George Rebane
The recent election did nothing to unite us as Americans. Half of us are still shocked that the election didn’t turn out as ‘everyone’ was told it would. And as the shock wears off, the losing side is not about to take President-elect Trump and the victorious Republicans lying down. At all levels the politically active Left is sounding the call for resistance and revolt – examples abound. At yesterday’s legislative swearing in ceremonies in Sacramento, the Democratic leadership destroyed any semblance of amity by immediately attacking the nascent Trump administration, denigrating its formation, and promising to “erect a firewall” against anticipated assaults from Washington on California’s “progressive agenda”.
In the country’s liberal-dominated universities invitations are already being cancelled for scheduled speakers for their sin of being invited by President-elect Trump for a talk, or having already participated (gasp!) in such contaminating conversations. Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s desire to expose non-existing rightwing election fraud is now well reported across the country. (However, don’t even think about checking the citizenship of registered voters.) So what the local lackeys are doing here and elsewhere is responding to the national call to assault and once more attempt to silence the voices they consider disagreeable and dangerous to their community’s progress toward a collectivist future.
In our neck of the woods former Union editor Jeff Pelline has been an assiduous worker in the socialist vineyards. The indelible blot that continues to arouse him is that his journalistic career ended with his being ignominiously dismissed as the editor of The Union, our small town community newspaper. His ensuing feud with that publication knows no bounds and has now bloated to include its subsequent editors, publishers, insufficiently leftist columnists, and its cartoonist (whose insight below on Pelline’s techniques was offered almost a decade ago).
Nor has it stopped there, instead it overflowed to include conservative bloggers and commentators who deign to make their politically incorrect voices heard in our community. I belong to the latter cohort, and have over the last ten years been the recipient of his tender mercies in his efforts to improve the community by first attempting to have me removed as a regular columnist for The Union, then the attempt to stop my work with young people through SESF’s annual TechTest and STEM mentoring, the ongoing attempt to remove my small voice as a regular conservative commentator on the left-leaning KVMR, and since last Saturday, in his new crusade (here) to have me resign from the MIM board. Pelline’s snarky ad hominems are a matter of public record and populate years of postings on his blog and comment streams in these pages. Inquiring readers are invited to research this record for themselves.
Apparently my unsuitability for that board position starts with my conservetarian (“hard right”) and therefore toxic worldview as illustrated by my critique of Ms Hilary Hodge’s Union columns (here). Why? Why, of course, because unbeknownst to me she is also a MIM chorister. That our contention in the arena of socio-political ideologies has nothing to do with either of our relationships to MIM, also had nothing to do with the fevered reasoning offered by Mr Pelline as a “teaching moment” to me. (There is no limit to the man’s hubris.)
Ms Hodge is a duly opinionated public figure in our community, as am I. And we both subscribe to opposing social philosophies with extended public followings. We both have our critics, and I am not the only one to violate the ascribed sanctity of her views. See for example today’s Other Voices column (here) by Larry DeMuynck in The Union wherein Ms Hodge also offers her highly selective analysis (here) of country’s political landscape and recent election – Trump won because too many bad Americans (the irredeemably deplorable multi-phobes) voted for him, Hillary lost because she simply couldn’t “resonate with the voters”.
To sum it up for now, it is hard (impossible?) to find a conservative or libertarian arguing that a progressive voice in the media be silenced, no matter how socialist cum communist that voice may be. However, today the obverse voices are profuse across our land, of which Jeff Pelline is just the local leftwinger checking off Alinsky’s protocols in his rants. Should he be silenced? Not at all. In fact we all would enjoy hearing some ideas from the gentleman, instead of the constant drizzle of local events pabulum, ad hominem tirades, and moralistic homilies that overfill his contributions to community dialogue.
In the same vein, should my strong opinions be silenced while I serve as a MIM board member, given that I am neither a spokesman for the organization nor do my MIM activities relate in any way to my socio-political commentaries that appear in the various media outlets? I don’t think so, and to my knowledge neither do any other Americans not smitten by the widespread intellectual sclerosis that arises from today’s progressive pandemic of political correctness.
rebanesruminations.com 
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