If you haven’t paid attention to all the budget troubles going on around here..welcome to the terrible party. In the next few weeks the budget for FCPS is going to be voted on, and we need to make sure that our schools get what they need to educate our children. We’ll let a good friend of the Yokel explain it to y’all:
The most important duty of local government is to educate the children living within their borders. If we fail at this it really doesn’t matter how nice our parks, roads or other public services are. At the bottom of this post we are going to list the email addresses for county council members and County Executive Fitzwater so you can email them with your concerns.
Speaking of the important duty of education, one of the most important duties we have as citizens is to vote for competent school board members. That is where a fair number of us failed this time around. We tried to sound the warning about there being too many candidates on our side, but that warning did not reach enough ears and we are now left to deal with the consequences of it all.
Colt Black has decided to use his short time on the board to harass and demean LGBTQ+ students at school board meetings. From the Frederick News Post:
Referring to the part of a districtwide gender identity policy, Policy 443, that instructs teachers and staff members to use a student’s preferred name and pronouns, Black said at a Jan. 8 school board meeting: “Just as much as you have your right to be you, we have our right to be free from you.”
Lots of local folks filed complaints about this outrageous comment from a sitting school board member. Well, today an independent investigator determined that Black did not violate Title IX:
But that doesn’t mean that he’s not an unqualified bigot that shouldn’t be on the board. We’ll tell you right now that the 5 member panel of judges here at the LY have already tried and convicted him in our court of public opinion, and so has a majority of the school board:
We’ll remind y’all again in a couple of years, but we do need to remember how the math works when it comes to school board elections. We cannot pay this high price again.
We’ve been yelling to y’all for years about paying attention to the Board of Education race. Every time Cindy Rose threw her proverbial hat into the ring, we’ve been there with sirens and horns warning everyone about the danger of bigoted, anti-education people getting on to the board.
This time is no different folks!
Thankfully every time enough people in this fine county heeded the warning and made sure she (and many others like her) didn’t get a seat. Just look at the bullet we dodged:
Just imagine the rants that would take place at BOE meetings over shit like this!
Jamie Brennan and Colt Black are also threats to the education and well-being of children in Frederick County Public Schools. They can try and hide behind the veneer that they are in it to improve reading and math scores or restore the virtual school program, but we all know it isn’t true. A few months back your Lady Yokels attended a few candidate forums and had the displeasure of hearing Colt Black lying to the crowd saying that schools didn’t allow kids to check out books from the library and therefore weren’t reading. (Isn’t this what Cindy and Nancy Allen want since all the library books are full of porn?) Jaime Brennan is a dangerous Moms For Liberty candidate who needs to be avoided at all costs. Here’s a sampling of what some people who pay attention have been posting about her:
Hard pass on this one!
Here’s the dilemma, we have four really good candidates running with only three spots to fill. Therefore, in order to keep Jaime Brennan and/or Colt Black out (because they do have a following amongst our local Trumpers), we need to align behind three, and only three. In our opinion, because we’ve been watching these races closely for the last decade and a half, it needs to be the Apple Ballot candidates.
This is not a criticism of Veronica Lowe or anything she’s said or done. We are sure she would do a very good job, but we need to be real here. Liz Barrett recognized this danger when she didn’t receive the Apple Ballot endorsement and knew she risked letting someone like Cindy Rose in if she didn’t drop out. The Apple Ballot works and it matters to a lot of people. We cannot take the risk of allowing these people to slowly fill up our board. First Nancy Allen gets on, then if we aren’t carefully, Jaime Brennan gets a spot. Then it’s like that mint you put in your garden thinking just a little bit won’t matter and now all you do is pull up sprigs of mint all summer long!
We can’t risk becoming like Carroll County or the whole freaking state of Florida. It’s important that we teach kids the truth about what really happened in our country. It’s really important that we welcome all of our children and their families into our school community. And, it’s really important that we don’t allow people who would work against those goals onto our precious school board.
