“In light of the postings that reflect poorly on the GPFL written and disseminated by Jeff Roby and the refusal of said person to remove those postings on his website and the Facebook pages, the Council of the GPFL declares on this date that the St. Pete local affiliate is now inactive.” [emphasis added]
There you have it! The new policy of the Green Party of Florida is that if one member of a local does anything that “reflects poorly on the GPFL,” then that local can be shut down. Locals beware. Party members beware. Don’t be “reflecting poorly.” There’s a new sheriff in town, and due process ain’t no longer in fashion.
Ironically, the GPFL now exhibits the very dynamic that I had characterized as fascistic on the post that led them to this purge. So after I posted “This is what Fascism feels like” on the St. Pete Greens website, party leaders panicked, or feigned a state of panic, claiming that exposure of their actions and inactions would cause the party irreparable harm.
Former co-chair Steve Showen expressed it best. Even though the Coordinating Council’s (CC) e-mail list was under moderation delay, he used Co-Chair Cathy Gilbert’s personal login to sneak in an unauthorized diatribe:
“… No one has condoned violence or the threat of it, contrary to assertions from Jim H. and Jeff R. Language has been cited from our values that explicitly says we do not condone violence. …”
Therefore, the threats in the 23 e-mails of Jeremy Griffin and the glossing them over at the subsequent conference call of the party’s CC must not have happened. Yet they must have happened, because Showen adds:
“Antagonistic communications … incite violence. They poison the atmosphere on list, and are as equally offensive as the threat of violence they beget, if not more so.” [emphasis added]
Gimme a break. Read the source material cited here yourself. Whether their horror at having their actions exposed was contrived or genuine, this was clearly seized upon as an opportunity to settle old scores.
Vengeance is ours, sayeth the Council…
Ecologically sound process.
Generating panic, a vengeful clique hijacked the Council’s previously scheduled conference call on February 2, to devote that session to this emergency. Facilitated by GPFL spokesperson Kat Duerr, who made no pretense of neutrality, we were asked to initially go around the “room” by county. Thus I had two minutes to deal with what was essentially a lynch mob. At the end of the call, after having failed to apologize for publishing the well-documented truth, I was summarily purged.
That left my wife Rose as the remaining St. Pete delegate. They got her the next day. On less than four hours’ notice, she was ordered to take the offending article down AND apologize publicly for an article that I had written. Rose could not make the meeting on such short notice. All we do know is that she was summarily purged, knocked off the Council’s e-mail list, the party’s main vehicle for internal communication.
No presentation of charges, no advance notice beyond the above-mentioned four hours, no due process, no citation of party rules justifying their actions, no formal notification to Rose, myself and the rest of the party of what was done. Were we expelled, suspended (for how long? for life?) barred from all contact with the party (a violation, we believe, of state law)? Nothing on the state of the St. Pete local (suspended, dissolved, disaffiliated?) nothing about the status of the St. Pete local’s other members (about 10 people),
Clusterf *** of epic proportions.
Everything else is murky. In phone conversations with party leaders, we received wildly mixed messages, that various contradictory things had been done, and that nothing had been done, and that the affair had been put to the CC for further discussion and voting.
All we knew is that we were kicked off the Council e-mail list. The playback number for listening to CC conference calls was suddenly password-protected, the password not disseminated to members. Party members in general are now aware that “something” is going on, but they have not been informed as to what. The website says nothing. The party is in virtual lockdown.
Finally, Rose and I demanded of party Co-Chair Cathy Gilbert that we be given official notice of what the CC had formally passed, listing names of those voting, and exact wording. On Sunday 02/08/15, we were then sent the notice posted at the beginning of this article:
“In light of the postings that reflect poorly on the GPFL written and disseminated by Jeff Roby and the refusal of said person to remove those postings on his website and the Facebook pages, the Council of the GPFL declares on this date that the St. Pete local affiliate is now inactive.”
Gilbert added, “In attendance on the conference call were representatives from every active local except for St. Pete and the proposal passed without objection.”
Gilbert lied. The Orange County local was not in attendance, and while party spokesperson Kat Duerr is from Orange County, she is in no way a representative or delegate of that local. The Orange County local is quite upset.
One might wonder how this came to be.
Green Party justice.
A brief review:
(1) A party which prides itself on its genteel discourse stands dumbstruck in the face of a torrent of vulgarity and violent threats by Jeremy Griffin, in which he talks about punching me in the face and inciting others to dish out Construction Worker Justice.
