Louisiana Voice

The last time Michael Lunsford’s name came up was on JULY 27 when I published my second consecutive rant about his efforts to censor libraries in Lafayette and Livingston parishes over what he perceived as efforts by the libraries to indoctrinate children in homosexuality or…

…to offer any literature containing something called critical race theory.

I had introduced his absurd contentions the day before after I attended a meeting of the milquetoast LAFAYETTE PARISH LIBRARY BOARD OF CONTROL (the key word here is “control”) which wilted in its intent to fire head librarian Cara Chance in the face of united opposition to its heavy-handed efforts to carry out Lunsford’s objectives.

Lunsford’s obvious libel of Livingston Parish middle school librarian Amanda Jones, his misspelling of the word “principle,” and his stupid blunder of implying that the lightning strike and ensuing fire at her school was some sort of message from God (wrong school, genius) aside, he plows ahead with his efforts to impose his religious and political beliefs on the rest of us.

The latest project of Lunsford, executive director of the so-called watchdog group Citizens for a New Louisiana, is to convince the University of Louisiana-Lafayette to bring in JACK POSOBIEC to speak at the university in October.

This is Lunsford’s brainchild and there’s a back story we ignore at our own risk — or at the peril of the US Constitution.

Posobiec is one of those hysterical alt-right neo-Nazis sympathizers who has never found a half-baked conspiracy theory he didn’t love. A protégé of Roger Stone and a Qanon adherent, he was a primary moving force behind the absurd “Pizzagate” B.S. that said Democratic politicians participated in a child sex ring run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. (One idiot actually launched an attack on a pizza parlor in the misguided belief that the ridiculous story was true.)

As Earl Long once famously said of the outrageous claims by Willie Rainach and Leander Perez that integration would doom Western civilization: “You never heard such clap-trap in your life.”

Besides offering moral support and giving a platform for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage punk who took it upon himself to travel hundreds of miles to “defend” commercial property during a BLM protest in Knosha, Wisconsin, killing a couple of people in the process, Posobiec has pushed the oft-debunked “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In short, his ideas are repulsive to anyone with half a brain.

But here’s the thing:

A ULL alumnus who protested the appearance on the campus by Posobiec and others who have contacted LouisianaVoice in criticism of his appearance at the request of the campus chapter of Turning Point USA, are playing into Lunsford’s hands.

As distasteful as we may find this human garbage can of toxic political thought, we cannot on one hand lock arms in protesting efforts at censorship and on the other, demand that he not be allowed to set foot on campus.

We are still a free society, despite efforts of encroachment on that freedom (alarmingly successful in places like Texas and Florida), and the First Amendment still has meaning to real patriots.

If we insist that Posobiec be banned, Lunsford wins. It’s that simple. He can then correctly remind us that if we have that right, then he certainly would have the right to ban books he finds objectionable.

We cannot allow him that victory.

The way I see it, there are two options available to those who disagree with Posobiec (and I would fervently hope we have a huge majority on that point):

We can boycott his appearance in the hopeful anticipation that attendance will be sparse and at best, apathetically and indifferently received.

We can show up in large numbers and hoot and jeer and laugh him off the stage.

Barring him from the exercise of free speech, however, is not an option and would cast doubt on the appropriateness of the second option.

Lunsford would love that.