[ad_1]
Loose Lips began his run here at City Paper delivering a simple admonition for D.C. politicos: Never Tweet. If only they’d listened.
This all might sound a bit strange to anyone who doesn’t frequent Elon Musk’s failing social media platform, but the tenor of the D.C. Twitter discourse has been driving many Wilson Building denizens a bit crazy for the past few months. Those frustrations finally spilled out into public view during a highly unusual meeting Tuesday, as councilmembers united behind a common message: Chuck Thies has simply got to stop tweeting.
There is no shortage of other D.C.-focused Twitter trolls to complain about, of course, but Thies has the unique distinction of simultaneously being one of the most outspoken critics of several lawmakers and also one of their coworkers. He’s worked for the past few months as Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray’s communications director. To say that he has managed to ruffle a few feathers with his frequent tweets, generally assailing the Council’s crime policies, would probably be the understatement of the year in District politics.
“It needs to cease,” said At-Large Councilmember Anita Bonds, who isn’t exactly one of Thies’ top targets for invective, or even the most online lawmaker of the bunch. “This is how members of the public see these remarks, as if we can somehow batter each other.”
Thies has been pissing off D.C. politicians with his (often intentionally) outlandish comments since getting involved in District affairs three decades ago, so it’s no surprise to see him become a subject of controversy. But the intensity of his recent Twitter tirades—generally trained on Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen and Chairman Phil Mendelson, his former boss—has reached a new high in recent days. And Thies’ spat last week with Henry Cohen, who ran for the Ward 3 Council seat last year as a high schooler, also got particularly weird, as he scolded the 19-year-old for daring to care about District politics after heading off to college.
“Average Wednesday night for me in college: weed, booze, blow, and chicks,” Thies wrote in the since-deleted post. “If Henry wasn’t so annoying, I’d give him some tips.”
This particular missive helped prompt the Council to try and do something, with Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George requesting that lawmakers have a discussion of “social media policy for Council staff” at their administrative meeting Tuesday, typically reserved for wonky questions about how the Council functions. Lewis George initially suggested that all her colleagues have conversations with their staffers about how to behave on Twitter, but Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau ultimately addressed the Thies-sized elephant in the room: “The Ward 7 councilmember is not here, so how are we going to handle this?”
Mendelson suggested that he would have a conversation with Gray privately and let him know that “there was unanimous concern that the content needs to be more tempered.” Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin raised the very salient point that the chairman might not be the “right person” to bring this to Gray, considering Mendelson has become Thies’ top target for criticism. Those attacks are fueled by Gray’s displeasure with Mendelson’s decision to remove him as chair of the health committee. (Gray’s even filed a discrimination complaint against the Council over the move, claiming Mendelson unfairly considered his health challenges in handing out committee assignments.)
“On this one, I’m not sure it works to delegate it, since I’m the chairman,” Mendelson replied. “I’ll talk to Vince, and if it continues, we’ll bring it up at another administrative meeting.”
Thies tells LL he’s a bit miffed that Mendelson wouldn’t bring those concerns to him directly, considering he’s met with him “more times than I can count” over the years. He adds that the Council’s deliberations were “overtaken by events,” because Gray’s chief of staff, Sheila Bunn, told the whole Ward 7 Council office on Monday to tone things down on Twitter. Specifically, Thies says he agreed he “would not put the name of a councilmember or the body itself on my Twitter timeline or in any other form of communication that is not private unless it is laudatory.” Thies says Gray wasn’t in that meeting, so it wasn’t clear whether the directive came from the councilmember or his chief of staff.
But, Thies says, he has no regrets about any of his tweets, and he agreed to a ceasefire “only to take Vince out of the crosshairs of the Council.” He believes this whole episode was a case of lawmakers merely “hyperventilating” and trying to silence him because they don’t like his tough-on-crime message.
“It’s a shame when the D.C. Council spends more time talking about tweets on a Tuesday in April than they do addressing the crime crisis in this city,” Thies says, stressing that he’s speaking in his personal capacity. “What did anyone on the D.C. Council do [Tuesday] to address the crime crisis? Nothing. But they talked about my Twitter feed for a half hour. That says everything you need to know.”
So why did the Council give Thies this attention when it’s so clearly what he wants? LL suspects there are multiple factors at play here.
For one, there’s legitimate concern about how it looks that the spokesperson for one councilmember is so openly trashing his colleagues. Bonds said she had multiple people raise the issue with her, while Nadeau said Thies’ “jokes about cocaine” help to “undermine the institution.” An array of Council staffers, lobbyists, and activists have similarly marveled to LL over recent months about just how unprecedented it is to see a fellow Wilson Building denizen publicly haranguing his colleagues.
