August 17, 2022 • 34 mins
We leave Shasta for now. We will come back in a later episode to find out the election results. Meanwhile, we return to Sequim, where Mayor Armacost reveals his love of QAnon on live radio and later forces his city manager Charlie Bush to resign, in what some residents see as an act of troubling partisan bias. It turns out the beef between Armacost and Bush has roots in a controversial proposal to build an opioid addiction treatment clinic in the heart of Sequim. We find out why that project divided the town and how that division sowed the seeds for Bush’s ouster.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Over the last few episodes, I took you deep into
the heart of Shasta County, California, where a group of
far right activists recalled their Republican county supervisor for not
being radical enough in response to the pandemic. Faced with
these extreme politics, a lot of people in Shasta fell silent.
(00:23):
They were afraid to stand up for the facts, to
stand up for democracy. Later in the series, will head
back to Shasta for another high stakes election where right
wing activists tried to win even more county positions. First, though,
I want to tell you a different story, one with
(00:43):
similar themes but a different outcome. It's a story about
how a normal issue for a town government, a heated
battle over a proposed development, brought far right extremism to town.
And it's about how people stood up, organized and fought back.
So let's return to Swim, Washington, the small town where
(01:07):
this series began. Yeah. Hello, my name is Josh. I
live in Squim. I would request that Mayor Armacrost denounce
Q and on. You're listening to Bedrock USA, a production
of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio, a podcast
about political extremism, small town life, and the fight for democracy.
(01:32):
I'm your host more a bliss real quick, I want
to remind you of where the story of Squim left off.
Here's the play by play, so you just heard Josh Sutcliffe.
Days after January six, he called into a city council
meeting and asked the mayor of the town, William Arma Coost,
(01:56):
to denounce Q and On in a nutshell. Armac Coost
had posted memes about the baseless conspiracy theory on Facebook
and had praised it on live radio, and by this
point Josh had had enough and wanted to say so publicly.
He was freaked out because Q and On had just
been on violent display at the Capitol riot. But the
(02:19):
mayor completely ignored Josh's comment. He didn't say a word.
Then later in the meeting, seemingly out of nowhere, he
announced he was telling the city manager, Charlie Bush, to resign.
Charlie was a beloved long time official in Squim, the
guy who basically helped the city government function. To some locals,
(02:43):
it looked like Mayor Arma Coost was attempting to overthrow
his own local government in a sort of gesture of
support the January six protesters. Not only that, there were
other people on the council who voted to remove Charlie
Bush as well. That meant the mayor had allies, and
(03:04):
that's when I came across the story. I read a
tweet describing Charlie Bush's allister as a kind of mini
insurrection at the hands of Mayor Armacrost. The aftermath drew
national attention, including a big report on CNN. The small
community of Squim, Washington, question after question, Q and on
(03:25):
and the mayor are the talk of the town? Mayor,
excuse me? We you owe it to the citizens of Squim.
Residents fear that Squim population seven thousand, maybe the first
to have a Q and non conspiracy theorist and power.
The whole thing was so bonkers. There was so much
to unpack. A mayor who spread the word of Q
(03:49):
and on and what locals were calling an attempted coup.
My question was, did Charlie Bush's aust really all come
down to Q and on or was there more to it?
Because in small towns like Squim, there's almost always a backstory.
I had to get to the bottom of it, so
(04:11):
I started working the phones, calling up locals who could
tell me more. And what I heard was a little
more complicated, and this version of the story, well, it
was kind of like a parable for the rest of
the country because, like virtually any town in America, I
learned that Squim has had cracks in its bedrock that
(04:33):
go back years, metaphorical cracks formed by racism, fear, and resentment.
Long before the pandemic, extreme ideologies had begun to seep
into those cracks, threatening to destroy community trust and relationships.
Things began to fall apart with something called the Matt Clinic.
(04:57):
A larger perspective, I think that went drove a lot
of that was the Mat Clinic. It was after the
Matt Clinic, was the Matt clinic. The MATT clinic. That's
short for medication assisted treatment, meaning a facility or patients
dealing with opioid addiction received medication to handle their cravings.
(05:19):
It's similar to a methodone clinic, but with other services too,
like mental health, counseling, dentistry, and job assistance. These kinds
of clinics are nothing new, But what I came to
learn was that back in twenty nineteen, a proposal to
build a Matt Clinic in the heart of Squim tore
(05:40):
the town apart. One side it was very very opposed,
and the other side saw it as greatly needed. And
I also heard that Charlie Bush was supportive of the idea,
but Mayor arm Accost was not. Perhaps that was part
of why Bush was pushed out, locals believed. But there
(06:02):
was even more to the story, they said, because it
was a local Native American tribe that was proposing to
build the Matt Clinic, and some people really resented them.
This was too much to untangle over the phone. I
had to get a feel for the town myself, to
talk to people face to face. So earlier this year,
(06:24):
my producer Kathleen and I decided it was time to
visit Squim. We flew into Seattle, got our rental, and
drove on I five to Edmunds, where we caught the
ferry to Kingston. We made our way along the highway,
passing a dense forest of evergreens. Along the way, we
(06:46):
have crossed the Sound Pugeit. I had learned that the
county Squim is located in Clallam County, happens to be
America's longest running bell Weather, meaning it's the Lee County
in the whole United States that has voted for every
president in every election since nine, from Ronald Reagan through
(07:09):
Joe Biden. It made me wonder, if the Squim area
is a bell weather for the nation's president, what else
could it be a bell weather for? The landscape opened
up into a sunnier valley, and we turned off the
highway towards downtown Squim, a stretch of restaurants and boutiques
with a big box shopping center at the far end.
