly the message the other side thinks they’re hearing too (Sohrab Ahmari stands out as being particularly explicit about it).
Of course McKee and Biden aren’t one and the same with their radical allies. In some respects they’re worse. McKee is terrified of a progressive primary opponent, and Biden is taking all that space to his Left to become the most radical president in history, as if that’s an achievement. Remember Biden talking about how Antifa is just an idea? Notice that there are literally armed insurrections going on in American cities right now that get no media play, but “the mainstream” is cheering the lack of bail for people who’ve been accused of killing a Capitol police officer who died of natural causes the next day?
I didn’t say it’s a coherent movement on your side of the question. At this scale, everything is a big mashup. But the big mashup on the left is leveraging the entire federal government, including the military, corporations, the news media, the entertainment media, and academia to demand confessions and penance from people with whom they disagree.
As to the “cooperated to, never with” talk, I can only go back to the basic point of my post: McKee is the governor of the state, as in the chief executive of a government that is supposed to represent the entire population, and he is the one issuing aggressive press releases that implicitly condemn more than one-fifth of the people with no hint of a way back to unity because he feels he has to appease the radicals in his party. I am in no way on an equal footing with him when, as a citizen, I criticize approach.
You can draw larger and larger circles around the point, but you’re only making it more prominent.
“Natural causes.” In any other circumstances, if a police officer healthy enough to show up to work is harassed, sprayed with bear spray, and suffers multiple strokes as a result you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the cause of death.
And calling it as my side is an indictment of the state of the right, no? How did the right go so far afield that I, without a single change in my opinions, found myself as a member of the amorphous left? Free markets and limited government have been replaced by bitterness, ethnic anxiety, and a sad cult of personality and, frankly, it doesn’t seem to be working out.
For the “implicitly condemn,” I go back to the persecution complex hypothesis. Zarrella was trying to participate in the processes of the Democratic Party while his Twitter page remained 100% MAGA and brain worms. He could have at least taken off the hat, no?
He wasn’t sprayed with bear spray. Maybe those two are culpable for his death, in some way, but the lies were fast and furious and continue. First it was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher, then it was bear spray. “The mainstream” isn’t interested in facts or truth, only the anti-Trump narrative. I’ll say this, if we’re going to blame them for murder based on a (possible) use of mace, we’re going to have to rethink the safety of that product, and maybe question whether Ashli Babbit wasn’t the only protester killed by authorities that day. After all, others died of natural causes, and we know the crowd was sprayed with harmful gas.
As to sides, you’re obviously in common cause with the far left on the particular question of requiring accused Trump sympathizers to grovel for forgiveness. That seems pretty bitter to me, and kind of like a cult of anti-personality.
Let’s just look at this objectively: We each think the other’s views on this matter are premised on anxiety and outright lies. That is the start-state of our current problem. I’m suggesting that maybe the chief executive of the state is making matters worse with blanket condemnations, with no hint of a possibility of unity, based on his political calculations. You’re insisting that my saying somebody in a position of authority ought to be a little more careful with his words and seek to be maximally unifying, rather than divisive, means I’ve got a “persecution complex.”
Again, the only consistent theme is making sure that Trump and Trump supporters bear no responsibility for the consequences of their choices.
Well, I guess if your response to evidence that a fact you promoted was false is to complain that it reduces the weight of your conclusion, there’s not much more to say.
I’m trying to let this go (only for now, I’ll never stop confronting you with the terrible things you choose to believe), but only because I’m afraid if I keep pushing my luck we’ll eventually hear a theory that he isn’t dead at all. I mean, “he wasn’t killed by bear spray, it was mace” doesn’t exactly undermine the “killed” part as much as you think it does, nor does “he wasn’t hit with a fire extinguisher or pummeled with the American flag, those were different officers” make me reevaluate the terror of the day.
Maybe we can at least agree that the “divisive” part in all of this comes down to the cavalcade of lies, even if we can’t agree on which side is the one with a greater grasp on the truth. I think it is the enormous one with all of the mainstream media, business leaders, the centrist politicians, the left, anyone who watched the video footage, the mainstream respectable right, and quite a few further right personalities like McConnell back when the events were still fresh. You think it is the shrinking side, with the Trump loyalists and a handful of Q nuts. When it comes down to it, those of us who are more removed from the situation are only really guessing which side is right.
