I openly offered to bet $50 that Council-member Jerry Dishman would announce his departure from the local democrats, just after another member Brandon Garrett did the same late last month. While Dishman flipped yesterday, he also ran for Democratic Party Chairman earlier this year, and lost to Andrew Dale. Realizing that he could no longer hold the same role he could in the party that Ana Quirk or the Tyler administration provided him, Dishman the opportunist is now flipping in the midst of his current term.

This was hardly a surprise. It was clear back in April, after he voted for half a million in opioid funds to go to pay raises instead of addiction programs, that Garrett and him would continue to keep up the same voting record against that of other democrats. Both men realized that such a disastrous vote could make it all the easier for them to be primaried in the next city race, and switching to a different party is more convenient than sticking to any meaningful conviction they had to joining the Democratic Party in the first place. Local Republicans, who have screamed about corruption for decades, are now willing to bring in those same opportunists, and could care less about the hypocrisy surrounding that decision. What they are clinging to now however is rebranding the local party into a culture war obsessed mess. And yet while this rebrand is happening, Republicans like Mayor Dan Ridenour wish to have it both ways: Dem leadership is too corrupt and too woke. And instead of picking whether to criticize the Tyler administration from 2019 or Chairman Dale from 2025, they cling to the most pathetic, insufferable and lazy position at their disposal.

If Ridenour wants to stick to the charges of corruption, then the mayor should explain what he thinks about Dishman’s claim that former-Mayor Dennis Tyler wasn’t guilty of bribery. As for both the council-members who left, we should get an explanation as to how switching parties can do anything good for organized labor in Muncie. Worried about blowback on actual policy, the new GOP Chair Tim Overton was chosen merely to drift focus away from local issues and toward that of culture war problems. He’s done this repeatedly through a half baked Star Press Op-Ed panicking over First Presbyterian Church being a potential early voting site, spending money on an ad in a coupon book calling his party “common sense” against the far left, and proclaiming at a council meeting he has “all of human history” to back up why gay people don’t deserve to get married.

On the topic of what constitutes far left to his party, local LGBTQ+ support comes up constantly. And if Garrett and Dishman feel any conviction about this, their voting records don’t make that clear. I already wrote about the fact that Brandon Garrett supported Res. 14-24, a resolution acknowledging Transgender Awareness Month, just months before switching. Dishman has two occasions that are similar: In 2015 there was Ord. 9-15 that effectively protected sexual orientation and gender identity from discrimination at City Hall, and in 2021 Res. 36-21 condemned Indiana efforts to allow conversion therapy. In both cases, Dishman voted in favor. He only recently defected from that with Res. 14-24 late last year.

While the GOP continues alluded to a “far left” takeover and groups like Muncie Resists having a role in party politics, they do everything they can to erase democrats who are simply against the Old Guard. Our two last Democratic Mayor’s James P. Carey and Dennis Tyler fell into the latter group, both getting into their own bribery scandals in their political careers, and there has been a long-time tradition of candidates described as “dissident” democrats taking a stand against them. From Jerry Thornburg to Andrew Dale, efforts to reform the party used to be widely talked about in the local news. Dale in fact ran for mayor himself in 2019, and essentially took on the establishment of the party in doing so. From the 1920s to the 2020s, reform has been sought within the party, and now our disingenuous and compromised GOP can only ignore it by warning voters about wokescolds stealing their jobs.

Believe me there’s more to say, and just in the past month my articles “Tim Overton Only Cares About Culture Wars”, “City Council Member Brandon Garrett Switches Political Parties”, and “Republican ‘Realignment’ is a Joke” have covered exactly this.

One silver lining: In the announcement that Dishman would join, Overton finally took my advice and talked policy with a single line: “as factories and businesses look to return to the United States, thanks in part to Republican federal policy, we must be ready to compete.” It’s a start yet still an absolute joke. To act as if the whiplash back and forth on tariffs in the U.S. have a coherent goal to bring manufacturing back instead of pulling money into Trump’s tight circle is completely laughable.