KKK-loving newspaper owner has always been a nut; this isn’t news

By David McElroy · March 17, 2019

When I stepped into the offices of The Democrat-Reporter in Linden, Ala., I was stepping into enemy territory. I was the newly appointed editor and publisher of The Demopolis Times, a larger newspaper about 15 miles north of Linden.

Goodloe Sutton was the owner and publisher of The Democrat-Reporter, which was my only local competition, so I wanted to meet him and establish a friendly relationship. My paper was far more successful than his, enough that his paper wasn’t really competition for the readers and advertisers we targeted.

I asked for Sutton and explained who I was. The person at the front to whom I introduced myself looked startled and went to another office.

“I don’t want to talk to anybody from the Demopolis Times,” I heard a belligerent voice bellow from the back a few moments later. As the woman walked back toward me, he called after her, “And tell him not to come back.”

That was my one and only interaction with the strange man who has lately achieved national notoriety for his bizarre editorials calling for the Ku Klux Klan to “clean out” politicians in Washington, D.C.

I had been warned about Sutton when I moved to Demopolis. I had been told that he was a strange man who could be a gadfly but didn’t really compete with us. His family had owned the paper since the early 20th century and Sutton had run it since sometime in the ’60s.

I was told that he was a racist and had the sort of prickly personality that made him impossible for most people to like. He ran his newspaper more like a personal bulletin board for his strange thoughts.

When I saw articles in a couple of Alabama newspapers last month saying that Sutton had published a crazy editorial headined “Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again,” I didn’t think much of it. Nutcase Goodloe was just being himself. Nobody has taken him seriously for a long time, as far as I can tell.

But even though Sutton is a nobody with a shrinking newspaper in a tiny, forgotten backwater town, the national media jumped on this story and made it a big deal. Why? I can only guess, but I assume that someone in Alabama talking favorably about the KKK was too good for them to resist — because it fit all of their preconceptions about white folks in the South.

But what was the significance of an 80-year-old nut rambling to himself on the pages of a tiny newspaper that he owns? Did it say anything about the attitudes of white people in the South? Exactly what point is being made by turning this into a national story?

If the owner of a sizable newspaper were making such inflammatory comments — and the readers were supporting him — that might be an interesting story that reflected something interesting about social or political trends. But that wasn’t the case.

Sutton claims the Democrat-Reporter still has about 3,000 subscribers, which is less than half of its claimed subscriber base not long ago. There are many bloggers whose work is read by far more than 3,000 people, but their crazy rantings aren’t treated as national news.

One of the biggest problems with the news you receive today is that there’s no longer any judgment exercised by media people about what matters and what doesn’t. The only thing that matters is whether something can be made inflammatory or sensational in order to attract clicks or views.

A rational editor or producer for a national news outlet would realize that a story about an absolute nobody ranting in a newspaper he owns — to a readership smaller than some high schools — isn’t news outside of his own state.

In the days of better news judgment, the story of Goodloe Sutton and his nutty editorials would never have made it out of Alabama — because it’s not news of any relevance to anyone else.

Note: The latest reports say Sutton is selling his newspaper and retiring immediately, which tells you all you need to know about how his latest rants have affected his ability to keep advertisers and readers.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts