Answer: A three-year-old editorial, an op-ed that hasn’t changed much in ten years, and the thoughts of a self-righteous Ohio legislator
Question: What can I find on today’s Wheeling Intelligencer’s editorial page?
The editorial
Today’s only Wheeling Intelligencer editorial, “Freedom Is Key To Independence,” has made the rounds of at least twenty Ogden’s newspapers since 2019. The editorial is cliched and predictable; my hunch is that few readers actually made it all the way through this long, by Ogden standards, editorial. It does take up lots of space, however.
The recycled op-ed column
At the bottom of the page is an op-ed by Jackie Cushman that she has been kicking around, with a few changes here and there, since at least 2012:
She’s Proud To Be An American This Independence Day
Cushman, like the editorial, is big on explaining the founders. And like the editorial, I found little in the column that was original or thought-provoking. In researching the article, I found this Cushman column from 2012 which has a number of the exact same passages as today’s version. My hunch is that every couple of years Cushman makes a few revisions and then her syndicate recirculates the column. For example, the 2019 version is very close to this year’s version. (As a side note, almost all sources list her as Jackie Gingrich Cushman. Yes, she is Newt’s daughter, and I don’t know why the Intelligencer doesn’t list her that way.)
Winning the war against “me first” attitudes
Also on the editorial page, an Ohio Republican state senator from Jefferson County, Frank Hoagland, has penned an op-ed with a provocative title:
What’s Happened to Our Country?
Hoagland asks a lot of questions:
Where is the American soul? How did we become this divided? Has America lost its soul? Did we become too focused on self and individual liberties that we have forgotten how far we have come? Forgotten what we fought for and what is ours to cherish as a nation? Freedom.
And he is not optimistic:
But America is in trouble — we are in a war with one another, battling for the soul of this great nation. The battle is ridden with ‘me-first’ attitudes, an attitude that will never win.
More specifically, he is especially concerned about education in America:
Our education system has become greedy with authority over the minds of our children, rewriting history, redefining biology, even changing the meaning and origin of English words.
He, him, her, she, they, them … what happened to we? We are who I fought for. United we stand, divided we fall.
We are losing our ability to critically think, provide solutions, and be inventors. Today’s generation needs to wake up!
After reading his call to arms, I did a little research on Hoagland and education. If you remember last month, Ohio passed legislation that would allow teachers to carry guns with only minimal training. (I wrote about it here.) Guess who was the sponsor of that bill? That’s right, it was Frank Hoagland. And guess what kind of business Hoagland owns?
The Ohio lawmaker who wrote the bill requiring gun training for teachers owns a gun training business.
— Morgan Trau (@MorganTrau) June 17, 2022
GOP state Sen. Frank Hoagland's company seemingly fits all the required steps in the bill.
INVESTIGATION⬇️ @WEWS @OhioCapJournal @WCPOhttps://t.co/vDo1LTzVRG
Nice work, senator. This isn’t “me first,” is it?