We’ve been taking it a bit easy this summer at Yokel headquarters. But now it’s time for us to step back into the fray! Lots of big news going on! First of all, we finally have a chance to have a woman president!
Kamala!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We also want to share with you this meme that pretty much sums up the last few years of American politics:
Imagine having to explain the last 8 years without having lived through it! It’s hard to explain even if you lived through it!
What we want to focus on today is the assault that the American educational system is under AND what that means for us locally. We are going to concentrate on two recent publications in particular.
First on our list is a column that the Frederick News Post ran on July 5th by a member of the Heritage Foundation with the seemingly innocuous title, “America’s teachers are unhappy. Here’s how we can turn that around.” Except there is nothing in this article that would make any teachers we know happy. Case in point:
Imagine Uber or Airbnb for education: An online platform that allows educators to offer their services to as many families as are willing to pay. One teacher could offer Advanced Placement English to hundreds of students at a time, and be compensated based on the popularity of their course, instead of a flat district salary schedule.
That’s what we want to know Mr.Tinkles!
So, teachers would be happier if they had to piecemeal their existence together? And what about healthcare and retirement? Or is that just the radical agenda of those evil teacher unions? Didn’t most people hate online learning for their kids? Here’s another jewel:
It’s no wonder. Teacher preparation programs can be money makers for colleges, but they offer little practical guidance on how to manage a classroom or deliver a lesson.
There’s been a bit of research on this so you can look for yourself, however we will share the conclusions of an analysis of student outcomes comparing Teach for America teachers to traditionally certificated teachers in the Houston School District:
Again we found that uncertified teachers and those with less than standard certification—whether TFA or non-TFA—exert negative effects on student achievement relative to teachers with standard certification.
AND…..
Raymond and colleagues reported that across the four years of their study, TFA teachers had left teaching in Houston by their third year at rates of between 60% and 100%. We found similar attrition rates: Between 57% and 90% of TFA recruits had left teaching in Houston after their second year, and between 72% and 100% of recruits had left after their third year.
No Heritage Foundation word salad on education would be complete without some accusation of indoctrination:
Those who persist are forced to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to sit through hours of abstract theorizing and ideological indoctrination — only to walk into class on day 1 of their first year ill-equipped to handle the student who won’t take his seat.
Of course this writer offers up no research to back her claims. So, let’s move onto the next piece we want to focus on, which is the deservedly maligned Project 2025.
That’s a great question!
There’s so much to unpack in that document, so for today we are going to just comment on the “Education Policy” section of this hot mess. First of all can we guess for whom the author of this piece works for?
If you guessed The Heritage Foundation, then…
Because of course she is!
So let’s go and break down some of these suggestions, shall we?
First of all, the overall tone of the article is that local school boards and local control is the best thing this country ever did, and all the problems in education would magically disappear if state and local governments had complete and total control.( We should mention that most other developed countries have a centralized education system) So, we set out to find some examples to refute that notion! Here’s a excerpt of an article from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education:
Daily stories abound of controversies related to school boards. In Clark County, public debates lasted all night over the boards’ deliberations over revamping sex education. Making national news, students chained themselves to the dais amidst the board’s deliberations to eliminate Mexican American Studies in Tucson while one board member was featured on the Daily Show making inaccurate and discriminatory remarks about the program. In Salt Lake City, the only board member of color showed up to the board meeting dressed as “Frito Bandito” (a cartoon character depicting a stereotype of Mexicans as thieves) in response to presumed racial discrimination. School board meeting attendees in South Carolina started singing “Jesus Loves Me” to silence advocates of transgender bathrooms, which translates to a villanization of transgender students. These are just a few of the existing examples.
You can also read stories about some coal mining towns in which the executives of the mines sat on school boards and wouldn’t allow advanced classes into the curriculum, mostly because they needed those students to work in the mines one day. And everyone remembers this, right?!