For what it’s worth, Thies counters that he was always clear that he was speaking for himself and not Gray. He admits that his comments have created some awkward situations with other staffers around the building, but they have “never roiled the Ward 7 office or [have] otherwise created any difficulties in my work relationships with my peers and my colleagues.” He is also quick to add that some of Mendelson’s own staffers have not been shy about sparring with critics on Twitter. But they’ve rarely targeted specific councilmembers the way Thies has.
As for his references to cocaine, he accused Nadeau of overreacting with Nancy Reagan-esque moralizing and defended his exchange with Cohen, a person several decades his junior.
“He’s 19: That makes him an adult,” Thies says. “He dragged me into a conversation that I had nothing to do with. He told me to basically shut up because I’m a middle-aged man…And so his ageism ended up putting a target on his forehead, and I was happy to smack him in it.” Specifically, Cohen noted that Thies should “go outside, you are a middle aged man arguing on Twitter.” And it’s hard for LL to disagree with that advice, no matter the age of those involved.
Then there is also the content of Thies’ tweets, which have uniformly accused the Council (and, less frequently, Mayor Muriel Bowser) of failing to address crime in the city. His critiques are not all that different from many other crime-centric accounts on Twitter. Chiefly, he believes the District has demonized and stripped needed resources from its police department, but the way his criticisms have dovetailed with Republican attacks on the city has not gone unnoticed.
Thies’ critics see his close ties to the D.C. Police Union as a key piece of this puzzle. By his own admission, he’s spoken with union leaders frequently over the years, and his talking points on crime mirror many of their own. He even worked as a consultant for the union for a month in the fall of 2021, and sat in on some meetings between union president Gregg Pemberton and councilmembers, though Thies says he has not worked for them since then. (Many advocates also note that Gray’s recently introduced bill to expand the police force also happens to roll back a slew of accountability measures loathed by the union, but Thies insists the labor group had no influence on that legislation.)
But plainly the union has had some sway on Congress’s recent meddling in District affairs. The group hired a lobbying firm to help convince lawmakers to overturn D.C.’s criminal code revisions, and a subsequent push from House Republicans to overturn separate police accountability legislation just so happens to target provisions the union fought tooth and nail in court (Mendelson himself said publicly that the union was “clearly” backing that effort).
So the view of many within the Wilson Building is that, at the very least, Thies is amplifying talking points that undermine the Council’s attempts to present a united front against congressional interference. And they wonder just how much Thies’ coordination with the union has continued as congressional Republicans needle District leaders.
Thies insists he hasn’t played any role in lobbying Congress alongside the union or otherwise coordinated with it in this process, calling the suggestion an “absolutely fantastical conspiracy theory.” He believes the Council earned this attention on Capitol Hill all on its own, and his detractors are simply angry he’s pointing this out.
Separate from these issues, however, is the final and perhaps most consequential factor: How does Thies’ behavior feed into broader questions about Gray’s future?
An octogenarian like the former mayor might not be the most tuned into Twitter spats even under the best of circumstances, and Gray is still recovering from a stroke, a torn Achilles tendon, and several recent falls. It’s led some Ward 7 politicos to wonder how much Gray knows about all this drama, considering Thies has railed against several bills Gray actually supported, and the new bill aimed at increasing the police force would repeal reforms that Gray voted to approve. (Similar rhetoric from Eric Goulet, who worked for Gray before leaving his Council job following his election to the Ward 3 seat on the State Board of Education, further fueled these questions.)
Thies has waved away these criticisms, arguing that his detractors simply don’t appreciate the nuances of Gray’s stances on policing stretching back years now. And he has cast any suggestion that Gray isn’t fully in control of his public communications as yet more ageism and ableism.
But it’s hard to know what Gray really thinks about all this. The councilmember has said he’ll communicate with the press only via written statements as he recovers, and Thies is the one in charge of writing those statements. Gray has attended pretty much all of the Council’s recent meetings virtually, and only rarely makes appearances at public events anymore, so it’s not like he’s readily available for questions.
“I think the conversation with [Gray] should be: You should be aware this is out there, and it reflects poorly on you and poorly on the rest of us,” Frumin said Tuesday, hinting at some of the apprehension about Gray’s role in this whole thing.
Gray is up for re-election next year, and it’s hard to imagine this all will not become a big part of the race if he decides to try for another term. It’s impossible to know if that will happen, however, as the only person in Gray’s camp to offer a public comment on his electoral intentions is, of course: Chuck Thies.
[ad_2]
Source link
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings