It happens over and over again: the “woke” left does something outrageous and gets me riled up, and then the extreme right responds with its own equivalent, takes it to the next level and puts it all in perspective.
I have railed against the progressive nuttiness of some school boards in recent years, especially in (where else?) San Francisco. Right-wing activist/journalists like Andy Ngo and Chris Rufo are extremely flawed messengers, to put it mildly, but they do also dig up some crazy stuff that more mainstream outlets either don’t know about or would rather you don’t know about.
(Side note: I’ve recently started using Ground News, a Canadian-made app that compiles news stories and keeps track of how much they’re being covered by right-wing, left-wing and straight-down-the-middle news organizations. It still needs some work - I’ve noticed The Guardian and Business Insider both listed as “left” outlets - but it does useful work in showing “blindspots” among certain segments of the media. Check it out. No, I don’t have a promo code.)
The thing is, the militia/MAGA right has also been targeting school boards and curricula. They’ve one-upped lefties demanding books be removed from public libraries by trying to pass state laws keeping doubleplusungood literature out of schools. And while I’m all in favor of, say, recalling school board members who’ve decided Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein are too problematic to have schools named after them, that’s still not as bad as “Three Percenter” militia members on school boards:
On the morning she met her opponent for coffee, Sarah Cole walked in with a front-runner’s confidence.
To Cole, the school board seat in this rural red district about an hour outside Seattle was all but hers. Educators and community leaders had endorsed her. She had name recognition from years in the Parent Teacher Association. And, besides, she was running against Ashley Sova, a home-schooling, anti-masking member of the far-right Three Percent movement.
“I kind of thought I had it in the bag,” Cole recalled.
Their coffee date that October day, as recounted by both women, was an exercise in gritted-teeth civility. Cole asked about the Three Percent logo tattooed on Sova’s neck in red, white and blue bullets. Sova tried to corner Cole on critical race theory. At the end, they took a photo and promised to work together no matter who was elected, each privately expecting Cole to win.
In December, however, it was Sova who was sworn in, the second Three Percenter on the five-person Eatonville School Board. Three Percenter ideology, part of the self-styled militia movement, promotes conspiratorial views about government overreach and imagines “patriotic” Americans revolting against perceived violations of the Constitution.
[…]
What happened in Eatonville, according to extremism trackers, is bigger than a small-town upset. In recent years, far-right groups have been moving away from national organizing to focus on building grass-roots support, harnessing conservative outrage to influence school boards and other local offices. That effort was stepped up after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol left much of the militant right under federal scrutiny and in operational disarray.
Eatonville is among several rural, conservative parts of the West where members of self-styled militias are making inroads through what researchers call a mix of opportunism and intimidation. Once-fringe views about government “tyranny” now match the mainstream conservative discourse on vaccine and mask mandates, softening the public image of movements linked to political violence.
“If you’re going to make a change, you don’t do it by storming the Capitol. You make change by using the process that you’ve been given and starting at the bottom,” said Matt Marshall, founder of the Washington Three Percent and a member of the Eatonville School Board.
Two years ago, watchdog groups warned that Marshall’s election represented the dangerous creep of anti-government extremism. Today, the Washington Three Percent claims members in dozens of official posts throughout the state, including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five school board seats. Sova, an officer with the group, was among four female members who ran in local races this cycle. Three won.
What’s notable about this story is that it’s not about Alabama or Idaho or some other deep-red stronghold. It’s Washington, one of the most reliably Democratic states in the union. This is all happening just a few hours’ drive from Seattle and freaking Portland.
For all the talk about a looming “second civil war,” the real divide isn’t between red and blue states. It’s between urban and rural areas. Most big cities in Republican states - Jackson, Birmingham, Little Rock, even freaking Salt Lake City - are as Democratic as Chicago and New York. (Oklahoma City is an exception, which makes me wonder if Trump’s platform promised to bring back Durant and Harden. “And Westbrook?” Um, let’s move on…)
Meanwhile, look at the county-by-county map of 2020 election results and you’ll see that several states that voted overwhelmingly for Biden are still mostly red. (New York and Illinois, in which the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in one megalopolis, are particularly striking.)
“Geography doesn’t vote,” people say when confronted by Trumpers insisting their guy must have really won the election because the election map is mostly red. But, in a way, it does.
Bad Fox News/Fairness Doctrine/FCC takes: the real reason I quit Twitter.
I know, I know, Fox News bad. (No, really, it is bad.) But that said:
Also, it’s kind of creepy seeing a filmmaker, whose livelihood is protected by the First Amendment, calling for government censorship. But that didn’t fit on the sign.
Speaking of The Simpsons, it is absolutely scandalous that this has been up for almost seven years and has fewer than 150K views. Be better, people.