While listening to the iPNB meeting in NYC today
I'm listening to the interim Pacifica National Board meeting in New York City over the www.wbix.org webstream. When I tuned in, I heard a woman singing a song at the microphone praising the activists who are fighting for the return of community control at Pacifica.
When that ended, I heard the board chair, Leslie Cagan ask a person named Ken Freeland to get the board a copy of the lyrics. Apparently Ken Freeland is serving in NYC this weekend as some sort of volunteer, helping the board at the front of the room.
But who is Ken Freeland?
Ken Freeland is a Houstonian, who has wheedled himself into any number of activist organizations. Ken Freeland is also a censor. He is the activist version of former KPFT station manager, Garland Ganter. Beware!
Plenty of Houston activists have gone on record criticizing him for censoring people off listserves and being a vicious control freak in general, to the ruination of many a local activist organization. They include a highly visible activist college professor, a Marxist-Leninist leader, a veteran activist from Pax Christi, youth activists, a major Arab-American leader, a pro-Palestinian activist leader, an India-born PhD., a key staff member at a peace oriented chapel, a low income housing leader, a leader of the Pacifica Listeners Union and many, many others. All this public criticism, and yet Ken Freeland continues to be able to pop up and be entrusted in or near centers of power.
Ken Freeland looks like a guy who might be rooting around in a trash dumpster, middle aged and thin with a long straggly beard and long unkempt hair. He wears a gimme cap and his clothes usually cover most of his skin. It would be difficult to distinguish him beyond these outward signs. In person, he can hardly talk, much of it is murmuring, and he can hardly hear. But on the net, he writes up a storm, especially when it comes to trying to convince people that significant voices should be silenced based on his seemingly schizophrenic and definitely anti-democratic rationalizations. On that point he has a long and infamous record.
Another funny thing is that although he tries to set himself up in positions of power in left wing oriented groups, he gives the impression that his own philosophy is center right. He often wears a cap emblazoned with the words: Republic of Texas, which is sort of a right wing militia thing. He believes that anti-war and peace activists should be waving the American flag, he often cites the words of far right wingers, usually America Firster types who are opposed to war, and when is criticized for that, says that he's trying to broaden the constituency beyond the left, which he sees as a failure. He has also aligned himself with a violent, so-called Libertarian who runs a little webcast outfit in Houston.
In the wake of the victory in Houston to reclaim Pacifica, Ken Freeland now wants to run a weekly one hour local peace radio program on KPFT. Ken has no radio experience, and as I stated can barely even speak. But the most important aspect of this is that he is a humorless, anal retentive and paranoid authoritarian censor.
I didn't fight the KPFT manager, Garland Ganter, tooth and nail to remove him, only to provide space for an activist clone of Ganter, in the guise of Ken Freeland, to become a new dictator at the station. I will oppose at every opportunity, Ken Freeland's plans to secure programming at KPFT in defense of my decades long fight for freedom of speech for everyone, except the censors.
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