(2) At the raucous subsequent (01/26/15) CC conference call, Orange County’s Jim Howe introduced a motion, “that we will not tolerate threats of violence on our list, we will not tolerate ad hominen attacks on our list, that we will not tolerate sexist attacks on our list.” The motion was crushed.
(3) On Sunday (02/01/15), I published the article (backed by transcript and e-mails) “This is what Fascism feels like” on the St. Pete Greens site.
(4) Monday (02/02/15), Under a self-imposed State of Emergency, the party purges me. I am taken off the Council’s e-list.
(5) The next day, Tuesday (02/03/15), Rose is given less than four hours to remove my article and apologize, which she is neither able to nor inclined to do. She was tried in absentia and purged from the party. No official notice is sent to either of us afterwards, as the party itself (per conversation with Gilbert) is not sure what it has done. The minutes of both the Monday and Tuesday meetings, done by the GPFL secretary, Professor DJ Chandler, are a mess.
Due process? We don’t need no stinking due process!
About a year ago, when disgraced former co-chair Anita Stewart and Hernando CC delegate and former Co-Chair Jennifer Sullivan were launching massive attacks against the GPFL on the Green Party of the United States Facebook page, there had been serious discussion of sanctioning Sullivan, whether to remove her from the Council or even disaffiliate the Hernando County local for these reprehensible attacks.
It was grudgingly but generally agreed that the GPFL had no mechanism for sanctioning individual members. Nor could the GPFL determine who a local’s CC delegates were. There were no provisions for disaffiliating renegade locals for misconduct. Individual membership status was determined by state law, and violating that could attract the attention of the Florida Secretary of State.
Now that we have an emergency, anything goes? Heaven knows.
An underlying irony is that the attacks on St. Pete and its leadership were executed as though there were some kind of actual state of emergency, due to the terrible harm the article was doing. But through its own actions, the GPFL has inflicted more harm upon itself than any article, however scurrilous, could have possibly done. And worst of all, the article “This is what Fascism feels like” is still up on the St. Pete website and elsewhere!
One approach the GPFL could have taken, if it had been genuinely concerned over what the article was reporting, would have been to point out the “distortions, false witness, insults, personal attacks, and unsubstantiated claims” in the article. But they prefer to use it as a pretext for settling old political scores that still rankle some of them.
Vindication of sorts.
Let us go back to the article “This is what Fascism feels like.”
“It evokes the days of Weimar Germany, in the years before the final Nazi takeover, when mobs ran through the streets, when Nazi students stalked the halls of the universities intimidating and even assaulting left-wing teachers, creating the ‘unsafe’ environment for the final seizure of power. So it began.”
Thus the GPFL in microcosm. Per the article:
“If I resist, I am blamed for resisting, for inflaming Griffin. If I don’t speak up, my silence gives Griffin and his friends a ‘green light’ to continue to escalate until he has over 20 posts poisoning the air. On the conference call, he could openly bully the chair, interrupt the facilitator, and is cheered on by enough of the Council members to silence all opposition.”
And so Rose and I are silenced.
We’ll gladly tell it to the judge.
Well, not quite. The words slander, libelous, etc., are getting thrown around rather loosely. People are dropping hints about talking to lawyers.
But we had looked over our writings before publishing and after, and our assertions of fact are fully backed by transcripts and e-mails. Libel cases are notoriously difficult to win, involving a heavy reliance on opinion and interpretation.
Steve and DJ and Jeremy huffing and puffing about “libelous” may work just dandy in the GPFL echo chamber. In a real court of law, it would be another matter. Consider how it would “reflect poorly” on the party to file such a suit and have it fail. Consider how their even filing such a suit would play out in the press, as we make our defense. Nor would it be difficult for us to find a lawyer to go after the GPFL for damages, in exchange for a cut of an easy payday. As they say, “it ain’t slander if it’s true!”
What other recourse do we have besides “going public”? The GPUS? It doesn’t get involved with state affiliates. The CC? That’s the body that carried out this hatchet job in the first place.
What is our recourse within a party whose ballot status is recognized and regulated by the State of Florida? What recourse would any party member have, should something they did or said or wrote “reflects poorly” on the GPFL?
We could speak to the Green Party of the United States, but as mentioned they have neither the means nor the inclination to lift a finger (they have been informed of the situation). We could address the other state parties to let them know of the goings-on in Florida. We have and we will. We have reached out to the GPFL ranks, its Active Members and its registrants. What other recourse is left?
Well, there’s one other:
Department of State
Division of Elections
Director’s Office
Room 316, R. A. Gray Building
500 South Bronough Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250 …
Jeff Roby
Secretary, St. Pete Local, Green Party of Florida
