2 Women 1 Senator*

June 24 wasn’t a good night in Madison. The protesters tore down a statue of abolitionist  Hans Christian Heg as well as the “Forward” figure, “an allegorical work meant to embody the state’s motto.” No confederate generals. No slave owners. Maybe they all look alike to the unduly passionate. Maybe they just didn’t care, as they were on a roll tearing down statues and, well, these were statues so why not?

It also wasn’t a good night for a gay Democratic senator who took a picture with his cellphone, which seems to be remarkably ordinary thing to do given that people are taking pictures and video of pretty much everything to do with protests, riots and, is there a long German word for statue tipping? Tim Carpenter was no statue, but got tipped anyway, and worse.

There was movement in the crowd, and then the two women, and possibly a third person, moved toward him. He said there was “no warning whatsoever” that he would be attacked.

“One of the two put her hand over the camera and pushed me back, and then the phone was knocked out of my hand,” he said. “That precipitated it. All of a sudden there were eight to 10 people, kicking and punching and doing all sorts of things.”

He tried to explain he was their ally, a friend, one of them. They didn’t care.

He said he supports peaceful protests and Black Lives Matter.

Like the guy who supports the Leopard Ripping People’s Faces Party, he was shocked that the leopards ripped his face. Leopards will do that. So will the two women who were arrested for the attack.

Whether they were the beaters remains to be proven, but they were identified from surveillance video and turned themselves in to Madison police.

On Monday, after the Madison Police Department released surveillance images of two women it described as persons of interest, the police said the women, Samantha R. Hamer, 26, and Kerida E. O’Reilly, 33, turned themselves in.

Both women face charges of battery and robbery, the police said. They were being held on those charges in a Dane County jail, inmate records showed on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear whether they had lawyers.

The question remains, why would anyone beat Carpenter? Why would they beat anyone? Why would they believe they were empowered to dictate whether Carpenter was “allowed” to take a picture, or empowered to stop him from doing so by the use of force?

The state senator posted his video of the incident on Twitter in the hours after it took place. As he records a line of demonstrators on a street, the video shows, two women break away from the group and run toward him. “Leave my phone alone,” he can be heard saying. “Delete it,” one of the women replies. Then the recording goes dark.

There have been arguments raised that videos taken of riots, vandalism and destruction have been used to identify individuals who committed the crimes, and consequently people don’t want others to take videos. There are some people who believe that no one is entitled to take pictures of them in public without their consent. There are people who complain about force used by others while believing they are entitled to use force at will against others whenever they decide it’s justified.

There is a dispute as to whether protests are peaceful, “mostly” peaceful or riots. It’s a silly argument made by foolish people, much as it would be to argue that Charles Manson was a swell guy except when he ordered his minions to murder people. If you want to be a peaceful protester, that’s great. So go to a peaceful protest, not a protest that you know will devolve into violence and riot because it’s done so every night for the past couple of months.

Or when the protest turns violent, leave so as not to be in the midst of the crowd when the rubber bullets and teargas start flowing. You knew it would happen. If you remain, your good faith complaint that you didn’t do anything rings hollow. You chose to be there and to stay, knowing full well what was coming. You made a choice.

That night in Madison wasn’t likely to be a peaceful protest.

The mayor of Madison, Satya Rhodes-Conway, has described the flare-up of violence the night of Mr. Carpenter’s assault as “far from the peaceful protests” the city had seen on previous nights. “The behaviors we saw were incredibly dangerous and intolerable — putting people’s lives at risk,” she said in a statement last month.

She said people were pulled out of cars. Some protesters tried to set fire to a building with dozens of people inside, used vehicles to push through crowds, or tossed firebombs, the mayor said.

Mayor Rhodes-Conway is no Trump acolyte. She’s a gay Democratic mayor. She’s female, for those who pretend that if women ran the world, we would all be riding unicorns. And she called out the protests as riots, with people being pulled out of cars and arson that could have killed dozens of people. In the context of less-than-peaceful protesters being notably less-than-peaceful to others, just regular folks in Madison, destroying statues, even of an abolitionist, pales in comparison. Would the mob cheer a firebomb that murdered dozens of people, much like them?

Tim Carpenter, of course, was a state senator, though it’s unclear whether he wore a sign around his neck identifying him as a person of power against whom the powerless mob was entitled to attack and beat, his bona fides as a friend notwithstanding. Are these the bold and brave revolutionaries whose passion for justice and equity will reinvent our flawed nation to make it a more wonderful place?

On the night of June 24th, a mob of people who believed they were serving the greater good toppled some statues and beat Tim Carpenter. Was it up to them to decide what conduct was so “moral” that they were entitled to inflict pain to achieve their goal? You may find huge and inexcusable fault in the way the government runs things. I know I do. But nobody elected two women like Samantha Hamer and Kerida O’Reilly to make the rules by which society functions.

*I originally wrote “congressman,” but was informed that Carpenter is a state senator, so I corrected my error.

22 thoughts on “2 Women 1 Senator*

  1. KP

    “There have been arguments raised that videos taken of riots, vandalism and destruction have been used to identify individuals who committed the crimes, and consequently people don’t want others to take videos.”
    Kids under 30 don’t do anything without it being filmed by someone else, or even themselves at a pinch! There are more cameras than reporters at any demonstration, and I’m sure they wouldn’t happen if there was no-one there to film it!
    Nah, he was done because he was old, white and male!

    1. B. McLeod

      Sure. Thus, they assumed he was tipping law enforcement rather than working on the social media album for the protest.

      The usefulness of these displays is that they are putting on show the violent hatefulness of the “peaceful protesters” who are speaking out for love and tolerance. In Madison and Pottland, Minneapolis and Aurora, the main difference between these people and violent right-wingers is the banner for which they unleash their primitive violence.

      1. LocoYokel

        But, but! THEY ARE PEACEFUL!!11!!11 It’s totally not their fault that the police station and courthouse jumped right in front of them blocking their attempt to throw those horrible molotov cocktails into the trash. The buildings did it on purpose just to make the fun-loving, peaceful protestors look bad. It’s a conspiracy I tell you!

  2. Hunting Guy

    Frank Rizzo.

    “A conservative is a liberal who got mugged the night before.“

    I wonder how he’ll vote in the future?

      1. Drew Conlin

        ..” Rizzo was a bad dude”.. bad bad,as opposed to .. Good bad not evil” ala the Shanghai- la’s

  3. Gretchen Schuldt

    Tim Carpenter’s sexual orientation had nothing to do with this attack, far as i know, so why is it worth a mention? And a small correction – he is a state senator, not a congressman.

    1. SHG Post author

      Carpenter raised his sexual orientation in defending his comraderie to his attackers. Blame him (and the NYT for saying so), not me, for making it relevant. As for his being a state senator, thanks for correcting me, and I’ve corrected the post accordingly.

      1. B. McLeod

        They might have beaten him less spiritedly had they realized he was a big-tenter from the LGBTQ bench.

  4. John Barleycorn

    When are we gonna get a post about whether or not to smile while posing for your mugshot?

      1. delurking

        What do you think about changing your hairstyle and dyeing your hair right after you commit a crime?

        1. LocoYokel

          Go for the full face henna tattoo, but do it right before. When it fades it will really screw up identification.

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