Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos’s attempt to tar competitor Gabe Amos for — get this — having ties to Home Depot is fascinating:

He wants voters to focus on his work as a public servant and to ignore the fact that he was a registered lobbyist for Home Depot despite the company’s ties to the far-right agenda, earning tens of thousands of dollars for his work.

• Amo says “we must all be steadfast in our advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community” but was a paid lobbyist for Home Depot after the company donated $1,825,500 to 111 anti-LGBTQ politicians from 2017-2018.
• He says he will fight back against MAGA Republicans, but he lobbied for Home Depot in 2019, despite calls to boycott the company during that time because of its co-founder full throated support of Donald Trump’s re-election
• Home Depot’s co-founder Bernie Marcus donated $7 million to Trump’s campaign in 2016.
• An analysis found that Home Depot was the single biggest corporate donor to 2020 election objectors, contributing over $265,000 to lawmakers dubbed the “Sedition Caucus”
• Home Depot has contributed tens of thousands to legislators who are anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, anti-voting rights, and insurrectionists.

The core deceit, here, is to extend the degrees of separation through which a political stain can carry, with a close second being the use of labels in lieu of facts.  The first bullet above does both:  Readers must rely on Matos’s unsubstantiated claim and then stain Amo for associating with a company (one degree of separation) that has had some sort of dealings with various politicians around the country (two degrees of separation).

Both are lessons of recognizable manipulation strategies that progressives use repeatedly.  For instance, politicians vote on a wide variety of legislation applying myriad rationales.  Activists then go through and pick and choose sets of litmus tests to which they apply an indiscriminate label like “anti-LGBTQ politician.”  Usually the translation is “people who veer in the slightest bit from our most extreme position,” although they reserve the right to excuse any given politician for reason of political expediency.

In this case, though, note the target.  Matos (our lieutenant governor, remember) implicitly assumes Rhode Islanders will readily think of Home Depot as a bastion of evil bigotry.  This company is a familiar part of most of our lives.  It employes hundreds, or maybe thousands, of Rhode Islanders and is a massive part of our economy across multiple industries and people’s quality of life.

None of that matters to a radical like Matos.  With opportunity for the slightest bit of political advantage, she’ll tear it all down.

In short, she’s a consummate example of the cynical and destructive power of progressivism.  Rhode Islanders should remove her at first opportunity and rethink any positive view of progressives they may have.

Featured image by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash.