SELECTIVE CHILLING STUPIDITY (CONTINUED)

PART TWO

John Patrick Hunter died in 2003. He had lived to a great age, as befitted a great man, and he was much mourned. But he was, again, one of those few people who seem to have achieved during his lifetime most of what he hoped to achieve. One of the things he never cared if he achieved was becoming famous. But he did. That happened naturally.

Online paper now, but a month ago its editor David Zweifel, who was the news editor when I started, wrote:

I'm starting to wonder if the Cap Times legend John Patrick Hunter would be able to get folks to sign excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights if he repeated his experiment today.

— "Trump ushers in new age of McCarthyism," Dave Zweifel, April 7, 2025

In Memoriam: John Patrick Hunter

“John Patrick Hunter, former Daily Cardinal columnist and board member, inducted into the Daily Cardinal Hall of Fame in 1999, died in November.

The newspaper he joined following his Cardinal service, The Capital Times, published the following account of his life, reprinted here with permission:

When John Patrick was hired to replace Bill Proxmire as a reporter in 1951, The Capital Times was in its fourth decade of publication. The paper had survived World War I, the Depression, World War II and the start of the Cold War with its progressive values intact. But as with human beings, middle age can be challenging for newspapers. Often, newspapers that begin as crusading tribunes of reform succumb to the business and political pressures that have corrupted so much of our media. But John Patrick ensured that The Capital Times would never conform to conventional wisdom, that it would never defer to the powerful, that it would never abandon the powerless, and that it would fight the good fight not with a sense of duty but with a sense of delight.