From White House, Sanders calls for firing of ESPN host

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment

Jemele Hill, who called Donald Trump a white supremacist

In the 21st century, the go-to move when someone expresses an unacceptable opinion is to try to get them fired. It’s a consequence of internet discourse: you can’t reach out and slap someone for, say, making a problematic joke about race and AIDS, but you can harness the power of social media to crowdsource complaints to their employer. When it comes to censoring bad speech, work is the new government. It was therefore kind of whiplash-inducing to see the original government—Government Classic, if you will—appeal to the power of ESPN to silence someone.

Monday night, SportsCenter host Jamele Hill tweeted that the president “owed his rise to white supremacy.” Conservative media has criticized ESPN for being too liberal, and the network duly chastised her for “inappropriate” remarks. Now seems like a good time to pause and point out that Hill’s tweets were probably unwise, from a career standpoint, but they are hardly inappropriate. There are good arguments to be made that Trump does owe his political success to white supremacists, and it’s appropriate for any American to criticize him for that. Anyway, despite this display of corporate submission, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said today from the White House briefing room that Hill ought to be fired.

Maybe there’s a precedent for a White House spokesperson saying in an official capacity that a critic of the president should lose her job, but I can’t think of one. It’s crazy, first of all, that the White House would even take notice. Huckabee Sanders’s remarks came in response to a direct question about Hill, but still—the obvious play is to say “who?” and move on. Setting aside the dignity-of-office issue, though, it’s nanners for the White House to single out one of the president’s critics and call for her to be fired.

Is ESPN supposed to understand these remarks as a request from the president? Will the most powerful man in the world be mad at the cable network if they don’t fire Hill? And if they do, what new era might it signal in American democracy? You don’t need bills of attainder when the executive branch can wreck the career of anyone whose criticism catches the attention of the president. Anyway, the important thing is that even as fundamental norms of American democracy break down, the Law of Trump Tweets remains inviolable:

 

Should we get white nationalists fired from their jobs?

By Dan Brooks in Ethical Dilemmas 8 Comments

Cole White, formerly of Top Dog, marches for whiteness in Charlottesville.

The thing about white nationalists is fuck them. Ordinary rules of civil society, such as “don’t persecute people for their beliefs,” break down as those beliefs approach fascism. We already tried responding to fascism with sanction and argument, and it ended baldy. This history puts fascism in a  unique category of beliefs that might justify preemptive violence. If NAMBLA organized a march through downtown Missoula, I would oppose heading over there to beat them up. We have seen what happens when fascism gets rolling, however, and the way it seeks to make force superior to reason or democratic processes, in a way that might justify wielding force against fascism right off the bat.

I mention this because of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend. It ended in violence and what appears to be a vehicular homicide. Even those marchers who did not show up with sticks and torches espoused an ideology antithetical to this country’s values. The white race is a fiction, in my opinion, but even if it were real, you cannot say one race is superior to or even just inherently different from others while simultaneously claiming that all people are created equal. Race nationalism is incompatible with American democracy. The people who believe in it are assholes, but are they Nazis?

This question should not be taken as a defense of any of the ideas expressed by what is called the alt-right. I’m not steeped in that culture, but literally everything I have heard from them has been stupid. Not everything I have heard from them has been what I would classify as Nazism, though. This distinction is important to me, because while I am comfortable with the idea of stomping Nazis for their beliefs, I am not comfortable with the idea of stomping someone because they believe, for example, that white people are inherently better at math.

That claim affronts me, and I would hold whoever said it in contempt. I would not persecute them, though. In most cases, that’s a distinction without difference. When you see some Richard Spencer type marching down the street with a club and shouting about Jews, by all means, knock him down. But what about when you see some asshole like Cole White, pictured at the top of this post? He marched in Charlottesville Friday night. The Twitter account Yes, You’re Racist identified him from a picture on Saturday, and by the end of the day he had been fired from his job at a libertarian hot dog restaurant.

Just desserts, right? That’s one white man who will have time to rethink his theories about which race is superior, now that he doesn’t spend all day preparing and selling hot dogs. I don’t feel too bad about what happened to Mr. White, but I don’t feel too good about the mechanism by which it came about. I have two concerns, one of them a lot more esoteric than the other. Both of them can be neatly encapsulated in one thought experiment:

  1. Imagine you are a socialist, and you march in a public demonstration demanding that the United States nationalize its banking system. The Twitter account Yes, You’re a Communist calls your employer about it, and you lose your job at the libertarian hot dog place.
  2. Imagine you are a socialist, and you see Cole White marching in a public demonstration demanding that Charlottesville preserve its monument to Robert E. Lee. You call his employer, and he loses his job at the libertarian hot dog place.

Scenario (1) is very much like what actually happened, except the political belief in question is not as unequivocally bad as racism. Some might even say it’s good. No one of sense would say that about white supremacy, but I can imagine someone of sense saying it about the preservation of Confederate statues. I’m against that. Tear ’em down. But I am not so against it that I believe anyone who disagrees with me should lose their job. This scenario raises questions about how bad a political belief has to be to justify attacking the person who holds it.

Scenario (2) raises questions about how we attack objectionable beliefs. The practice of getting people fired for saying stupid things on the internet is well-established. White was doing stupid things in real life, but he was fired by the same basic mechanism: people were disgusted with him, figured out who he was, and put pressure on his employer. If you believe, as I do, that capital in general and work in particular exercise too much influence on American lives, it’s hard to justify getting people fired as an instrument of political action. White is an asshole, but has he now lost his health insurance? If he gets leukemia next week, are we willing to deny him treatment because of his opinions on Robert E. Lee and so-called racial science?

Again, I’m not trying to drum up sympathy for this jerk. I am trying to ask what we are willing to do to the people for whom we have almost no sympathy at all. We should punch Nazis, but maybe we should refrain from punching people who merely resemble Nazis. Otherwise, the mechanisms of our disagreements might overpower their content. If you had a button on your desk that electrocuted anyone you disagreed with, you could solve the Nazi problem real quick. Maybe, though, you would generate a new problem entirely.

Valerie Stamey returns, clothed in righteous fire

By Dan Brooks in Self-Promotion 0 Comment

Former Ravalli County Treasurer and missing person Valerie Stamey

It’s been over a year since the last time we heard from Valerie Stamey. Last May, we got the headline Former County Treasurer Found and Served, which pretty much tells you what you need to know about my favorite story in Montana politics. Stamey was appointed treasurer on a 3-2 vote by Ravalli County commissioners in 2013. She served about eight months before she was suspended in June 2014. During her tenure, the office filed no monthly reports and the fire department ran out of money. After she left, investigators found $780,000 in undeposited checks lying around her office. The county estimates it spent around six figures putting the office of the treasurer back in order after she left. Stamey was found guilty of official misconduct and fined in absentia, but by that time, she was gone. Her husband told reporters she was in a different state, but he wouldn’t say which. Process servers who hoped to find her at the auction of her home were disappointed.

Now she’s back, though, and more Stamey than ever. Last week, her attorney announced that she was suing the county and about a dozen of its employees for $20.2 million—that’s $240,000 for “lost economic opportunities” and $20 million in punitive damages. Among those to be punished are the county attorney, the former treasurer, three former deputy treasurers, the county clerk and the owners of the Bitterroot Star newspaper, all of whom are named as defendants in the suit. Their co-defedants include Greg Chilcott, J.R. Iman, Jeff Burrows, Chris Hoffman and Suzy Foss—the five members of the Ravalli County Commission that made her treasurer in the first place.

Stamey’s lawsuit claims that county commissioners conspired with treasury employees and the newspaper to “create the false impression that she was incompetent.” I’m no lawyer, but I think she’d have a better shot if she didn’t put the word “false” in there. This conspiracy does explain why the county commission appointed a treasurer who had no experience in managerial accounting, a history of bad debts, and a FUFI judgment against her. They needed a patsy. The only other explanation is that they made the worst hiring decision in Ravalli County history, exhibiting astonishingly poor judgment in the process. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!