Aaron is running on a progressive ticket in conservative Kansas, so how he intends to provide this goody bag to his constituents is also in question, but that's not the main thrust of this post. I'm going to talk about his character and how this plays into the themes I've been writing about lately.
First of all I want to give credit to the tech blog owner who stood up and was counted for standing up for women. He was against Coleman taking office, agreeing with the people who said he is unfit because he's a nasty little git who targeted, harassed, and sexted girls at school when he was 12 and continued until he was 14, per the Glenn Greenwald article we started the discussion with. Bearing in mind that the discussion was focussed on his conduct at ages 12-14 and I didn't know about his subsequent git-ery, I began by siding with Coleman, which might seem a bit strange to people who have been following this blog. Allow me to explain why.
Sin and redemption
He should have been smarter than to run for office with the skeletons he has in his closet, but should that hold him back forever? On the flip side, after further research I learned this:
The sins
- He attempted to drive a young girl to suicide by name-calling and persistent harassment in a fit of jealousy when she started seeing his friend.
- He got hold of a nude photo of another girl and tried to extort more from her, then carried out his threat to send it to everyone she knew.
- He harassed another girl for months, constantly calling their phone.
We all agree, I'm sure, that these were sick, bad, and very wrong things to do, but a) he's stopped doing it (as far as we know) and b) he has admitted to doing these things and apologised. Had the story ended there, as I believed it had (since I hadn't read the Kansas Star's version of the story at that point, I'd have a leg to stand on. As it happens, there's more to it than that. You see, since then he has:
- Minimised what he did, saying it occurred "only digitally," which is not how anyone would describe a real life campaign of bullying and harassment.
- Callously wrote [to] a relative of the young woman who attempted suicide, saying, “I’ve moved on. They call the past the past for a reason, because that’s where you are supposed to leave things. At this point you shouldn’t move on for me, you should move on for yourself.”
- Threatened his opponent with unspecified allegations when Frownfelter brought up his past, which he explained away as calling him out for his conduct as a legislator.
- Harassed his opponent's campaign manager at her home.
- He posted on social media that he would “laugh and giggle” if a former Republican state politician perished from COVID-19.
- He also posted that he supported abortion right up the the moment a baby is born.
- Played the victim card on several occasions to get the heat off.
Okay, so he's apparently given up digitally bullying people and has admitted to this but since he was eighteen, and in the last few months, he has done other awful things. I'd be prepared to let the stuff he did as a messed-up child slide based on his admitting to the things he did and apologising for them, along with the fact that he was a child at the time, but his actions since then reveal an entitled prat with a lot of growing up to do.
The redemption
I write of this in Christian terms because I am a Bible-believing Christian. I take the "show, don't tell" approach because I abhor virtue signalling and generally work to influence people to be moderate and considerate of others. My faith includes the idea that even if you do the most horrible things, you can find a way back to a state of grace by repenting. Have you ever watched My Name Is Earl?
You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks? Well, that was me. Every time something good happened to me, something bad was always waiting around the corner: karma. That's when I realized that I had to change. So, I made a list of everything bad I've ever done, and one by one I'm gonna make up for all my mistakes. I'm just trying to be a better person. My name is Earl.
That idea. Don't just apologise, fix what you broke, or at least make the effort to make amends. Well, per Greenwald, he did.
Coleman says he has reached out to his victims from middle school to make amends, though they have not responded, and says he is eager to speak to them should they wish so he can do what he can to repair the damage he caused. He also insists that society bears the burden along with him of repairing similar damage — by better funding public schools so that impoverished kids like him do not end up lost and abused by a failing system, and by providing services to victims of school bullying and other forms of childhood abuse to obtain the help they need. - Aaron Coleman, the 19-Year-Old Progressive Who Won His Kansas Primary, Speaks About His Troubled Past and Promising Present, by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept August 21 2020
That is where I started, and that was all I knew, because when I started, I was responding to this:
there’s a cavernous space between “irremediable piece of shit” and “guy who failed to demonstrate that he’s learned from the egregious crime he committed 5-6 years ago, and thus doesn’t appear to currently merit a position of public trust”— Lindsey Barrett (@LAM_Barrett) August 23, 2020
but glenn knows that https://t.co/7xNB1ZVEGP
I had to look up the article, since it wasn't linked, and what I read suggested that Coleman has indeed learned from his egregious crime (since he's not recorded as having done this kind of thing since five years ago when he was a young teenager) since he said he had reached out to his victims to make amends. I saw a kid who had owned up to doing awful things and being willing to learn from them and they saw a stupid brute who had no business being in office. This is the focus of the discussions on the left and the right, where Coleman's life and acts are being dissected and held up to scrutiny. Camp Coleman says, "Move on, the man apologised" and Camp Victims says, "He's a right psychopathic little git, and should have gone to jail for what he did." The excellent Jill Filipovic has a balanced take on this:
But we should be thoughtful about how we act within our own movements, and whether how we mete out justice reflects how we want things done. Or at least that we let these questions be messy and complicated.- Jill Filipovic tweet thread, 23/08/2020
I've been bullied on and offline, and my heart goes out to the victims, it really does. I also see Coleman as a kid being wailed on by everyone, each for their own purposes. I've asked the people bashing him if there's a pathway back to being considered a decent human being, and they won't answer me. Personally, I reckon that a life dedicated henceforth to helping others in some way would go a long way to rehabilitating his reputation.
