Leadership from the Town of Gilbert, Arizona have begun serious damage control after an investigative report dropped earlier this week into their $1 million office that is largely dedicated to spying on employee online speech.
First reported by AZ Free News after weeks of research and reviews of multiple public records, Gilbert’s Office of Digital Government (ODG) has made itself the authority on all communications from town employees, both public and private, as part of a hard push to ensure that it aligns with a progressive, liberal agenda.
Gilbert pays a department over $1 million a year to control town employees and elected officials' online speech to ensure conformity with a progressive political agenda.
My latest covered by @azfamily ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/bBs07t09aE— Corinne Murdock (@CorinneMurdock) January 19, 2024
Doubling down on their reported mission, the ODG didn’t deny the “Big Brother” characterization made by the investigative report. In a statement to news outlets purportedly from the Town — though, as made clear by the investigative report, from ODG itself — the department defended its actions as necessary to prevent “wrongthink.”
The ODG also claimed that “false claims [from] disgruntled employees” formed the basis of the report, dismissing the lengthy documentation of internal emails and group messages from the department cracking down on disputed speech.
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“The Town has been clear that we will not tolerate divisive, offensive or culturally insensitive posts from employees purporting to represent the Town,” said ODG. “There is no further need to address the false claims from anyone, including disgruntled former employees.”
@GilbertYourTown AZ gets called out for spending $1 million / yr on a dept that controls all digital comms out of the city and censors views that aren’t progressive. Their response? Yeah we’re intolerant, but it’s a lie and there’s no need to discuss further. On brand! pic.twitter.com/3CVS9Pngth
— Mike Brownfield (@mikebrownfield) January 19, 2024
After the report dropped, ODG head Dana Berchman quickly hid her Twitter profile by making it a private one. Berchman makes well over $200,000 to run the department, and has been aggressive in her own left-wing speech, including under her title as ODG’s chief officer. Berchman alluded in public records to keeping a dossier of other town employees’ social media posts: what she called her “social media files.”
— Amber McAffee (@ThatsMrsMcAffee) January 19, 2024
Yet as is so often the case with left-wing thought police, the vocal Berchman and her team took issue with conservative political speech by town employees online. The investigative report further revealed public records of different departments entertaining numerous requests from ODG to address various employees’ online speech. One cited and recurring example concerned shows of support for police amid the year-long Black Lives Matter riots.
ODG even arranged for the chiefs of police and fire to take time out of their day to record a video telling their employees not to “choose sides” concerning the pro- and anti-police movements. The real implication, however, was for first responders to stop their public show of support for pro-police messaging, as revealed by those emails obtained.
ODG spent hours combing through “problematic” employees’ posts at times, according to the report.
“This individual has had a few bad tweets and likes in the past 24 hours,” said one ODG employee.
Major political events, like the January 6, 2021 protesting and rioting at the U.S. Capitol, would apparently send ODG over the edge. The department hunted down and tracked the personal social media posts of at least one employee critical of them.
The report also points out a connection between ODG control and the communications delay on the Gilbert Goons.
“It was difficult to get anything accomplished,” said a former employee in the report. “Everything was so tightly managed. People on the ground there were upset because they couldn’t do anything.”
Gilbert officials have been under scrutiny by watchdog groups like Judicial Watch since at least 2021, due to complaints of strong-arm tactics used by and against both employees and members of the public.
Since taking office in January 2021, Mayor Brigette Peterson has been the subject of nine ethics violation complaints.
In December 2023, Peterson was forced to undergo open-meeting training from the League of Arizona Cities and Towns after three Gilbert residents filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against her and her fellow council members stemming from the Mayor’s order to a police officer to remove the three from the town council’s meeting of Sept. 22, 2022.
Ryan Handelsman, Dr. Brandon Ryff, and Joanne Terry offered to settle the dispute if Peterson received remedial training on the importance of the First Amendment and apologized, along with the council, for shutting down the trio’s quiet, free speech activity.
“This case involves the Mayor of Gilbert and the Town of Gilbert retaliating against their political opponents -the Plaintiffs- by squelching their right to free speech and assembly, their right to petition public officials for a redress of grievances, due process rights and rights to equal protection under the law,” the lawsuit stated.
In 2021, Judicial Watch raised the ire of Peterson when it began is looking into complaints that employees working for the town of Gilbert misused their positions to push the “Marxist agenda of Black Lives Matter.”
At the time, Mark Spencer, the southwest projects coordinator for Judicial Watch who submitted the FOIA, told the tabloid, The Arizona Sun Times, “One might be led to believe the Town Manager’s office is allowing a costly liberal social experiment to be conducted on Gilbert taxpayers. The endorsement of Marxist literature such as The 1619 Project, White Fragility and How To Be An Antiracist appears to have taken roots in the altering of employee testing processes by injecting equal outcome practices based on gender and ethnicity over skill and competency. Citizens are put at risk when this type of bias is allowed by management into a first responder hiring process.”
According to the tabloid, Spencer submitted the request to the town asking for documents “promoting the political Marxist agenda of Black Lives Matter … as well as Democrat Party elected officials.”
Berchman’s posts were among the most blatantly partisan.
