Republican Mayor Removed After Refusing to Back Down to the Woke Mob During Pride Month
Even small-town mayors scorn the god of “pride” at their peril.
News 12 The Bronx reported that the governing committee of Rochelle Park, New Jersey, a township of fewer than 6,000 residents, has ousted the mayor for refusing to fly the “pride” flag at town hall.
Ironically, Republican Mayor Perrin Mosca objected to the flag because it is not inclusive.
“A majority had agreed that as a township we would not put up any flags that singled out one group over another group. That should have been the end of the issue,” Mosca said.
The four other members of the township committee — three Republicans and one Democrat — voted to remove Mosca as mayor.
This is a strange story, even by the standards of local politics.
For one thing, Mosca’s stated objection to the “pride” flag might strike the reader as more milquetoast than principled. This is not to question the now-former mayor’s sincerity, but his objection hardly constitutes an all-out assault on woke madness.
According to the News 12 report, “Republican council members have also accused Mosca of missing council meetings.”
Meanwhile, Trending Politics reported that Mosca already had fallen out of favor with the local Republican Party. “GOP Municipal Chairman Frank Valenzuela accused Mosca of embarrassing the township and hindering its progress, asserting that he prioritized personal ideals over what is best for the residents of Rochelle Park,” the report said.
Now we are getting to the ominous heart of the matter.
For present purposes, it makes no difference whether Mosca actually did shirk his responsibilities or hinder the township’s progress. That is for the people of Rochelle Park to decide in November’s election, when they will have an opportunity to vote him back into office.
What matters is that the committee members did not justify dismissing the mayor on those grounds. The competence-related concerns came into the story after the fact. They justified dismissing him over the “pride” flag.
In short, whatever their actual reasons for ousting the mayor, the committee members felt most confident in citing the flag issue.
If the ominous aspect of all this is not yet clear, one historical analogy should help illustrate.
In “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China” (1991), author Jung Chang offered a chilling, first-hand account of China’s Cultural Revolution, when the entire country fell victim to the Cult of Mao Zedong.
Images of Chairman Mao proliferated. Copies of Mao quotations replaced actual schoolbooks. Classes came to a halt as teachers were either terrorized or arrested. Students — Mao’s “Red Guards” — took control of school buildings.
Chang recalled one incident from her teenage years when a local woman appeared at the school and informed the Red Guards that a neighbor woman owned a picture of Chiang Kai Shek, Mao’s hated rival. A group of students went to the neighbor woman’s apartment and beat her senseless. They never found a photo of Chiang Kai Shek.
The photo, of course, might or might not have existed. The woman who appeared at the school simply had a personal vendetta against her neighbor.
For all we know, the bloodied and beaten neighbor woman might have been a liar, a cheat, a miserable human being (though unlikely given the enemy she made).
What chills the modern reader, however, is that the woman with the vendetta knew that amid the prevailing madness, the best way to exact revenge on her neighbor was to accuse her of anti-regime sympathies.
According to the Rochelle Park Township Committee, is the former mayor’s primary guilt any different?
Perhaps the Chinese neighbor woman also failed to attend council meetings.
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