HATER CITY NEWS' HISTRIONIC HAUTEUR: Felicia Regan Responds, Again

In the words of John Randolph of Roanoke, MICHAEL GOLD "is like a rotten mackerel by moonlight: he both shines and stinks.

Best read when he's doing research and scooping us all, quoted in The New York Times on our corrupt Sheriff DAVID SHOAR

Best ignored when he's perseverating pugnaciously and pusillanimously,  as on this occasion, when he showed his ass.  Michael Gold's racism, sexism and homophobia are like that "crazy old aunt that lives in the basement," in the words of the late H. Ross Perot.

The St. Augustine Oligarchy is transmogifyining.

Their St. Augustine Record is shrinking before our eyes.

Their one-party misrule is in tatters.

The St. Augustine Oligarchy fought desegregation, blocked inclusion in the GTM-NERR and once put a landfill in a lake without permits.

Michael Gold once attacked me for reporting the City's illegal dumping, as did misguided  locals who were allied with the itty-bitty City government.

KKK once ran our town. Now, power is diffuse, with multiple avenues of information, opinion and power.

Local business interests encouraged, guided and funded Michael Gold.

His initial mission was to run the homeless out of town, as confessed in a December 23. 2006 St. Augustine Record column by Mr. Gold. The St. Augustine Record for years ran its own hate site for "The Anonymice" to spew hatred, Talk of the Town.  The Establishment took part in this sport, with local public officials posting anonymously on ToTT and Mr. Gold's own hate webtites.

Juvenile, jejune jerks did not prevent us from winning a federal court victory on the Rainbow flags in 2005, which still rankles Mr. Gold, whose off-the wall ranting cant, rodomontade, ridicule and smarmy schoolboy satire have now been taken down after Felicia Regan's column.

We're a "Compassionate City."

Michael Gold is not setting the agenda, We, the People are setting the agenda now.

Pray for Michael Gold to find peace with the better angels of his nature.

Michael Gold and I both supported  some of the same candidates, including Mayor Nancy Shaver, who valiantly fought corruption for 1550 days until over stroke, resignation and illegal replacement by ex-Mayor Tracy Upcnurch -- the Triple Crown of Lawbreakign , violating the First Amendment, F.S. 119 and FS. 286.

Pray for local officials to do better, and not call for First Amendment violations, as Vice Mayor TODD NEVILLE did concerning Mr. Gold's opinions.

While I feel Felicia Regan's pain, I think she would do well not to attack Mr. Gold, or his academic credentials (Flagler College), or to play the victim card for other officials who can speak for themselves, and who are, in fact, victimizers.  (Like St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar).
I  do not support "guidelines of social media to infringe First Amendment rights to express opinions about government officials.

Robert Kennedy said the night MLK was murdered:

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Here's Felicia Regan's July 21, 2019 St. Augustine Record column:

Opinion
GUEST COLUMN | Gold’s behind the curtain as The ‘Wizard of Sleaze’

By Felicia Regan / St. Augustine
Posted Jul 20, 2019 at 2:22 PM
Updated Jul 20, 2019 at 2:41 PM

I am the sole writer of this letter and it reflects my thoughts. I have attached the article I am referencing.

Social media has become the latest area of technology to be used as a weapon both on an international level as well as locally. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide the perfect environment to spread malice, hate and lies at a pandemic rate. While we have our share of this locally, there is one site that is particularly malignant — that is Historic City News. The website and Facebook page are owned and operated by Michael Gold, also known as Michael Tobin under his corporation Historic City Companies, which is registered in our state. It appears he is the sole employee, functioning as editor and writer. There is no evidence this is an actual media company or that Mr. Gold/Tobin has any education in journalism. What makes him so dangerous is his particular brand of “editorials.” These are nothing more than personal attacks and veiled threats, often including pilfered photos that intimidate and threaten members of our community.

His targets are usually city and county employees, elected officials and anyone running for office against his current candidate he is managing. My husband is the City Manager for the City of St. Augustine and is frequently the target of his malice.

June 30, my son, daughter and I were also included in his latest “editorial” which included a photo of my husband in the Young Professionals Organization Womanless Pageant which he won, raising funds for St. Augustine Youth Services. Why would anyone want to subject themselves and their families to this abuse by working for a local government, running for a local office or participating in a charity? Gold bullies those who object on his Facebook page and often resorts to derogatory language. In addition, Michael has a private investigator’s license (C 9800228) from the Florida Department of Agriculture, which gives him access to personal information.

