What Happens When the Texas Governor Shares the Worst Day of Your Life on Twitter?
On Saturday morning Krista Chacona, a criminal defense lawyer in Austin who specializes in mentally ill and indigent clients, got a news alert on her phone from a local TV station. Late the night before, Governor Greg Abbott posted an alarming video on his Twitter account to his some 314,000 followers. The video shows a man on a street corner in downtown Austin having some kind of episode. He flings a pole at a car, then picks up a temporary street sign and does the same. The car is damaged, but no one is hurt.
The video was posted by a Twitter account called @AustinSkidrow, a participant in the social media campaign against the Austin City Council’s efforts to decriminalize homelessness in June, which have been the subject of a bitter and divisive political fight in the city. Abbott, for whom messing with blue cities is a perennial political winner, has threatened Austin with some kind of state crackdown. He’s repeatedly highlighted individual incidents of crime in Austin using his Twitter account. With the video, he wrote: “Austin’s policy of lawlessness has allowed vicious acts like this.” He demanded the city “compel order.” In the replies, one man called the homeless “savages,” and another compared them to zombies.
As it turns out, the video was from February 2018, putting the incident well before anything the city council did. When the age of the video was pointed out to Abbott, he responded in the traditional manner of the internet, tweeting that his wrongness had only made him more right. Moreover, the city council in no way legalized or encouraged attacks on vehicles of the kind in the video. But as Chacona lay in bed reading the article, she realized she knew the case well: She had represented the man in the video in court.
“I was furious. It’s reckless,” Chacona said. “He didn’t even bother to check the facts.” The facts were that the man wasn’t homeless, and in fact had never been homeless. He has been diagnosed with mental illness and has developmental and intellectual disabilities. On the day of the “attack,” he was experiencing a mental health crisis. “He was never able to articulate to me what was going through his mind that day,” Chacona said. Arrested for felony criminal mischief, the man was ruled incapable of standing trial and his case is still pending.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/what-happens-when-the-texas-governor-shares-the-worst-day-of-your-life-on-twitter/
It's a shame nobody has a video of the tree that fell on Gov. Abbott and caused his paralysis for redistribution. It appears that he could use a refresher course in empathy.
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