Deconstructing the Mass. GOP’s dangerous spin on Somerville attack

Over the weekend, the Massachusetts GOP pushed out a deeply disturbing video that showed Shawn Nelson, a Black man and staple at Boston anti-vax protests, battered and bleeding after being attacked in Somerville near an event featuring Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Boston) and her fellow “Squad” members. In an accompanying note, Mass. GOP chair Jim Lyons suggested the video — which also showed Republican congressional candidate Donnie Palmer, who’d been protesting at that event, brawling with Nelson’s assailants — highlights the Left’s eagerness to attack Republicans and the media’s unwillingness to cover it.

“Watch for yourself and ask whether this would have been national news if the roles were reversed, and a gang of angry Republicans jumped a gay Black progressive,” Lyons wrote.

The damage done to Nelson by his assailants is awful to look at and impossible to condone. But Lyons’ gloss on the situation — which doubled as a fundraising pitch — looks to be incomplete and deeply misleading.

At the start of the video, as four men assemble around Nelson, one asks, "You got a problem with my aunt?" In response, Nelson identifies the aunt as “one of the ladies from City Hall” who “talk[ed] all these threats.” The men say they don't know what Nelson is talking about. Then one says, “You put your hands on her."

That exchange may refer to another altercation, which occurred in late August outside an especially tense and chaotic Boston City Council meeting, in which Nelson slammed a woman into a wall. After that incident, Nelson was arrested and charged with assault and battery and resisting arrest.

If so, the brutal attack in Somerville seems to have been a direct response, driven by a personal grudge rather than political differences. Even if other precipitating incidents were involved, nothing in the video suggests politics were the catalyst. (According to a police report, Nelson subsequently said that, before the Somerville attack occurred, he'd argued with a woman with whom he'd had “prior altercations.”)

Which brings us back to Lyons’ interpretation. By omitting crucial context, and casting Nelson’s assailants as “Squad sympathizers” having “Democrat fun,” Lyons is playing an incredibly dangerous game. Implying to his followers they should expect to be targeted by violence evokes the natural response: to prepare to answer in kind. From there, it’s a short leap to identifying threats where none exist — and “defending” yourself in a way that creates violence that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred.

That’s literally the last thing we need right now, in Massachusetts or the United States as a whole.

In a recent Boston Globe op-ed, Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who tracks public acceptance of political violence, noted that about 18 million Americans believe force is justified to reinstall Donald Trump as president. Eight million of them own guns, and two million of them served in the military. At the same time, about 10 million Democrats say the use of force is justified to change unjust laws and institutions, and the same number say force is justified against the police.

It’s the political equivalent, Pape wrote, of a “combustible pile of dry brush in a wildfire season.”

We can’t fix the problem here in Massachusetts. But we can, and should, expect our political leaders not to make it worse — and call them out when they do.