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First there was the Tennessee Three. Now comes the Montana Trans One.
What next? The GNV (pick your favorite numeral) Sacrificial Lambs?
I was reading a New York Times article about the Montana Legislature expelling its sole trans member, Zooey Zephyr.
Her offense? She was rude enough to tell her colleagues they would have “blood on their hands” over the raft of anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans bills being pushed.
Ho hum. Just another day in authoritarian GOPland, I thought.
And then I came across this paragraph:
The Times: Missoula, the Western-chic college town that Ms. Zephyr represents, has become an encircled island of progressive politics, nurtured by a robust environmental movement and the intellectual ferment at the University of Montana. The city offers whitewater rafting through the surrounding Rattlesnake Mountains and craft breweries across a downtown that features a rainbow crosswalk to celebrate the city’s embrace of L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
Except for the white water rafting bit, the Times could have been describing GNV.
Welcome to the Club, Missoula. Our little “eastern-chic” blue college town is very much in the crosshairs of our deeply red state political authoritarian regime.
And not just because The Great DeSanitizer purged Andrew Warren, a GNV favorite son and political success story, for having the effrontery to speak his own mind.
If you are wondering why Mayor Ward has that deer in the headlights look these days it’s because he pretty much expects to be suspended by The Great Sanitizer sooner or later.
Make no mistake. The forces of Red Florida Authoritarianism are out to get GNV because of who we are and what we stand for.
Listen, GNV was the only city in Florida to vote for Montana next door neighbor George McGovern. And they’ve never let us live that down!
To neuter “radical” GNV they diced, sliced and dissected us into so many gerrymandered slivers that our destiny is largely in the hands of suburban politicians who pretty much hate everything GNV stands for.
Having rendered us politically impotent, our suburban overlords are now in the process of dismantling just about everything that makes GNV GNV.
They’re starting with a hostile takeover of the GNV-owned Gainesville Regional Utilities.
More than one hundred years ago, GNV had to build its own electric utility because, frankly, nobody else wanted to do it. And over the course of decades, GRU has grown to become a model municipal utility. One that takes onto consideration, not only profit but also social and even environmental issues.
Chuckles wants you to believe that his hostile takeover – his bill to yank control of GRU out of the hands of our City Commission and into the warm tender embrace of The Great DeSantizer – is only happening because GRU is on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to feckless GNV managerial decisions.
That’s a lie.
Chuckles’ hostile takeover is being driven by an entirely different motivation. You can read all about it here.
Long story short: In moving to, um, de-electrify GNV, Chuckles is carrying someone else’s water. And shame on him for doing it.
And that’s not the end of The Red Crusade against our university city.
On Friday (they always save the news they don’t want you to notice for Friday) The Great DeSanitizer’s new UF Hand Puppet Ben Sasse announced, in tactful fashion, the “departure” (read firing) of UF Senior Vice President Charlie Lane.
I began my 37-year career at the Gainesville Sun in 1976 as higher education reporter. And nearly half a century later I am prepared to say that no one I’ve ever covered in Tigert Hall has done more than Charlie Lane, through his thoughtful strategic planning, to bring this town and gown together in common cause.
The last thing The Great DeSanitizer wants is to bring newly “red” UF and still stubbornly “blue” GNV into common cause over anything.
And Sasse is just getting started. This Nebraska politician is here to finish the DeSanitization of a once great university. When he starts “cleaning house” in earnest the purging will resemble the climactic scene in The Godfather.
You ain’t seen nothing yet, Before he’s through The Great DeSanitizer is going to make the Johns Committee look like a benevolent society.
The Republicans have declared war on higher education, and by extension, on college and university towns and cities.
So, yeah, we feel your pain Missoula. But not as sharply or as deeply as we feel our own wounds.
FreeGNV 