For those of you wondering what the New York Carriage Horse struggle is really about, it is really about this: NYClass, the group spearheading the effort to ban the carriage horses, meets every definition of a hate group, except for a few things: they have millions of dollars to spend, a mayor in their pocket, and big horses to hide behind.
This is a new reality, even in the turbulent world of civic and animal politics, and a disturbing one.
According to Wikipedia, a hate group is an organization or movement that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society.
Hatred is defined as the feeling of one who hates; intense dislike or extreme aversion or hostility. Hate groups, then, are organized to promote hatred, hostility and violence. There, I’m afraid, is the real story of the campaign against the New York Horse Carriage Trade.
This week, NYClass, the civic group that loves animals and hates people, sent out thousands of fliers all over New York – a $500,000 mailing campaign – that stated that the New York Carriage Drivers, “notorious for using hate speech against anyone who shows any concern for the carriage horses,” are using hate speech continuously.
In one the most offensive and boneheaded mailings in the very controversial history of civic fights in New York, the fliers claimed that the carriage drivers routinely stand outside of Central Park and call passersby “nigger,” “faggot,” or “whore” if they express any concern for the horses, or even if they don’t. Residents and city council members were deeply offended at this exploitation of these social issues, at least one – a gay person of color – is now voting for the horses.
Over the past few years, the attacks on the carriage drivers have become ever more hateful and personal. The drivers, most immigrants or the children of immigrants, have been called Nazi’s, thieves, drunks, immoral, cruel, abusive. They have been labeled as greedy, and torturers of animals. They are reviled online, their privacy invaded, their computers hacked, and portrayed as being without even the most basic human concerns or integrity. Several drivers have been refused the right to adopt dogs at rescue shelters.
NYClass was founded by a wealthy garage and real estate developer named Stephen Nislick. He seems quite obsessed with the carriage horses. He has spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to help elect Mayor deBlasio, to develop a prototype electric car that would replace the horses, to fund phone and mailing campaigns, to hire private detectives to follow the carriage drivers, to build expensive websites to attack them, to hire countless demonstrators to harass them. He has threatened to punch a news photographer because her paper supports the carriage horses, called the drivers “random people,” and said the horses would be better dead than pulling their carriages in Central Park. He may yet get his wish.
His organization is a perfect reflection of it’s founder.
Nislick’s every act suggests a very personal, even frightening, vendetta against the drivers. It is a hateful campaign, extraordinary even by the standards of fractious New York.
Demonstrators from NYClass have stood next to the carriages shouting “murderers” at the drivers and at families and children and lovers seeking rides on the carriages. Kids have run crying from the carriages. Carriage drivers have suffered strokes and heart attacks, fear and uncertainty, they have lost their dreams for the future and their plans for caring for their children. They live in fear of losing their sustenance.
This kind of behavior would hardly be tolerated by the media, the police, or the civic community if it had been directed at almost anyone else in New York. The mayor and his supporters in the animal rights movement have done a good job dehumanizing the carriage drivers. Nobody in New York seems to care how they are treated. I never thought progressive politics celebrated elitism.
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When I began writing and researching the New York Carriage Horse controversy two years ago, I came to it with an open mind. A lifelong supporter of the idea of rights for animals, I went to New York expecting to see a bunch of beat-up and overworked horses, I had been reading and seeing so much about their abuse and mistreatment for years.
If you follow this story for any length of time, you will eventually come to puzzle at it’s irrationality, to wonder what it’s really about. Since the horses are not abused or mistreated, since they are popular and healthy, then it must be about something else. The controversy makes no sense. Neither did Mayor deBlasio’s insistence that banning the horses was his most urgent priority, he would do it, he said, on “Day One.” Or that his claim that driving a horse carriage is immoral.
One of the first things I noticed was that the animal rights groups seemed to know absolutely nothing about horses. They don’t know how they socialize, what their history is, what affects their health or moods. They say the dumbest and most inaccurate things about them.The demonstrators who regularly come to Central Park to shout at the drivers never approach the horses, look at them, touch or pet them or offer them an apple or a carrot. There is no record or evidence that NYClass, which has collection millions of dollars from animal lovers seeking to help animals, has ever saved or aided a single one. Odd for people who say they love animals.
