Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, is Trump Town.
This struggling provincial city needs all the evolution it can get.
Low Cut Connie offered to help.
At first Luzerne County government bosses in this county seat people once called “The Valley with a Heart” cut a deal with the band to play a fun summer concert called Rockin’ the River. Then little power-hungry bosses bowed to bigger power-hungry bosses who crave more control, more censorship and more authority over people who call Wilkes-Barre home. Elected and appointed public servants suddenly cancelled the show for Friday night’s outdoor riverfront concert.
Luzerne County Manager Romilda Crocamo said in a statement “our goal is to have a place where we can enjoy music, food, promote our community, have fun, be safe and free of politics and propaganda.”
You can’t take a deep breath in Luzerne County without almost choking on toxic local politics. As for propaganda, Crocamo’s mere use of the word unleashes her own bias. Propaganda means harmful disinformation that is often untrue. Crocamo refuses to even tell band members what exactly they have done to deserve her defamatory insinuation that sure sounds like a First Amendment violation to me.
Back in the 1990s Luzerne County prosecutors charged me and three co-workers at The Times Leader with felonies for doing journalism in Luzerne County. For our trouble, we later won a national journalism award for our service to the First Amendment and a free press.
Crocamo, who failed to respond to my written questions, is just the latest in a long line of lackluster Luzerne County lackeys. She said in a WILK News Radio interview Tuesday morning she wasn’t even familiar with the band. If not, how did she know they’d be inciting revolution through propaganda?
Alan K. Stout, Executive Director of the Luzerne County Convention & Visitors Bureau who willingly helped kill the music, refused to answer my specific written questions.
“I can’t really get into it on here, but there was much more to it and everything that he (Low Cut Connie singer Adam Weiner) said in that video was not true. Romilda is handling it and I’m fine with it,” Stout said in a Facebook Messenger response to my questions.
Stout called the heavy-handed decision to blacklist the band “just another day at the office” and refused to say what he claimed was inaccurate about the video Weiner posted on social media.
Weiner said in the heartfelt post he addresses diversity and inclusion in his performances and recently released a song, “Livin in the USA,” that “speaks to the terror, the unease, the fear that so many people in the United States are experiencing right now because of these ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids that are absolutely inhumane and anti-American.”
“I will not stop speaking about that,” Weiner said of the ICE raids. “For all these reasons, the organizers of this event feel that my show is too controversial. It’s going to alienate people and be too polarizing, so they cancelled the show.”
Is it coincidence that current Republican law-and-order Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce recently signed off on working with federal immigration ICE agents in a pact the first of its kind in any Pennsylvania county? Sanguedolce failed to respond to my written questions asking if he played any role in the decision to cancel the concert.
It also didn’t help Weiner’s image among “authorities” that he stood on principle when he pulled out of a March Kennedy Center concert in Washington, D.C. to protest President Donald Trump’s takeover of the previously nonpartisan venue.
Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) mentality is written all over Luzerne County‘s narrow-minded decision to cancel the Low Cut Connie gig. Complicit in silent tacit approval are Rockin’ the River sponsors including Geisinger, Mericle Commercial Real Estate, Pennsylvania American Water, King’s College, Wilkes University and too many others.
I lived and worked in downtown Wilkes-Barre for 17 years during which I wrote newspaper columns for the Times Leader, often focusing on injustice. Decades ago I called Wilkes-Barre “pound-for-pound the most racist city in America.” In 2020 Avventura Press published my novel about Wilkes-Barre bigotry and how MAGA madmen in the city take credit for Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. So grim and relevant does the story remain that Avventura Press this year published Paddy’s Day in Trump Town Revisited which includes the original novel with a current nonfiction introduction, five up-to-date chapters and an epilogue I aptly call an “Apocalogue.”
Sound familiar?
Mind control is everything in Luzerne County. MAGA crusaders now rule. Republicans last year took over the lead in voter registrations for the first time in decades. But even when conservative Democrats dominated, Luzerne County festered as a nest of judicial criminality, sexism, ethnic hatred and racial bigotry. Luzerne County history remains riddled with political secrecy, cover-up and retribution.
In this craven cultural landscape littered with “Bikers for Trump,” rattlesnake hunts and abandoned coal mine shafts, local yokel MAGA political powerbrokers pulled the plug on Low Cut Connie for one reason and one reason only.
MAGA hates anything they deem “woke.” Liberals, Blacks, feminists, LGBTQ people, undocumented Mexicans and other people of color who dare consider Wilkes-Barre a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) safe house are not welcome.
Trump is the almighty MAGA God.
Low Cut Connie is Satan.
All hail Trump!
Ask for a match to burn Low Cut Connie at the stake and MAGA will fire up a flamethrower.