Commie Pinko Witchhunt at City Hall

Go get your pitchfork, its time to round up some Commie Pinkos and burn 'em at the stake!

People who want to join Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s new Facebook group may want to avoid wearing a Che Guevara shirt in your profile picture. Also don't mention any communist or hippie things, like Das Kapital as one of your Favourite Books.

Giorgio Mammoliti (a big time Ford supporter) has gone down the road of Joseph McCarthy and is endorsing a witchhunt of 'Commie Pinkos' at City Hall.

He isn't alone either. Don Cherry went after “pinkos” at Rob Ford’s mayoral inauguration. Now Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, the conservative and controversial right hand man of Rob Ford, is going after people he sees as reds. His new Facebook group “Save the City..Support the Ford Administration” has a rule. No one who looks like a communist is allowed in.

“I’m really sick and tired of hearing from the communists in this city,” Mammoliti said in an interview. “I don’t want anything to do with them. I don’t want to listen to them. I don’t want to listen to their griping and their whining. I want to listen to people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way. I’m clearly trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining.”

In other words he only wants sheep to join.

What is ironic is that Mammoliti was a union leader in the 1980s before making a sharp turn to the right in the late 1990s. He has frequently referred to citizens who have spoken against budget cuts at committee meetings as “socialists.” “Communists” appears to be new word of choice.

The group had 347 members as of noon on Tuesday.

“But I will be monitoring their comments,” says Mammoliti, “and if I get a smell of communism, they’re off the page.”

According to Mammoliti only 3 of the 169 citizens who spoke to Ford’s executive committee at an all-night meeting two weeks ago are not communists. The other 166 people opposed any kind of cuts to city programs and services. But Mammoliti and Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, another member of Ford’s executive, have dismissed the 166 out of 169 people as unrepresentative of the broader population of Toronto.

At this point most of the people in Mammoliti's group seems to be personal friends of Mammoliti or Rob Ford. Preaching to their own choir.

Other group members, however, have criticized Ford and Mammoliti. One complained that “an entire discussion thread” which included criticism had been deleted. He wrote, “It's distressing that a member of city council. . . would elect to delete the voice of the people — any people — when they express their opinions after being invited to do so. It's called discourse.”

But Mammoliti doesn't like discourse. He just wants sheep who do and say what he allows them to say. Its called propaganda and censorship, two of the cornerstones of a dictatorship.

Thankfully Rob Ford and Mammoliti are minorities in City Hall. Calling the other city councillors "communists" on a regular basis has only jaded city councillors into refusing to cooperate with these bigots.