What a great example of local control of education!
Here’s a real eye-opener from Project 2025:
Safeguarding civil rights. Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.
These people really know how to pull out their dog whistles don’t they? Their suggestions continue along this same route:
The next Administration should abandon this change redefining “sex” to mean “sexual orientation and gender identity” in Title IX immediately across all departments. On its first day in office, the next Administration should signal its intent to enter the rulemaking process to restore the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulation, with the additional insistence that “sex” is properly understood as a fixed biological fact. Official notice-and-comment should be posted immediately. lAt the same time, the political appointees in the Office for Civil Rights should begin a full review of all Title IX investigations that were conducted on the understanding that “sex” referred to gender identity and/or sexual orientation.
Is this idea put forth to make sure Trump can get his followers jobs in the Federal Government? Just asking questions!
Minimize bachelor’s degree requirements. The President should issue an executive order stating that a college degree shall not be required for any federal job unless the requirements of the job specifically demand it.
And of course the main idea here is to destroy the public education system so they and all their buddies can make education into a business that they can profit off of:
Advancing education freedom. Empowering families to choose among a diverse set of education options is key to reform and improved outcomes, and it can be achieved without establishing a new federal program. For example, portability of existing federal education spending to fund families directly or allowing federal tax credits to encourage voluntary contributions to K–12 education savings accounts managed by charitable nonprofits, could significantly advance education choice.
Freedom they call it.
Is that why they can’t seem to hear anything?
So, we know this has been a long post, but we do need to circle back to what this means around these here parts. We have a few candidates (cough, cough-Jaime Brennan and Colt Black!) who have espoused some of these same viewpoints. Jaime Brennan is a member of Moms For Liberty who also has a relationship with the Heritage Foundation. From the Heritage Foundation’s own website:
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project filed a lawsuit yesterday on behalf of Moms for Liberty against the Biden Administration, demanding the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Federal Bureau of Investigation produce all records concerning the parental rights organization and the Biden Administration’s coordination with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
This lawsuit comes after the agencies refused to comply with the Oversight Project’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the same documents.
Prior to requesting these documents, the SPLC produced a report which listed Moms for Liberty as an “extremist” coalition of “far-right antigovernment parents” who are known for “intimidating and harassing teachers and school officials.” It also claimed that Moms for Liberty is “one of the most recognized names in the anti-student inclusion movement,” citing the group’s opposition to critical race theory.
Therefore we need to be smart about our vote this Fall. We need to consolidate our votes behind 3 candidates in order to make sure that our board doesn’t become overrun by people who want to destroy our schools. It’s just as important as your vote for President! And we don’t want the writer of the LTE that ran in yesterday’s paper to set the tone for our next election!:
We don’t need any more taxes.
Haven’t the politicians heard of not spending when you don’t have the money? I guess not. It doesn’t matter if it’s national or local.
To help with the spending, we need some conservatives on the school board. We need people who won’t cater to the teachers union.
Nothing is wrong with unions if they concern themselves with the employees’ well being only.
Don’t worry about critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion, as they are anti-common sense anyway.
Oh, well. The county doesn’t care about the older people who live here.
We’ve been waiting for the second batch of mail in ballots to arrive before we put our 2 cents in, so forgive our late reply! If you want to peruse the elections results, click here. But who wants to look at boring numbers when you have our very fine analysis?!
President
Of course both Biden and Trump won, but it tickled the Yokel bone to see that over 3,600 of our local folks voted for Nikki Haley, who dropped out over 2 months ago! We shall see what that means for the law-breaking orange menace when November arrives!
Time to peel away people!
U.S. Senate
Angela Alsobrooks, the County Executive from Prince Georges County, and former Governor Larry Hogan will run off for the open Senate seat. In our county over 4,000 of those votes went to Robin Ficker, which we can imagine are from the people who still refer to Hogan as “Lockdown Larry”. However, no matter what you think of Hogan (you can read here about who recruited him to run), everyone needs to remember that we cannot risk a Republican controlled Senate. Let’s say Trump wins another term and Hogan tips that balance over to the Republicans, can you imagine the laws that we will be subjected to? Don’t count on this guy to protect women’s reproductive rights either. Remember this?
We need to make sure that April Delaney makes the cut this November in order to push that balance back onto the Democratic side. The Republicans have proved time and again these past two years that they cannot handle the responsibility of governing in the House.
School Board Election:
UPDATE: Apple ballot is now in the top 3 spots with Veronica Lowe pulling up to 6th place:
Now it’s time for the results of the election we like to talk about the most. Here’s a handy little chart we made for y’all:
Or if you prefer:
Name
Early Voting
Electio-n Day
Mail In Ballot
Provisi-onal
Total
Perce-ntage
Colt Morningstar Black
1,646
7,682
1,121
NR
10,449
10.83%
Josh Bokee
1,412
6,395
3,010
NR
10,817
11.21%
Jaime Kiersten Brennan
1,818
8,327
1,229
NR
11,374
11.79%
Tabitha McLoughlin
836
4,359
741
NR
5,936
6.15%
Janie Monier
1,438
6,217
3,046
NR
10,701
11.09%
Chad King Wilson, Sr.
1,427
6,233
2,806
NR
10,466
10.85%
Not so fast Beaker!
Do we like that the bigoted, book banner, Moms for Liberty candidate won the most votes in the primary election? Of course not. But this scenario works because in the General Election you choose three. Plus, many independent voters did not come out for the primary so these results don’t include those folks! We’ll have many posts about how Brennan, McLoughlin, and Black would be a nightmare for our board, but that is another post for another day. Just be sure that you tell all of your friends to vote for Bokee, Monier and Wilson! BMW for short!
We are going to try our best to do just that for you today!
On May 14th you have a very important job to do! And that job is pick the most qualified, compassionate, intelligent people to be a part of our BOE. You get to vote for 3 (there’s thankfully many more than 3 to choose from this year) and 6 get to go on to the general election in November. And remember that your lack of party affiliation does not prevent you for voting for these candidates as it is a non partisan election!
We’ve created three categories for you to peruse today. The first category will be our approved candidates. The second will be those that passed the Yokel muster, but didn’t exactly make it to the approved category mostly due to a lack of information or because we felt their stance on the various issues was not well articulated. And finally we have a pile of rejections! Thankfully the approved category vastly outnumbers our rejections this time around.
Your Lady Yokels made our decisions based on a few criteria. First the issues on their websites, in news articles, video interviews, and in-person forums had to match what we thought was important in a candidate. We like to see candidates mention making all students feeling welcome, a support for teachers and paying them what they deserve, a focus on student mental health, inclusion of all kinds of people and events in school libraries and the curriculum, and a commitment to teaching children with scientifically approved methods and not educational fads. If there is any hint of a candidate discriminating against children OR advocating for the removal of accurate history or sexual education, they went immediately into the rejection pile! We know your code words people! They aren’t hard to crack!
Click here to discover how we found all the candidates.
We went in alphabetical order, not by who we liked the most.
Below is our approved list of candidates along with a link to their website so you can see what they have to say for yourself!
Jerry Alexandratos- in our original post we stated we couldn’t find his website, he has since contacted us with a link, and we have since moved him to the approved column!
These 8 would all make great members of the board! It’s so nice to see so many qualified people running this year.
The next set of candidates have a lot of promise, but some of them lacked information about what they would do as school board members. However, we didn’t feel as though they warranted an outright rejection.
Now our tone is going to change folks! The four candidates on this list must be avoided like the plague. We’ll give you some more details with each one for our rejection.
