Huffman Derangement Syndrome
The state media still doesn’t get it.
The voters have given Ohio’s GOP lawmakers an overwhelming mandate.
But the editor of a major paper can’t cope with that reality.
So he invented a bogeyman to blame for all the left’s misfortunes.
Captain Ahab had his Great White Whale.
Chris Quinn has his obsession with Matt Huffman.
The editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer sees a dark ulterior motive behind almost everything the outgoing senate president says and does.
Huffman’s increasing success has increasingly disturbed Quinn.
It has become so weird it’s kind of comical.
And now the editor has come down with a bad case of Huffman Derangement Syndrome.
We’ll just call it HDS.
On The Record has been watching with wary bemusement as Quinn has increasingly blamed Huffman for everything the far-left dislikes about Ohio.
But, no matter how many times Quinn stabs his Huffman voodoo doll, there never seem to be enough pins to break the spell.
The syndrome began in earnest in April of 2022, when Quinn used his podcast to repeatedly express a desire to see GOP members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, including Senators Huffman and (incoming Senate president) Rob McColley, in “orange jumpsuits.”
That is, Quinn wanted to see the president and the floor leader of the senate arrested, tried and convicted, and jailed.
For doing their jobs.
Actually, for doing their jobs too well.
It would be funny if it were not so pathetic.
April 5, 2022: “We still have our dream of them being in orange jumpsuits in a cell being, forced to draw maps together before they can get out.”
April 11, 2022: “It’s pretty clear that my dream of these guys sitting in orange jumpsuits in a jail cells not to be.”
April 18, 2022: “Orange jumpsuits. That was my answer.”
April 19, 2022: “I still have my fantasy of them all in orange jumpsuits in a jail cell.”
April 21, 2022: “I still think there’s a chance of orange jumpsuits.”
December 22, 2022: “I still wish we would’ve seen those guys in orange jumpsuits.”
Insert sad clown emoji here.
And it only got worse.
Quinn’s HDS began to metastasize on January 18, 2023, with his reckless character assassination of both Huffman and Governor Mike DeWine, when he said, “They've both been proven out to be puppets of the dark money funded by the natural gas industry.”
That’s a serious accusation.
Especially as it is not based on a shred of evidence.
That makes it something else.
It is slander.
A lie meant to discredit our state’s top leaders based on a monumental leap to a conclusion entirely unsupported by any actual facts.
Another stellar sample of your fake news at work, today in Ohio.
But wait, there’s more.
After another year of increasingly villainizing Huffman, the editor’s increasingly dark fantasy has turned the senate president into some sort of supervillain, now that he's on verge of becoming speaker of the house.
“Matt Huffman is about to become Ohio’s most powerful elected leader in modern history,” read the headline of Quinn’s daily podcast on November 21st.
If you thought that was hyperbolic, just wait.
“Matt Huffman now will be able to do anything he wants,” declared the editor.
Wow.
That’s like a superpower.
Or magic.
Is Huffman really a wizard, or something?
Quinn says “nobody can stop him” because he has “unlimited power” to do “anything he wants to do.”
“Having control basically of both houses with super majorities means nobody can stop him. Mike DeWine has no power because anything Matt Huffman wants to do, he has the super majorities to overcome the veto. It’s going to be interesting to see what he does with this. It’s unlimited power in the hands of one guy. So when you say he has those priorities, consider them done. Anything he wants to do.”
Five days later, Quinn’s reasoning took another bizarre turn.
If Huffman really is that powerful, maybe it’s best to butter him up.
“He’s proving to be a pretty brilliant politician, I think you’d have to argue. I don’t think there’s been anybody who will be as powerful as he is in decades and decades and decades. Think about it. He has the new incoming senate president as an acolyte, somebody that is just like him. So he’ll have the Senate, he’ll have the House, he’ll have super majorities that the governor can do nothing to stop.”
(“Acolyte” is an inaccurate and disparaging description of incoming Senate President Rob McColley. But that didn’t stop Quinn from having his own acolyte – reporter Jeremy Pelzer – use it twice to describe the lawmaker, most recently in what we were told would be an interview.
However, it was more of an indictment than an interview. No actual quotes from either Huffman or McColley appear until 16 paragraphs were spent building the case that "Matt Huffman is set to become the most powerful Ohio lawmaker in decades."
Huffman immediately shot down that notion, calling it “absolutely ridiculous.” The paper then let McColley and Huffman actually speak for themselves for almost a dozen paragraphs, followed by another 14 paragraphs of wishful thinking on ways their agenda could be derailed.
Oddly, Pelzer’s copy reads identical to podcast comments made by Quinn...almost like he wrote the piece for his acolyte.)
Back to the podcast...Quinn hit on another way to butter up the president – disingenuously suggesting that maybe he is a superhero rather than a supervillain.
Quinn offered Huffman this advice:
“I hope he watches some Marvel movies over the holidays. With great power comes great responsibility, and he’s going to have the great power.”
By December 2nd, Quinn was ready to crown Huffman:
“Matt Huffman is the king of Ohio come January.”
A week later, the mercurial Quinn demoted Huffman. The president no longer was nobility, but, just as suspected – he really is a wizard!
“Ignore Matt Huffman’s ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ advice. He’s the wizard of Ohio.”
Another Quinn acolyte, Content Director Laura Johnson, warned readers about Huffman’s nefarious intentions.
Coincidentally, they were the same as his campaign promises.
