GLENN
_GREENWALD
Aaron Coleman, the 19-Year-Old Progressive Who Won His Kansas Primary,
Speaks About His Troubled Past and Promising Present
In an exclusive video interview, the controversial young candidate from an
impoverished background responds to critics.
Glenn Greenwald
August 21 2020, 6:25 p.m.
THE UNEXPECTED PRIMARY VICTORY on Monday in Kansas by progressive Democratic
challenger Aaron Coleman should have been a political fairy tale. Coleman is
a first-time candidate at the age of 19, and was outspent by more than 10-1
by his entrenched, corporatist incubment-opponent, seven-term State Rep.
Stan Frownfelter. Yet he narrowly eked out victory to become the Democratic
nominee in a heavily blue district with no Republican on the ballot.
Yet now Coleman is engulfed in controversy based on serious misconduct from
middle school when he was 12 and 13 years old. In an exclusive 30-minute
video interview with the Intercept, his first since allegations about his
past emerged, Coleman addresses the controversies surrounding his victory,
his life story that led to his past acts as a child and his current
candidacy as an adult, and his unusual political outlook generally. The
video interview, which is quite illuminating, can be viewed on the player
below or on The Intercept's YouTube channel.
Inspired by the populist-left movement and working-class coalition that
emerged during the 2016 Sanders presidential campaign, Coleman's worldview
is composed of several core beliefs that are virtually nonexistent in Kansas
electoral politics: universal health care coverage, raising the minimum
wage, state-funded trade schools, a Green New Deal, full reproductive rights
for women, and the legalization of cannabis, with new revenue from marijuana
sales going to public schools and to create free trade schools. Frownfelter,
meanwhile, supports none of that. He joined with the GOP majority to
restrict abortion rights, and generally supports a corporatist agenda
favored by his large-money donors.
Even more extraordinary are the conditions of Coleman's childhood and life
story: ones extremely common in contemporary American life yet, revealingly,
vanishingly rare to see among elected political officials. Raised by a
father who could not work due to severe mental health disabilities and a
mother who is an under-employed teacher, Coleman's childhood was one of
poverty, at times not knowing where his next meal would come from. After
dropping out of high school, he enrolled at a local community college in
Kansas City to obtain his GED, and now splits his time between community
college classes and his job as a part-time, hourly-wage dishwasher.
But far from a fairy tale, a dark cloud has quickly descended over Coleman's
improbable victory. The Kansas State Democratic Party has vowed to heavily
finance an oragnized write-in campaign on behalf of Frownfelter. In a very
negative New York Times article on Coleman's win, leading state Democratic
officials are quoted as pronouncing him unfit for office, vowing to pour
whatever resources are needed to re-elect the incumbent with write-ins.
"Aaron Coleman is not fit to serve in the Legislature," the Democratic
Governor's spokeswoman told the Times, while the Democratic House Minority
Leader said of Frownfelter's write-in campaign: "I hope he can pull it out
so I don't have to deal with this kid."
DEMOCRATIC LEADERS DENY that their contempt for Coleman is due to his
unseating of their long-time friend or his progressive agenda. Instead, they
insist, they find him appalling because of serious misconduct in which he
engaged when he 12 and 13 years old as a middle school student.
Specifically, as a middle school student, Coleman bullied several of his
female classmates, including one who says that when they were in sixth
grade, she attempted suicide due to his incessant mocking of her physical
appearance. The worst event was when Coleman obtained from the internet a
nude photo of one his middle school classmates, and demanded more photos
from her upon threat of publishing the one he had, which he made good on
when she refused.
That middle school behavior is horrific, and several of the the girls say,
credibly, that they suffered greatly. During the campaign, Coleman, when
confronted with the accusations, immediately acknowledged that they were
true, said he was deeply ashamed of what he did when he was 12 and 13,
characterized his actions as the behavior of a "sick boy," and says that as
an adult he has reformed and evolved past the pathologies he suffered and is
no longer the child from a very troubled and deprived background who did
that. He cites the fact that there have been no similar accusations lodged
against him in the past five years since he left junior high.
Coleman says he has reached out to his victims from middle school to make
amends, though they have not responded, and says he is eager to speak to
them should they wish so he can do what he can to repair the damage he
caused. He also insists that society bears the burden along with him of
repairing similar damage - by better funding public schools so that
impoverished kids like him do not end up lost and abused by a failing
system, and by providing services to victims of school bullying and other
forms of childhood abuse to obtain the help they need.
All of this raises profound and important questions about whether adults
should be judged by the actions they undertook when they were a child,
particularly when they have apologized and expressed remorse. It has long
been a staple of liberal philosophy that humans can and should be
rehabilitated, not eternally condemned for bad acts, particularly those
committed when they were very young. There is a reason courts are divided
into adult courts and juvenile courts, and that many states bar minors from
being tried and judged as adults even when they commit savage murders.
Just this week, the Democratic National Convention hosted as a speaker a
convicted murderer named Donna Hylton, who committed one of the most
gruesome crimes imagainable not as a junior high student but as an adult:
she participated in a group that over the course of fifteen days kidnapped,
tortured, starved, raped and then murdered a man for ransom. She spent her
prison time becoming a criminal justice advocate and the DNC gave her a
platform at their Convention based on the belief that we should affirm the
right of human beings to be rehabilitated even when they commit the most
barbaric murders and rapes as an adult, let alone as a young child.
In 2018, after University of Oklahoma quarterback Kylar Murray won the
Heismann Trophy at the age of 21, a USA Today reporter unearthed tweets he
had posted when he was 14 and 15 that hurled ugly and bigoted anti-gay
slurs. Murray apologized, insisting he no longer thinks the way he did when
he was 15. A consensus quickly emerged that the journalist had engaged in
shameful conduct because what someone does when they are young teenagers
should not be held against them as adults.
How these long-standing liberal principles governing rehabilitation and
childhood misconduct should be applied to Coleman's election victory as an
adult present interesting and important questions. So, too, does his
background: if we say we want more candidates from working-class and
impoverished families running for political office - as we should - do we
make allowances for the fact that deprived childhoods often produce aberrant
behavior as a child that are not common among those from more privileged
backgrounds? After all, the British Journal of Psychiatry documented in
2014: "Poverty or low socioeconomic status (SES) during childhood is a
well-known distal risk factor for subsequent criminal and substance misuse
behaviours."
How do we weigh various character flaws? If misogyny is the issue, how does
Frownfelter's anti-choice voting record as a fully grown adult weigh against
Coleman's abusive behavior as a child? When does remorse matter? Frownfelter
has never expressed any, while Coleman has and continues to. If an
unremorseful George Bush is welcomed in decent company after committing war
crimes, implementing a worldwide torture regime, and destroying Iraq; if an
unremorseful Bill Clinton is welcomed to speak at the Democratic National
Convention after his long-time close friendship with pedophile Jeffrey
Epstien and multiple women who accused him of rape and assault and
harassment; and if Joe Biden is fit to serve as U.S. President despite
numerous women complaining of inappropriate touching as a fully grown adult,
why does Coleman's actions as a 12-year-old render him unfit for a much less
influential office?
It is vital to have consistently applied principles to ensure that these
serious issues are not exploited and weaponized for partisan gain or other
petty forms of of self-interest. And it is very difficult to locate such
principles in the reaction to Coleman's candidacy, to put it mildly.
Whatever else is true, nobody should form judgments about a person's
character and fitness without at least having the decency to hear from them
in their own words as they discuss their actions, their life that led to
those actions, and their sentiments about their past. It is in that spirt
that I sat down today with Coleman for a 30-minute interview that I found
very worth listening to and very enlightening in numerous respects.