Originally Posted by
BCR
Why was Baio slated to speak? I don’t assume he knew the officers and that’s a highly populated area, so yeah he’s from the general area, but I can’t imagine why Chachi is addressing the crowd there unless he personally knew someone involved.
I don’t see why they can’t still have it? The sheriffs department basically just said we don’t want to associate with these attention whores, which in Baio’s case, is accurate. I’m sure he wouldn’t be able to resist making it political. They can still have it and donate the money if their motives are as pure as they claim. They don’t need official involvement to raise money. Doing it, keeping it non-political, and donating it would be a more powerful statement imo.
This is just the beginning. There will come a point being a known Trump supporter is going to be a scarlet letter that everyone will distance themselves from. People will be arguing someone isn’t to be trusted because their father was a known trump supporter 50 years from now. I honestly prefer him to a typical Republican politician, but it’s just going to go down like that moving forward if you pay attention to the way the world moves. He’s had an unreal run good streak and dances between the raindrops. I don’t think he’ll ever pay a price, but his supporters aren’t Teflon like him, and won’t be able to live it down. Most are old enough where it won’t haunt them personally, but when all his shit comes to light and there isn’t anyone to protect him, having supported him will be denied and ran from.
Scott Baio lives in Thousand Oaks, last I heard. It's appropriate for a celebrity living in the city of a major mass shooting to speak at an event for a victim, even if the celebrity is also doing it to keep himself in the news. If Baio had zero connection to the area, that would be a little more questionable, but still not so bad. Think if a liberal-leaning celebrity was going to speak at this event, even if they were from out of the area. Would there have been similar objections from the Democratic police chiefs? I doubt it.
Celebrities speak all the time at events following tragedies. Here Baio actually lives where it happened, so he's definitely an appropriate guest.
The correct thing here would have been to warn the organizer that there is to be no political speech at the event, and to tell Baio and Villa that, and get them to agree. I'm sure the organizer would have been fine with that, as would Baio and Villa. If anything, they were looking to promote themselves here, not Trump. This simply wasn't a political move on their part to attend. The political move, ironically, was the cancellation of the event.
Very poorly handled, and it sets a bad precedent. Basically, "If you don't vote for the 'right' candidate and you're famous, you are blackballed from high profile memorial events."
Bad.