The Daily Kos is not the standard bearer on this, but it is emblematic of one of big rallying cries in the Democrat party right now.
F*ck Civility: Why we should follow Maxine Waters' lead — Disrespectability Politics Season 2, Ep. 7 https://t.co/gXgB3lgqZw
— Daily Kos (@dailykos) July 6, 2018
Civility is being treated as a dirty word. The reason for this is reciprocity. After all…
Are the Civility Defenders™️ on this? https://t.co/NdkV99j5o9
— andrew kaczynski? (@KFILE) July 6, 2018
There’s a problem here, and it’s eating away at the country. It’s hate. Unbridled hatred, justified by pointing to the other (Democrat / Republican) party and engaging in “whataboutism”.
It is obvious that politicians and prominent pundits representing both major political parties are attempting to anger their supporters in an effort to gain political advantage during the Fall elections. Hate is still destructive, however. Case in point, San Antonio.
A man named Kino Jimenez lost his job at a San Antonio bar, Rumble, after a video of him went viral yesterday. It shows Jimenez berating a 16 year-old-boy, grabbing the boy’s drink and tossing it in the kid’s face, then stealing his property and walking out of a Whataburger fast-food restaurant after calling him “n***er” and continuing to rant.
The property? A MAGA hat.
The line of decency should be easy here. The teen was merely wearing a hat. Jimenez attacked him and stole his property for purely political reasons – a hate crime. Nevertheless, Jimenez has been cheered by some on Twitter and a San Antonio paper’s reporting seems to indicate pleasure from his actions. The San Antonio Current‘s headline reads “San Antonio Man Fired After Completely Owning Teen Wearing MAGA Hat”. Their web page also points out:
However, KENS5 is reporting the attack might not have been unprovoked after all, with anonymous source coming forward to share more insight into the incident.
KENS5, on the other hand, has retracted most of that story after the source’s quotes could not be found to match anything on available audio and no evidence could be found placing the source at the restaurant.
In other words, not only were Jimenez’ actions effectively supported by a local paper, initial indications are that someone falsely accused the victim of initiating the conflict.
Kino’s not even a Democrat; he’s a member of the Green Party. Or, rather, he was; the Green Party did not want to be associated with him and officially removed him from their membership on July 5th, the day the video circulated. But this is the atmosphere fostered by the Democrats, and Jimenez felt emboldened to act this way.
Their rejection of civility is reaping the expected results. And while it does so, it hands the Republicans a hammer. The kid in the video remains polite during the attack, even as his hat is stolen and he is assaulted. When interviewed afterward, he did not respond in anger toward Jimenez. By being attacked but refusing to attack back, he allows Republicans throughout the country to feel that they are somehow also being attacked by proxy, and that they’re also being noble about it. It enables the Republican leadership to ignore the fact that they’ve been as vicious and sleazy in recent months as any Democrat. It gives the leadership something to tell their followers rather than discuss Scott Pruitt’s improprieties or the Independence Day delegation to Russia.
If the Democrats had embraced civility they would have had both moral high ground on at least this subject and a chance to showcase bad behavior from Republican leadership. Instead a contingent of their activists are demonstrating themselves to be every bit as deplorable as the rabidly Trump-centric Republicans they hate.
