Bangor Newspaper Smears Aroostook Group with Latest Journalistic Malpractice (2024)

The Bangor Daily News, the media arm of marketing firm Bangor Publishing Company, on Tuesday published its latest report into the boogeyman of anti-government extremism in Maine.

From Christopher Polhaus, the Biden-backing pro-Ukraine war Wyoming man whose business partner raised $100,000 for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, to Tom Kawczynski, a former town manager who posted ridiculous things on social media, the Bangor newspaper has developed a fetish for identifying, publicizing, and “exposing” anyone in Maine who can be vaguely connected with a person or group the Southern Poverty Law Center claims is bad.

It’s a strategy that’ll generate clicks from terrified liberals, but it’s not very useful for directing public attention toward real problems in the state.

Let’s review the latest report on “Tactical Civics” and the egregious leaps of logic taken by freelance writer, artist, and pigeon-rescuer Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli (more on her later):

Tomaselli reveals in 12th paragraph of her story that a BDN reporter (presumably her) was on a Zoom call for a Tactical Civics meeting. Nowhere in the story does Tomaselli offer a quote about the content of the meeting, other than to say the participants discussed “their mission, God, the Constitution, and Trump.” Sounds extreme!!!

Before admitting that she snuck onto a “secret” meeting and heard absolutely nothing scandalous or remotely extreme, Tomaselli engages in extraordinary logical leaps to denigrate and smear the group, relying on guilt by association affinity fallacies and appeals to authority to imply that Tactical Civics is a racist, white supremacist, and militant organization.

In the 2nd paragraph of the story, Tomaselli invokes the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to definitively brand the group as an “extremist anti-government group.” Readers should know that SPLC is itself an extremist hate group that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars by convincing gullible liberals that basically everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is an evil extremist. The SPLC’s rankings, which have inspired at least one attempted mass murderer, have been so discredited that GuideStar, a top charity ranking service, abandoned them in 2017.

After appealing to the pseudo-authority of this bogus left-wing group, Tomaselli proceeds to list other groups it has designated as extremists, including the Three Percenters, The Righteous Army, and the Oath Keepers. Then she raises the specter of Polhaus and Kawczynski, two weird dudes who post bizarre things on social media and who have been relegated to irrelevance because no one in Maine wants what they’re selling.

Do the people behind Tactical Civics have any connections with any of these groups or individuals? None that Tomaselli reports. Those groups may, indeed, be extreme or even militant, but Tomaselli offers not a shred of evidence that the groups are connected to Tactical Civics by anything more than SPLC’s hit list or her own suspicions. Polhaus and Kawczynski are definitely losers with racist ideologies, but Tomaselli doesn’t even attempt to offer evidence connecting them with the subject of her report. Proof and evidence don’t matter, of course, because her purpose is guilt by association. Before she reveals that she sat in on a Zoom call with them and heard nothing scandalous, she wants you to know that they are very bad people like all the other very bad people liberals have fear-mongered over in the past.

After priming her readers to understand that she’s reporting on true evil up there in Aroostook County, she finally acknowledges the actual activities she’s observed from Tactical Civics: They’ve advertised in local papers, they had a float in the Potato Blossom Parade, and they ran a booth at the Loring Air Museum’s open house.

The horrors!

Throughout the entire story, Tomaselli spends much time associating Tactical Civics with white supremacists and even suggests they are a paramilitary group — even though she presents no evidence whatsoever that the group is hosting events involving firearms.

Had Tomaselli simply reported on what the organization actually says its mission is, she might have actually informed her readers rather than stoking fear over some imagined threat that exists only in childless cat lady fever dreams.

At TacticalCivics.com, John Calhoun has published a short video explaining the group’s mission. His comments in that video bear no resemblance whatsoever to the fake specter Tomaselli created in the Bangor Daily’s front page story.

Here’s Calhoun’s opening statement from the video:

“Our mission is the result of 45 volunteers investing over 80,000 hours of research and development to craft the only full spectrum lawful, long term, peaceful plan to arrest organized crime and corruption in our federal and state palaces and even in our county and local governments. You see friend in our system of self governance, called Popular constitutionalism, which the founders gave us, we the people, occupy the highest office in government, above presidents, above legislators, above judges. It is in we the people collectively that sovereign power rests and our elected servants are supposed to be at all times accountable to us as they execute the clearly defined duties that we delegate to but that system has been captured, corrupted and turned upside down to the extent that we act like serfs and subjects and our servants assume their offices with a pervasive sense of entitlement to rule like Overlords of their own individual fiefdoms. Well, it’s time to restore sanity and the rule of law in America, to remind every person who holds an elected office that in American civics, we, the people, are the boss.”

Calhoun goes on to layout a plan to use county level grand juries as tools to investigate and prosecute government corruption. Is it a little wacky? Sure. But no more wacky than using 150 petitioner signers to get internal combustion engines banned in Maine, or hijacking Maine’s electric bills to subsidize out-of-state solar companies, or turning a blind eye as pro-Hamas agitators maraud through downtown Portland, or making your singular political purpose ensuring that children can get sex changes.

The representatives of Tactical Civics, including those who have spoke in Maine, have repeatedly stressed that they are interested in peaceful tactics. That’s more than can be said of the Democratic Socialists of America in Portland, which has advocated for and engaged in violence.

In an interview with the Fort Fairfield Journal, Maine State Coordinator Jon Ellis said the following: “Tactical Civics is the only solution I’ve seen that’s peaceful.” Somehow that remark didn’t make it into Tomaselli’s reporting, nor did Calhoun’s explanation that the organization advocates a “lawful” and “peaceful” plan. Far from being “anti-government,” as Tomaselli and the BDN headline writers assert, Tactical Civics appears to be anti-authoritarian, and its activism is aimed at restoring what it views as good government.

If the Mainers behind Aroostook County’s small Tactical Civics group are white supremacists or militant extremists, they’ve certainly done a good job of keeping that secret, and Tomaselli presents no information or original reporting whatsoever to support the headline of her story or the “guilt by association” accusations she hurls at the group. The smear job disguised at journalism is disgraceful, and it speaks to the Bangor Daily’s poor judgement and political bias that they would accept such drivel. It also demonstrates what little respect they have for the intelligence of their readers that they would hype the story on their front page as if this organization’s Zoom call is in any way meaningful to the daily lives of Mainers.

So who is Tomaselli?

She’s your quintessential anti-Trump activist, judging by her social media accounts.

When former Republican President Donald Trump was declared the loser in the 2020 election, Tomaselli declared to her 96 Twitter followers, “Today is a good day.”

A few weeks before the election, Tomaselli shared that she was watching the “I Will Vote Joe Biden” concert, which she described as “inspiring.” Throughout the 2020 election season, Tomaselli posted almost exclusively anti-Trump slogans and content.

Although it appears that Tomaselli once engaged in journalism for national outlets, whatever she’s doing now is not that. Instead, she’s presented a warped image of a group of conservatives who are engaged in legal, peaceful political activism. Such left-wing screeds would be better saved for the opinion section — or, better yet, Facebook group for fellow sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome.