Dem Michigan AG Faces Backlash After Condescendingly Anti-White COVID Tweet
Look, I don’t particularly think you should be out golfing during a stay-at-home order. Yes, I understand it’s very mild exercise, but golf course employees aren’t precisely essential and you can just as soon walk around your block as opposed going for a good walk spoiled on the links.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, felt the same way. She’s a golfer but was apparently annoyed with the volume of requests she had to reopen the state’s golf courses under the state’s stay-at-home order.
“If your game is anything like mine, this temporary break won’t really matter much,” she said. “You’ll still be terrible at golf when you get back onto the greens.”
The people who work the course, she noted, couldn’t practice social distancing and weren’t critical infrastructure workers. Therefore, no golf. What irked people, however, wasn’t quite what she said but how she said it:
There’s nothing quite like a government official who sounds annoyed and exhausted that he or she has to condescend to answer your question. There were apparently still people who were complaining to Nessel about the fact they couldn’t golf and you could guess why.
However, between that April 2 Facebook posting and Tuesday, something changed for Dana Nessel. Yes, she sounded exasperated in the video, but sarcastic enough to take it with a grain of salt. Tuesday was a very different matter.
At 7:48 p.m. Eastern, she tweeted this seemingly unrelated thought about racial disparities in COVID-19 outcomes:
The high rates of infection and death within our African-American population from #COVIDー19 is staggering and horrific. It further establishes how AA’s are treated like garbage when it comes to equal opportunity and access to health care, housing, education and employment.
— Dana Nessel (@dananessel) April 7, 2020
“The high rates of infection and death within our African-American population from #COVIDー19 is staggering and horrific,” she wrote. “It further establishes how AA’s are treated like garbage when it comes to equal opportunity and access to health care, housing, education and employment.”
So far, so Democrat. Then, however, she decided to retweet herself along with racially charged insult regarding those golfers from before:
I just can’t hear about one more black health care worker, police officer or bus driver die while getting a barrage of complaints from white folks outraged because they can’t go golfing. https://t.co/PfpYOYdDeh
— Dana Nessel (@dananessel) April 8, 2020
Yeah, you uninfected white people who like golf had better realize that black health care workers, police officers and bus drivers are dying.
The efficacy of this argument, as you can probably realize, is somewhat wanting. The only thing that links the two groups is race — but then, what about black golfers or white health care workers? She can probably be forgiven for ignoring the former, but I think the latter might be something it would behoove a politician to care about at this moment in particular.
So anyhow, this became uglier when conservative Detroit News columnist Ingrid Jacques called out Nessel on her decision to racialize an already bizarre comparison between golfers and front-line workers.
Why is our attorney general turning a pandemic affecting all of us into a racial issue? “White folks outraged because they can’t go golfing.” Seriously? White folks are dying, too. https://t.co/EBM0uM5B4k
— Ingrid Jacques (@Ingrid_Jacques) April 8, 2020
“Why is our attorney general turning a pandemic affecting all of us into a racial issue?” Jacques wrote. “’White folks outraged because they can’t go golfing.’ Seriously? White folks are dying, too.”
So, why is it a racial issue? Ah, yes — because those who disagree with Democrats are responsible for racial inequities.
At least that was Nessel’s take in a new Twitter post:
Bc when you advocate against universal healthcare, a living wage, paid sick leave, public education and environmental regulations, the virus disproportionately impacts communities of color and black Americans get sick and die at exponentially higher rates. https://t.co/ZmFcDvf1Tw
— Dana Nessel (@dananessel) April 8, 2020
“Bc when you advocate against universal healthcare, a living wage, paid sick leave, public education and environmental regulations, the virus disproportionately impacts communities of color and black Americans get sick and die at exponentially higher rates,” Nessel wrote.
Unless you signed on to liberal policy prerogatives before the COVID-19 crisis, you’ve created a situation where “the virus disproportionately impacts communities of color and black Americans get sick and die at exponentially higher rates.”
Keep in mind: Michigan isn’t necessarily the most left-leaning of Rust Belt states, so Nessel just impugned a wide swath of her own population as being ostensibly racist.
The exchange continued apace:
I never said there aren’t disparities, @dananessel. We should be concerned, and we must tackle those issues. But right now, we are all in this together, and it affects all of us. https://t.co/FwleUN75ju
— Ingrid Jacques (@Ingrid_Jacques) April 8, 2020
“Right now” we all in this together. But tmr you will go back to railing against policies badly needed to assist communities most in need which would mitigate the racial disparities evident from the impact of the virus. Use this event to promote fairness and justice for all. https://t.co/DAq0PKpEIo
— Dana Nessel (@dananessel) April 8, 2020
Again, let me put Nessel’s argument in an uncharitable light: If conservatives don’t agree they’re wrong now and get in the liberal boat, there’ll be no unity. Beneath Nessel’s brave clap-back against a conservative politician is a psychological protection racket. We’re only accorded unity if we all pay up.
Some of us are allowed the luxury of rhetorical stridency, I suppose, in this crisis. For instance, it’s my job to give you my opinion. That’s not Dana Nessel’s job. She’s the attorney general of the state of Michigan. (The first openly gay politician elected to statewide office in Michigan history, in fact.)
Being “all in this together” during the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t mean putting aside your political opinions so long as they’re pursued in a civil manner. It does mean, however, ceasing to cast aspersions of a racial nature on certain Michigan residents because of the positions they support.
You can’t claim to be for unity and then say it’s a false unity if others aren’t ideologically identical to you. That’s tribalism.
Most conservatives, given time, could effectively argue that all of the things that Nessel is arguing for, when put in the proper context, actually dispossess people of color and make them poorer, less educated and less likely to get the health care they need. (Democrat-dominated Detroit and its public schools would be an excellent example to start with, for instance.)
She doesn’t care. This is Twitter and this quick hit probably got plenty of clapping-hand emojis from people who think precisely like her. It debases the authority of a state government official when she needs it most, but so what?
This should be a time for politicians to remind the people they serve that they represent all of them. Instead, Nessel decided to own the white golfers and smear conservatives as oppressors of black front-line workers. Nice work.
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