TACOMA’S GOTCHA PROSECUTION

LET’S STOP TURNING INCOMPLETE INFORMATION INTO ABSOLUTE VERDICTS ABOUT HUMAN BEINGS.

I've seen this movie before.  Actually, I've seen it more times than I care to remember.

Somebody finds a fact, then comes the association, then the innuendo, then the assumptions, then the labels.  And before long, people who have never met the person at the center of it all are absolutely certain they know who that person is.

You can tell me I'm reading too much into it.  Fine.  I'm telling you what I've watched with my own two eyes.  When you've watched the same routine play out over and over again, eventually you recognize the routine.  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... I'm gonna call it a duck.

I've started calling this particular duck GOTCHA Prosecution.

The latest example involves John Xitco, E9 Brewing and a political contribution to Let's Go Washington that has created quite the shitstorm around Tacoma.  But before anybody gets ahead of themselves, this isn't a blog that’s trying to convince you that John Xitco is a great guy.  I wouldn't know.  I've never met him.  We’ve got plenty of mutual friends but I've never had a conversation with him.  I don't know what he thinks when he wakes up in the morning, what he believes in his heart or how he votes when nobody's looking.

I also don't support his political choices AND I don't support what I see happening to him because of the choices he has made.  Those two things can exist at the same time.  At least they should be able to.

Here's something funny about all of this.  I've reached out to John more than once over the years and never heard back.

Years ago, I contacted him about Saint Meatentine's Day because I thought it would be hilarious to get some Tacoma restaurants involved.  I wasn't asking him for money or a piece of anything.  I didn't want anything from him, I just wanted SOMEONE in Tacoma to join me in celebrating the greatest fake meat-related holiday in American history.  (Pat Nagle DID take me up on it at all of his restaurants. God rest his beautiful soul.)

John?  Crickets.  During my campaigns for Mayor, I reached out again.  More crickets.

I suppose I could've decided right then that I knew exactly what kind of person John Xitco was.  What an asshole… too important to respond to Steve Haverly.  A Tacoma restaurateur who couldn't be bothered with the little people. So, I could have had an ax to grind with the guy and when the episode that’s unfolding erupted, I could have thought, “serves him right for never getting back to me”.

Except, I didn't THINK any of that because I didn’t KNOW any of that. Instead, I saw what I’ve seen all too often from Tacoma’s toxic political scene.

And here's where my brain goes somewhere completely ridiculous, because that's what my brain does.  The more I've learned about John and his family's business interests over the years, the more my mind goes to The Jerk, one of my all-time favorite movies.  Navin Johnson suddenly has money and everybody's got an idea, a request or a reason why he should give some of it to them.  And I started thinking... I wonder how many emails, phone calls, investment pitches, donation requests, political candidates, charity asks and absolutely BRILLIANT ideas somebody in John's position probably gets?  Maybe that's why he never responded to me.  Maybe he never saw the messages.  Maybe somebody else handles that stuff.  Maybe he thought Saint Meatentine's Day was the dumbest idea he'd ever heard.

I don't know.  And THAT'S the point.

When you don't know, you don't get to fill in the blank with whatever answer makes you feel best.

That's where I think we've lost our way.

When I read something terrible about somebody, my first instinct isn't automatically, "HOLY SHIT! WHAT AN ASSHOLE!"  Usually it's more like, "Well, THAT doesn't sound realistic.  There's gotta be more to this than THAT."  So, if I care enough about the subject, I look.  Sometimes it turns out to be true, sometimes it's actually worse than I thought, sometimes it's complete bullshit, sometimes the truth is somewhere in the middle where nobody on either side wants it to be.  But, if I care, I want to know.

And here's probably the simplest way I can explain the way my brain works:  I don't need to know whether you're Left or Right before I care whether what's being said about you is TRUE.  That's my True North.  It was when I ran for Mayor in 2021, it was when I ran again in 2025 and it still is to this day.

There are politicians I absolutely cannot stand, political movements I despise, people whose politics piss me off beyond words.  Regardless of my feelings or beliefs, they still deserve the truth.

Because the second I decide somebody I don’t like doesn't deserve accuracy, I'm no better than the people I'm bitching about.

Accuracy doesn't have a political party.  Neither does fairness.  And somewhere along the way we've also decided that asking questions means you're taking a side BUT it doesn't.

Skepticism isn't defense, asking for evidence isn't endorsement, wanting the whole story doesn't mean you've joined somebody's team.  Sometimes I just want to know if the thing I’m hearing is TRUE.  Apparently, that's becoming a novel concept.

Because here's the sneaky thing about GOTCHA Prosecution.  It doesn't necessarily start with a lie, sometimes it starts with a fact.  A real fact.  Then comes the association, the assumption, the innuendo.  Somebody assigns motive, then somebody else adds a label and that label gets repeated enough times that pretty soon the label becomes the fact.

Somewhere along the way, we stop being curious enough to ask questions and appoint ourselves Judge, Jury and Executioner presiding over another human being's character.  Sometimes the sentencing occurs before the investigation.

And here's the really effed-up part:  The verdict travels farther than the evidence.  THAT pisses me off and I don't give a damn which political team is doing it.

John made a political contribution, that's a fact.  People have every right to look at it, criticize it and decide it matters to them.  They have every right to decide they won't spend another dime at one of his businesses.  That's freedom.

Zev Cook has been one of the people publicly raising questions about those contributions.  I know Zev. And no, I’m not going to portray us as buddies because I don’t think she’d appreciate that.  The truth is, we’ve exchanged a few DMs and I talk to her at every political event we attend simultaneously.  I respect the hell out of her drive and her advocacy, even when I disagree with her.  I think she should have been elected when she ran for City Council because she’d fight like hell for Tacoma and wouldn’t take shit from anybody.  In this instance, she has said she didn't call for a boycott and I'm not going to pretend she did.  Because how stupid would it be to write an article about people being misrepresented while misrepresenting somebody?

I just don't agree with where some of the conclusions surrounding this story have gone and that's allowed, too.

I don't have to agree with John and I don't have to agree with Zev.  Neither one of them has to agree with me.

Welcome to America.

What I do care about is that little leap we keep making from what somebody did to declaring what or who somebody IS.  Those are not the same thing.

Association can justify a question but it does not automatically answer the question.  That's the distinction I keep coming back to, time and time again.  Accountability wants to know more.  GOTCHA Prosecution already knows the verdict and maybe this particular subject gets under my skin because I've been in that courtroom.

In 2021, during my first run for Mayor, a controversial character in Tacoma supported me politically and that association generated questions.  Good, it SHOULD have.

Ask me what we agreed about and what we disagreed about.  Ask me why that person supported me or what I believed.  ASK ME.

But that's not where it stopped.  People who had never met me, never spoken with me and never asked me what I actually believed started deciding exactly who Steve Haverly WAS.  The association became the evidence and the evidence became the verdict.

I've seen the same thing happen with my PDC mistakes.  I made some first-timer clerical mistakes.  I wasn't hiding money, I wasn't trying to deceive anybody, wasn't playing games.  I dealt directly with the PDC and corrected what needed correcting.

Were they mistakes?  Yep.  I own them.  But don't take a clerical mistake and write a delusional screenplay around it. Though, I will give the authors high marks for creativity. Some of their nonsense was whimsical!

Take the receipt, read the receipt and let the receipt prove what the receipt actually proves.  Don't use it to write chapters that didn’t exist.  That's the whole damned point of receipts.  Maybe I'm sensitive to this because I've lived it.  Fine, guilty as charged.

I'm not looking for sympathy.  I don't need it.  It never broke me.  Hell, I ran again.

I'm telling you because I've watched this same movie from both sides of the courtroom.  I've been a spectator.  And I've been the defendant.  And if I'm being completely fair about it, I've probably been the prosecutor, too.  I'm human.

I've gotten pissed off and jumped to conclusions.  I've looked at somebody and thought I had them all figured out without knowing nearly as much as I thought I did.  Maybe you have, too.  Maybe every one of us has been both the prosecutor and the defendant.  That's another thing politics has taught me.  I don't pretend to have walked a mile in anybody else's shoes because I haven't.  And I guarantee that relatively few people have walked in mine.  So to everybody who's ever had the guts to put their name on a ballot, Left, Right or somewhere in the great big screwed-up middle, I applaud you.

We may disagree on damn near everything but I've got a hunch we've worn some of the same shoes and I've learned something from wearing mine.  I don't have to agree with you to believe you deserve to be treated fairly.  I don't have to like you to give a shit whether somebody is lying about you.  I don't have to vote for you to defend your right to tell me what you actually believe.

Fair is fair.

And none of this means we stop calling out horrible shit when we see it.  Actual racism?  Call it out.  Actual transphobia?  Call it out.  Homophobia, corruption, dishonesty, hate?  HAMMER IT!

But if you're going to make a serious accusation about another human being, you'd better be prepared to show why you're making it.  Bring the receipts.  And then let those receipts say what they actually say.

Political contributions have consequences and so do accusations.

Words don't disappear when you hit POST.  They travel, they get screenshotted, they get repeated, they become somebody else's version of a person they've never met.

And once again... The verdict travels farther than the evidence.

Which brings me to something much bigger than John Xitco, E9, political contributions, Zev Cook or anything else that happened this week.  What the hell are we missing?  I keep thinking about that because I've discovered over the years that some of the people I was supposedly completely opposed to are the people whom I’d love to read this but most likely, never will.

My first instinct is to say they'd rather double and triple-down on what they've come to believe about me than find out we might actually agree on a hell of a lot more than either of us realizes.  But there I go filling in the blank again. I don't know that they’re thinking that.  Maybe they'd read this and surprise the hell out of me.  And maybe THAT'S the entire point!

We disagreed about plenty and sometimes we disagreed like hell.  But there was common ground sitting right there that neither of us knew existed because nobody ever bothered getting far enough to find it and I wonder how often that happens in Tacoma.  How many people have we written off without ever talking to them?  How many potential allies have we turned into enemies because somebody else told us who they were?  How many conversations never happened because the verdict had already been handed down?

Maybe that's the greatest casualty of all this shit.  Not the argument or the Facebook fight or the boycott or even the reputation.

Maybe it's the common ground we never discover because we've already decided the person standing across from us is the enemy.

That's the lightbulb that keeps going off in my head.  What would happen if we got to know the person before deciding who the person is?  Maybe we'd still disagree.  Maybe we'd dislike them MORE.

Hell, maybe we'd walk away saying, "Yep. I was right. That guy really IS a jackass."  Fair enough.

But maybe we'd discover something we weren't expecting.  Maybe we'd discover that the person we've been told is our enemy wants safer neighborhoods, better schools, affordable housing, opportunities for kids, thriving businesses, dignity for people who are struggling and a Tacoma they're proud to leave to their children.  Maybe we’ll even disagree like hell about how to get there but at least we'd finally know what we're actually disagreeing about.

We're so damned busy deciding who everybody is that we've stopped getting to know anybody.

THAT'S the problem.  The problem isn't reaching conclusions, the problem is reaching them before curiosity ever gets a chance.

So before we appoint ourselves Judge, Jury and Executioner, maybe we try something radical.  Be curious enough to ask the question and patient enough to listen to the answer.  Check the receipts, meet the person, hear the person and challenge the person, THEN decide what you think about the person. Gather first-hand knowledge and see how it feels to actually know enough to form an accurate opinion.

You don't have to agree with them, you don't have to become friends, you don't have to buy them a beer, you don't even have to like them.

But for God's sake... STOP TURNING INCOMPLETE INFORMATION INTO ABSOLUTE VERDICTS ABOUT HUMAN BEINGS.

I've been preaching Unify Tacoma for years.  Some people probably thought it was a campaign slogan but it wasn't.  And maybe after everything that's happened since I first started saying it, I understand what it means better today than I did then.

Unify Tacoma doesn't mean everybody holds hands and agrees with each other.  That's not unity, that's fantasy.

It means we can disagree without inventing each other.  We can challenge each other without defining each other.  We can look across the room at somebody we think is completely dead-ass wrong and still care whether what we're saying about them is true.  Maybe that's where we start.

Unify Tacoma doesn't mean asking Tacoma to agree.

It means asking Tacoma to meet.