by Marie Heins | Mar 25, 2022 | General
Author’s note: This article uses the term public discourse to describe a specific type of communication used to gain understanding about matters of shared public concern. Public discourse is a process that involves dialog among trusted parties to discover the best outcomes for a community. Civic discourse is the traditional name for this activity. Unfortunately, civic discourse and civil discourse are now often used to describe rules for civility, politeness and being non-confrontational instead of the productive exchange of knowledge and ideas.
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Washington state was a very different place not that long ago. Disease outbreaks ran their course without the authorities imposing a never-ending medical dictatorship. Where were the public debates about lockdowns and potential remedies for COVID-19?
There were public comments on these issues but not all comments are public discourse even if the speaker is addressing issues relating to governance. Most public comments at our local meetings are statements for the public record. While a three minute presentation is an appropriate format for rants and sales pitches, it is useless for sharing complex information like scientific studies or in depth personal experience in a trade or profession.
Effective public discourse involves dialog. It is a seat at the table. It provides a feedback mechanism that all complex systems require to continue functioning for their intended purpose. A thermostat is necessary to keep a heating system or vehicle engine safe and operational. Complex systems help control train speeds to prevent derailments. Public discourse prevents ignorance and corruption from driving a community off the rails.
Public discourse was once an integral part of the dominant culture in our region. From academia to local watering holes, contrarian views were welcomed and debated – not labeled misinformation and used as evidence to banish someone to the gulag. Over the past several decades, the cancel culture replaced discussion with ostracizing anyone who challenged experts and ideologies favored by powerful government and corporate interests. There is no role for public discourse in the cancel culture.
The Evolution of the Cancel Culture – From Tribal Cohesion to Totalitarianism
Shaming, shunning, and exiling outcasts are ancient tools for dealing with threats to a community like thieves and child molesters. The cancel culture uses these same techniques to enforce loyalty to a political ideology.
My personal experiences with the local cancel culture all involve over-the-top outrage inflicted on individuals who have not harmed anyone, broken any laws, used foul language, or even displayed bad manners. The attackers have no doubts that terrible humans must be purged from their community and they proceed with ruthless precision. The true reasons for the attack are rarely revealed.
One example is a boycott planned to run a small business out of town a few years ago that I was privy to. The owners provided useful services and appeared to support themselves with income from this small business. The alleged reason for the attempted cancellation? People were not comfortable with advertisements the offenders were running in the local Leader newspaper. The ads were cringe-worthy but I never noticed anything kinky or alarming in the ads or my interactions with the owners. I did not join the boycott. I never found out why these people were targeted but I have seen patterns in situations where I had firsthand experience with the cancel culture.
Refusal to join boycotts and hate mongering will mark a person as a potential problem. Questioning or opposing a popular narrative or majority political opinion is unacceptable. It means a person does not share “community values” and is subject to removal. I have witnessed (and thwarted) attempts to have an undesirable evicted from their apartment based on false accusations. Apartment dwellers and small business owners were ideal cancel culture victims in the pre-Covid era – disposable people easily pushed into financial ruin. When totalitarian societies treat people this way, it is called a purge.
“The essence of totalitarianism — regardless of which costumes and ideology it wears — is a desire to completely control society, every aspect of society, every individual behavior and thought. Every totalitarian system, whether an entire nation, a tiny cult, or any other form of social body, evolves toward this unachievable goal… the total ideological transformation and control of every single element of society (or whatever type of social body it comprises). This fanatical pursuit of total control, absolute ideological uniformity, and the elimination of all dissent, is what makes totalitarianism totalitarianism.” – CJ Hopkins, The Great New Normal Purge
Totalitarian systems are effective at controlling the population in the short run. They eventually fail but not before inflicting significant misery on their subjects. Covid tyranny appears more extreme in places infested with an existing cancel culture, for example, Jefferson County and college campuses. Even if the tyrants recently rode in on the SARS-COV-2 virus, they do not appear to be going away anytime soon. Dealing with totalitarians requires recognizing and repelling the destructive purge techniques they use to acquire and maintain power.
