Florida Paper Super Sorry About 'What's So Bad About Boys Being Proud?' Op-Ed

Every time she's seen violins on television it's been a perfectly nice program!

One of the vilest things white conservatives do these days is when they play dumb about how they're supporting straight up Nazi/white supremacist/eliminationist value systems. Sure, a case can be made once in a while that a person really did not know . But usually, you know, fuck off. It's trolling.

This is absolutely a case of fuck off .

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida is having to apologize for a real piece of shit it published from a woman named Melissa Radovich defending the Proud Boys, in which the author actually tried to convince us Proud Boys were just nice proud dads who were proud, and also concerned. To the paper's credit, the piece has been fully removed, instead of there being some pablum excuse about why they had to leave it up for free speech reasons.

The message from the paper's editorial board reads, in part:

The Herald-Tribune erred Sunday in publishing a guest column on our opinion page and website with the headline “Attacking Proud Boys does disservice to caring parents.”

Yeah, we are still having a hard time understanding how that headline passed the laugh test, especially at any time since the 2017 Charlottesville Nazi rally the Proud Boys co-starred in, but let's not dwell.

[T]he Herald-Tribune opinion page will not provide a forum for support of the Proud Boys, an extremist group that promotes white nationalist views and which has been labeled a terrorist group by two countries and has top members under indictment on charges of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. To do so is antithetical to our values as an organization and is outside of our responsibility to provide a fair forum for different points of view.

Oh, you mean there aren't two equal sides to every issue? Tell Chuck Todd the op-ed editors at a small paper in Florida are giving a free journalism clinic he might be interested in. Also they're saying they're sorry after doing a big journalism fuckup. Both of these things could be useful for Chuck Todd.

Anyway, when we say this thing is gone from the internet, we mean it is gone . So in order to find really disgusting quotes and make fun of them, we are having to resort to clicking on Mediaite, which notes just like everybody else is that the Sarasota paper also did not mention that Melissa Radovich is married to a Proud Boy. We can understand a number of reasons why Radovich might not have wanted to include that particular truth about her life, but an editor's note at the bottom that said in italics something like " BT-dubs, she sleeps next to a Proud boy at night just FYI" might have been helpful.

The column itself was some local-ass shit, with Radovich responding to an earlier op-ed that made her mad, which called on candidates for the Sarasota school board to call out the Proud Boys, instead of being cowards who are overly cozy with them. Radovich clearly took this personally.

“When I think about the Proud Boys,” Radovich wrote, “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 heading in, and I commend them for coming to School Board meetings.”

She accused [earlier op-ed writer Lisa Gialdini] Schurr of attacking the local Proud Boys because they are “opposed to abortion;” “stand for America and freedom, and against communist organizations;” “believe that discussions of homosexuality are best left to parents, and that this is an issue of parental rights;” and “stand against medical mandates, such as the illegal mask mandate in Sarasota County.”

And so on and so forth and bugfuck and batshit and blah blah blah blah blah.

We guess the Proud Boys are just an innocent white supremacist Nazi terrorist org that loves everything Melissa Radovich loves and hates everybody she hates. Bless all their vile little hearts.

 Here's a thread that will tell you a bit more about who the Radoviches really are:

“@HeraldTribune has some 'splainin' to do... What purpose does publishing "both sides" do when it's from the mouth of white supremacist seditionists? The author is the wife of a #Sarasota proud boy. 🙄 Maybe more than a sympathizer? (Article in thread) 1/7 https: //t.co/wqjjokBk8W”

— WTFlorida 🌻✊🏾🇺🇦 (@WTFlorida 🌻✊🏾🇺🇦) 1657496944 

Prediction: This fucking terrible woman and/or her husband will be on Tucker within the next 72 hours, they will become overnight wingnut celebrities because they are now silenced martyrs, and Tucker will claim ignorance of what a "Proud Boy" even is, as he will have just heard the term for the very first time this afternoon.

Money will be made by all.

OPEN THREAD!

[ Sarasota Herald-Tribune / Mediaite ]

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