Freedom Of Speech Lives In Small Town Newspaper In Reddest County In The Red State Of South Dakota

Some time in the 1990s my husband and I stopped reading the Oregonian, the largest newspaper in Oregon because it was merely continual Democrat propaganda. We did continue reading the local weekly newspaper in our burb. Indeed, I wrote a monthly legal column for the West Linn Tidings. Yes, since I am conservative, my articles leaned “Right,” although the paper’s editorials leaned “Left.” The editor was thrilled to get my articles and published every one I submitted between 2000 and 2005. I cancelled my column because I was too busy with my law practice.

Fast forward: By 2012 or so the newspaper had a different editor and the big corporation which owned about 25 “small town” newspapers in Oregon had turned to the Hard Left. Virtually all articles viewed “the facts” from The Left, Op Eds all leaned Left, and even Letters to the Editor were rejected if they were critical of Democrat policies which were harming our little burb, our county, our state and our country.

NOT ENOUGH RACISM TO SUIT DEMOCRATS

Since there weren’t enough racist incidents in West Linn to promote the “conservatives are white supremacists” narrative, the editor hired a Leftist activist to beat the bushes and write about “how racist West Linn is.” When someone claimed to be a victim of racism, this writer only reported the “victim’s” claims, ignoring witnesses and evidence. In December, 2022 she rushed to report a homeowner's claim that racist slurs had been painted on the front of her house. She couldn’t be bothered to talk to the neighbors who saw the “victim” paint the slurs on her own house.^ THAT would have spoiled the false narrative Democrats have been crafting for decades now.

During the Democrat riots in 2020, we escaped to our beach house at the mouth of the Columbia River in Washington State. There, too, the local weekly newspaper is owned by Big Media and we soon noticed that it, too, leaned Far Left. It is still publishing Letters to the Editor claiming Trump’s 2016 win was influenced by Russia. Ha! The editorials spent four years praising Biden and now they are condemning everything Trump 47 does. Check out the article linked below which I wrote almost three years ago. The following Letter to the Editor, written before the Los Angeles riots and published in the Custer County Chronicle would never be printed in a Blue State newspaper where such common sense is not “fit to print.”

Oh, what a difference there is between Red jurisdictions and Blue jurisdictions! Newspapers in Red States believe in facts, and those in Blue States believe in propaganda.

CUSTER COUNTY CHRONICLE, CUSTER, SOUTH DAKOTA

Dear Editor,

Seeing the coverage of all the protests taking place recently really has me wondering. Wondering why so many people were so happy for four years, having an administration which was purposely doing its best to destroy the United States from within by doing away with the enforcement of our immigration laws? Why were so many people happy with a federal government merrily spending its way into bankruptcy? Why were so many people content to have a president who was obviously not mentally fit to be president? Oh, wait, I know the answer to that last one.

The answer is the media attempted, pretty successfully, to convince the gullible that Joe Biden was just fine. Nothing to see here, just move along. What a lie that has been proven to be!

Now folks who were part of Biden’s inner circle are coming out of the woodwork and telling everyone that Biden was incompetent from the very beginning of his presidency. Several of them have even written books about it. Now we have a president who believes our immigration laws should be enforced and that wasteful, fraudulent federal spending should be rooted out and done away with and some people think those two things are just awful?

Really? I am both surprised and disappointed by those people. I proudly stand with the many, many Americans who think, like President Trump, that we have immigration laws for a reason and they should be enforced. I also believe the United States should not be trillions of dollars in debt. I know the United States does not have an income problem, it has an outgo problem. There’s plenty of money going to the federal government, but there’s far, far too much money being spent by the federal government.

It has to stop somewhere and I am glad someone has finally decided to do something about that problem instead of ignoring it.

MB, Custer

^The West Linn Tidings recently removed from their website both the original article about this “racist incident” and the article published after police had investigated and discovered it was a hate crime hoax by the homeowner who claimed to be the victim.