What Charlie Baker Might Have Said About Ayanna Pressley’s Talk Besides ‘Rant’
By Matt McDonald | January 22, 2020, 0:25 EST
After listening to a harangue by U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley about this, that, and who-knows-what on Monday, Governor Charlie Baker called it a “rant.”
Pressley’s immediate reaction was to laugh – no doubt realizing that what the governor said was true. So did other members of the panel.
Baker said nothing negative about Pressley’s screed before, during, or after uttering the word. Instead, he praised something she said toward the end in effusive terms. Yet his use of the term “rant” is now supposedly, according to the mainstream media, a “gaffe.” We are supposed to believe that Baker is a bad person or a clumsy person or a clumsily bad person for using the word.
Knowing the governor, he probably meant “rant” in the way they do at ESPN and on sports talk radio, where it refers to a long-winded head of steam in righteous indignation over some injustice or absurdity in the world of sports or the world at large.
He probably didn’t mean it in the sense of “wild, angry tirade.”
Too bad. Because that’s what it was.
Pressley was speaking without a text and in a flame of passion, so it stands to reason that not every word was measured. But how about the thoughts that generated her words?
Pressley likes to talk as though she’s the spokesman for oppressed people of color. But she undermines what she says by frequently praising abortion, sometimes in the same breath.
To posture righteous indignation while celebrating killing babies before they’re born is a feat. To do it while claiming to be a spokesman for black people – whose babies are wildly disproportionately killed through abortion – is a cruel irony.
Yet the point of our inquiry is to see whether the word “rant” is accurate to describe what she said. As sportscasters used to say, let’s go to the tape. These excerpts are all from the same talk, uninterrupted by anybody else, within 4 minutes 36 seconds:
A Modern-Day Medical Condition Is Like Lynching and Slavery
Pressley recently announced that she has a scalp condition that has caused her to go bald, something that has rightly drawn sympathy.
Here’s how she used that sympathy Monday, January 20 during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day panel discussion:
I’ve been robbed of my hair. I lost my hair. I was saying to people that’s nothing new. Transcendent hardship is universal. And for the issue of alopecia, of which there are millions of sufferers, certainly there are many black women.
So I’ve been robbed of my hair. But black women have been robbed of things for a long time, so — Right? So we were robbed of our men that were lynched. We were robbed of our children we were separated from at the auction block – you know, of plantations. They tried to rob us of our beauty by criminalizing or violating our bodies.
Celebrating Veterans Is the Same As Identity Politics, White Supremacy Is the Law of the Land – And Whatever the Rest Of This Means
Here’s Pressley explaining why voting for people on the basis of their skin color or national origin or some other immutable trait that has nothing to do with policy or character is a good thing:
I am so tired of people saying that what is ruining this country is identity politics. No it isn’t. It is hate and white supremacy that is codified through legislation.
If we can celebrate the identity of a veteran, if we can celebrate the identity of a survivor of domestic violence, if we can celebrate the identity of someone in the recovery community and say why we need them at the table, to make sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to another person again — the solution is representation, and there is nothing wrong with identity.
Trump Is ‘Coming For Our Humanity’ By Trying To Save Our Babies
Here’s Pressley using “humanity,” “civil rights,” and euphemisms for abortion in the same sentence:
When this administration is coming for our humanity, for our democracy, for our civil rights and our civil liberties, for my self-agency and autonomy over my body, I’m not giving them my joy, too.
… And By the Way, Has Anybody Ever Listened To Ayanna Pressley and Thought … ‘Joy’?