On today’s Wheeling Intelligencer editorial page, syndicated columnist Jeff Crouere wants us to:

Wake Up, America – Purge is Here

Crouere’s column rounds up the usual liberal suspects from Town Hall’s list of enemies: Hillary Clinton, the Deep State, Peter Strzok, and Anderson Cooper, among others. The column covers a number of Trumpian grievances including recent actions by Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple to ban Trump and some of his followers from social media. He also takes to task the companies that he claims are firing workers for participating in the Trump rally. (Crouere doesn’t say, but as a self-proclaimed libertarian, what exactly does he want the government to do about all of this?)

And then there is Crouere’s reminder of election fraud:

Despite the legitimacy of the President’s complaints about election fraud and his condemnation of violence on Wednesday, his political enemies are trying to eliminate any potential future campaign by Donald Trump.

Please note -- as with all the other Intelligencer claims of fraud, no proof is supplied.

Judging a newspaper by the columnists it keeps

I could not remember ever having read anything by Crouere and so I went looking for his columns. Here are two of his most recent:

• Oh Brother, Nancy Pelosi Is Insane

• President Trump Is the Hero of 2020

Last summer, the Intelligencer quit running the syndicated columns of conservative George Will, who had long been a fixture on the paper’s editorial page. Will disappeared from their editorial pages after his columns started regularly criticizing President Trump. For example, in this one, Will, not only criticized Trump, he also took to task the Republican senators who enabled his behavior. (As might be expected, the Intelligencer edited out some of Will’s more critical commentary.) For comparison with Crouere, here is Will’s most recent column:

• Trump, Hawley and Cruz will each wear the scarlet ‘S’ of a seditionist

As I finished this post, I noticed that the afternoon Wheeling News-Register has apparently abandoned the editorial part of its self-proclaimed “community newspaper*” status that it proudly articulated a few years ago as an excuse to not criticize the Trump presidency. Today’s News-Register opinion page features Ogden’s first editorial criticizing the Biden presidency:

Transparency Vital for Biden Nominees

Nice. Biden is not even president and yet, he already has been editorially criticized more than Trump in the four years of his presidency. I’ll state it again: the Wheeling Intelligencer is not interested in informing or on its editorial page, challenging its readers with thought-provoking opinions; it’s simply a propaganda vehicle for excusing Donald Trump's behavior and supporting the West Virginia Republican Party.

*Note – there is an upside for Wheeling readers – we will probably see fewer editorial on Steubenville-area sewage treatment plants.