Cancel Culture and the Practice of Ritual Defamation
The journey to real and virtual gulags usually begins with character assassination. The technique used across time and cultures is often described as Ritual Defamation:
“Ritual Defamation is used to hurt, to intimidate, to destroy, and to persecute, and to avoid the dialogue, debate and discussion upon which a free society depends. On those grounds it must be opposed no matter who tries to justify its use.” – Laird Wilcox
According to Wilcox,
“the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.”
Learning ritual defamation characteristics is useful for protecting your reputation in the community. Wilcox’s element 2 may be the most difficult and important one to deal with during an attack.
“2. The method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.”
The best defense against Ritual Defamation is to anticipate an attack or at least quickly recognize it is happening if you are taken by surprise. Don’t ever apologize or attempt to justify any alleged character flaw or opinion that has offended your accusers. If someone attacks your character instead of your ideas, they are probably not interested in your opinions.
Eventually these individual attacks eliminate effective public discourse. When the price of challenging a belief system is too high, silence is usually the best short term economic decision especially for someone with limited assets or employment opportunities. Even long term residents may be reluctant to risk their standing in a community that they, and often their ancestors, have built and nurtured.
Lessons from the 4th Grade Mean Girls Club
My grade school classmates defeated the cancel culture of their time. There is much to learn from their success.
Imagine being forced by law to meet with your worst social media tormenters every weekday – in person. That describes my first few months in 4th grade. Several girls formed cliques and started a practice called “blackballing”. This involved identifying outcasts by drawing a black circle on a slip of paper followed by a person’s name. It was never clear why anyone was being blackballed or who would be next.
One day, all the girls were invited to an important meeting after school at Marilyn’s house. There were no adults in the large living room when the three clique leaders stood together an announced the end of cliques and blackballing. The rest of the meeting was spent planning some fun things we could do together.
In the years between that meeting and 8th grade graduation, we had many wonderful times together – parties, picnics, trick or treating and hours playing kick the can in the network of ally-ways behind the school.
The 4th graders first rejected their toxic system and dismantled the leadership structure. They then started rebuilding their community with input from the experts – every kid there who had an idea about what they considered fun. Even though our situation is much more complex, this two part model is useful for evaluating problems and possible solutions.
No End in Sight to an Entrenched Medical Dictatorship
There is always the possibility that the upcoming elections will provide better leadership. Unfortunately, six more months of destruction to essential services could be devastating. Medical care, utilities and schools are mostly public in our region. They are political entities controlled by the Covid tyrants.
Reliable utilities and emergency medical care are essential services for almost everyone. Our local providers made the decision to prioritize Covid tyranny over the well-being of the people who depend on them. There does not appear to be any future here for those of us who cannot afford our own off-grid power system or a helicopter to fly us to trusted health providers.
The legacy news media and the majority of registered voters in Jefferson County appear to favor a medical dictatorship form of government. There are no plans to change the state laws (RCW – Revised Code of Washington) or codes (WAC – Washington Administrative Code) used to justify this abuse of power.
Most elected local officials do not have the capability to evaluate the Covid scientific data themselves. They accept information exclusively from official sources often staffed by bureaucrats with unreliable past performance. There is a preference for authoritarian governance that may not change anytime soon.
Building / Rebuilding
While a voting majority is necessary to rebuild some Covid captured institutions, there are many opportunities for building replacements and walking away from the ones which no longer serve their purpose. Education is the most obvious with the growth of homeschooling.
Another example is the Port Townsend Free Press, which has replaced the area’s legacy media as a source of investigative reporting. Their comment section is a rare local source of diverse opinions. This is a good place to sharpen the public discourse skills that are necessary for citizen-directed governance.
by Jim Scarantino | Mar 22, 2022 | General
Anti-Police Politicians Now Desperate for More Law Enforcement. Realizing that a shrunken Port Townsend Police Department can’t protect the city, City Council approved an agreement with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office to rent deputies and their equipment. The city will pay significantly more than it would for a fully staffed police department. The annualized cost of a rented deputy and his equipment comes to around $200,000. But, according to the mayor — who spearheaded recent anti-police actions of council — this is “the reality of a tough situation. We’ve gotta do what we’ve gotta do.” Even if it means breaking the city’s budget.
