The Sarasota Herald-Tribune has taken down a pro proud boys op-ed,
that they agreed to publish following backlash across the country over
their decision to initially publish it.
Now the op-ed was penned by a wife of a proud boy member,
which was not disclosed in the op-ed, problem number one.
The op-ed was also a response to an anti proud boy op-ed
that was written by Lisa Gialdini Schurr, titled show some
courage school board candidates and call out the proud boys.
Well, Melissa Radovic who's married to a proud boy didn't like that.
So she pens this op-ed Sarasota Herald-Tribune decides we're gonna
publish it.
So the op-ed by Melissa Radovic published on Sunday by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
defended local school board candidates alleged association with the proud
boys by claiming the group's members were simply caring parents who were being
unfairly attacked for their conservative political views.
In fact, her argument was attacking proud boys does a disservice
to carrying school parents.
Okay, so here's why you don't play both sides and
remain neutral as the opinion board of a paper,
even if it's a small local paper like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Your job is to ensure that your readers know what the truth is.
And so if you just allow someone to publish whatever they want,
regardless of how many lies and deceptions are included in that op-ed,
some of the readers might think that the proud boys
are just caring parents that don't wanna do anything wrong.
When in reality, their right wing gang members and
many of them ended up getting arrested on January 6 because they tried to overturn
the results of the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump.
So it's stupid and I think they realized what their error was,
which is why they ended up taking it down.
But she also wrote when I think about the proud voice, I think of fathers,
business owners, and veterans.
These fathers have spoken at many school board meetings.
They are concerned about the direction that their local schools are headed in or
heading in.
And I commend them for coming to school board meetings.
Now of course, we've seen some of the videos featuring right wingers at these
school board meetings.
They wanna persecute teachers who have an open and
safe environment for LGBTQ students.
They want to silence those students, they want to persecute them themselves.
Like these are not caring individuals, these are individuals who wanna go after
anyone who has a lifestyle that doesn't conform to their own.
>> So when they first started the proud boys, there was debate as to whether they
were going to be violent, whether they was a dangerous group or not.
And a lot of people thought they were joining the group because they just
wanted to be proud of being white males.
Some of them weren't even white, okay, but
was certainly about western civilization and their code words, right?
When you told them, great let's uphold the pillars of western civilization,
like equality, justice, science, advancement.
And so they're like, no, no, no, we don't want any of that.
Yeah, just white and Christian, okay?
So but at that point it was debatable, right?
And you could say, hey they're for whites and they're for Christians, etc,
but that's their right as Americans.
We're way past that now, January 6 already happened.
We already have witnesses who say, yeah, they were
planned to enter the building and they planned to execute the vice president.
Several countries including Canada have declared them a terrorist organization.
And there's been tons of violent incidents already with the proud boys.
If at this point you're joining the proud boys or you're proudly declaring
that you're a proud boy, you're sending a very clear message.
You're saying no, no, I am for the violence, I am for
what happened on January 6, I am for strictly whites and Christians, etc.
So there's no ambiguity at all left anymore.
So she says, well, I mean, they're fathers and businessmen and veterans,
I got news for you, so was the Klan.
They were business owners, they were veterans of the civil war,
they happened to fight for the confederacy, and
they were definitely fathers, and they had real concerns.
They didn't want black people to be equal to white people and
they also wanted to do violence in order to prevent that from happening.
So did they influence the local education boards back then too?
Yeah, okay?
I mean, they didn't have the same kind of board setups that we have today, but
would they enforce that only the white Christian version of American history was
taught in the south?
Yeah, for a long, long time.
And they did not like that talk of equality and
that was not going to be taught.
And back then they did in both sides and they just were largely in the south.
They were like, the Klan is right, right?
And so it's a little bit more complicated than that, but
that was the essence of the Jim Crow era, right?
So now, honestly, a lot of the media has been taught neutrality,
no matter what, okay?
Legitimate political opinion and the clan, I can't tell, I'm neutral.
>> Let's just represent both sides and let the audience and our readers figure it
out for themselves, even though it is literally your job to do that, right?
So listen, I know what it's like to submit op-eds, right?
When you submit an op-ed, typically what happens is someone reads
over it to make sure that you're not lying in the op-ed,
that you're not misinforming the readers in your op-ed.
Seems like none of this happened.
There was no disclosure about the fact that, I mean,
of course Radovic loves the proud boys.
She's married to one of them.
But you should probably let the readers know that there's a conflict of
interest here.
In fact, don't publish it at all, I would say.
But if you're gonna publish it, first of all,
make sure that you balance it with accuracy.
And you also let your readers know, this is someone who has a massive conflict of
interest as a wife of one of the proud boys.
But look, we're giving this very specific example of a proud
boy related misstep in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
But let's take a look at a national paper like the Washington Ppost because they do
something similar all the time.
Case in point they published an op-ed titled democrats
are overreacting about the Supreme Court, written by Curt Levey.
Interesting, who's Curt Levey?
Now the Washington Post didn't disclose the fact
that he's with the Federalist Society, okay?
So Curt Levey is president of the Committee for Justice,
an organization devoted to advancing constitutionally limited, blah blah blah.
Please, constitutionally limited government.
He's been fighting to strip women of their reproductive rights to
allow the government to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies.
He's also a veteran of Supreme Court and other judicial confirmation battles and
serves on the executive committee of the Federalist Society's civil rights
practice group.
Cenk what is the Federalist Society?
>> It is an extremely right wing legal organization.
And they have helped to hand pick the extreme Supreme Court justices that you
see here.
There is no dispute that they are massively right wing.
Not identifying them as such makes it appear that it's a concerned Democrat
who's telling other Democrats now remember surrendering to
Republicans is always the right strategy.
So be good boys and little girls.
But to be fair to the Washington Post,
they might not have noticed because that's what every democratic leader says as well.
So they might be like, super right winger and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi,
they might literally not be able to tell the difference because Pelosi could
write that op-ed and she probably wouldn't change a word.
So that's the sixth state of Washington right now.
By the way, to Ana's point,
we both submitted op-eds to mainstream media outlets.
When a progressive submits an op-ed, it is fine tooth comb.
I mean, they go over with microscopic detail.
>> They're like, all right, let's see it, no, no.
I mean by the time that op-ed's done with their review process,
it's like a big fuzzy mess.
>> Yeah, like if you see things that are like your opinion in an op-ed,
like hey democratic leadership has been weak.
They're like, no, not allowed.
You have to show 12 pieces of evidence that they've been weak.
Otherwise, it's a scandalous and outrageous thing to say.
What is this?
An op-ed, right?
And they won't literally won't let you say things that insult Democrats and
etc., right?
It's a right winger, who cares?
Let him pose as a Democrat, don't identify him.
They're proud boys, don't fact check them.
And that leads to the second problem.
And why this was the Sarasota one was published in the first place,
because honestly, they're scared to death of Republicans.
They think the Republicans are the whole country,
they got themselves to believe it.
They think the country is really, really right wing.
So they feel like, these are real Americans and
the real Americans are racist, the Klan members, and
we have to let them state their opinion both sides, both sides, right?
And so I'm surprised that they flinched after people said,
hey they might be a terrorist organization.
At least leadership according to hearings, were looking to murder the vice president.
They're like, okay I guess that's a tiny bit too far.
We'll retract it, but don't think they won't do it again, they will.
They're normalizing extreme right wing fascists.
That's what this is.