“He’s going to have a near unrivaled control to push his conservative agenda and that affects millions of people.”
You mean the same “conservative agenda” those “millions of people” voted for when they overwhelmingly re-elected a supermajority of conservatives?
If only the people had a say in who they elected.
It’s almost like the voters gave GOP lawmakers a super-mandate, or something.
Huffman’s dastardly plan to fulfill his campaign promises caused Johnson to exclaim:
“He wants to slash the state income tax, expand publicly funded vouchers for private schools.”
Scary stuff.
The Plain Dealer brain trust knows just how much voters hate having their income tax slashed.
And how much parents hate having the power to decide where their kids go to school.
You have been warned!
Quinn then decided, maybe Huffman isn’t a supervillain, superhero, king, or wizard – maybe he is an evil genius!
“You’ve got to give Matt Huffman credit for being a pretty brilliant strategist to have pulled this off. He comes from a small town in the middle of nowhere, but you don’t do this unless you really are a very good strategist and you’ve got some brain power.”
But acolyte Johnson was still puzzled by Huffman.
“I mean, from his leadership, he has not been backing the kind of quality of life things that I think a lot of Ohioans want.”
Well, as On The Record has comprehensively documented (and, as the Plain Dealer has studiously ignored) here are some of the accomplishments in the last two General Assemblies under Huffman’s leadership.
See if you can spot any of those “quality of life” thingies.
• Record Tax Cuts
• Record School Funding
• Universal Vouchers for K-12
• Making Higher Education Affordable
• Major New Literacy Initiative
• Expanding Job Opportunities and Innovative Training
• Economic Development and the Booming Silicon Heartland
• Helping Farmers
• Slashing Regulations
• Prioritizing Rail Safety
• Empowering and Supporting Women
• Prioritizing Support for Children, Mothers, and Families
• Supporting Ohio’s Local Communities
• Improving Access to Quality Housing and Encouraging Home Ownership
Maybe the question should be, is there any aspect of the “quality of life” that the Ohio legislature did not try to improve?
Quinn restated his acolyte’s nonsense point about Huffman in darker terms.
“He has the ability to make this a better state for everybody to live in, or does he count out (sic) a Jerry Cirino nonsense and turn college campuses into fascist training centers?”
Quinn is referring to Senate Bill 83, a version of which will be passed next year.
As On the Record has comprehensively explained numerous times, that bill accomplishes one thing above all else.
It guarantees the First Amendment right to free speech on campus.
That’s what Quinn and his acolytes call fascist.
They live in a Bizarro World backwards-land.
No wonder they think Huffman is a dictator.
Or was it Wizard? Supervillain? Evil genius? King?
Quinn literally sees politics in comic book terms.
This is what passes for political analysis under his leadership at the Plain Dealer.
And it is why he and his acolytes are so perpetually confused as to why Ohio keeps electing conservative supermajorities and Huffman just keeps winning.
His real superpower is no secret.
Huffman is simply a dedicated public servant trying to make life better for everyone in the state he loves.
Will our state media ever learn?
The signs are not promising.
Quinn recently announced his paper’s new chief political writer will be Kim Lyons, the current “editor in chief of the Pennsylvania Capital Star, part of The States Newsroom, a nationwide non-profit focused on state governments and policies.”
States Newsroom runs the Ohio Capital Journal in our state – we know it well.
Calling States Newsroom a non-profit is a twisted joke: it is funded with billions from far-left megalomaniacs for the sole purpose of pushing woke ideology on unsuspecting Americans via the legacy media.
This dark money is laundered through various levels of shell companies in order to hide its origins and dark purposes.
As On The Record detailed last year, mega-rich donors such as Bill Gates and George Soros pump billions into an umbrella group called Arabella Advisors.
One of the far-left organizations managed by Arabella is the Hopewell Fund.
Hopewell runs a media network pushing far-left political activism disguised as philanthropy.
Hopewell created left-wing fake news sites (called the Newsroom Network) to pour “millions of untraceable dollars into advertisements and other digital content masquerading as news coverage to influence the 2020 election” in favor of the Democrats.
The Newsroom Network became the States Newsroom in 2019 and obtained non-profit status. It still consists of a number of radical left media outlets. But now it is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, meaning it is not required to disclose the donors who keep it afloat.
These “newsrooms” (such as the Pennsylvania Capital Star) may be “non-profit” technically, but they are anything but non-biased.
Just look at the headlines of some of the recent editorials run by the site under the direction of editor in chief Lyons:
• The shallow, phallocentric politics of Donald Trump
• With Carlson, Musk, and Trump, Republicans’ ‘strict father’ has become the creepy uncle
• Trump’s criminal conviction won’t stop him from getting security clearance as president
Lyons should feel right at home at the Plain Dealer, where she’ll find the same sort of cringeworthy, crass, and shallow attacks on Trump and average Americans as you’d see on MSNBC.
The once proud Plain Dealer has devolved into just one more legacy outlet that can be ignored by Ohioans tired of being insulted by their media.
As for Quinn, judging by the mind-boggling 21-percent drop in the Plain Dealer’s circulation in just the last year under his guidance, one can only presume the time for honoring himself will soon be at an end.
Garth Kant is Senior Press Secretary of the Ohio Senate Majority Caucus. He spent 25 years writing and producing television news for CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and local affiliates. He spent five years covering Capitol Hill and the White House as a print reporter. He is the author of the McGraw-Hill textbook "How To Write Television News."