Why the hell do people hate Sarah McBride Part 2: Electric Boogaloo
We have an update.
Holy cow. Stuff has popped off in the last couple of days regarding Rep McBride, and although nothing special, I felt it to be necessary to make a follow up. In case your new here, I made an article about Ms. McBride asking the question: “Why the hell do people hate Sarah McBride?” That went over, what I believe to be the crux of the reason, the fact that she is a spineless coward and her capitulation to the bathroom policy instituted just for her. Lets go.
Sarah shouldn’t have capitulated to the rules! She should have raised hell and made a stand!
This is going to come off as me repeating myself from the last article, and i’m sorry, but it bears repeating. For the longest time, I’ve seen this point that she should have raised hell and made a stand about it. I have seen, to no end, people ripping this lady to shreds, calling her spineless, a coward, saying that she violated rule one of How to survive fascism, which is never comply in advance. She shouldn’t have complied with the rules!
Now, before i really sink my teeth into this, I just want to explain my personal stand on her as a person, since I feel that I didn’t make that clear in the first article.
I fall right in the middle of the “Sarah is a spineless coward and is doing nothing” debate, but do lean on the side of, she should be doing more. What I mean is that she wasn’t exactly given the best of hands, she should be talking to the dealer, if that makes sense. Essentially, the point that I’m trying to get across is that, while she should absolutely be held to a higher standard by not only we as a community but her constituents in The First State, she needs to be shown grace.
Getting back on topic, I feel like Sarah didn’t really have a choice when it comes to complying. To me, and to most, it feels like she had really only two options:
A: Comply
B: Dont comply and be the topic of Fox News, Newsmax hate cycles for days on end; having your life in danger by these pure deranged psychopaths because you dared to violate the patriarchy, etc.
It’s pretty obvious that she chose option A, and for good reason. She is by no means stupid, and I’m pretty sure that she knew that she would get ripped to shreds if she didn’t comply.
Look at what happened with Neville Chamberlain. He is why Sarah shouldn’t blindly appeased.
I saw this getting thrown around, granted this wasn’t a very popular take, but I still felt like I needed to talk about it. Its saying that Neville Chamberlain, yes the British Prime Minister that implemented the strategy of appeasement in an attempt to stop Adolf Hitler, and Sarah’s situations are similar. I didn’t mean to be all Oh your stupid for thinking that! But the, for lack of a better word, stupidity of this, needs to be talked about. For those who don’t know, right around the time that we were on the collision course for what would eventually become World War 2, Chamberlain thought of a way that he thought would appease Hitler. To put it simply, anything Hitler asked, they would give, but would make him pinky promise to not do anything else. A prime example? Taking the Sudetenland. Hitler met with the Allies in Munich and agreed to an agreement that read like this, essentially:
We will give you the Sudetenland, just don’t annex the rest of Czechoslovakia. Okay?
Guess what happened after Hitler signed and Chamberlain came home thinking mission accomplished? He annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia. This is a shining example of Chamberlain’s utter failure of a diplomatic strategy.
Now, getting back to Sarah. Her and Chamberlain’s situations, while similar in certain aspects, aren’t entirely. Actually no scratch that, they aren’t similar at all. And while yes, they do share the similar aspects of someone pointlessly trying to appease fascists, there’s more details to it that makes these two situations so different from one another. The biggest one is that ,Chamberlain chose to pointlessly appease Hitler. He could have written a scathing rebuke of Hitler, mobilized the military and the RAF, etc. No. HE CHOSE to pointlessly appease to a fascist and give Hitler, essentially whatever he wanted. Sarah was, for all intents and purposes, pushed into a corner and was left with no other option other than comply. She was fucked from the moment she stepped foot into Congress.
Why isnt Sarah raising hell about this? She making the Republicans more emboldened and making more laws aimed at the community! We need a firebrand, not a wuss.
This last point, specifically the last sentence, is one that I saw way too much, especially during her first few days in DC. Now, yes, she is starting to find her footing a bit in DC and get her megaphone set up, but this is still a point that is being raised. That we as a community need a rep that is willing to fight for us and raise all hell in the process. I saw someone comment this in my last article, and I feel like it was a really well thought out. The commenter said:
“The first Catholic president (JFK) had to walk carefully so as to not assist his opponents in painting his administration as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Vatican. In a similar way, McBride has to prove every day that she's not a wholly owned subsidiary of an activist trans rights movement. It's not fair. It's not okay. But since she loses her election if her opponents are able to paint her as an extreme whack job who outsources her brain to even more extreme activists, it is literally a requirement of the job that she misses opportunities to stand up for trans people -- at least publicly, we don't know what she's doing inside the Democratic caucus -- and that she moderates her language when she does stand up for trans folks.”
While I do feel like this could have been worded a wee bit better, I don’t think that it was a bad point in and of its self. Sarah had to publicly, at least, show that she was there to represent the people of Delaware first. Now, again, we don’t know what Sarah is saying beyond what we as the public can see. But, we do know, with the anti-trans hatred in the States growing by the day, if she openly (key word, openly) made a stand for trans people, it might potentially put her in danger, make her seen like a vessel of the trans movement ( I don’t know if that’s the best to describe it), in the same way that JFK had to make sure it didn’t come off as he was a subsidiary of the Vatican.
Conclusion
Sarah McBride has been hated by so many people for so many reasons, especially by the right. She has been given no favors, and has been backed into a corner. She has, literally since November 6th, been having shit thrown her way, and she has said nothing, or just flat out brushed it off and was the bigger person. While infuriating, she didn’t really have a choice. And I feel that we as a community need to hold her to a high standard yes, but we need to hold judgement until it is deemed necessary to judge her.
Thanks for reading.