In the past eighteen months or so, the city has lost more than half its police department to transfers to other agencies, resignations, and opting for retirement. It lost another officer just last week. How did Port Townsend so quickly lose so many valuable, highly trained personnel? Not one of the City Councilors bothered to ask.
A Grim Assessment
At its March 21, 2022, business meeting council heard from Chief Tom Olson that the skeleton crew of officers are being forced to work overtime in order to maintain at least one officer on duty 24/7. City Manager John Mauro stated that having just one officer on duty is “becoming very, very challenging.” In order to maintain minimal yet admittedly inadequate and unsafe coverage, the department has “greatly reduced,” as Mauro put it, services the police department normally provides. Chief Olson anticipates that it will take 12-18 months to get to “where our staffing levels are much closer to where they need to be.”
The Sheriff has in the past helped fill occasional gaps in PT’s patrols but has not been called upon to make up for anything like a greater than 50% shortfall in PTPD’s roster. The agreement approved by council is a renewal, but more costly renewal of the pre-existing arrangement. Neither the city manager nor the finance director was able to answer questions from council members on how much more this pricey arrangement will cost than had been budgeted for a police department staffed with 15 regularly employed officers in city vehicles.
Port Townsend Police Chief Tom Olson
Chief Olson could only predict that it was going to cost “a lot more.” This means the city will exceed its 2022 budget for law enforcement and will have to take the money from elsewhere. City Councilor Libby Urner Wennstrom called this “going into debt.” (To her credit, she recently did a ride-along and found she was patrolling the city with the only officer on duty that night.)
The $200,000 annualized figure was calculated by Mayor David Faber using the $93.34/hour “fully loaded” rate the city will pay for use of county deputies. “Fully loaded” includes the deputies’ rate of pay under their most recent union contract, and also the cost of their equipment, including their vehicle, and county overhead. On holidays, the “fully loaded” rate jumps to $121.63/hr. The figures Faber used are available in this staff briefing for council.
Why Has the City Lost More Than Half Its Police Department?
City councilors did not ask this question. The answer points at them.
In the summer of 2020, City Council launched what many members of the police department and surrounding law enforcement agencies viewed as a hostile and unfair “review”. It was clearly a pretext for anti-law enforcement measures council members openly discussed. The former mayor hoped — it was that obvious — for evidence that she thought would show bias by law enforcement against minorities. (The evidence was not there, though she kept seeking it.) The current mayor Faber, then a member of council, proposed disarming police by requiring them to lock their weapons in the trunks of their patrol vehicles. The current mayor initially sought to strip officers of their qualified immunity, meaning they would lose insurance coverage for even good faith mistakes made in a high-stress, high-risk situation, thus exposing themselves and their families to the ruinous costs of litigation and possible judgments. Other officials, like city councilors, would retain their qualified immunity and insurance coverage, even for acts of gross negligence, such as approving the Cherry Street Project. See “City Council Threatens Port Townsend’s Public Safety,” PTFP 7/29/20. (Former Chief Surber and his staff did a brilliant job fending off this attack on the department by convincing council that PTPD was already the most “progressive” department around.)
During 2020 elected officials in the city and county enabled and encouraged efforts to humiliate and disparage local law enforcement personnel. See “Reckoning with ‘The Reckoning,‘” PTFP 8/3/20 and “Black Lives Matter Sought to Humiliate Sheriff, Police Chief,” PTFP, 9/25/20. Anti-police protestors requested a police escort for their march down Sims Way and Water Street. Was this to humiliate police? Their motives were unclear and contradictory. The city gave them preferential treatment and police stood guard as marchers with “ACAB” (All cops are bastards) placards passed by. The leader of the event, a man known to law enforcement because of his long police record (including stealing a truck followed by a high-speed chase, followed by hitting a horse) was the keynote speaker. He was applauded by city leaders. That speech repeated numerous lies and baseless attacks on police in general. Ironically, this man’s life was saved by one of the law enforcement personnel he attacked in statements to The Leader. Unfortunately, due to threats and harassment of herself and her employer, a member of this law enforcement officer’s family was driven out the city where she had grown up.
