Local man rises to occasion when he's accosted on plane for supporting Trump

Millions of people saw the video last week of an airplane passenger being accosted by a woman who was angry at him for saying that he was in Washington, D.C., to “celebrate democracy” rather than to protest Donald Trump.

Turns out that man was Scott Koteskey of Kalispell, Montana, who instantly became a national hero for his calm, quiet response to the hectoring attack of the smug “progressive” woman (or is that progressively smug woman?) sitting next to him.

While she was going off her gourd with invective and hyperbole (“You put a crazed man in charge of the nuclear codes! You should be ashamed!”), Koteskey answered her politely and reasonably (“Well we’re all entitled to our opinions here, ma’am.”).

Her response was classic Stalinist intimidation: “And I’m entitled to get drunk and puke in your lap! I’m going to throw up right in your lap! You make me sick! Don’t talk to me! Don’t look at me! Don’t you dare even put your arm on that rest. You disgust me! You should be ashamed of yourself! You put a maniac’s finger on the button. You are a bigot. You should get off this plane!”

At this point most of us would have lost our cool and punched the woman in the face, but not Koteskey.

Indeed, the reason Koteskey has emerged as a hero is because he demonstrated the proper response to the bullying techniques of the left, which in this case were verbal only, but often rise to the level of spitting or punching. Don’t fight back or otherwise sink to their level — instead, just remain civil, let them complain, and stay loyal to your principles.

“Ma’am,” he said (you gotta love it!), “by definition, bigotry is disparaging someone prior to knowing them simply by their beliefs and opinions. Thank you for being the very thing you preach against.”

In other words, he might just as well have said, “I’m not moving to the back of the plane just because I voted for a Republican,” or as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “I cannot hear what you say (‘ma’am’) because what you are shouts so loud.”

Passive resistance is a technique modeled by Jesus Christ, perfected by Mahatma Gandhi and used in this country by Martin Luther King Jr. to allow evil to manifest itself in order to expose it, shame it and conquer it.

That’s just what happened in this case, as the pharisaic woman — who demanded first that the “untouchable” Koteskey not use their shared armrest and then that he be forcibly moved to another seat — was herself ultimately escorted off the airplane by a policeman to the cheers of her fellow passengers.

Koteskey posted his account of the incident (“the craziest experience ever on an airplane”) to his Facebook page on Saturday, Jan. 21, shortly after arriving at Seattle on his Alaska Airlines flight from Baltimore following his stay in D.C. for the inauguration. He probably thought the account would amuse a few friends, but the fact that he had shot cellphone video of the woman flipping out meant that his Facebook post quickly went viral.

The next thing you know Koteskey was being featured on national television shows like “Inside Edition,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” and “Fox & Friends,” and written about in the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and hundreds of other newspapers and websites.

What is truly remarkable though is that virtually no one (not even the most liberal of the leftists) has defended the woman who attacked Koteskey.

Let’s get this one thing straight at least — no matter what you believe, no matter who you voted for, in the United States of America you have the right to travel without being abused, the right to your own opinion without being puked on, and the right to be morally superior as long as you don’t, through your own behavior, prove that you aren’t.

Thanks, Scott, for making that point the right way.

•Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.