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A Brief Defense of Hillary Clinton (!) and a Longer One of Britt McHenry

Posted By Sonny Bunch On In Culture | Comments Disabled

Of the many Hillary Clinton gaffes this week, the one I found least compelling was her totally reasonable refusal to "tip" the employees at Chipotle. I don't know when we started tipping fast food workers (it certainly didn't start when I was manning the counter at McDonald's), but the whole idea is idiotic for any number of reasons: We tip waiters because they are providing a wholly different, far more complex service and because they make the tipped wage (the federal minimum wage for tipped employees is just $2.13/hour) and rely on tips for their livelihood. This faux-controversy is dumb. LEAVE HILLARY ALONE (about this; feel free to pile on about everything else).

More complex is the situation around Britt McHenry. Now, you've probably never heard of Britt McHenry—but neither had most of the people calling for her to be fired after video of her freaking out on a tow truck company's employee surfaced. It took almost the entire work day for the social media mob to find someone to sacrifice, but they did it! Good job, good effort guys. We needed our daily expiation!

Look: I'm not going to defend what McHenry said to the woman in that video. It was mean and nasty stuff. But let's be honest: tow yards are the worst. The worst, Jerry. The worst. As JVL notes, they are essentially private companies in the business of stealing your most expensive piece of private property for the supposed violation of some minor law:

You can see why that might be true. A towing company has customers only in the very loosest sense. They have contracts with the controlling entities whose property they patrol, but these contracts typically involve very little money. Instead, the contracts merely act as a kind of letter of marque giving the towing companies the ability to make money from the people they tow. So the towing companies aren’t responsible to the parties with whom they interact most intimately, and are only vaguely responsible to the controlling parties, who tend to be institutions and not individuals. You can understand why towing companies behave as if they are a law unto themselves.

Judging by the reactions I've seen from people who have interacted with the specific company in question, it is even more awful than most tow truck companies. My colleague Lachlan Markay highlighted some choice reviews of the establishment:

And my friend Mary Katharine Ham has had her own run-in with this disreputable shop of horrors:

You'll note that we haven't seen an unedited version of the interaction between McHenry and the woman she so colorfully insulted. Gee. Odd. I wonder why that is.

Now, sure, one can feel some sympathy for the poor clerk who just happened to be on shift when the crazy D-list TV personality decided to dehumanize her. I certainly do; that's an awful way to be treated. On the other hand, that clerk is the face of an evil corporation that, again, exists solely to steal your most expensive piece of property and then extort hundreds of dollars for you to get it returned. And, if the reviews are to be believed, it's the sort of company that flips you grief when you come in to get the item that they have stolen from you. When you're the most publicly accessible face of that evil corporation, well, people are going to say mean things to you. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

But hey, at least Britt McHenry provided everyone a reason to pretend to be outraged about yesterday. I was starting to lose my faith in the social media mob's ability to find a random person and destroy them for some supposed social infraction without having the whole story to properly guide their actions! WHEW. Really dodged a bullet there.