Camas resident Tony Teso responds to opinion by Clark County Today Editor Ken Vance’s latest column
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com
Read Editor Ken Vance’s column carefully and you’ll notice what Vance is actually doing. He’s not arguing with people who disagree with Trump. He’s calling them mentally ill. The phrases stack up: “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” “psychotic and deranged behavior,” “mental illness is mental illness.” By the end, he says these people need to be “handled.” That’s the whole argument. Once you decide your political opponents are sick, you don’t have to listen to anything they say. You just have to manage them.
Tony Teso
This is a very old trick, and it’s worth naming. If your neighbor is worried about her healthcare, or her kid’s school, or whether ICE is going to show up at her job, calling her crazy doesn’t answer her. It just shuts her up. That’s the point.
Watch how Vance handles two events that look pretty similar on paper. Two people tried to shoot Trump. Vance treats this as proof that the entire Democratic Party is whipping deranged followers into killing the president. Then January 6 comes up — a planned attack on the Capitol after weeks of the president telling people the election was stolen. Vance’s response? “It wasn’t our finest moment” and “we can debate the president’s role.” One sentence. That’s it. So when one of theirs does something, it’s an unfortunate moment we can debate. When one of ours does something, it’s a coordinated political conspiracy proving the whole other side is sick. You can’t run that double standard honestly.
The piece pretends to be about lowering the temperature, but look where it ends up. Vance says people who show up angry to Clark County Council meetings and Vancouver City Council meetings should be “trespassed” — meaning physically thrown out and banned. Think about what that means here, locally. Most of us don’t get to talk directly to a senator. We don’t fly to D.C. The City Council and the County Council are the few places where regular people can show up and tell elected officials what they think. Vance is saying: if you sound too upset, you should lose that. Not because you broke the law. Because your tone bothers him. That’s not a defense of civility. That’s an argument for narrowing who counts as a citizen.
Notice what’s missing from the column too. There’s no actual policy in it. Nothing about wages, housing, the bridge project, ICE raids, schools, healthcare, taxes — nothing a person in Vancouver actually has to live with. Trump is great because Scottie Scheffler says he’s nice to caddies. Biden was bad because Vance personally felt miserable. That’s not analysis. That’s mood. A column about politics that never mentions a single policy is telling you it doesn’t want to argue on the merits, because on the merits it would have to be specific, and being specific would invite disagreement.
One more thing. Vance approvingly quotes Nancy Churchill, who writes in regional papers around here. Churchill is not a moderate. She traffics in election conspiracies, anti-vaccine stuff, and “Marxist takeover” framings. Putting her sentence — “many lifelong Democrats no longer recognize their party” — in the middle of a column that presents itself as just-a-regular-guy-worried-about-tone is a way of sneaking hard-right talking points in through the side door. Worth noticing who he reaches for to back up his point.
Bottom line: this is a column that wants to look like it’s calling for calm and is actually arguing that people who disagree with the president are sick, dangerous, and should be excluded from public meetings. The friendly tone is the disguise. The exclusion is the pitch.
Tony Teso
Camas
Also read:
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- Opinion: Greg Johnson’s $2 million contract delivered a huge mess
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Ken Vance argues Democratic hostility toward Trump has crossed from politics into dangerous derangement.
