Beware: The Woke Mob Is Targeting You Next, Small-Town America
Woke mobs have made demands all over America. (AP Photo/Matt York)
Article by Jeff Reynolds in "PJMedia":
Woke mobs are coming for you if you are an elected official
with conservative values. In cities and towns all across America,
organized and well-funded protest groups have begun attacking city
councilors, mayors, county commissioners, and members of school boards.
It’s not just the big cities. Increasingly, small towns have faced
similar harassment. The woke mob has targeted local elected officials
for the sin of not being sufficiently woke. Its goal appears to be to
intimidate conservatives from getting involved at any level of
government. It also appears that the mob efforts are expanding faster
than anyone realizes.
Here in Oregon, the small, rural, conservative-leaning towns of
Estacada and Mollala have recently seen elected officials threatened
with recall. In Oregon City, a medium-sized city south of Portland, a
protest group has organized a recall against the mayor. The suburb of
Gresham saw resignations from its mayor, city manager, and chief of
police. And in Salem, the state’s capital, several school board members
have been targeted for destruction.
This trend is growing and expanding and it appears to be the work of
well-funded progressive groups on the local level with ties to large
national non-profits pushing a radical agenda.
In Estacada, Mayor Sean Drinkwine was forced to apologize
after he posted in a Facebook group, “I would not and have not condoned
these BLM Vigils in our community. All city staff and I are working
tirelessly to shut these Vigils down … Our number one concern is to keep
our city safe and free from conflict.”
Dan Holladay, the Mayor of Oregon City, is now facing recall
for attempting to cite, perhaps clumsily, accurate statistics about the
number of African Americans shot by police across America:
Holladay has faced backlash after writing on Nextdoor
that a small number of Black people were killed by police, though he
gave no timeframe, and that, in some cases, the officers were being
prosecuted for their actions. “That is hardly an epidemic,” he wrote in the since-deleted post. His comments came amid ongoing protests after the death of George
Floyd, a Black man who died in Minneapolis in late May after a police
officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Holladay was also criticized for a post asking how there could be
“protests, riots, looting and vandalism” in Portland, but the state
wouldn’t sanction Fourth of July fireworks shows in some of Oregon’s
smaller communities. In a statement to the commission, Holladay condemned the Minneapolis
police officers but defended his posts. He also seemed to equate anger
over his posts with an endorsement of the destructive behavior that has
accompanied some of the mostly peaceful protests in larger cities.
In Gresham, long-time Republican Mayor Shane Bemis became the third
high-ranking city official to submit his resignation in the period of a
week, after a conflict over promoting a person of color to the position of city manager:
Bemis’ resignation comes within days of both the police chief and
city manager leaving their respective jobs. Since Thursday, city manager
Erik Kvarsten and Police Chief Robin Sells have stepped down. Both said
they were retiring.
The resignations come during a time in which allegations of racism
within city government have surfaced. Deputy city manager Corey Falls, a
black man, sent an internal letter to city leadership that called out racism and lack of support for him and other employees of color.
“My reception into the city of Gresham has been at best dismal,”
Falls wrote. “It was very clear to me that those in (leadership) were
not going to accept or support a black man in a leadership position.”
Sells sent an email Sunday to city officials saying she’d been pushed out of her job because Falls accused her of racism.
According to The Oregonian,
which obtained Sells’ letter through a public records request, Sells
said her family gave her a gnome statue as a present when she started as
chief. Some officers took the statue and posted it in different
locations as a prank. While the statue was still missing, Sells wrote
that she told a crowd at an awards banquet, “it’s time to return my
gnome, as gnome lives matter also.” Sells wrote that Falls called the
remark racist.
The instance in the Salem-Keizer School Board is the most brazen so far.
At a meeting of the board on Tuesday night, the issue of Safety
Resource Officers (SROs) in schools came up, after discussions at
previous meetings. Having police in schools has become a hot-button
issue, with the woke mob believing that removing cops makes schools less
violent. Portland Public Schools and several other local districts have
already removed SROs in the wake of the George Floyd murder while in
the custody of the Minneapolis Police.
Keep in mind, in Tuesday’s meeting, the board only had a budget vote
on its agenda. The question of SROs was to be taken up at a later date.
