The Right of Conscience at Peach Pundit
Josh McKoon is big mad at me.
More specifically, the Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party is holding me personally responsible for a post written by Jason Shepherd at Peach Pundit, and the post in question is this one: https://peachpundit.com/mckoons-chattahoochee-trot/
Let me say this as plainly as I can, right up front, before anybody starts shadowboxing with their own assumptions. I did not write that post. I hated that post and everything in it, and I told Shepherd that back when he was working on it. I also did something I almost never do, I added an editor’s note, which is basically me standing on the hood of the car waving my arms and saying, “Hey, I have serious reservations about this, and here is exactly what I required before it was allowed back on the site.”
That editor’s note exists for a reason. I cringe when spouses of political figures get dragged into the arena, and I was not willing to publish anything that treated a spouse like collateral damage just because her husband has a title, so I pulled the post when it originally appeared, then I required Shepherd to provide definitive proof that Jacqueline McKoon is a public figure in her own right, not just “the spouse.” I also required that the McKoons be offered the opportunity to respond and offer comment. Those are not small hurdles, and I do not usually make contributors jump through them, which should tell you exactly how much I disliked the framing and the direction this thing wanted to go.
Now, here is the part that some people find difficult to wrap their minds around, especially in politics, where everyone wants a clean chain of custody for blame.
Even though I own and publish Peach Pundit, I do not censor my contributors. That means each of them is free to write something that may go so far as to piss me off. Agreeing with me is not a prerequisite for being a Peach Pundit contributor. If it were, Peach Pundit would be a very small, very boring place.
There have been times when I have directly contradicted my contributors, and not on minor issues, either. Abortion is the easiest example, because it is a topic where people tend to assume that a “conservative site” must speak with one voice, and we do not. A contributor wrote this: https://peachpundit.com/handmaids-tale-new-season-now-irl/ and then I responded with my own follow-up here: https://peachpundit.com/an-editor-in-chiefs-note-and-additional-thoughts-on-the-dobbs-decision/ That is how I handle disagreement on my own site, I use my own words, on my own byline, and I let readers see the tension instead of pretending it does not exist.
Which is why this feels like a good time to remind everyone what I did when I took over Peach Pundit. Among the first things I did was update the about page, and I put the right of conscience at the very top, on purpose: https://peachpundit.com/about-peach-pundit/
I did not do that because it sounded poetic. I did it because I do not want to control the reader, and I do not want to control my contributors. I want each of them, reader and writer alike, to be able to make their case about the issues they care about and the things they think you should know, even when their case annoys me, even when I think they are wrong, even when I wish they had written something else entirely.
That does not mean there are no boundaries. We have rules, and they are not complicated: write truth, avoid defaming or libeling anyone, and do not dox people. In all my time as owner of Peach Pundit and as editor-in-chief before that, I have only permanently deleted one post, and that was because it violated those rules. I take doxxing seriously, I take truth seriously, I take reckless accusations seriously, and if you cannot live inside those guardrails, you do not get to publish here.
But within those guardrails, I am not going to turn Peach Pundit into a place where the only acceptable opinion is my own.
Look, it is my site, I get why people want to hold me accountable for things I do not believe, or when someone expresses a deeply held belief that I do not share. That’s politics. People want a single neck to grab, and the owner is the easiest one to grab. I also have the luxury of no longer worrying about having my name on a ballot, so the spin, misdirection, or misrepresentation of that being in the atmosphere is of little consequence, at least to me personally.
What does matter to me is the principle.
The post written by Shepherd continues to stick in McKoon’s craw, but I did not write it, and I am not going to silence Shepherd because someone I once considered a very good friend is mad at me. If the price of running a site built around conscience is that I occasionally take incoming fire for something I would not have written myself, then that is the price, and I will pay it, because the alternative is worse.
If you think I have strayed from the facts here, slap me in the comments. That’s not sarcasm. It’s the whole point of the exercise.