Rehabilitation
That kid is his own worst enemy. His conduct has revealed he is an immature young man unfit for public office owing to his defensiveness, petulance, and lack of self-awareness. This is what I'd ding him on if I were in a position to vote for him. That said, let's take a look at what he can be doing to sort himself out, bearing in mind that this stuff will be on the internet forever.
Do damage control
My old post "How To Resurrect Your Reputation: 5 Steps To Success" deserves a call-out here:
1. Stop digging
2. Get out of there
3. Evaluate the situation and make a plan for what to do next
4. Develop your self-awareness
5. Make lemonade — and sell it
...One thing I know for sure is that however bad your online reputation is, you can recover if you work to create a better one than you have now. - How To Resurrect Your Reputation: Five Steps To Success, by Wendy Cockcroft for On t'Internet 12/11/2015
Accept you can't control what's online about you
You can't actually control the public's perception of you, but you can influence it. I've written many blog posts on the subject that many of you may find useful. In Who Are You Online? Five Points To Ponder, I had a look at the way people's own conduct has as much influence over what people think of them as what other people say about them. I remain convinced that if you want other people to think well of you, be self-aware enough to behave in a way consistent with the image you want people to have of you. - Do People Who Do Dodgy Things Have A Right To Get Them Forgotten? by Wendy Cockcroft for On t'Internet 31/10/2015
Prepare to influence the narrative
You have to accept that your conduct, online and offline, affects what people think of you. Failure to accept that results in one misstep after another until you finally go off-grid and become a hermit, or something. Or you could act in a manner consistent with the way you want people to perceive you. Think about it: what are you aiming for? Human and approachable? Economist Noah Smith is a huge nerd but he loves his bunnies and this makes him popular with people who don't necessarily agree with him on other things. This makes him more approachable. Anti-copyright overreach activist Cory Doctorow loves sci-fi and writes books for kids. Columnist Adam Serwer's cutesy pictures of his cats have won him a large and loyal following. Okay, that might work for you. What about "Serious and knowledgeable?" Noah. Adam, and Cory post serious articles too. The point is, they curate their posts carefully to build an online image of themselves that portrays them as respectable men. If Coleman wants to be seen as a leader and influencer who should be placed in a position of power, he needs to do something similar. As it is, he's doing himself no favours by the way he acts now.
The political angle
Americans have a saying, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." The Aaron Coleman story has a lot to teach us in terms of how politics influences the narrative especially when you're a politician running for office. Remember, he's trying to sort his life (and his reputation) out in the full glare of publicity due to the fact that his bad actions have been recorded permanently on the internet at the age of nineteen. His dad is ill and he has other issues. Add a dash of politics and we can see this running for years.
In the red corner
Kansas is a red state, by which I mean they're conservative, i.e. they tend to vote Republican. The only way a Democrat could gain and hold power there is to run on a conservative-leaning ticket. Coleman's popularity was due to his progressive leanings, and it's what caused the upset in what should have been a safe seat. Surprisingly, they've come out on his side because they think his apology is enough. As Jill Filipovic pointed out, women are routinely expected to roll over for men, particularly if he's running for office on issues they favour. In this case, Coleman is not, but since he's a man, they're supposed to get over what he did to them because he said sorry. It's classic rape culture, and the right wingers are siding with Coleman to uphold the patriarchy. They downplay the original and subsequent behaviours and pretty much tell the victims to shut up and get over it.
In the blue corner
Coleman didn't get the memo: if you want to be a raving misogynist and get away with it, do it in the name of trans rights. You can cheerfully hand women over to be folded like a deck chair, raped in prison or threatened at a shelter, or even to be intimately handled by male-sexed people if they are trans. I'm not even joking about that, I wish I was. Remember, anyone can claim to be trans regardless of whether or not they've had hormones and surgery and we must all accept it without question and treat them as the actual sex they claim to identify as, which is why things like this happen in the first place. Safeguarding and even consent are thrown out of the window when the T-word is mentioned. So, since he was doing the bullying and harassing for himself (a white "cishet" male), not for a marginalised group, he's a Very Bad Person for Life. Since he was running on a progressive ticket, some people were willing to give him a pass, but that's not how many feminists see it.
