Arkansas’s least favorite, former state senator recently made headlines because of his inane and dangerous comments regarding state libraries. The long-suffering women of the State Library Board once again put Jason Rapert in his place, most notably Shari Bales, who Governor Sanders appointed alongside Jason.
But this is a familiar story. At each meeting of the Board since his appointment, Jason has proposed various motions that have all died for want of a second. They’re all similar: defunding libraries that are party to an ongoing lawsuit over Book Ban Dan Sullivan’s notorious Act 372, defunding libraries that contain books Jason personally finds objectionable (an obvious First Amendment violation), and… something to do with refusing to fund the American Library Association through membership dues.
Jason has promised to repeat this circus at every meeting till the expiration of his term in October of 2029, and frankly, the thought of reading the same story over and over again, several times a year for the next five years is exhausting.
It is a predictable cycle.
Step 1: Jason proposes the motions and they fail for lack of a second.
Step 2: Just about every outlet in the state – us included! We are pointing fingers at ourselves here too! – runs a story about how Jason once again speaks over the women on the Board, doesn’t understand what the Board can and can’t do, how libraries should be protected, and how annoying he is.
Step 3: Jason plays the aggrieved white Christian male card on his social media, which sparks another round of stories about how oppressed he is.
Step 4: The Democrat-Gazette runs op-eds and letters to the editor about the situation.
Same merry-go-round, every time, like clockwork.
So maybe it’s time to come up with a different strategy for dealing with Jason. Until something changes – for example, he finally gets a second vote on any of these dumb motions, the Legislature signals it may actually disband the Board (even Sullivan opposes this idea according to the Democrat-Gazette), or he leaves the Board to seek elected office again – why don’t we all deprive Jason of what he desperately craves?
We can stop giving him our collective attention.
We have no power over his Facebook posts (sadly) so full deplatforming is, alas, off the table. But we certainly don’t have to talk about him every time he does something ridiculous (which is every time he opens his mouth). He’s not doing anything new. We know he hates constitutional freedoms, we know he hates women and minorities, we know he punches down at every opportunity, and we know he wants to make Arkansas – and the country – into a theocracy. He has been the same person for the decade-plus he’s been a statewide figure.
We pushed hard to avoid giving him the Board seat in the first place, but that cat is out of the bag. Since then, nothing has fundamentally changed. He has no friends on the Board and few friends in the Legislature. If nothing has changed, do his statements and views still count as news?
It seems increasingly clear the answer to that question is “no.”
It is relatively simple to keep an eye on him and shine a light on any new, dangerous actions. Hosting Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, for example, is worthy of attention, but that hosting does not seem to have translated into national power or exposure. We certainly should not let him work his anti-democratic, anti-American mischief without oversight.
However, oversight does not necessarily entail exposure. If he attains actual power on the State Library Board or if the Legislature actually threatens dissolution of the Board, we should start the presses again. Otherwise, every time the above cycle starts up again, it just gives him another chance to air his terrible views with a bigger audience.
So until something fundamentally changes, it seems to us that we can and should let him shout himself hoarse in his sad, unhinged corner of the Internet, not take his obvious bait, and perhaps, just maybe, he might eventually…
Be quiet and give us all some much needed peace while we go about the business of making this state better for all Arkansans.
