🎧 Letter: On Civility, Fascism, and Clark County Discourse
Anthony Teso offers a response to recent Rob Anderson opinion
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
Rob Anderson’s recent column faults Indivisible Greater Vancouver for “extreme language,” then informs readers that “some” call the group’s guide the bedrock for “rhetorical terrorism” and that it is “almost as if” its members willfully sow “the seeds of hatred” for political gain. The anonymous “some” and the “almost as if” make an accusation while refusing to take responsibility for it. A column demanding civility should model it.
Anthony Teso
Consider what Anderson actually documents. The guide endorses, in writing, nonviolent tactics: earned media, protests, and civil disobedience. Anderson quotes that passage himself, concedes the group advocates nonviolence, and complains only that the endorsement is not emphatic enough. A group faulted for insufficiently denouncing violence it never proposed is innocent.
Counting words is not analysis. Anderson reports that the guide labels its opponents “fascists” and a “threat” more than sixteen times. The tally tells us how often the authors use those terms, not whether they are mistaken. Whether the label fits is a substantive question about executive power, mass deportation, defiance of courts, and troops deployed in American cities. Anderson engages that question nowhere. He counts vocabulary instead.
The Weimar reference inverts its lesson. In Germany in the 1930s, the people warning about fascism were correct, and the respectable opinion that dismissed them as hysterical was wrong. If Anderson wants that history, the burden falls on him to show the warnings are wrong, not to complain that they are impolite.
As for the auditor race, candidates for nonpartisan office speak to Rotary clubs, chambers of commerce, church congregations, gun clubs, and civic organizations like Indivisible. That is called campaigning. Anderson’s objection to candidates addressing an advocacy group appears under the banner of Reform Clark County, a conservative advocacy group he founded, and closes by promoting his podcast interview with the candidate he favors, a former Republican county council chair who assures him she would not have attended had she been invited. The standard applied to Stober, Wylie, and Kelly evidently does not apply to Anderson.
Clark County’s civic discourse will survive a citizens’ group holding monthly meetings. The better question is whether it survives the habit of insinuating that one’s neighbors are terrorists for attending them.
Anthony P. Teso
Camas
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