Beware of Weapons of Mass Distraction

This week, the Manatee County Commission showed its intent to reopen the contentious debate on the confederate monument that was removed from the county’s historic courthouse five years ago. Ripping the scab off this community wound would be a massive distraction from the many vital issues of governance that the board has ignored for too long. Then again, maybe that’s the point.

Throwing a little red meat into the crowd so you can do the bidding of your actual constituents while the community you’re supposed to be serving is too busy going for each other’s throats to notice is not an uncommon political tactic. The monument issue had been rumored to have been percolating since the 2020 elections when every commissioner elected in that cycle included it on their platform in order to court far-right zealots they’d need to win primaries against opponents they were attacking from the right, thanks to nearly limitless funding from local developers.

A massive public records dump that December showed Commissioner Kevin Van Ostenbridge answering a text from "Rodney“ (initials RO) who had asked when the monument issue would come up. Van Ostenbridge responded that he would vote for restoring it if someone else raised the issue, but felt that racial discord was too great at the moment to bring it up himself. RO responded that Commissioner Satcher, arguably the most vocal candidate on the issue that cycle, might be the ideal commissioner.

The monument issue had largely been put to rest outside of a rare mention during public comment. During Thursday’s work session, however, three citizens gave public comment on the matter, and five of the seven commissioners indicated that they would support directing the administration to put the matter on a future agenda.

Included in the discussion was a veritable firehose of verbal stupidity from a gaggle of elected officials whose command of history, at least of this subject, is woeful, at very best. I’ve written too many columns on this tired subject to recount all of the ways in which the baseless, self-serving pretzel logic our commissioners use to make inaccurate claims about the history and intent of the monument and what it represents is utterly bogus. If you’d like to read a thorough debunking of their fallacies, you can find the most detailed of them here. TBT’s Dawn Kitterman and I also discussed the matter in depth on this week’s podcast.

However, and I can’t stress this enough, this isn’t meant to be yet another column about the monument. It’s to point out how the tactic of flooding the box can effectively put citizens onto their heels while other much more consequential matters fly below the radar. By stirring up racial discord on one item and rallying the animal rights community to a single issue through discussions of ending the recently passed ban on the retail sale of dogs and cats, commissioners and their boss/top employee (it is difficult to discern exactly which term best describes County Administrator Scott Hopes these days) can quietly move forward with the job that this particular board was put in place to do: eliminate any remaining rules or policies that might inhibit their developer overlords from squeezing every last nickel they can get from Manatee County before leaving behind a rotting husk and moving on to greener pastures.

The recent comp plan amendment that would see more than 4,000 new homes built on a parcel of land adjacent to both a historic drag strip and race track exposed some contradictions in the commissioner’s supposedly conservative bona fides and the reality of being developer puppets. That issue seems like little more than the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s in store for Manatee County.

The recent plans to move forward on the substantial takings of private property for roadway widenings that the surrounding communities do not want is another stress fracture. In other words, it would be a good time to gin up some toxic culture war issues lest citizens of different political ideologies wind up side by side with their pitchforks.

This trick is old, but it has never been nearly as effective as it has been in the era of post-Citizens United. As long as corporations are people and money is speech, special interests will continue to operate at a titanic advantage, pouring money into the engines of the culture war so that neither side will ever look up from melee for long enough to see whose boot is really on their necks.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University, where he earned a degree in Government. He later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. Dennis's latest novel, Sacred Hearts, is availablehere.