#

Former Allenstown Middle School instructor Daniel Rattigan has pleaded guilty to charges he threatened to mutilate state Rep. Keith Ammon (R-New Boston) and sexually assault one of his family members in response to the Republican lawmaker’s support for anti-CRT legislation.

“I’ve gotten crazy emails, but nothing like this one. It was unhinged,” Ammon said.

Rattigan, 31, pleaded guilty in Goffstown District Court on Friday to two misdemeanor counts — one for harassment and one for obstructing government administration. Two other identical charges were dismissed as part of a plea agreement.

Rattigan will not do jail time, but instead has $1,240 in fines which are suspended for one year so long as he remains on good behavior. Rattigan is not to have any contact with Ammon, other than writing an apology letter.

“I doubt it will be sincere,” Ammon said.

Rattigan was reportedly upset with Ammon’s efforts to prevent schools from teaching Critical Race Theory-based content in New Hampshire classrooms. Ammon was one of the original sponsors of HB 544, which “prohibits the dissemination of certain divisive concepts related to sex and race in state contracts, grants, and training programs.” That legislation was set aside for an anti-discrimination law passed as part of the 2021 budget.

Rattigan called Ammon a racist in the messages and he made numerous obscene and graphic threats against Ammon and a family member.

“I truly hope you get skull f***ed to death you pathetic privileged white [expletive] boi,” Rattigan wrote in one of the messages.

Rattigan sent the violent and obscene threats to Ammon via Facebook in late February, as the politics around the anti-CRT law were getting heated. Ammons said he and his family spent subsequent months worried for their safety. 

“We were making sure the house was safe and making sure there are no unexpected visitors, as you can imagine,” Ammon said.

The threats started coming in on the night of Feb. 25, and included numerous misspellings and punctuation mistakes. Ammon assumed Rattigan might have been intoxicated and would think better the next day and apologize. Instead, according to Ammon, Rattigan continued to display angry and unhinged behavior.

Ammon went to law enforcement the next day and reported the issue, first to the Protective Services of the General Court, the branch of the New Hampshire State Police that protects state representatives, and then to the New Boston Police Department. 

Rattigan lists his employment on LinkedIn as being an Educational Assistant at the Armand R. Dupont Middle School in Allenstown. The profile claims he has worked at the school since 2013. 

On Monday, Allenstown Superintendent Peter Warburton said Rattigan worked at the middle school for a month and a half in 2013 and has not been employed by the district since.

Contacted by NHJournal through his Facebook account, Rattigan asked that no story be written because he feared losing his job. He would not reveal where he works, but he minimized the repeated and escalating threats he made against Ammon and his family. 

“It was a rude empty comment that I apologized for,” Rattigan said in a message.

Rattigan’s language was extremely crude, but his claims that supporters of the anti-discrimination bill are racists echoes language used by Democratic leaders in the legislature and progressive activists. It’s an interesting claim given the law literally bans government-funded instructors from teaching that one race, sex, or group is inherently superior or inferior to another.

State Rep. Linda Harriot-Gathright (D-Nashua) opposes the anti-discrimination law because, she says, New Hampshire’s public schools are racist.

“This language robs young people of an inclusive and realistic education by targeting efforts to talk about systemic racism in schools,” she said when the law was passed. “We need to be looking at how our systems promote racial inequity and working towards solutions. Systematic racism is still alive and well.”

When Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary, she blamed it on her inability to raise money. Some pundits, both left and right, said her lack of a clear message was the problem.

But others saw a more disturbing force at work: White people. In particular, the white Democratic primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“Iowa is 91 percent white. New Hampshire is 94 percent white,” Rolling Stone senior writer Tim Dickinson tweeted in reaction to Harris’s exit from the 2020 field. “These states are off the charts white, and yet the Democratic Party gives the electorates in these states effective veto power over the nomination process.”

“It’s structural racism masquerading as tradition,” Dickinson said.

Nate Silver of the left-leaning website FiveThirtyEight wrote, “If the Democratic Party wants a field that’s representative of its members and its voters, it probably shouldn’t have two states as white as Iowa and New Hampshire vote first every year.”

“Having two super white states go first is a big disadvantage to nonwhite candidates,” Silver added.

Defenders of the New Hampshire #FITN primary are used to hearing the “too white” complaint. “You go to New Hampshire. There are not any minorities there. Nobody lives there,” then-Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told the Washington Post back in 2015.

What’s new is the more overt suggestion that white New Hampshire Democrats are rejecting candidates of color out of bigotry. That they’re participants in the “structural racism.”

“I’ve seen the bile, the anger, from my family members, to people in the Congressional Black Caucus, to leaders of color across this country who just don’t understand how we’ve gotten to a point now where there’s more billionaires in the 2020 race than there are black people,” Sen. Cory Booker said in response to Harris dropping out of the race.

Progressive writer Lauren Duca was more direct, telling her nearly 500,000 Twitter followers:

“Kamala Harris officially ended her campaign today, which means that all of the candidates who currently qualify for the December Democratic debate are white. White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks.”

So is it a New Hampshire Democratic Party problem?

“I have heard all the arguments and don’t buy any of them,” former Democratic National Committeeman and longtime New Hampshire strategist Terry Shumaker told NHJournal. “They certainly don’t explain Govs. Inslee, Hickenlooper and Bullock dropping out — as well as Beto and others dropping out even earlier — they are all white.”

Shumaker notes that “an African American has won our primary, as has a woman and a Mormon.  Jesse Jackson ran competitively here in the 1980s. He didn’t blame not winning on the voters.”

True, but progressives are. Their argument isn’t just that “New Hampshire voters are too white,” but rather this whiteness prevents them from supporting candidates of color. Call it “racism,” “bigotry” or “lack of wokeness”–it’s a commentary on New Hampshire Democratic primary voters.

“I don’t agree that they are saying Iowa and New Hampshire are racist,” New Hampshire Democratic Committeewoman Kathy Sullivan told NHJournal. “They are saying that having more diversity among voters would better reflect the Democratic electorate. I think the DNC addressed that by having Nevada and South Carolina added to the calendar.”

“I would also add that Barack Obama came very close to winning the New Hampshire primary in ’08, and he won the general election here twice.”

Then there are the New Hampshire polling averages for Castro, Booker and Harris, which are similar to their numbers nationally. Yes, when she dropped out Harris’s RealClearPolitics average was about half a point lower in the Granite State (2.7 percent) compared to her national numbers (3.4 percent), but both Booker and Castro are actually outperforming their nationwide average in New Hampshire.

Even in her racially-diverse home state of California, Harris had been stuck in single digits and well out of the top tier. Are white voters to blame?

And yet it remains the case that the top six Republican frontrunners in 2016 were more racially diverse (one African American and two Hispanic candidates) than the Democrats today. And many on the left see bias at work.

“Women are held to a different standard,” Rev. Al Sharpton said on Tuesday, “and black women especially.”

Former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, whose 2020 POTUS candidacy has rarely cleared the 5 percent support mark, has long argued that New Hampshire’s demographics were a problem for Democrats, going so far as to compare it to what he deems Republican voter suppression.