Colt Black, yes the same Colt Black that ran for Congress but now wants to be on the school board. Here’s something on his website that really got to us:
As a parent, you don’t cede your rights to guide and parent your child at the school door. So often times parents are treated as the enemy by teachers and administrators of schools. Spoken down to and disrespected. Enough is enough. It’s past time to ensure parents are respected by teachers and administrators and treated as a partner in their child’s education. Whether you are dealing with a student with special needs and are working to get your student the services they are entitled to or a disciplinary issue which is being taken too far. Or perhaps there is something your student or yourself object to on the basis of religious or philosophical thought which is causing the conscience to be violated and in turn violating your rights, parents need an advocate on the board who will stand up to ensure that every child receives a quality education.
Yeah, we had to read through that a few times as well.
So parents are the enemies of the teachers and administration? And why is that, because the parent doesn’t agree with what is being taught, or their kid misbehaved and actually faced some consequences? And what’s this nonsense about parents being abused?
We’re going to drop this right here for Mr. Black and anyone else who is curious:
2. Jaime Brennan is our Moms For Liberty candidate, she posted a series of videos that explain her position on the issues.
If you are interested in hearing someone bash kids and promote the removal of books from the school libraries (didn’t we already solve this?), go ahead and waste 6 minutes of your life. A friend of the Yokel sent us his rendition of her campaign sign that we think you will enjoy:
This lady tried last time around, and we need to reject her this time around as well. She’s a homeschooling advocate and lists on her website that she’s received the endorsement of an organization called Power 2 Parent, which is just as awful as you can imagine:
UPDATE: In our original post we weren’t able to find a lot of info on Tabitha McLoughlin. After looking at this graphic designer’s nightmare of an attempt at political propaganda we’ve decided to move her to the do not vote for column.
There’s still a few more forums for you to drop in on should you like to hear the candidates for yourself. Check out the League of Women Voters website for more details:
There’s lots to avoid this election season, the orange menace is back, and Dan Cox is trying to get into Congress, but don’t underestimate the importance of these school board elections.
Ever since the birth of this website in 2015, we’ve tried to sound the alarm about the consequences of elections. They have countless unforeseen effects that many folks don’t consider when choosing a candidate. We’ve decided to illustrate this concept through a nice flowchart that hopefully makes it easy to see the connections between elections and their aftermath:
WHOOPS! We forgot that sometimes flowcharts don’t always make sense, especially when you set #kirbydelauter loose with some construction papers and markers! Here’s the right one:
Hopefully this illustrates our point nicely!
We’ve got to be more careful with our government and institutions. Real people are being hurt in our country all because a snake oil (or hideous sneaker) salesman convinced enough people that he actually gave a shit about them. (Spoiler alert: he most certainly does not.) At the Constitutional Convention way back in 1787, folks waited anxiously to find out what type of government would replace the too weak Articles of Confederation. When it was all hashed out a woman approached Ben Franklin to enquire of what path the new country would take. His reply:
The “if you can keep it” part should give us all pause…
In case you’ve isolated yourself with a Netflix subscription and a delivery from Naked Wines (No Judgement!), we need to pull you back into reality. Women’s health is in danger. Women’s self-determination is in danger. Women’s ability to decide when, if, and now how to have a child is in danger. And for those of you who don’t think that’s a big deal, try to imagine if you were stripped of all bodily autonomy. Try to imagine that the one thing that you wanted more than anything else in the world was now blocked from you because people could not be bothered to figure out simple cause and effect relationships work. It isn’t funny or wise to tell over half the country’s population that they can’t make their own major life choices. There is nothing in the Bible or any other ancient religious text that discusses when life begins. The folks who wrote these books had no idea what a sperm, egg, or embryo even was! You would also be hard pressed to find a scientist that says that life begins at conception. It’s all made up!
At the Yokel, we’ve tried to maintain a focus on the local. And of course we still will. However, all politics is local. When the nation declares a war, our local men and women go off to fight. When our nation fails to support our allies against evil we endanger not only ourselves, but the entire world. To illustrate the cause/effect relationship once more, when we don’t take dictators seriously because we want to score political points, we also make self aggrandizing, pompous pieces of shit think it’s okay to normalize dictators and war criminals.
Tucker Carlson bragging that Russia is better than America because groceries are cheaper in the poorer country is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen pic.twitter.com/fDi7HOnEFw
This is really worrisome (and also extremely stupid) because there is a certain segment of the population that will buy into this crap. And they vote!
When women’s personal health choices are taken out of their hands it shows that the government only views us as incubators… at best! It also very stupidly prevents what these ideologues claim to want–people having children. Just look at this poor dear, the “esteemed” Senator from Alabama, struggle to backtrack on the Alabama decision when he finally realizes that IVF treatments actually cause children to be born:
Just stunning…
If you have a friend in Alabama, maybe pass this post along to them, since these rulings seem to have a trickle down effect. Every election, be it at the federal, state, or local level has consequences. Let’s creep back into the local scene and envision a hypothetical situation that could happen here in Frederick County. We’ll stick with a flowchart since we are in a visual aid kind of mood this evening:
What if college doesn’t fix their worldview because they go to a Florida State university and we are stuck with even more generations of this nightmare???
If we’ve learned anything over these last nine years, it’s that you cannot be careless with your vote. You need to pay attention. It matters. We matter. The world, our country, and our county all depend upon the way we vote. Thinking of all the possible consequences is exhausting, but that doesn’t excuse us from doing so.
Another tradition at the Yokel is a recap of our top 10 posts of the year. If you haven’t checked out our In and Out list ,be sure to take a gander at that as well.
At #10 is our summer lament about the High Sheriff claiming he got tricked, horrible “transparency” groups who seem hell bent on hurting the youngins, and the Reconsideration Committee that had to be formed due to Cindy’s uneducated complaints.
Speaking of that Reconsideration Committee, at #9 we all got an early Christmas present in that we got to see exactly what Cindy and friends wrote and said in their complaints about the so-called offensive books, PLUS the committee’s notes on the books in question. It really is a quite a treat.
At #8 we are sticking with the theme of fighting against the book-banners. In this post you can read all about our suggestions for future book banning complaints.
For #7, we had a little fun with the new flag contest. In our completely scientific poll our flag design won! Be sure to check out the other selections. It’s a stroll down memory lane.
You probably already guessed from the title that this post is about Dan Cox. Remember when he tried to get Jenkins’ co-defendant off by complaining that one of the agents involved in the investigation was of Ukrainian descent? We also had some fun with Cox’s last name.
This town could be a sitcom. If you don’t remember when the bag pipers from Gilead came to our school board meeting be sure to read this post. As we’ve said many times over the almost 8 years we’ve been writing this blog…we couldn’t make this shit up if we tried.
So far we’ve rejected all attempts from these people to infiltrate our school board. But we must not get complacent as one of the two filed candidates for this year’s election is one of these so-called “Joyful Warriors”. Expect them to rebrand soon as a result of some their recent sex scandals.
Our most popular post of the year was about a so-called Joyful Warrior attempting to to ruin the first day of school because she didn’t like a question on a teacher’s “All About Me” form. She was egged on by Cindy Rose, who of course shows nothing resembling joy in her interactions with the school system.
We hope that y’all see a theme here. We really need to be on guard against these book banning, anti-joy people. This year is going to be stressful when it comes to politics, but we will be with you every step of the way!
There continues to be absolutely no evidence Cindy Rose has ever read a book. Maybe if she had she would be aware that “Hitler’s Brown Shirts” were not a part of a grassroots organization protesting the government, but a paramilitary government police faction that operated tippy-top down, predating Hitler, and weaponized by him against the people to the point that stuff like, oh, say…Kristallnacht happened. If you are a reader, we have a book to recommend by Erik Larson called In the Garden of Beasts that may help clarify who is a good guy and who is in charge of whom in Nazi Germany. If you are Cindy Rose, there is a chance that they are going to make it into a movie. Get a load of this:
This is really, really reaching.
Here’s a tidbit for ya: in 1920 Hitler outlined the Nazi Party’s 25 Point Plan. Perhaps a more thorough investigator would like to check those out and assess in what ways history may repeat itself. Protesters tried to shout Hitler down at *his* big rally in Munich, and they got rounded up by these Brown Shirts (a.k.a. Sturmabteilung, or maybe you’ve heard of them called the SA)! All of the people who possess critical thinking skills are able to see the delineation here where the Brown Shirts and the protesters are on opposite sides, right?
For the lady who is not even able to lay claim to the weakest degree of verystablegenius, please note that the government leadership and the ruling party who hold power (who would that be in America right now?) and who are getting shouted at by upset citizens are all on the same side of the analogy, and the Brown Shirts act against those out of power on behalf of the government to violate their free speech. Pro tip: Cindy Rose is a dangerous idiot.
She plugs away at proving it constantly. To the point that we have ignored a lot of it lately, because frankly it gets old, but this is beyond the pale. Before you get on the Board of Education, just get an education.
If you make an appeal for something that isn’t happening and will continue to not happen, does that mean you get to take credit for it not happening? What are we even talking about?
Seriously, you don’t get to take credit for this.In today’s FNP we find out that Tony sent a request to Jan to continue to not do something she has already said she won’t do. Tony is concerned that the Bussards will be fined while the whole zoning issue surrounding their mulching business is being sorted out.
“I have never before been asked to not do something that I am already not doing!” she wrote. “It has been very clear that the County would not assess fines as long as an effort toward compliance was in the works. The County always works with property owners and businesses to solve problems and we will continue to do so.”
For this, we are awarding Councilman Chemlik the following award.
In other news, #fakenews, we have seen an online petition circulating to save Maryland’s flag. The only problem? No one is trying to change it. Go waste your outrage on an actual real issue please.
We’ve received a few questions recently about who we are and why we are not adding by-lines to our writing, probably as our blog has received a little attention in traditional media outlets. For starters, what’s the point in running an underground newspaper if not for a little mischievous fun?
Our anonymity was mere happenstance. We hadn’t decided whether we wanted to be open about who we are. As a group we didn’t have unanimous agreement, so we opted to keep our names off of our website while we rolled it out. And then people started to say things–like that our children should be forced to wear red letters on their clothes at school–and we thought, “Eh…maybe it is just better this way.” Some of these people are whacko birds.
The truth is, women online get harassed. A lot. More and more attention has been given to that issue. That’s one thing that makes us (and some of our family members) reluctant for us to use our names, although hopefully no one would go personal. It’s just, sadly…that type of thing is common. A couple of our local ne’er-do-wells have some stuff on their permanent records that make them seem questionable. And others have kooky fetish interests that make us question whether or not they’re the safest around. Perhaps it is an overabundance of caution, but…here we are, and that’s our story and we’re sticking to it for now. We are pretty sure in the end our identities will be a secret impossible to keep, so we will see what happens when the day comes that we’ve been unmasked. We’re guessing this post will be the I-Told-Ya-So of the future. We’ll keep a detailed catalog of screen captures for your entertainment, of course (and for law enforcement, should it become necessary).
Maybe most interestingly, there is a long American tradition of anonymous political opinion writing. Most editorial boards write weekly columns without a by-line other than Board of Editors. In our earlier days, it was the custom for opinion writing to be done anonymously. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison were all “anonymous cowards” (and wrote in response to other people using pen names and anonymity, as well) if examined under the same sorts of criticisms that we are. We’re fine with that kind of company.
Here we are in the grand tradition of (Poor) Richard Saunders trying in vain to drive home his point: It is ill-manners to silence a fool and cruelty to let him go on.
frederick local yokel 