The city’s anti-police animus continued through 2020. The city broke its own laws to rush through painting of “Black Lives Matter” on Water Street but rebuffed a request to honor law enforcement with a similar street painting.
In the face of this official hostility towards their husbands, fathers and sons, wives and mothers of local law enforcement officers organized what proved to be a massive “Back the Blue Rally” that attracted around 400 cars, truck and motorcycles. Instead of offering support, city officials and leaders (including the current mayor) were furious. It was reported to this author that the city manager was overheard yelling at the former police chief and demanding that charges be filed against the organizers — the wives, mothers and daughters of officers and deputies. As reported to me, the former chief stood his ground because the rally organizers and participants had broken no laws. (Laws were broken by anti-police protestors who blocked Water Street to interrupt the rally, but no charges against them were ever lodged.)
City council in their anti-police fervor was bent on eliminating the school resource officer. Why? Because they objected on ideological grounds to police in schools. The Port Townsend High School principal had to plead with them to keep the valued and beloved officer in her hallways. “PTHS Principal Tells City Council to Keep Police in Her School,“ PTFP, 9/28/20. (That particular officer has since left the Port Townsend Police Department.)
In September 2020 first responders had to fight the city to commemorate the sacrifice of firemen and police officers who died rushing into the Twin Towers on 9/11. Since 2002, they had been ringing the old fire bell at the hour when the planes hit the Twin Towers. This was the first time they had ever been denied permission to hold their modest ceremony.
In 2020, Officer Mark DuMond sustained such severe head injuries in the course of protecting a nurse at the hospital he was incapable of continuing to work as a police officer. While he was honored by the department and awarded two rare departmental Purple Hearts for lives he saved, city council telegraphed its hostility toward law enforcement, or at least its indifference to DuMond’s sacrifice, by doing nothing to recognize his suffering and service to the city. See “The Violence that Cost Port Townsend a Man Who Saves Lives,” PTFP, 12/6/20.
But now city leaders are concerned they don’t have enough police on the streets and are so desperate they will break the city’s budget to rent law enforcement services from the Sheriff.
Mayor David Faber blamed the alarming contraction of the police force on difficulties for new hires finding housing. Chief Olsen said nothing about qualified officers turning down job offers due to housing concerns; Faber resorted to what is becoming the go-to cause of every problem in the city, true or not. In this case it is not true. It does not explain why so many good officers — who already had housing — left the force in such a relatively short period of time.
Faber failed to acknowledge his own contribution to the city’s dilemma. Who wants to work for a city that treats police so badly? That city will likely hang you out to dry when it suits them. Chief Olson said he has not been able to hire the kind of people who meet his standards. Other communities are also looking for men and women who can fill the holes in their police rosters. Officers can choose a community that appreciates their professionalism and sacrifice, or they can work for a city administration that recently talked about disarming them and exposing them to personal ruin.
Communities across Washington state are finding it difficult to hire police due to the “police reforms” passed by the Legislature, measures that amount to little more than handcuffing police and giving criminals “drive away free cards.” Men and women who want to protect and serve can find better places to risk their lives.
Not long ago, PT City Council and its current mayor were talking about a smaller police force. They thought that turning against law enforcement was the smart political move. It certainly played well to the angry mob. Now taxpayers must pick up the tab, yet again, for the costs of council’s irresponsibility and ideological foolishness.
by the Editors | Mar 21, 2022 | General
Dear Port Townsend Free Press readers:
As you know, the censorship window has been closing on all forms of free speech and alternative views for some time now. You may not know that the Free Press website mysteriously crashed on Thursday, March 17th.
Anyone who attempted to log on saw a skeletal version of our homepage with a “critical error” message at the bottom.
Our website administrators say it was probably triggered by a WordPress update, thus they don’t think it was a hack (or St. Patrick’s Day leprechauns). Given the warnings we’ve received on our Facebook page over the last year, we remain agnostic on that determination, but we do ask for your input on the new look.