But this week’s hateful flier suggesting that all carriage drivers are bigots and homophobes only crystallized something else for me.
It isn’t about the horses at all, it’s about the carriage drivers. They are the targets – their work, their way of life, their very existence as an entity in New York. It’s about hating them and stamping out their very identity. That’s what the controversy is really about.
For various reasons, many of them psychological, it is about the dehumanization, vilification and destruction of the people in the carriage trade. That is the point, the obsession. Then it makes sense. The horses are beside the point.
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This morning, I talked with an attorney who has volunteered at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit organization that has tracked and studies hate groups for many years. I asked her to describe a hate group for me, and she said they almost uniformly meet these characteristics:
– They practice hostility, they become obsessed with the people or groups that they target, they embrace intimidation and harassment, which almost inevitably leads to various forms of violence.
– Almost all hate groups have beliefs or practices, says the center’s website, that attack or malign an entire class or group of people, typically for their immutable characteristics – that is, traits, work or characteristics that are changeless, that they cannot change.
– Hate group activities can include criminal acts, says the center, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing. The most often use websites to convey their messages.
– Hate groups do not reason, negotiate or meet face-to-face with the objects of their hostility. Characteristically, they seek to demonize them to the point that they are no longer seen as human or worthy of moral interaction.
– They dehumanize their targets, portraying them in ever more graphic and vicious ways. The people they target are said to have no redeeming qualities or values, they are purely evil, greedy or sub-human. It is critical, she said, to see the targets of their campaigns as something other than human, because if that is accomplished, they can be assaulted and destroyed at will and without retribution or public outcry.
All of these traits and characteristics will be familiar to anyone following the carriage horse story in New York.
Without mentioning where it was occurring or what it is about, I described the campaign against the carriage horses to this lawyer: the insults at their workplace, the vandalism to their buildings, the personal attacks on their looks, the personal attacks online, the raging blogs and websites, attacks on their health, even teeth, the never-ending accusations against them – charges of abuse, thievery, immorality, callousness, the marginalization and dehumanization of them as thugs and bigots and cruel, the refusal to visit their stables, talk with them or meet with them or compromise in any way.
These attacks have radically altered the lives of the carriage drivers. Thousands of accidents happen every day in New York City – nearly 17,000 vehicle accidents alone each year. When a New Yorker gets hurt, it’s an accident, when a carriage horse is hurt or killed in an accident – three horses have died in accidents in 30 years – it’s a fund-raising photo op for NYClass and other groups on the Internet, and a big story in the city media for days.
The lawyer said my description of the behavior of NYClass and other groups in New York City quite easily fit the definition of a hate group, it was very familiar to her. She agreed that the Internet promoted many different kinds of hate groups, online their views are never challenged or corrected or confronted. They can find vindication and reinforcement for every kind of victimization, slight or grievance. They are beyond the pale of traditional democratic discourse, there is none for them.
Quite often, she said, these groups are formed by people who have themselves been victimized or marginalized or abused. There are very few successful or wealthy people in hate groups, few people in healthy relationships or family structures. Quite often, the groups are comprised of loners, people with fragmented lives who focus their rage and frustration on people in power who they believe are corrupt or evil and cruel to them or others. Or to animals.
Usually, she said, they function out side of the political system. What, I asked, if they had a big-city mayor on their side? That, she said, would be disturbing.
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I called a psychiatric social worker who is on the staff of Bellevue Hospital in New York City, she treats and writes about people who become obsessed with causes or who target other people for various reasons. She was familiar with the New York Carriage Horse controversy and agreed to speak with me, as long as I did not use her name. She was not, she said, authorized to speak to writers or journalists.
She was familiar, she said, with some of the extremism has emerged in recent years involving people who work with animals, rescue them or lobby for animal rights. What made hostility in these kind of groups unusual, she said, was that they used animals to justify and rationalize their own feelings of victimization and anger, the animals are a screen to hide behind. Because saving the horses from abuse is the publicly stated and noble-sounding cause, the general public and the media do not focus or even see the tactics, methods, or violence and harassment that almost inevitably occurs. Saving animals from abuse, she said, is a very effective way of avoiding responsibility for cruel or immoral behavior that might occur in the cause.
