cosmoline

fredy

@cosmoline

hi

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cosmoline
@cosmoline
lmichet
@lmichet
shadsy
@shadsy

Welcome to Snyderville: The brief, bizarre story of a Hoosier dystopia

Back in high school, I bore witness to the events of Snyderville, the unbelievable saga of a small-town fascist power grab that briefly turned a half square mile in northern Indiana into a two-person autocracy.

(A disclaimer: There aren't a lot of primary sources about this that are easy to access anymore. Many of the specific details in this article, including all the images, come from a student documentary that's still on YouTube. The rest are drawn from local news reports and my own memories of what went down. I may get some details wrong or I may have embellished some things in memory, but otherwise, the story you are about to hear is true.)

lmichet
@lmichet
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in reply to @shadsy's post:

ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

It cannot be overstated just how utterly corrupt local politics in the US can be. Shameless graft, racketeering, bribery, theft, favoritism, nepotism ... shit that by all rights is illegal as hell happens all the time in America, but no one's paying attention because the stakes seem so small and even local news barely cover it.

My home town was essentially owned by a local property developer. They had employees in majority seats on the board, they bought the main newspaper, had the goddamn cops on the take to keep the meth problem out of the papers (so they could keep selling vacation homes to Cali yuppies), sold theatre monopoly rights to a big national chain ... the list goes on, and unless you were one of the few hundred weirdos who still read the local paper, you probably didn't know about any of it.

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Vertxsees
@Vertxsees

really grateful you punctuated this chost with an explicit call to be active in local politics. Like, it was definitely the way I read it, but I really appreciate that you. y'know. actually said it.

There's so much interest in what's happening in high-level races like that presidency that we don't pay attention to the bizarre things happening below our nose, and increasingly there's no newspapers or local media to cover it.

EDIT: also worth echoing the whole "hey information on this stuff is sometimes really difficult and also sometimes just flat-out impossible to find because it was never recorded\the records no longer exist"

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CandyCorvid
@CandyCorvid

that's not at all how I read it, but maybe it went over my head. It definitely presented his side, but I don't think his side actually made him look good.
Edit: Oh I thought you meant the documentary; I've just seen the assault video and yeah, I see what you mean.

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spineflu
@spineflu

the 'funeral procession' bit made me remember Rosendale, WI; it sits on WI-26, the 55mph one-lane-with-passing-shoulders rural highway between Fond Du Lac/Oshkosh and Madison. About 100 feet from the edge of town, that 55mph slows to 30, and then at the edge of town, 25mph. 26 (with in-state plates) won't get you pulled over, but 27 will (and Illinois drivers / FIB*s will be pulled over on principle). There's about a mile and a half of glacially-paced roads before you get back to real speeds.

The gas station sells shirts that say "Rosendale's Just the Ticket"; state lore says the residents of Rosendale don't pay property taxes because their town government is funded wholly through speeding tickets (although I don't know if that's true or not).

https://fox11online.com/news/fox-11-investigates/fox-11-investigates-speeding-tickets-in-rosendale

https://www.riponpress.com/editorial/editorial-being-speed-trapped-in-rose-ndale-incites-both-anger-appreciation/article_29afdd60-b850-11ed-8196-f7be24023763.html

*FIB is a .... local slur that some have backronymed into "Friendly Illinois Brethren"; please use your imagination for what the F and B stand for.

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