His penchant for cruelty to others, combined with his access to confidential information is why he is especially dangerous. He continues to write and post his “editorials” after many have reported them to Facebook. What can be done? Contacting the Florida agencies with which he has a license and registered corporation may be a start. Another strategy is to “unlike” his Facebook page, and avoid commenting or sharing his “editorials,” which will deny him of the attention he seeks.

Until stricter boundaries are created regarding online harassment, Michael Gold/Tobin will continue to target anyone he wants. I can imagine him hiding behind his computer, frantically typing his next “editorial” while pretending to be someone more great and powerful than he really is.

ED'S NOTE: As of 11:21 AM on Sunday, July 21, 2019 Michael Gold's blog, the link to the editorial in quo is deleted.

From this blog, 2016:

HATER CITY NEWS' HISTRIONIC HAUTEUR: Felicia Regan Responds

Michael Gold's Cyber-rag Stepped Way Over the Line
by Felicia Regan
The St. Augustine Record (print edition), August 28, 2016
Editor:
I am concerned with the increasing use of social media and online “newspapers” to bully private citizens and public officials. In particular, I am addressing the local website “Historic City News” and its affiliated Facebook page.
For years I’ve seen doctored photos of my husband and other city employees, as well as videos and other media used for humiliation. I’ve stayed quiet and “let it go” as he is a public employee and it is the usual eighth-grade level humor that is used on sites such as these.
What I won’t “let go” is a threat. On Aug. 4, Historic City News made the following comment on its Facebook site in response to an article it published “…Thanks John Regan for another example of how totally inept you have become at making decisions. He’s starting to look like Old Yellow to me. Time to put him down, I guess.”
This reference to murder is unconscionable and represents how social media has the potential to become dangerous.
In addition, the editor, Mr Gold, is using his “newspaper “ to endorse this message with his followers.
Hiding behind a computer and spewing volatile material such as this proves how a bully can evolve into something even worse.
Opinion Editor's Note: Felicia Regan is the wife of John Regan, St. Augustine City Manager.

Michael Gold and Sheriff DAVID SHOAR F/K/A "HOAR"; Photo by Maureen Ortagus 

1. Photo by Maureen Ortagus; enhancements by Daniel S. Somerson

Ed Slavin and Felicia Regan (2014); photo credit: Michael Gold and Historic City News



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From this blog from 2011:

Friday, May 13, 2011

Exposing Hate Websites in St. Augustine Florida -- Fronts for Enemies of Civil Rights and Environmental Justice

