Week in Review: Fact Burning & the Triumph of the TRAINED

May 4, 2023

Week in Review

City Council Meeting, May 1

See Fauxglin’s story here, and the Hillsdale Daily News coverage of local book “censure”-ship efforts here.

One addition regarding the meeting: Fact Devotee Penny Swan mentioned in a public comment that the Airport Advisory Committee (what she likes to call the “Airport Board”) has members on it that do not live in Hillsdale County, let alone the city. She was correct: the AAC is governed by its own particular bylaws because its duty has been deemed categorically different from that of other city boards. See the relevant passage from the AAC’s Membership Qualification criteria below:

The committee members are appointed by the Mayor, subject to the approval of the Council. Members are residents of the City of Hillsdale, users of the City airport, or have knowledge and experience in the fields of aviation or business.

But, wielding her carefully curated¹ fact as a cudgel, Swan beguilingly presented this singular and exceptional board (Committee!) as proof—as damning evidence—that Mr. Paladino’s amendment was not in accord with a commonplace board practice, even though the amendment brought the library board policy into line with both (a) the other city boards, and (b) the state of Michigan’s library board selection requirements.

May 2 Special Election Ballot Initiative Results

• “Misinformation” has been defeated with Adams Township’s Mark Nichols and Stephanie Scott losing their recall efforts to the Abe Dane-backed Democrats-turned-Independent, Randy Johnson and Suzy Roberts. The Democracy-saving vote was not close (~35% to 65% in both races). We can breathe a collective sigh of relief now that our elections are back in the hands of the “TRAINED.” Do not fear: our keepers have restored “our community” and revitalized our “conservative movement.”

  

• The Hillsdale Community Schools Sinking Fund Millage Increase Proposal was approved by a margin of 60% to 40%.

The Circuit Court Sides with the Establishment Hillsdale County Republican Faction

The Honorable Michael R. Olsaver issued a ruling Wednesday May 3 thenceforth prohibiting the America First! Republicans from:

1. Holding themselves out as officers of the Hillsdale County Republican Executive Committee;

2. Conducting any business in the name of the HCREC;

3. Sending any form of communication on behalf of the HCREC.

This appears to be a death blow for the rebels, who have spent themselves in their efforts to win this fight. The defeated and legally unrepresented faction received a letter Wednesday from Mr. Brent Leininger’s big city, pronoun-listing lawyer demanding that they turn over all materials to Leininger by Friday, May 5 at 5:00 p.m. The Republican Party is now in the hands of fast friends, Leininger, Swan, Marney Kast, and Neil Brady.

Upcoming Events

• Today, Thursday May 4, 5:00 PM: Library Board meeting. See the agenda here.

• Today, Thursday May 4, 6:00 PM: The America First! Hillsdale County. . . Right-Wing Partisan Entity. . . is hosting its first annual Comic-Zoo at Old Wilson Hall. The wind, however, may have been taken out of these sails.

• May 5: Join Library Director Jessica Spangler and esteemed Boardsman George Allen at the library for a “Coffee & Confrontations” session on Friday morning from 10:00-10:30.

• May 15: City Council will take up, among other things:

  • The no-camping ordinance proposal; and

  • Ted Jansen’s plethora of concerns. Jansen seems to be a figure of such stature that his personal gripes warrant multiple council meeting agenda lines and numerous pages in each packet. Even when he is not present in the flesh, Jansen occupies space in the mind of the council.

• May 19-May 23: Jonesville will host its annual Riverfest.

A Letter to Fauxglin

regarding the opinion of certain city councilmen who vote according to the number of emails received regarding a given issue:

Some on the council said that they would vote on the library board proposal, among other proposals, simply based upon the count of emails received for or against. Others on the council said that they would take such email counts into strong consideration. Our elected officials must consider the messages this sends to the people of Hillsdale:

1. The loudest and most petulant side will get what it wants.

2. The council does not care about the merits or reasoning of each argument.

3. The council is not obliged to, and will not, exercise its own judgment.

4. The council will ignore the larger citizen body of Hillsdale that does not send emails, wrongly assuming that a non-email means a lack of concern and therefore ambivalence. This renders citizens’ electoral votes for particular council candidates meaningless if they are not prepared to send emails for the subsequent four years.

5. The position of councilman consists of little more than tallying up emails.

Such statements shift responsibility from the council in order to appease the loudest complainer. Is this a sustainable or just way to govern a city? What recourse will be left to voters who are unable to send an email expressing their views about every issue? Will email counts be made public? Could councilmen lie about email numbers? Will citizens be able to submit FOIA requests to see the emails? Could someone create email accounts to spam councilmen? Are there other acceptable means of communicating one’s views? Could not Artificial Intelligence replace the council? I prefer Mayor Stockford’s novel method of exercising authority as an elected representative and taking responsibility for his decisions come election time, but I realize that not every councilman is resolved to be a councilman.

—a Hillsdale resident

External Links

• If you did not know—shame on you!—we are on Facebook and Twitter. Maybe someday we’ll learn to use them properly, but that day isn’t today.

• Following the Review’s lead, the Hillsdale Daily News published—and shared on Facebook—a pair of letters to the editor regarding the Adams Township election.

• Hillsdale resident Jordan Adams has started an education consulting firm, Vermilion Education, that is already on the front lines of the curriculum wars.

• At Law & Liberty, Josh Herring makes the War Over Classical—which has everything to do with classical education “going mainstream”—a battle of three armies, rejecting both Jessica Hooten Wilson’s “siren call of representation in literature” and Matthew Freeman’s all-too-pagan “hero-worship.” We would encourage the gentlemen of The New Thinkery to devote an episode to this problem.

• Oregon Democrats have introduced a bill “relating to rights of persons experiencing homelessness” that would, according to CNN’s summary, “decriminalize homeless encampments in public places and allow homeless people to sue for $1,000 if harassed or told to leave.”

• The media’s new line on our octogenarian president is that “the American government can function . . . despite the lack of a fully engaged leader.”

• Sources have told Breitbart News that Fox News may have the contractual power to silence Tucker Carlson until after the 2024 election. In a separate commentary, Titus Techera says that Carlson was always a “prisoner of the media” and now has the opportunity to “create another model of media . . . [that] would emphasize character over celebrity, the memorable over the fantastic . . . [that] would finally permit us to talk not about lackeys, but about the oligarchs of our regime.”

• American Compass has issued a policy brief calling on Congress to “regulate children’s access to social media.” In February, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote that “there is now a great deal of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide.” Haidt argues that social media use is particularly harmful for teenage girls, and that it creates a “cohort effect” involving even those children who do not use social media.

• Patrick Deneen’s article on the progressivism of John Stuart Mill is obviously an esoteric blueprint for an integralist alliance with the administrative state.

• We can imagine certain Hillsdale residents nodding along vigorously with Jonah Goldberg’s supercilious article bemoaning the Trumpist takeover of state and local Republican parties. We would remind them that Goldberg’s hero of decency, the late Senator John “Complete the Danged Fence” McCain of Arizona, once joked that the United States should “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” We’ll take stupid or conspiratorial over World War III every day of the week.

• The name “Audrey Hale” is disappearing down the memory hole faster than you can say James T. Hodgkinson.

1. Is Swan guilty of censoring facts!? Why did she choose to present this fact over others? Shouldn’t she have said all the facts, especially the most disadvantaged facts? Would she like to ban—or even burn!—the other facts??