Nevertheless, during public testimony, several community members read
off scripts to call Board Chair Marty Heyen a white supremacist for
supporting SROs, and to say that they felt uncomfortable going back to
school if she remained in her position. They repeatedly demanded that
the board “divest” funds from cops and the “school-to-prison pipeline,”
and invest more in education.
Christy Perry, the superintendent of the Salem-Keizer School District, unloaded on the 7-member school board over their racist actions and inactions because she “cannot sit quietly any longer.” Perry, who in a lengthy statement described herself “as a cis
gendered white female” who acknowledges “that I have all kinds of
privilege,” took the entire school board to task. “We have provided opportunities to help understand our own biases,”
she said in the statement. “Our board members barely engage in the
training. We have instances of social media display of white supremacy, a
black face mask and mockery over that mask. All actions I can’t
defend.”
Salem-Keizer
School Board member Paul Kyllo. In the center, his official photograph.
On either side, the black face and black face mask he wore during a
board meeting on March 30, 2020 (Salem-Keizer photos)
The black face mask was worn during a 97-minute school board meeting
via Zoom on March 30, 2020. In that meeting, board member Paul Kyllo
holds up a black face mask for nearly the entire time. When he put the
mask down, Kyllo is seen with black face from his nose down through his
neck.
The astute reader, at this point, will note that media accounts say
the board member wore blackface when no such thing occurred. He happens
to be a fan of the Portland Trailblazers NBA team. Calling that
blackface is a stretch Gumby couldn’t accomplish. It’s obvious to anyone
that he’s not being racially insensitive, he’s protesting the unsecured
nature of a virtual board meeting. The woke mob will hear none of it.
During her remarks (around the 27-minute mark), Superintendent Perry
lists several of the groups responsible for the action against members
of the school board. Perry calls them out for showing leadership in the
conversations about racism, and thanks them. The groups include:
Coalition for Equality, a radical progressive community organizing group masquerading as an educational advocacy group for the Latino community
CASA Oregon, a non-profit
that takes public and private grants to engage in community organizing
in minority communities and advocate for affordable housing.
PCUN, a farmworker’s union that has engaged in radically progressive election efforts in the Salem area.
At the 1:05:45 mark, the agenda allowed for public comment time. Two
members of the public made statements attacking Chair Heyen for supposed
white supremacy. A member of the woke mob, Raul Marquez Guerrero, ran
unsuccessfully against Heyen in the 2018 election. He demanded that the
board “divest” funds from the cops and reinvest those funds into
education. He called for Heyen and Kyllo to resign from the board,
saying that Heyen had ties to “white supremacist and anti-immigrant hate
groups.”
After the meeting, the woke mob attacked another board member, Satya
Chandragiri, on social media. Chandragiri, an immigrant from India and a
child psychologist, apparently amounts to no more than a token person
of color to the woke mob.
Facebook screenshot of Satya Chandragiri’s profile.
Facebook screenshot of Satya Chandragiri’s profile.
Then, out of the blue, an article
showed up at Vice this morning recounting all of the supposedly racist
things done by the Salem-Keizer School Board. Ironically, perhaps, the
board member who caught the original ire of the woke mob is a Democrat
(a fact that Vice conveniently left off, while being certain to list the
Republican registrations of the other two board members in its
crosshairs). They laud the student activist groups while excoriating the
accused white supremacists on the board. Several students read off
scripts evidently provided to them by activist groups, according to the
Vice article:
To the dismay of local activists, the school board voted
Tuesday evening in favor of continuing to fund police in local schools—a
common policy nationwide, which civil rights organizations firmly say unequally targets students of color. “We have been asked what would make us feel safe returning to
schools, and we can tell you that Black and Brown young people will not
feel safe returning to school with police in schools and a racist school
board,” said an LUS statement provided to VICE News following the
meeting. “By
not calling for the resignation of Director Kyllo and Director Heyen,
the board placed more importance on protecting white fragility than the
safety of students of color. Shame on all of you.”
Vice then drops the SPLC bomb by noting that Heyen’s husband belongs to a “hate group”:
The level of coordination in these attacks by the woke mob at the
local level, up to and including a national smear campaign, indicates an
escalation of the witch trial tactics. These activists don’t want
dialogue. They wish only to shame and intimidate people out of office if
they don’t toe the woke mob line and support all aspects of the social
justice movement. These mobs have been common in large cities. Now,
conservative small-town America, they’re coming for you, too.