Please let us know in the comment section if you find the home page more or less inviting or accessible than the previous format. As we move forward, your views will weigh heavily in the website’s design.
We are so grateful for your ongoing interest and active engagement. Thank you, thank you.
With sincere gratitude,
the Editors
by Jim Scarantino | Mar 16, 2022 | General
Lipstick on a pig. The side of the Carmel House the public sees from Cherry Street shows new plywood sheeting where windows were broken out during the extensive vandalism on January 3, 2022. It looks like maybe the city is somewhat taking care of its largest, most costly housing project. To deter further vandalism, city crews also posted warnings that the building is under video surveillance. And, wonder of wonders, after years of swinging open to the wind (and me calling out this negligence), the front doors have finally been closed.
It’s all for show. Get a little closer and you’ll see shards of glass everywhere in the weeds. The refrigerator teenagers launched through a picture window is still where it landed.
Walk around back and you’ll see the city has done nothing to protect the building from the elements. All the broken windows are still broken and uncovered. My favorite is the one that looks like a cat in the window (featured at top).
The rest are just ugly, and admit snow and rain, dirt, insects, birds and bats. The place already was overrun with rats and home to raccoons. And, once again, it appears the grounds have a homeless camp.
Those surveillance cameras that are supposed to be watching and recording are nowhere to be seen. It’s the same cheap trick homeowners play when they think they can scare off burglars with fake “Protected by ADT” signs.
The city is jumping into a huge development project with its acquisition of the Evans Vista property at the first traffic circle coming into town. City leaders contemplate building hundreds of units and possible commercial spaces — an entirely new village at the entrance to the city. Yet, it can’t even take care of this single dilapidated, fantastically expensive derelict of a building.
Why be so confrontational by calling it “Faber’s Folly?” David Faber, our current mayor, like the two mayors before him — Deborah Stinson and Michelle Sandoval — has been a vocal supporter of the project, from his years on Council to his current position. He pushed the financing through over pleas of caution and requests for due diligence from former councilor Bob Gray. The financial documents in front of Faber at the time showed the project was doomed to default. Despite the abject failure of this boondoggle, Faber recently boasted “I wouldn’t change a single thing about what we did.”
Faber owns this, as does City Councilor Amy Howard, who also overrode Gray’s calls for caution and due diligence to protect taxpayers. During the discussion on going huge with the Evans Vista village, and with the failure of the Cherry Street Project hanging over council, Howard, now our Deputy Mayor, echoed Faber’s delusional braggadocio and declared she, too, had no regrets.
What this means is that our Mayor and Deputy Mayor have no regrets about saddling taxpayers with the tab for their gross negligence — a nearly $1.4 million debt, highly valuable land rendered unavailable to provide housing for people instead of vermin, and the cost of tearing this thing down and cleaning up the site, an inevitability the politicians think they can ignore. As I have written elsewhere, the costs sunk into this project already exceed $2.2 million and the last cost estimate predicted at least another million would be needed before the first of eight modest apartments would be ready. That was before construction costs began soaring.
While the city suffers under the affordable housing emergency that is depriving businesses of workers, and workers of a place other than a car to call home, the city-owned lot occupied by the rotting Carmel House is unavailable for any kind of sensible housing project, public or private.
The housing crisis is so bad a downtown business owner, who moved here from Asia and invested his savings to pursue a dream in a new country, is on the verge of moving out because he can’t find a home for his family when he loses his lease in less than a month.
Our city leaders have been dithering around since they joined the county’s declaration of a housing emergency… in 2017. We fought and won a World War in less time. It will be many more years before the “incredibly expensive” Evans Vista project (to quote former Mayor Michelle Sandoval) provides a single room of human habitation. I will be writing about this project in my next article.
The only Cherry Street Project related work in the 2022 city budget is simply paying the monthly principal and interest on the bond, with a decade-and-a-half of debt service still to go. Nailing up some plywood boards to partially mask vandalism damage and buying the false surveillance camera signs was presumably off-budget.
