Keller @ Large: Mayor Michelle Wu's list of hecklers not the same as Nixon's enemies list
BOSTON - When the administration of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu confirmed they sent a list of aggressive hecklers to Boston Police, critics compared it to President Richard Nixon's infamous enemies list.
But is that criticism warranted? We put that claim to the truth test.
From disrupted mayoral events to altercations inside City Hall, it's been a tough environment for Wu and the security detail that protects her, with some of the same people involved in the incidents again and again. Among their offensive behaviors, according to Wu: "Yelling at my family, outside our home for months, following my kids and me as I walk them to school, committing violence against the police officers who are on our detail team."
So after especially intense harassment of the mayor during last year's Dorchester Day parade, a Wu aide forwarded a list of frequent harassers to police. Was this inappropriate or unusual, as Wu's critics charge?
"This happens all the time," noted Bill Forry, editor and publisher of the Dorchester Reporter newspaper, who witnessed the parade and wrote a scathing editorial denouncing the trolls. "The mayor's security team has a job to do, and that is to protect her and her family. They're well within their rights, I think, to do this."
And what about the claim that the list is akin to Nixon's enemies list back in the 1970s?
"I certainly wasn't around then and have no sense that there's any political relevancy," said Wu.
She's right, there isn't.
"The whole attempt to classify this as Nixonian, that comes with all sorts of connotations about persecuting your political enemies, auditing their taxes, or essentially making them an enemy of the state," said Forry.
Perhaps the suspect in the recent Modern Pastry shooting in the North End - who's on the list - will now claim to be a victim of Nixonian persecution.
If there's been any political persecution going on here, it's been of the mayor by her tormentors. Some have made the rounds of the right-wing media echo chamber peddling their complaints about pandemic policies; others are now jumping into the city council races. A case could be made that Wu has been too restrained in her responses to them.
But "Nixonian"?
Only in some fantasy parallell universe.