Your <em>ad populum</em> fallacy and collective guilt bring us back to the real central dividing line, here.
McKee condemns Zarella entirely with reference to <em>somebody else</em> he doesn’t like. You’re condemning two men on the basis of the violence of <em>somebody else</em> who attacked a police officer.
To be clear, I’m not saying that I know that mace was actually used. After all, it was the prosecution in that case who downgraded the alleged chemical from bear spray, after the weapon had been downgraded from a blunt-force weapon. All I’m suggesting, with respect to mace, is that it either reduces the likelihood that the actions of these men was actually the cause of officer Sicknick’s death or we have to rethink its use more generally.
By all means, prosecute those who have done wrong, but don’t prosecute some people because they’re the closest available stand-ins for some other people, especially when the other people may be characters you assume to exist but may not, in fact, be real.
The fact that a madness has spread among our culture’s elites does not make it something other than madness.
I fully admit to assigning collective guilt to the mob. When you join this kind of group and do things like storm government buildings you become responsible for all of the damage and deaths that result. The mob killed Ashli Babbitt. The mob killed Brian Sicknick. The mob killed the officers who succumbed to suicide right after. The mob broke windows, stole things, etc. The two who are being held may very well be innocent on a technical level, or they may be guilty. But on a higher level we already know who is responsible for those deaths.
Don’t forget that there were two aspects to the rally that day, the people who showed up for the speeches and milled around for a bit afterward minding their own business, and the ones who rampaged at the Capitol with treason on their minds. If you offered Democrats a quarter of the skepticism and forbearance you reserve for the latter group you’d be horrified. I wouldn’t be bothering with this if I didn’t think you were capable of it. Hillary said half of Trump supporters were deplorable, you don’t have to self-identify with that half.
I don’t know. I think I’m pretty fair about judging the activities of individual Democrats when it comes to assigning specific blame. It’s one thing to assign collective blame — which may even be a healthy way of signaling to people that they’re contributing to something they probably wouldn’t want to if they thought about it. It’s another thing to say that we should ignore the facts around what an individual actually did because he or she is subject to a collective guilt.
Seems to me you’re having it both ways. You still want to differentiate between protest attendees and rioters, but that’s not so sharp of a line. So, speech attendance was OK. Milling about was OK. What about meandering over toward the Capitol to see what was going on? What about walking into the Capitol when the police inside opened the door and stepped aside?
Three people in particular are directly responsible for the death of Ashli Babbitt, in my view: Babbitt herself, that one guy I wrote about who riled up the crowd at key moments and then broke all of the windows and went at the door, and the person who shot her. The instigator is important to remember. The people who were just going with the crowd are plainly not as culpable as the likes of him, but you would wash all that away.
If a group of teenagers break into a house and have a party, which of the party-goers are to blame? Are the ones who arrived late less responsible? I think it’s pretty clear that going through the door is the line.
In this case there is another nice sharp line, the barricades (the idea that the police opened the door is another convenient lie (as if the riot officer screaming as he was being crushed trying to block a doorway never happened), though even if there were some collaborators that wouldn’t change anything). I wouldn’t say speech attendance was okay, it was a cult-like rally in service of a lie. But (except for maybe the organizers) it was still speech, not treason. This is like any other protest, protesting is fine, rioting is not. Mob violence works like a flood, the people who start the violence are emboldened by the feelings of anonymity they get in a large group. The people in the back increase the pressure in the front; there are rarely specific instigators, they all instigate each other cooperatively. The teenagers only throw the party in the first place because they expect other people to show up. Each person has a responsibility to defuse the situation, or at least not to add to it. You can’t look at a gallon of water and say that’s the one that broke the dam.
You’re eliding blaming everybody for the party and trying to blame a teen on one side of the house for an assault that happened on the other.
If you watch the videos from January 6, it’s obvious that there were different experiences at different entrances. In one, there was more of an initial march up the stairs and then relatively easy entry into the building mainly due to crowd pressure. In another, there was a more violent attack on the door. In another, the police literally opened the door and set aside. There wasn’t a single Storming of the Capitol, in that regard.