- December 4, 2025
Dear Editor:
National partisan politics and issues of free speech surprisingly made an appearance at a recent Palm Coast City Council meeting. A podium speaker asked for a motion to cease advertising dollars the city expends for public information and announcements published on FlaglerLive because of some inconvenient truths that the local blog wrote critical of Charlie Kirk's very controversial views.
The issue of advertising dollars was clearly a “red herring” to disguise the speaker's true intent which was to punish speech he didn’t agree with. It was disingenuous rhetoric.
From past observations of City Council meetings, the usual protocol exercised in response to gripes and spiels from speakers is to just politely thank them for their comment and simply move on. However, the council took the bait. They bought the subterfuge and decided to litigate free speech under the guise of taxpayer-funded advertising dollars. They entertained the stunt and spent 15 minutes doing so, seemingly failing to recognize what it really was from the git-go.
This is a council that regularly fails to disallow or correct misinformation, call out conspiracy theories and decry slanderous comments when they are too often presented by speakers at council meetings. But on this occasion they opted to engage in and entertain a topic involving blatant retribution and the suppression of free speech while seemingly pretending to be good stewards of tax dollars.
A momentary return to sensibility concluded with the issue being rejected by the council, at least for now, but not before the expected dig at FlaglerLive by the mayor, who has been FlaglerLive’s poster boy of bad behavior and poor city leadership. The mayor, the only one in support of the move to cancel FlaglerLive’s advertising contract, spoke in disingenuous reverence for the First Amendment, while in the same breath wanting to kill it, a common phenomenon witnessed nowadays, and even more pronounced as a result of the Charlie Kirk matter.
Admittedly, I’m a fan of FlaglerLive, its detailed fact-based reporting and well thought-out opinions, and was appalled by a staged effort to stifle it by attaching a dollar value to its right to exist simply because someone disagrees at times with its content. The City Council should never have considered the speaker’s politically biased presentation to be anything more than a “thank you for your comment, next speaker please.”
Margaret Minutaglio
Palm Coast