To “Faber’s Folly,” let’s add “Howard’s Hovel.” Faber and Howard earned the honors. They were on council when the city approved the Cherry Street boondoogle and when it thumbed its nose at a $1 million offer from Keith and Jean Marzan to take the project off their hands and actually get some affordable housing built. No one else who dumped this wasteful lemon on taxpayers is left in city government. Let’s hope the new council has functioning brains and enough backbone to cut the city’s losses, bulldoze the decaying hulk and put the land to better use.
By the way, Howard’s Hovel/Faber’s Folly turns 5 years old in a few weeks. Somebody, bake a cake.
by Annette Huenke | Mar 12, 2022 | General
Last November, a group of concerned parents of Port Townsend School District (PTSD) students garnered nearly 600 signatures on a petition demanding that there be no Covid-19 vax mandates for school attendance. In an introductory letter, the parents made clear that they’d done their homework, writing:
“We urge you to consider the fact that invoking such a requirement will be seen as a divisive, discriminatory and potentially dangerous dictate by parents who understand the health risks associated with contracting Covid-19 in school-age children have been proven to be negligible.
“When the unknown potential long-term risks associated with this vaccine in children and the CDC’s “Reported” injuries and deaths (over 700 vaccination-related child deaths) are weighed in combination, the evidence speaks for itself. There is no justifiable reason to place our childrens’ health at risk due to injury or death by vaccine as a requirement to attend public school.”
They went on to question whether or not “funding in the form of financial incentives to the school district” may have been an underlying force. As Free Press contributor Brett Nunn reported here in January, we now know that those financial incentives were real and significant.
As the narrative further unravels and “public health” justifications no longer bear weight, the vaccine and mask mandates are being rescinded throughout the country. One of the last holdouts, WA Governor Jay Inslee, has finally let go… sort of. His latest masking directive has given broad latitude to regional jurisdictions to make choices at local levels.
Schools look to be the next battleground, as evidenced by this urgent letter written Friday, March 11th, to the PTSD superintendent, principal and board:
“We would like clarification as to the changes for the mask policy beginning Monday, March 14th, 2022. Per governor Inslee, the WA state health department, and Dr Berry, indoor masking in public schools is no longer required. The PT school district has sent numerous emails to parents stating this change.
“That said, many of our students came home from school today and told a very different story regarding this subject. The main topic was segregation. Separating the masked students from the unmasked, and even forcing students to wear masks while in certain classes if the teacher insists they do. Many students said their teachers stated they ‘can make students wear masks if they choose to.’ Also stated was if there was a shortage of desks kids would be forced to sit on the floor.
“It is VERY concerning to us as parents as to why a school district would be encouraging any kind of segregation, especially one who prides themselves on non-discrimination. We as parents will NOT in any way support this. We would like clarification immediately so steps can be taken as parents to make sure our students who will be exercising their rights to unmask will not be excluded, segregated, or in any other way felt guilted into wearing something they are not legally required to. Our children should never feel bullied by their teachers or any school staff members.
“We request a meeting immediately if any of the above stated will be implemented. If our children could potentially face any kind of opposition from school staff while exercising their rights to not wear a mask, we as parents are to be contacted by phone BEFORE our children are confronted by staff. Also, we do NOT support our children sitting on floors or made to feel uncomfortable in any way by any school staff member while exercising their right to unmask.
Concerned PTHS Parents”
And well they should be concerned.
by Stephen Schumacher | Mar 9, 2022 | General
Senior Leader columnist Bill Mann is at it again, unleashing his second wave of trash-talk against so-called “anti-vaxxers”, calling them “stupid”, “idiots”, “foolish”, “deniers”, “clueless”, etc., etc., etc.
In a bizarre reversal of reality, Mann blames lockdown opponents for locking his grandchildren into a “bubble” that “deprived [them] of a normal childhood”:
I don’t blame my cautious daughter in Oregon for the protectiveness she affords our two under-5, un-vaxxed grandkids. They’ve never been in a store or restaurant. They only go to empty playgrounds. They have only one “bubble,” three other kids in a small family that they play with. And we can all hardly wait until the day those kids under age 5 can get vaccinated. If all the clueless and heedless had been vaccinated, our grandchildren may not have been deprived of a normal childhood.
