It demonstrates a critical lack of integrity to claim you believe one thing when addressing the community that elected you and to privately say the opposite. It is also irresponsible and incompetent to assert positions your supporters would object to in less-than-reliably private forums, like social media. As an extra layer of incompetence, two Oregon mayors were active on social media behaving like this when they clearly didn’t understand the perils of social media (though I bet they do now).

First let’s take the case of Dean Sawyer, the three term mayor of Newport, a city of about 10,000 residents in Oregon. A 30 year police force veteran, he joined a private Facebook group called “LE (that is, Law Enforcement) Only in2016, two years before he was elected mayor. All these years, while he has been extolling “diversity” and celebrating LGTBQ+ “pride,” he was mocking both, as well as progressive sacred cows like illegal immigrants, in his posts, often with particularly vulgar and juvenile memes. (During “Pride Month,” for example, Sawyer posted a photo of disgusted-looking, scantily clad women in a dressing room with the legend, “Strippers waiting for EMS to untangle the new girl’s balls from the pole.”) his luck ran out as it usually does with reckless social media users. Somehow Oregon Public Broadcasting got a tip and managed to track down Sawyer’s politically incorrect and wildly hypocritical posts. Then it wrote, in a special report headlined, “For years the mayor of an Oregon Coast city has posted hateful memes on Facebook”...

Since 2016, Sawyer has posted racist memes mocking Mexicans and endorsing former President Donald Trump’s hardline policies on immigration. One post in April made fun of trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Several mocked Bud Light, which has drawn the ire of Republicans for the company’s business relationship with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Both Thomas and Mulvaney have been targets of right wing smear campaigns and online harassment.

I did say this was in Oregon, right? That’s a slanted and inaccurate item in several respects; for example, mocking a collegiate women’s swimming champ who remains a biological male and went through puberty as one for cheating female swimmers out of meet victories is not “hateful.” Nonetheless it also represents the orientation of a sufficient majority of Oregon residents for the state to have allowed itself to become the oppressively Ultra-Woke fantasyland it is. Mayor Sawyer was elected while posing as someone who embraced his community’s values, but if he did at all, it was only superficially. It doesn’t matter that Lia Thomas, Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney deserve every bit of mockery they get; nor does it matter that President Trump’s “hardline policies on immigration” amounted to “enforcing the laws.” [Wait, Marlon wants a word…]

Sawyer’s supporters in Newport elected him because they thought he believed otherwise. Now if he feigned wokeness but consistently behaved in concert with his community’s desires, that’s ethically acceptable to a limited extent as legitimate public service. Still, he has to take that secret to the grave, not air it to his pals on Facebook.

Remember, and this applies to everyone but especially public officials: If you don’t have to use social media and electronic communications generally, don’t. If you must, use the three Ethics Alarms: The Gut Test, the Mom Test, and the New York Times Test regarding everything you post. For Sawyer, the Times Test becomes the Oregon Public Broadcasting Test: “How would what I’m considering writing look if it were published by OPB?”

Coincidentally another Oregon mayor, Baker City’ s Matt Diaz, had recently resigned after a Facebook scandal of his own: while praising Pride Month, he had posted a meme on Facebook featuring an image of four Pride flags arranged to look like a swastika with the caption read, “When you join four pride flags you become ultra pride.” And his wasn’t even a private Facebook account! Did I mention that the town whose government he lead was in Oregon? As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon!”

Both mayors disgraced themselves on the way out the door. Diaz, to his credit, responded to the calls for his resignation with a statement explaining that the post was intended “to illustrate how the DEI or ‘woke’ ideology is being propagandized and militantly forced on American society,” and reiterating that he is not “a Nazi sympathizer or supporter.” Then he resigned anyway, dishonestly claiming that it was not in response to calls for his ouster as punishment for the meme, but because he had planned on leaving anyway. Sure…and Lee surrendered at Appomattox because he needed a vacation.

Diaz was an Ethics Hero, however, compared to Sawyer, who groveled pitifully, telling OPB that he loves Newport’s “diversity” and that his public actions and comments represent his true values, not what he says in private. (This is an interesting variation on the axiom that ethics is what one does when no one is looking.) “These comments were totally separate,” Sawyer said. “They don’t reflect who I am and what I do on a daily basis. They were stupid. They were juvenile….I apologize to the public for this.”

The apology was appropriate; the lie that he had been posting sentiments he didn’t really hold was pathetic.

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Pointer: The Blaze