When news breaks, she screams at it.
Many of the people who attended Monday's George Floyd vigil at the Holy Name rotary were local parents and their children.
And then there was Dianna Ploss, a Trumpist Muslim-hating provocateur from Gloucester who helped run virulent homophobe Scott Lively's failed 2018 campaign against Charlie Baker but who now takes to YouTube to post videos in which she rants about things like the absolute tyranny of the Swampscott DPW painting social-distancing markers on downtown sidewalks.
On Monday afternoon, she navigated her way to West Roxbury and roamed the rotary with a phone mounted on a tripod, trying to interview some people, but screaming at others.
Cora Carey of Roslindale, who brought her sons to the vigil, reports:
Oh she was BONKERS. She got right up in my face in front of my kids and screamed at me that I was a disgusting person for bringing my children to this. I calmly told her she was entitled to her opinion and turned my back. She kept screaming. It did start an interesting conversation with my kids on the bus ride home, though...my ten year old asked, "why didn't any of the cops standing right there protect us from her or ask her to stop?" I replied, "because she was not threatening us physically, she was not armed, and she was not using hate speech, and she was exercising her right to speak freely, which we should not take for granted." That made a big impression.
She adds:
What I found particularly ugly was there was a man there who was replying to her calmly and quietly...sort of trying to defuse the situation....she kept getting up in his face and then the second he didn't budge and confronted her she yelled, "oh you think just because you're a BIG MAN you can come and intimidate me like this? Because I'm a woman?" Such an ugly mutation of feminism; this was a kind, thoughtful citizen who happened to be male-presenting and 6' tall. She's a tool.
She called me "disgusting" at least five times and told my kids "your mother is a disgusting person." She also said BLM is a "terrorist organization." It took all the self restraint I had to not tell her I found her 80's blue eyeshadow "disgusting" but I didn't think that would make me a very good role model for my kids.
Another local mother, who requested anonymity, had a similar story:
She came up to us screaming like a lunatic "You're disgusting, bringing your children to this!!" She seemed truly unhinged.
There's yet another report from a parent in the Chronicles of West Roxbury II Facebook group.
As we waited to cross the street she started aggressively harassing my family. She started yelling "You are horrible parents", "You should be ashamed of yourselves" "You don't belong here" and "Your children deserve better than you" among other sentences I don't feel I can write here. My youngest started crying. ...
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Comments
A lot of the things you said there
By Willy
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 4:06pm
are not wrong, fungwah
The first news story about
By Vicki
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 4:19pm
The first news story about Trump, ever, was about him breaking the law by refusing to rent apartments to black people. That was in 1971.
Later, he told the casinos he owned not to hire black people. There's a lot out there, if you bother to look for it.
Trump has a long history of racist speech and action. His Bible-waving may be an act, but the racism is real.
Ahhhh......
By merlinmurph
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 7:16pm
Ah, the old "He doesn't mean what you think he means" even though he literally said it.
Two doors up
By FlyingToaster
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 3:51pm
Our local trumpista is all "You can protect yourself from the corona virus with 'personal responsibility'. Open everything up and send the kids back to school!" I won't even engage on that topic.
She also freaked out at the block party when I invited the black kids across the street to come down and have burgers. And she shies away from the asian families on the block -- weird, since one of them is a local cop.
Trumpista gets called out because she tries to blast her radio with right-wing-shit all the time, and everyone is like, "Turn it down, wear headphones, or close your window." Her next-door neighbors told her to stop or they'd call the cops on her.
I had to tell her to leave my calendula alone (she kept dead-heading them, and knocked on my door to accept thanks, which was not forthcoming).
I still count some Trumpies among my friends, mostly
By MC Slim JB
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 11:01pm
childhood classmates, kids I played high-school football and hockey with in our tiny nowhere Masshole town. Their common thread seems to be decades of right-wing propaganda-media conditioning to profoundly distrust advanced education, professional experience and expertise, scientists (all traitorous ideologues chasing that sweet, sweet grant money), and serious mainstream reporting as part of a vast worldwide conspiracy to lie incessantly to each and every one of us.
When Nixon said, right before taking his last helicopter ride away from the White House (paraphrasing), "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling cub reporters", his press secretary Roger Ailes went out and founded Fox News. The strategy worked, alas.
It should surprise no one that these people cannot argue a political position rationally, in good faith, using basic facts and evidence, instead parroting hare-brained conspiracy theories, when anyone who ever once picked up Occam's Razor would quickly arrive at explanations that didn't involve vast numbers of people acting in perfect, covert coordination without their gigantic nefarious secret ever leaking. You know, like the FBI being honeycombed with commies masquerading as straight-laced, overwhelmingly rock-ribbed Republican law-and-order public servants. (As a colleague dryly observed, "Trumpies obviously have never worked in project management.")