Mann is mistaken regarding the relative risks versus benefits of the Covid quasi-vaccine for otherwise-healthy youngsters, who have virtually zero risk of death from the virus but serious known and unknown risks from the vax.
New studies are finding healthy boys have about 4-6 times higher chance of cardiac hospitalizations than catching Covid, with 1 of every 4515 adolescents hospitalized for myocarditis in Hong Kong after the second dose, and similar destruction of young hearts in the U.S.
County officials have been repeatedly alerted about these dangers, but falsely claim “no children have died from receiving Pfizer’s vaccine” and are “hopeful” they can start pushing it on children under 5 soon.
Mann’s new column is a sequel to his similar screed from August 25, 2021, which unloaded even more vituperative verbiage:
- dehumanizing his neighbors as “boneheads”, “spreadnecks”, “dolts”, and “knuckle-draggers”;
- demonizing them as public enemies “making innocent people sick, especially children”; and
- urging they “should not be allowed in public spaces” and “not work.”
The Leader‘s blithe promotion of Mann’s provocative hate speech, coupled with their continued censorship of contrarian voices, unleased a flood of letters to the editor and critical responses online. When none of this criticism was allowed to see print in their Opinion Forum, protests outside the Leader offices followed.
Unfortunately, Mann is not just shouting at the moon, but is a small but angry cog is a larger campaign to fan up fear, hatred, deplatforming, discrimination, and violence against so-called “anti-vaxxers”.
This jive term was originally a slur on folks concerned about problems shared by all vaccines, but “anti-vax” has been progressively broadened to suppress negative findings about any individual vaccine or booster, especially the experimental mRNA injections that increased all-cause mortality by 24% during their abortive and fraudulent emergency-use-authorization trial (and which are not even vaccines according to the CDC definition from a year ago).
The “anti-vaxxer” slur has nonsensically been extended to embrace those who are pro-vaccines but anti-mandates, as well as anyone who questions any aspect of the current lockdown narrative. According to its current usage, the majority of Americans are “anti-vaxxers”, given the unpopularity of vaccine mandates.
The authoritarian risks from this hate campaign are not just academic… an unhinged Department of Homeland Security has now issued a crazy dangerous bulletin targeting those spreading “misleading narratives” or factual “malinformation” including about “vaccine and mask mandates” as “domestic terrorists”!
If the malefactors behind this classification get their way, what’s next?
- Burning books and outlawing free speech, as is already happening via social media monopolies following illegal executive branch marching orders in defiance of the First Amendment?
- Rounding up thought-criminals into concentration camps like those being built in Australia?
- Freezing or stealing their bank accounts as done to working-class truckers and their supporters in Canada?
- Indefinitely detaining them in gulags and trampling on due process rights as done to Jan. 6 trespassers?
To his credit, Mann now expresses openness about ending mask mandates, but is quick to say that doesn’t make him “anti-mask”. Wrong again… at least according to the broad-brush “anti-vax” definition rules, Mann’s statements are as “anti-mask” as the nuanced views of most supposed “anti-vaxxers”.
Given that his county health officer is still urging everyone to wear masks, the fact that Mann’s “anti-mask” published views differ from the official truth means Mann is spreading medical “misinformation” as defined by Homeland Security. That also means Mann may now officially be a “terrorist”, whom the covid coup threatens to censor and persecute along with the “anti-vaxxers” that Mann despises. Maybe he can share a prison cell with them.
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The Leader saw fit to print Mann’s two feature columns dedicated to abusing “anti-vaxxers”, despite (or because of) their being filled with “insults, taunts, bullying, intimidation, and profanity” … the very language that specifically violates the Free Press commenting policy against flame wars deterring and drowning out serious discourse.
As writers and editors, we wrestle to discern what level of civil discourse we should aspire to and enforce… what would be most true, kind, and helpful. I am concerned that my own words of criticism are sometimes too barbed and unkind in this and other articles I have written, and if so, I truly apologize.
But it is also true that our own county’s namesake was adamant that his sharp words should stand in our Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson wrote: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