The “temple-destroyers” in St. Augustine, Florida are not slouches
For years, here in St. Augustine and St. Johns County, Florida, local community members were treated diffidently and with disrespect by our City and County officials.
People were often openly, notoriously and publicly insulted by Commissioners when they raised Civil Rights and Environmental Justice concerns. Some were threatened with arrest simply for speaking their truth about these matters.
In February 2006, I reported to federal officials the illegal dumping of 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir by our City of St. Augustine City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRIS, resulting in Florida DEP orders to put the contaminated solid waste in a Class I landfill.
HARRIS spent $200,000 of our money on legal and engineering fees to avoid indictment on pollution charges.
HARRISS fought accountability from 2006-2008, when the City finally agreed to deposit the waste in a Class I landfill.
At the City Commission meeting on November 13, 2006, I proposed the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore. Later that same meeting, I was blasted as a pesky disbarred lawyer by our then-Mayor, his valedictory speech, applauded by 75 Yacht Club members (and RANDY BRUNSON) who were there to receive a subsidized no-bid rental of the Lighthouse Park community center for their clubhouse). Six days later, the St. Augustine Record editorial defended my honor, called me brilliant, and told me not to be deterred by the Philistine attacks on free speech.
On December 23, 2006, former St. Johns County Deputy Sheriff (and former SAPD officer) MICHAEL GOLD f/k/a “MICHAEL TOBIN” announced in a St. Augustine Record column that a “Local businessman” was starting plazabum.com for the express purpose of running the homeless out of town.
That was not the only mission – the hate website focused on hating environmentalists, community activists and reformers with a fervor and a vengeance.
From 2006-2010, plazabum was a noisome nuisance, anonymously and obscenely attacking free speech under the guise of free speech.
The plazabum’s negative agenda was to intimidate, coerce and chill free speech by activists, who were described in increasingly irrational, irascible terms as homosexuals, crazies and damn Yankees (among other epithets, others of which are obscene and will not be quoted here). That's not surprising, since GOLD's Historic City News website has posted a crackpot "League of the South" column on December 30, 2010 -- the group is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "hate group" that favors the State of Florida seceding from the United States (and defends slavery).
Other unaccountable organizations have attacked reformers as crazies, including the Soviet Union (which put dissenters in insane asylums) and the United States Department of Energy and its contractors (which called sick workers “the crazies” and attacked everyone who ever said that nuclear weapons plants made people sick, including Dr. William K. Reid, M.D., dozens of sick workers, and me).
St. Augustine’s hate squad lacked the style and panache of the Soviets or U.S. nuclear bomb-builders. But they shared the same psychopathy – attacking critics of a sick system as if they were mentally ill.
Thus, it was especially revealing when the haters wrote about how people moved here from the North (they weren’t talking about Henry Flagler or other rich guys, but about average citizens with intelligence and ethics).
Plazabummers whined about how these “outsiders” went to public meetings and (horrors) expressed our opinions without being “invited.” How trite!
Were we supposed to receive engraved invitations from the WHETSTONE family before speaking out? And who invited them?
MICHAEL GOLD said he was running against people who wanted to make St. Augustine more like “Jamestown or Williamsburg” That’s a thinly-veiled attack on St. Augustine Mayor Joseph Boles (who admires Jamestown and hired ex-Mayor Jeanne Zeidler of Williamsburg to help us with our 450th Celebration). Mayor Zeidler told me she enthusiastically supports a St. Augustine National Historical Park and Seashore (so does Mayor Boles’ mother, Maurine Boles, who shook my hand in 2007 and thanked me for speaking out on behalf of preserving and protecting what she’s worked 35 years to preserve and protect).
It is especially revealing when civil rights activists – including Andrew Young – are described as “outside agitators” on MICHAEL GOLD’s faux “Historic City News” website.
The hatesiters’ vitriol did not deter First Amendment protected activity. I once called them “the Anonymice,” whereupon MICHAEL GOLD f/k/a “MICHAEL TOBIN” humorously procured embroidered baseball caps bearing the words “Anonymice” with art showing a computer mouse. Ipse dixit – he said it.
The ancien régime used vicious vitriol to attempt to intimidate First Amendment protected activity.
The ancien régime used electronic Jim Crow tactics in defense of foreign-funded “developers” who propose dubious, low-quality projects that go belly-up (the worst of which destroyed the remains of 3000-4000 year old Indian village next to St. Augustine High School at the behest of disbarred New York lawyer ROBERT MICHAEL GRAUBARD, a frequent recipient of dubious favors from St. Augustine and St. Johns County governments.
First the ancien régime abused the St. Augustine Record’s “Talk of the Town” website to post anonymous hate speech --- 32 looong pages of homophobia directed against the Rainbow Flags on our Bridge of Lions in 2005, with haters continuing to post on that topic until I quoted them, writing about how local public officials were posting homophobia and hiding behind anonymity. At that point, three pages of postings were removed by people who were caught red-handed; former Mayor George Gardner stated at a City Commission meeting during 2006 that he no longer “enjoyed” reading “Talk of the Town” after I started posting on the City’s Environmental Injustice there (e.g., his being misled by City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS into thinking there was 40,000 cubic yards of “clean fill,” not solid waste, dumped by HARRISS in our Old City Reservoir.) What a pity – as if the world existed for Hizzoner’s pleasure. That's narcissism. What do you reckon?
Someone was paying plazabummers' MICHAEL GOLD to spew hatred -- it was full-time.
Misguided plazabum posters had some 120 loooong pages of hate directed against President Barack Obama.
