Were the Commanders right to fine Jack Del Rio?
Give the Washington soccer group credit score: it at all times finds a inventive new approach to screw up.
This time round, it’s an unpleasant collision of truth, opinion and punishment. Jack Del Rio, defensive coordinator for the Washington Commanders, spent a number of days final week expounding on the relative variations between the riots that erupted throughout BLM protests in 2020 and the riot that erupted in and across the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It won’t shock you to study {that a} skilled soccer coach didn’t have probably the most nuanced grasp of a charged, advanced political second in our nation’s historical past. It should additionally not shock you to study {that a} skilled soccer group responded in exactly the improper method.
”A easy query,” Del Rio mentioned on June 8. “Why are we not trying into (the riots on the protests), if we will speak about (the Capitol riot). Why are we not trying into these issues? … I see photos on the TV, folks’s livelihoods are being destroyed, companies are being burned down, no drawback. After which we’ve got a dust-up on the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we will make {that a} main deal.”
Del Rio’s tweets and feedback have been the kind of standard-issue “I’m simply asking questions” superficial whataboutism that plagues our whole nationwide discourse — if my facet has achieved one thing dangerous, your facet has achieved one thing worse, why aren’t we specializing in X as a substitute of Y, and round and round. Any affordable factors get misplaced within the rush to personal the opposite facet.
On one hand, Del Rio was highlighting an undeniably tragic ingredient of the riots that occurred throughout the BLM protests, the misplaced lives and ruined livelihoods. On the opposite, he’s evaluating apples to motor oil by focusing solely on the end result of that and Jan. 6, and never the intent.
However the matter isn’t the actual concern right here; it’s the response. Put apart what Del Rio mentioned, and concentrate on what occurred after he mentioned it.
Del Rio suffered reputational penalties, which is acceptable. Any time you say one thing that others discover objectionable, they’re going to search out you objectionable too. However Del Rio additionally suffered some fairly substantial monetary penalties, too, and that’s the place this will get difficult.
Commanders head coach Ron Rivera levied a $100,000 fine against Del Rio, a hefty sum for itemizing information and asking questions — nonetheless inartfully expressed they could have been — about these information.
Granted, a part of the motivation behind the high quality is that Washington is attempting to determine a brand new stadium inside a couple of miles of the Capitol, and Del Rio’s offhand feedback render the workforce much more poisonous than it already is. However Rivera framed the fine in political terms, and that’s the place the tree limb thins out.
Rivera mentioned on Tuesday that this isn’t a free speech concern, and he’s proper. Yet one more time: the First Modification protects your proper to speech free from authorities intervention; it doesn’t shield you from penalties of that speech. The federal authorities isn’t coming for Jack Del Rio. (Though if ever a soccer workforce was crying out for federal intervention …)
The folks celebrating the high quality and calling for Del Rio’s job could wish to suppose lengthy and laborious concerning the precedent they’re establishing right here, attempting to get somebody fired for a unpleasant political assertion. When you suppose Del Rio ought to go, are you positive you’ve by no means mentioned something prior to now that will now replicate badly on you? Are you actually positive? Would you wager your profession on it?
Del Rio’s not innocent right here, both. “Simply asking questions” is barely a protection in the event you’re prepared to hearken to the solutions to these questions, and Del Rio’s obvious incapacity, after 18 months, to acknowledge the gravity of Jan. 6 suggests he’s not a lot serious about listening to something that contradicts what he already believes.
We are able to spin out hypotheticals for one more three hours. Why don’t we see punishment for political opinions from the left? What if Del Rio loses the locker room? What if his speech normalizes anti-BLM sentiment? However that is grandstanding, not discussing. After we body the questions ourselves, we give ourselves the luxurious of organising the solutions we wish to hear. Dealing within the information, and information alone, leads us from Del Rio’s phrases to a fairly chilling place.
Punishment solely enforces silence. In case your purpose is really to alter folks’s minds, not simply shut them down, you don’t try this by firing them, hammering them with six-figure fines or scalding their identify on social media. You alter their minds by getting them to see a distinct perspective than their very own, to get out of the little nest of social media and bolstered half-truths that all of us occupy.
Slightly than high quality Del Rio, the Commanders might have sat him down with a Capitol police officer or 20 who might clarify precisely why the riots have been an entire lot greater than only a “dust-up,” whatever the relative ranges of property harm. The workforce might have listened to his perspective as effectively. That’s how we attain widespread floor … which, I do know, is a overseas and undesirable idea now.
Piercing bubbles. Discussing divergent factors of view. Think about that.