“These groups are not entirely female, but overwhelming comprised of women,” she said. “They would see the carriage drivers as evil, as powerful men who abuse animals for money and who care nothing about them. These men would have no feelings, they cannot be harmed by insult or attacks. They are stand-ins for all the violence and cruelty committed by men. This kind of Devil-in-power situation is a familiar idea to them, many of them have suffered in the same way they see the carriage drivers inflicting suffering on the horses. They very powerfully identify with it, using words like “torture,” “enslaved,” “exploited.” They would see the drivers as imprisoning the horses, keeping them against their will, making them suffer in every way.”
If you substitute people for the animals, she said, it is the language of victimization. This sense of grievance, this hatred for brutal authority figures is simply projected onto animals like the horses, dogs and cats.
The drivers, she said, cannot be injured or mistreated because they are not human, they have no feelings, they are too hateful to empathize with. And if you have the support of mayors and other politicians, she added, then the behavior is even more justifiable. Because it is being affirmed and ratified.
Obviously, she said, some animals are abused, and not all of the people fighting to protect them are acting out of rage or other emotional issues. But it is, she said, a growing concern in situations involving animals.
“The carriage horse thing is revealing,” she said, “because it cannot be resolved, it goes on and on with any kind of negotiation, reason or resolution. Nobody will talk to the carriage drivers and they are, of course, demonized as people unworthy of speaking with. So they are targeted in very personal ways and their persecutors keep on adding to the idea of them as being so evil they must not be allowed to speak, defend themselves or be defended. They deserve no consideration. And insulting and harassing them is justifiable to them in the same way freedom fighters will justify destroying a government they see as tyrannical and immoral. If you see someone as immoral, of course, then you can feel free to do whatever you need to do to destroy them. And doing it in the name of animals is a familiar rationalization.”
When I finished talking to this woman, I went online and read through some of the animal rights mailing lists and websites, I was taken aback by the fury and rage…by the hate. the language describing the carriage horses referred to them alternatively as “Nazi’s,” “animals,” “murders,” “drunks,” “thieves” and “low-lifes.”
One poster said “I hate these scum, I have no sympathy for them whatsoever, they should be eating garbage in the Bowery.” One group of demonstrators even compared the lives of the horses in New York to the holocaust, as captured by videographer Sandi Bachom.
I was startled to see so much hate in the discussion about the future of the horses. I was saddened to come to see that the people arguing to speak for the rights of animals have no real ideas of any kind about preserving animals in our world or making them safer or healthier. The mayor of New York has teamed up with a hate group to put hundreds of hard-working people out of work and sent more than 200 horses out of safety and into danger. Quite obviously, we cannot help animals without caring for the people who own, live and work with them. We cannot love animals and hate people.
What is this controversy supposed to be about? The safely and well-being of the carriage horses or the dirty words that may sometimes come out of an angry and provoked carriage driver? One of the drivers accused of making offensive statements messaged me and said he said a dumb thing in the heat of the moment three years ago after being taunted in the most insulting way for hours.
If it were really about the horses, wouldn’t NYClass be worried about what the New York State Veterinary Medical Society said in a letter to Mayor deBlasio more than a year ago?
“Much of the public debate over the carriage horses fails to take into account what is likely to happen to the city’s current carriage horses if their jobs are taken away from them. The naive assumption that somewhere there is a pasture to which they can retire masks the reality that sooner rather than later, many of them will be put down.”
So there, a movement to save the horses that despises the people who live with them and puts the horses in great danger.
By now, it is clear that the mayor and the people seeking to ban the carriage horses don’t seem to really care what will happen to the carriage horses any more than the people who drove the elephants out of the circuses seem to care what will become of them when they aren’t being cared for any longer. The mayor is not an animal person, he has never owned a dog or a cat.
The poet Maya Angelou wrote that hatred has caused so many problems in the world, but has not yet solved a single one. Hate groups will never protect the animals in the world and ought never be trusted to make decisions about their fates and futures.
So the issue for us is whether or not we stand strong against hate. Moral men and woman and ethical governments and honest journalists stand up to hate groups, they do not submit to them on bended knee.