Donal's Dog Whistle to his "Gang of Hate"
Chatham's Town Supervisor uses his surrogates, common-law wife, and tribal politics to intimidate and bully. He is no friend to farmers, democracy or truth.
EDITORIAL
Reporting on Chatham has been an education, mostly heartening. But underneath it runs something genuinely ugly: a campaign of intimidation by Mr. Collins’s surrogates, a bush-league Trumpism with no place in civil society. It isn’t smart. It isn’t democratic. It’s schoolyard politics dressed up as civic engagement, and in a town where everyone’s car is recognizable in everyone else’s driveway, it doesn’t just coarsen the discourse. It poisons it. Mr. Collins doesn’t get to stand at a polite distance from this. These are his friends. This is his echo chamber. It was built in his name, it operates for his benefit, and his silence isn’t neutrality. It’s endorsement.
Chatham is, journalistically speaking, a news desert with charming views. The Columbia Paper rarely covers local government. The Register Star and Times Union, rarer still. Local TV, practically never. So where do people get their information? The Chatham Community Facebook page, where 18,000-plus people gather like villagers at a well. And the town does almost nothing to compete, which starts to look less like incompetence and more like strategy. The newsletter sits dead on the website, a digital ghost. The town no longer posts minutes, that quaint old format where a citizen could actually search a record for what matters to them. Now you sit through a YouTube video, popcorn optional. Agendas surface, at best, a day before meetings. No way to sign up for updates. In one email from a community member, shared with me, Donal Collins wrote that he does not weigh in on things via email to constituents. Sit with that. An elected official, asked a question by the people who pay his salary, informing them he does not want to weigh in. That’s not discretion. That’s contempt, with a return address.
So when I started posting links to The Powell House Press on the Community page, what happened? The Collins claque showed up, right on cue, same cast every time. This is news, and naming them is fair game, because they’ve made themselves the news. Bad news. His live-in partner, Abi Mesick. James Klienbaum, the local lawyer who can’t finish a sentence without a curse word, advocacy by tantrum. And Jeanne Bowerman, Chatham’s own Margaret Fuller-lite. There are others, but it’s a small repertory company at its core, a handful I’ve started calling the Gang of Hate. The name isn’t hyperbole. It’s a job description.
Here’s what makes it dangerous rather than merely pathetic: this is where people now get their news, and the Gang has turned it into a sealed room. Disagree with them and you’re sorted into one of three bins: liar, mud-raker (a favorite of Abi’s, who can’t spell it correctly, which tells you something about the rigor on offer), or the dreaded “democrat.” Not refuted. Sorted. All because of an article about a project pursued in bad faith and a supervisor’s allergy to transparency.
And that word, “democrat,” hurled like a slur, tells you what Chatham is becoming: Washington in miniature. A place where anything short of blind party loyalty is treated as a moral failing. Collins, like Trump, was a Democrat himself until he spotted an opportunity in switching sides, because membership in today’s Trump owned Republican Party isn’t about leadership. It’s about personal advantage. He read the room, changed jerseys, and the faithful applauded the conversion. None of this is an indictment of Republicans generally, plenty of whom find this style of government by intimidation as contemptible as anyone. It’s an indictment of a specific costume: the grift that drapes itself in party colors because the colors provide cover.
There is no mystery to what this brand of politics produces: bad policy, high costs, division, and a stunning absence of progress. A small town taking two years to get a handle on solar policy isn’t deliberation. It’s paralysis. Chatham isn’t inventing anything; the templates exist, other towns have done it. But the delay has a cost, even if it’s only what residential solar might have meant for homeowners and farmers. The vineyard’s cost isn’t hypothetical. It’s already on the tax rolls.
Vanity projects that drain the tax base are a real issue, because the shortfall doesn’t vanish. It shifts. Homeowners who can’t reclassify their land as a farm will cover the hole left by Fox Hill Estate Vineyard’s reduced taxes. A project Collins supports. It is also a nod to other wealthy people to come into the area, raising home prices. A tacit wink: toss some plants on the ground, buy a cow, and pay a fraction of what is owed. How many jobs does anyone think 400 grape vines bring to a community? Now add the lack of transparency, the absence of Planning Board oversight, and no environmental review.
Here’s the truth about the Gang of Hate: they bring nothing to the discussion but venom. In all these months, the lone substantive correction came from Bowerman, who was right that Rick Weirwass attended a ZBA meeting and it was a conflict when I said he had not, a point I corrected immediately, because that’s what you do when you’re wrong. One exception. Everything else has been the same threadbare playbook: attack the person, skip the facts, repeat. And it’s gone past rhetoric into bigoted attacks and threats. Stop and consider what that actually is. Not debate. Not disagreement. An organized attempt to silence dissent of “their” government. In a functioning town, that would be the scandal. It’s CBS in work boots.
The dishonesty is just as deliberate. They’ve manufactured a narrative that no one cares about Bashford Road or the preservation of dirt roads. They’ve raised the false flag that opponents of the commercial project, and remember, not one person is on record supporting it, are elites at war with farmers. The irony cuts two ways. First: no administration has been more hostile to small farming than Trump’s GOP, the same brand Collins sells. Diesel prices are at record highs. His tariffs have hit small farms disproportionately compared to corporate agriculture, while his tax policy hands industrial farms the advantage. These are facts, not opinions. Second, and closer to home: the claim that local elites are at war with farming runs straight into the Fox Hill Estate Vineyard. The premise is absurd on its face, and they know it. The person building this “farm” is the very definition of an elitist. The Gang can blather all it wants. Just drive down Bashford Road, past the lovely homes, and look up at the manse that the quest for beauty bought. They’re not defending agriculture. They’re running cover for money, dressed in overalls.
This brand of politics does nothing for a community. It poisons the water it drinks from. And the innuendo that board members are on the take is the most cynical deflection of all, given that the only person actually called out for conflicts sits at the center of it. The man who only recused himself when confronted. The man who, asked why he hadn't reported this to his fellow board members, said 'I didn't have to' (he did). The one who failed to file his legally mandated disclosures. Winning by only 35 votes is no mandate and I wonder just how many voters on Richmond, Bashford, Brown and Reed roads will tick the box for another candidate? Just how many people have been turned off by this kind of body politic? I’m sure he can count on two votes coming from Bashford Road, but I think he had those long ago.
In the end, as Collins and the Gang of Hate blow their dog whistles, they don’t seem to understand: we all hear it. In fact, it is, the most transparent thing about them.
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