For weeks, John DePetro and I have been discussing Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s response (or lack thereof) to the protesters upset that they’ve lost their jobs based on a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 that he implemented, and they had their closest interaction yet over the weekend.

What strikes me, in this incident and generally, is the governor’s lack of acknowledgement or compassion for the effects of his order.  Even if one considers it justified, it ought to have been a difficult decision, which ought to inspire a level of sympathy.  Otherwise, the impression is that the governor’s attitude is that people who lose their jobs because they have qualms about a still-new medicine and doubts about the benefits of their getting it deserve whatever they get — as if the emergence of COVID and our government’s reaction thereto (whether appropriate or overdone) aren’t tragic on every level.  Maybe that’s an acceptable attitude for a wag on Twitter, but from the governor?

In an awkward moment, McKee asks organizer Paul Rianna whether he is a nurse and has no response when Rianna says a CNA (certified nursing assistant).  Why ask the question if he had no follow-up?  It is as if McKee was hoping the answer would be, “no,” so he could snidely dismiss Rianna as simply a political activist.

This attitude of dismissiveness and condescension continues when the governor walks away and Sgt. Pete Philomena of the state police steps in to quiet an Unmask Our Children protester.  Coalition Radio captured the interaction in this video:

Philomena looks like the person who was instrumental in initiating the conflict that resulted in the arrest of two protesters outside McKee’s home in early October.  Notably, one of the arrested men in that incident stated multiple times that the officer did not identify himself, and in this video Philomena makes a point of saying, “I’m identifying myself.”

In communicating the need for the protesters to be respectful and orderly, Philomena is only doing his job, but he conveys a level of disrespect that we would never see if, say, the protesters were from Black Lives Matter.  Picking up on this attitude, Rianna comments to another officer after Philomena says “I’m done” and walks away, “I’m not entitled to be dismissed. I’m a grown adult.”

That’s exactly the point.  For our ruling elite, particularly in the Democrat Party and the news media, there is a class of people who simply don’t count.  Perhaps those of us in that class have to be tolerated (for now) and permitted to sit quietly in the corner with our little signs, but we’re on a hair-trigger to be arrested and silenced, as indicated by Sgt. Philomena’s lecture in this video as well as the social media giants’ speed to censor and deplatform us and the attorney general of the United States’ likening parents protesting school committee decisions as “domestic terrorists.”

Featured image by Coalition Radio on YouTube.