Ways of seeing
Whether people are willing to accept it or not, most of us don't think for ourselves. I'm guilty of it myself, as you can tell by my experience of discussing Coleman with people who had read more than Greenwald's article on the subject. At first, I went along with Greenwald since it seems like a reasonable take and appeals to my Christian outlook RE: forgiveness. When the others weighed in with stories of Coleman's other acts, I struggled to find anything particularly damning for a while. Today, I looked into his activities with fresh eyes and was horrified by what I saw: sorry is as sorry does. Whatever Coleman learned from what he did five years ago, it's not much. He's still an entitled jackass. The question, then, is how do the lenses through which the people on either side of the debate as to whether he is any kind of decent person work? Is it really a matter of Red V Blue thinking? Actually, it's more complex than that and is based on the thick Puritanical streak that runs through the American consciousness. Ross Douthat has an interesting take on it:
In theological terms, we’re watching the post-Protestant elect wrestle power away from the more secular elite, which long paid lip service to the creed of social justice but never really evinced true faith.
...If they succeed where the religious right failed, it will be because post-Protestantism enjoys an intimate relationship with the American establishment rather than representing an insurgency of outsider groups, because centrist failures and Trumpian moral squalor removed rivals from its path, and because its moral message is better suited to what younger Americans already believe.
If they fail, it will probably be because of three weaknesses: the absence of a convincing metaphysics to ground post-Protestantism’s zealous moralism; the difficulty of drawing coherence out of its multiplicity of causes; and the absence of institutional embodiments that make for deep loyalty and intergenerational transmission.
My guess right now is that these problems will be fatal in the long run — that post-Protestantism will burn brighter than the religious right as a moralistic flame within the liberal order, but then pretty rapidly burn out. - The Religious Roots of a New Progressive Era, by Ross Douthat for the New York Times 07/07/2020
I think he's right, but I reckon that the generation running the show will grow up and have to face the consequences of the Inquisitional world they're bringing about, at which point the movement will moderate and settle down. As it is, the enforced conformity that used to mark the Right out has appeared on the Left and the shaming used to lock it down is one of its hallmarks. Each side, as I've pointed out before, has its own brand of morality, which shapes the lens through which they view the world, and the way they respond to events. The questions posed by the responses from each side (and their tributary cliques) to Coleman's actions will remain until the age of moral relativism is over, since we don't have a dominant view on morality and how to deal effectively with transgression.
What we can learn
Life is complex enough without mixing politics up with it but since politics is in everything these days there is no way to escape it. There are, however, three takeaways I'd like to leave us with:
- Maintain your good name
- Try to get along with everyone
- Stand your ground when challenged
Maintain your good name
Remember, if you become famous, even in a relatively small way, your past will be dug up and scrutinised by people who might want to have a go at you or to get you into trouble. Be careful, then, to ensure there's nothing dodgy for people to find, otherwise it's best to keep your head down instead of drawing attention to yourself. If you have fouled up in some way, resurrect your reputation, pronto.
Try to get along with everyone
You can't please all of the people all of the time but most of us like cutesy pictures, knowledge, or science. We can't agree with all of the people all of the time but we can agree enough to get things done. People appreciate integrity; if they see that you're generally decent they'll be willing to let a lot slide in terms of things they disagree with about you. Remember, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. It's why Bernie Sanders, though he's called "an admitted socialist," has friends on the other side of the aisle.
Stand your ground when challenged
If your positions are problematic, i.e. you're a bit TERFy, as I am, be sure to have as many people on side as possible, and be ready to defend your position. Mine is that I don't hate trans people but I find TWAW (the notion that trans women are women in the same way that I am a woman) to be massively problematic since anyone can claim to be trans and many bad actors have taken advantage of this. The list of incidents grows longer every day. I've got the Equality Act 2010 on my side as it is the law of the land and it recognises the conflict between the rights of natal women and male people who identify as women. Any employer hauling me into the office to explain my tweets or blog posts would be met with this and the threat of an employment tribunal, which I'd win on the protected characteristics of "religion or belief" and "sex." Remember, the law of the land trumps queer theory every time. All they've got is feelz. Man feelz. TWAW, at its core, is profoundly misogynist.
We can all learn from Aaron Coleman's story and the way it is presented in various outlets. Let's all hope that he learns, too. I'd like to see him become a wiser, more considerate man than become embroiled in a neverending downward spiral of bitterness and violence because the women he abused as a child, and as a man, called him out for it in the press while he was reaching for power.
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