Recently, in the face of the intense RHOC boycott by people who want her fired, Kelly Dodd tried to walk back her abhorrent statements.
But this summer, she was filmed attacking Black Lives Matter activists as she faced off against her castmates. This week, that footage aired.
It started off with the usual — talking behind a castmate’s back.
Kelly Dodd and Elizabeth Lynn Vargas stepped away from the other ladies and gossiped about Braunwyn Windham-Burke’s participation in this summer’s historic Black Lives Matter protests.
Kelly, not being able to fathom why anyone would do something good for its own reasons, seemed to think that Braunwyn was just doing it for PR.
“Be for the cause but don’t have a professional photo out there,” Kelly demanded, as if the participation of famous people did not help raise awareness.
“Everything’s about her image,” she accused, “and she’s full of s–t.”
“If you’re truly invested in it,” she added, “you don’t go around into a protest and have a professional photog taking photos of you. That just defeats the whole purpose of the protest.”
Later, things became more heated as they ladies discussed Rick Leventhal, Kelly’s then-fiance, now-husband who works for noted engine of societal collapse Fox News.
Kelly insisted that Rick wasn’t actually conservative, merely interested in “facts,” a claim that didn’t hold any water, and which Gina openly chided as absurd.
Kelly did very quickly confess that her claim wasn’t true, if not in so many words, by saying that Rick “doesn’t believe in tearing down history.”
Kelly whined about the push to remove a photo of one of history’s greatest monsters, describing Christopher Columbus as someone “who has been there since 1886.”
(Fun fact: Christopher Columbus’ crimes against Native Americans were considered so vile in his own time that he was later imprisoned in Spain by the people who started the Inquisition — that’s how bad he was)
Braunwyn, as you can see in this clip, very succinctly explained why it’s important to listen to marginalized communities when they raise their voices.
Kelly, like a thousand clowns before her this summer, exclaimed: “You can’t rewrite history!”
“I don’t think anyone’s trying to rewrite it,” Braunwyn replied. That makes sense, given that monuments glorify — they’re not where history is stored.
Kelly only became more unhinged and absurd as the talk continued.
“Are you gonna tear down Rome?” Kelly demanded. “You are gonna tear down the Coliseum? You have to learn from history so it doesn’t repeat itself!”
Well, there is no actual evidence that slave labor was used under Vespasian when the Flavian Amphitheater was constructed, but we’ll let that slide.
Because the real point is that Ancient Roman monuments do not reflect atrocities committed just a few generations ago or policies under which people continue to suffer.
And again, monuments aren’t where you learn history. That’s books.
Which is sort of funny, because Kelly is the one who tried to bring up Braunwyn’s lack of a college degree as if this made her less informed on this particular issue.
Kelly’s real goal was of course to silence her, which did not work, which is likely while Kelly’s outrageous statements became more frantic … and began to include more audible racist dogwhistles.
“You can’t go and destroy and loot and destroy things,” Kelly whined, as if what little looting there was this summer wasn’t part of a tradition spanning thousands of years.
Looking is the language of the unheard, and this was true millennia before the Roman Empire came into being.
“They shouldn’t ruin it, they should get together and vote on it. We’re a democracy,” she complained, ignoring that gerrymandered legislators often block locak governments from democratically doing just that.
Braunwyn countered that “hundreds of years of being nice” has clearly not done much good.
Millions of Black and Indigenous Americans are tired of driving to work by statues glorifying people who murdered, tortured, and enslaved people who look like them.
“You don’t destroy history by taking down a statue,” Braunwyn explained to her. “A statue does not educate, a statue sits there and pigeons s–t on it.”
Kelly’s jab that Braunwyn is “not college educated” did not really amount to much.
Braunwyn countered that she has “never seen anyone go to Arizona State who thinks they are a Mensa member, besides Kelly Dodd.”
Kelly also tried to deflect by pointing out her Mexican heritage, but Braunwyn again noted that this is not the same.
“When you go to the grocery store in a hoodie, you’re not worried about being shot. None of us here are,” Braunwyn pointed out.
“Black people are being killed disproportionally by cops,” she correctly noted.
“There’s bad cops! I know,” Kelly yelled in response. “You’re not going to fix it by destroying things!” (Really? Because a lot of the communities with the biggest improvements were places where protesting was the most intense)
Gina recalled her DUI arrest from last year and, like so many of us with white privilege, explained how that resonates in her mind now.
“I was scared because I f–ked up, I was scared of the consequences,” Gina said, adding that “never once was I scared of the police officers that were arresting me.”
Even Elizabeth chimed in that she’s learning about her own white privilege this year. Kelly, unable to win outside of a conservative bubble, went to plate the salmon for dinner.
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