Misguided plazabum posters had nearly as many pages of hatred devoted to hating County Commission J. Kenneth Bryan (African-American retired Justice Department manager and former Deputy Director of the Executive Office of the President under Bill Clinton).
Misguided plazabum posters even had more than 106 looong pages of hate directed against little ‘ole me. “I welcome their hatred,” as President Franklin Roosevelt said of “malefactors of great wealth.” Their approval is neither desired nor required.
Misguided plazabum posters were not only limited individuals, those who were not just MICHAEL GOLD's NICs were severely limited in what they could say -- some topics were off-limits – e.g., any criticism of the ancien régime!
The reason hate website sociologists (and students of electronic psychopathy) know this is that someone once posted something mildly mocking about controversial City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS (a picture of him golfing with then-Commissioner DONALD CRICHLOW, et al.) and joking that he was doing it when he should be working – the picture and comment was quickly removed.
The only people who were ever blasted on plazabum were reformers and activists --- these are mean and base KKK, Jim Crow tactics by people who lack the courage to speak at public meetings or sign their own names.
Oddly, one of the terms they use to describe activists is “coward,” as if saying it meant it were so.
These back-shooting cowards, including GOLD, called for the horrible painful death of a cancer patient on Christmas Eve 2007; called for the kidnapping of activists; called for death and serious bodily harm of activists; and used private information to attack people, always questioning other people’s motives – e.g., people they never met.
Some misguided public officials and candidates actually posted on plazabum, some even doing so under their own names – you know who you are. So do we. We forgive you. Don’t do it again.
Insulted by the inflamed rantings of the St. Johns County Monster Raving Looney Party, activists did not dry up and blow away, or turn into pillars of salt.
We continued our work, informing the people and speaking at meetings. Inflamed rantings did not stop us – the haters only empowered us to speak the truth to power.
During 2006-2010, in their righteous wrath against injustice, St. Johns County voters ousted KAREN STERN, BRUCE MAGUIRE and MARC JACALONE from County Commission; voters elected Nancy Sikes-Kline, Leeana Freeman and William Leary to City Commission; and elected Jeanne Moeller, John Sundeman, Janice Bequette and Cathy Brandhorst to the Mosquito Control Commission; and halted purchase of a $1.8 million no-bid helicopter and halted erection of a $6 million Taj Mahal building.
In 2010, City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS “retired” in disgrace.
Now citizens’ concerns are heard and heeded.
Now Civil Rights and Environmental Justice are protected and not neglected.
Now citizens are treated with dignity, respect and consideration when we speak at public meetings (except by the St. Augustine Record, which routinely boycotts and refuses to cover “activists” unless it is to smear us).
Environmental injustice is being remedied, including the $800,000 capping of the illegal former City dump at the south end of Riberia Street, which will soon become a park, and $11 million to construct Riberia Street, the key arterial street into Lincolnville, which the ancien régime neglected, never providing proper drainage, never providing proper paving, never providing sidewalks, never providing bulkheads.
Those who heaped scorn on civil rights, environmental and community activists lost.
Civil Rights and Environmental Justice won.
Tomorrow our City dedicates a monument to the Civil Rights “footsoldiers” – the local residents and others who demonstrated peacefully against Jim Crow segregation here in 1963-64, resulting in enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. On June 11th, our City will dedicate a memorial to Andrew Young, who was viciously attacked twice by racists here while teaching non-violence.
In 2010, plazabum lost the considerable subsidy provided by the “local businessman” who had provided tens of thousands of dollars in funding 2006-2010. For months, plazabum was merely a Facebook page.
A few days ago, I wrote on this blog about “temple-destroyers,” including BRUCE MAGUIRE, invoking the words of naturalist John Muir about people who destroy our environmental heritage in the name of the Almighty Dollar, focusing on BRUCE MAGUIRE’s efforts to ruin Old Florida with condos on A1A between Vilano Beach and Ponte Vedra, attempting to destroy the Guana-Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM-NERR), formerly Guana State Park, seeking to move A1A west of the parking lots, ruining protected wildlife and their habitat.
Now plazabum is back, bragging that you can read it to “see what the local temple-destroyers are up to.” Ipse dixit – he said it!
We wear the ancien régime’s scorn as a badge of honor.
Former St. Johns County Commission Chairman Ben Rich once publicly opined that the foreign-funded “developers” as being “worse than any carpetbagger,” condemning their overbearing overreaching, clear-cutting of trees, while winning approval of some 70,000 homes (most not yet built) in the northwest part of St. Johns County.
The “Anonymice” and plazabum’s self-confessed “temple-destroyers” remind me of a story: A kindly church-going lady had the reputation of being able to say something nice about everyone. Putting her to the test, a new pastor asked her to say something nice about the Devil. She thought for a moment and said, “Well, he’s no slouch.”
The “temple-destroyers” are not slouches either.
The shadowy “local businessman” has cut their funding and cut them loose.
Appparently they’ve found another guardian devil to fund their spiteful rodomontade and provide band-width for their inconsequential illiteracy and hopelessly provincial babblings.
The enemies of free speech on plazabum are now claiming to be the only place for free speech in St. Augustine.
How exquisitely self-deluding.
How indescribably Orwellian.
Plazabum exists because the ancien régime hates free speech.
Lord Byron said, “Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.” Or as Francois La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.” ("Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à la vertu.")