I still engage them, trying to keep the door of friendship open despite the fact that we clearly live in alternate realities, me with my suspiciously urban address and Volvo and latte and duplicitous grasp of the scientific method and opposition to Trump that is clearly motivated solely by hatred. My other friends just shake their heads at me. Maybe they're right: I'm just foolishly wasting my time.
But one of these anti-elites has found late-life romance with a mutual childhood friend, one of the sweetest, most liberal flower children I've ever known. Might some of her essential goodness and empathy rub off on him? I don't want to believe that every die-hard Trumpie is irredeemable. We're all going to have to live alongside them when this historic shit-storm of incompetence, bigotry, schoolyard-bully cruelty, corruption and toxic narcissism is over.
Wait
By Will LaTulippe
Thu, 06/04/2020 - 10:18pm
Mr. I Use Ten Words About Food Regular People Don’t Know in Every Review played football? I don’t even picture you as a big dude for being a gourmand.
Ha! My shame as a food writer is having to fall back
By MC Slim JB
Fri, 06/05/2020 - 11:31pm
on the same trite twenty words to impart the notion that I love some dish. (For one example, I think my most recent review is pretty free of ten-dollar words: https://www.boston.com/food/restaurants/2020/03/03... ) Were I more gifted, I'd craft metaphors that vividly conjure the thrilling sensations of a skillfully-rendered aji de gallina or Sichuan boiled fish. Knowing my limitations, I settle for communicating joy when it happens, hoping readers trust me enough based on past recommendations to believe they'll share my enthusiasms.
And only in a tiny nowhere Masshole town could I have been a high-school football starter. I was an undersized (6', 140 lbs) tight end, a decent run blocker who could reliably handle short passes but usually booted my QB's perfectly-targeted long tosses. But I had speed (competing in the States as a low hurdler and the 200-yarder in sprint medley), was a good outside defender on punt and kick returns.
My most storied play was leveling a punt returner with a full-gallop flying hit. I could see the fear in his eyes as I steamed into him at the instant he caught the ball, momentum lifting him up and back five yards in my brutal embrace, slamming him into the ground with a thundering whomp. "This is the greatest moment of my life!", I thought. Then the flag fluttered to the ground six inches from my face. I'd missed his fair-catch signal, got benched for the last quarter by my furious coach: a harsh swerve from thrill of victory to agony of defeat.
Coach's deadpan comment in Monday-morning film review: "Here's the Rhodes Scholar (my nickname as the squad's lone high-SAT nerd) making a beautiful form tackle. Who can spot the mistake?" That got a giant deserved roar from my teammates. It remains the high/low point of my career as an amateur athlete: at once my most skillful and idiotic play. (My buds all agreed: it *did* look awesome on film, never mind that it was a huge fuck-up, an unintentionally cruel smash on a defenseless receiver. Teenagers!) The other guy wasn't hurt, thank goodness.
Epilogue: I was neither recruited for nor tried out for my college team, which despite D-1 status would likely get thumped if it ever had to play Everett High.
A terroroist in her own right....
By cat
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 2:01pm
she is awful. the problem with highlighting her and her vitriol is that folks that were not already aware of her and her 'radio' show is that now more of her ilk know about her and her "radio" show......
Kudos to Cora Carey
By mg
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 2:22pm
For how she discussed this with her children:
Unlistenable and Grating
By anon
Wed, 06/03/2020 - 3:17pm
I checked out some of her Yotube videos to see what the fuss is about. Her voice is so grating she is unlistenable, whatever her message may be. And every other word is "um", a very bad speaking trait. She needs to join Toastmasters or similar group to learn public speaking. Marty Walsh falls into the "um" trap a lot too.
They're out there
By lbb
Thu, 06/04/2020 - 9:40am
There is a nasty, selfish, mean-spirited, utterly bigoted Republican population of Massachusetts, and clearly from the comments here most of you are unaware or indifferent to it. You shouldn't be. I'm old enough to remember people on Uhub saying "Wow, where'd that come from?" when Scott Lively won 36% of the Republican gubernatorial primary vote in 2018. Apparently none of the people saying "wow" then have learned a thing.
Self-proclaimed "reasonable" Republicans need to stop complaining about people's poor opinion of you. You need to clean up your yard, not carp at people who hold their noses at the stench.
I see it
By Will LaTulippe
Thu, 06/04/2020 - 10:27pm
I’ve been occupying my idle time with drives around the state. Once I pass 495, out come the Trump signs. Hell, I even saw a Carson ‘16 sticker on a sign in Lancaster.
I’m happy that, save for a year in Cambridge, I’ve lived my whole life in BVT and in Brighton.
Dianna live in Swampscott
By Hardy Har Har
Thu, 06/04/2020 - 10:57am
https://www.facebook.com/diannaploss/videos/209512...
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