(07:32):
I'd read that the town attracts a lot of retirees
from urban places like Seattle in southern California, and I
could see why it felt like a land apart. But
I also knew it wasn't the fact that this area
was a bell weather that it swung back and forth
between political parties to pick the president every four years.
(07:54):
Told me that Squim's population was pretty bipartisan, that it
was a mostly white cross section of America. One of
my sources told us to go to the Hurricane Coffee Company,
a cafe on the downtown strip. He said it was
a good place to talk to residents and get a
feel for local life. That's coming up after the break.
(08:29):
What are we having today? Kathleen and I introduced ourselves
to a group of older folks seated in the back
of the cafe. It turned out they met there every
morning to shoot the breeze over a cup of coffee. Yeah,
most of them hadn't followed the drama with Mayor arm
Accost and Charlie Bush too closely. But when I asked
(08:50):
them what they thought about the Matt Clinic, well, they
were thoroughly opposed before they come down here, and they
give us all these insurances and it's I was like, uh,
like they're lying, you know. It's like, um, the people
that go to those uh the clinic are gonna create
a problem. That's what they feeling of the people think.
(09:14):
And I explain it away with lame uh statistics. Where
are those people gonna go until they go back again
to get there next dose of of what do you
call it? The the fake heroine that they use nothing?
(09:34):
Where are they gonna know? Where are they gonna go?
They have to be housed locally or else on the street,
and I think it will be on the streets. The
thing I'm most worried about, and as a teacher and
a grandmother and a mother, is that the they're gonna
probably some of them are going to come in by
(09:55):
bus uh and be dropped off up near there. But
then they get their treatment and then there let go
and the Yeah, they're supposed to go back to where
they came from, but I don't know. They planned it
right ahead of time. They even told us it was coming.
(10:16):
And we've talked to members of the tribe and they say,
we're independent. There's nothing you can do about it. You
just heard from Jim Nichols and Sharon and Joe Walsh.
They all lived in the Squim area, and they were
against the Matt Clinic for a variety of reasons. I'm
going to tell you more in a moment about what
the Matt Clinic was and who it was designed to serve,
(10:40):
but first I want to just sit for a moment
with what you just heard. Jim, Sharon, and Joe all
shared a fear of the people the Matt Clinic would
attract people with addiction. They said, homeless people, people with
problems coming in by the bus load. And there was
another thing. Joe mentioned the tribe, and he talked about
(11:03):
this tribe as if it was in control of everything
in the town and that people like him had no
say at all. We chatted for a while, and my
biggest takeaway from the conversation was that Jim, Sharon and
Joe were afraid, afraid of the Native American tribe who
(11:23):
was building the clinic and of the people who might
one day use it. They reminded me of other people
I've met before reporting on other local stories, people who
were shouting not in my backyard. Their detractors called them
nimbies for short. They'll often come in with critiques about
(11:44):
things like the size and sighting of an affordable housing
project or transit station in their neighborhood. They come from
all kinds of political persuasions and live in all kinds
of places, from New York City to small rural towns.
And for sure, some nimbies have legitimate concerns, but for others,
(12:04):
critics say their concerns are rooted in uglier fears about
other people. So what was this Matt Clinic? Actually? After
we said goodbye to the folks at the coffee shop,
I knew we had to go straight to the source.
And this is a specific treatment center for opioid use
(12:25):
disorder opioid addiction. So for folks that have been on
heroin for folks who have been on maybe opioid pills
or medications and they're trying to come off of those things.
This would be the treatment center for them. That's b
Lonnie Grenninger, the tribal vice chair for the Jamestown Scolumn
tribe that was the tribe that was proposing to build
(12:46):
the clinic. We as Jamestown for us UM, I know
our our clinic staff say it's a no brainer. This
is something that we should just provide for everyone, Native
and non Native, because we know that it's here in
our communit. We know that addictions here, we see it,
we live in. It's in Native communities, especially Um in fact,
(13:07):
you know, having disparities of this particular issue, any substance
use is more so in Native communities. But because we
so are intermingled, were intermarried, we're interdispersed with our checkerboard reservations,
so to speak, we know that we need to be
able to provide services for everyone. Lonnie is speaking to
the need for opioid addiction treatment in the area. Clallam County,
(13:31):
where Swim is located, has one of the highest rates
of opioid related death in all of Washington State, and
She also mentioned something unique about the Jamestown Scolumn tribe,
the fact that it is deeply integrated with the non
native Swim community. Unlike a lot of Native American tribes,
there is no single separate reservation. The businesses and homes
(13:56):
of tribal members sit alongside those of non native people,
and those businesses, including a medical center and dental clinic,
are open to everyone, not just tribal members. I say
all this to give you a sense of how the
tribe fits into the community. Jamestown Squalum is not some
other entity. It was already providing healthcare and other basic
(14:20):
services to everyone in Squim, and the Matt Clinic, similarly,
was designed to serve patients who were already in Kallum County.
In the neighboring county. Patients were not going to be
bust in from far away and dumped on the streets
of Squim, So the tribe's proposal was to build a
(14:40):
twenty million dollar opioid addiction treatment clinic on an empty
lot behind the Costco. When that plan became public in
spring twenty nine, Lonnie expected people to welcome it. When
we brought this idea forward to Squim, and the community
saying we're providing this on a leave. We were actually
(15:01):
surprised by some of the pushback that we received, but
even in the pushback, the way that we interpreted it
was there's just a misunderstanding. This is a misunderstanding of
what problems we're facing right now and a misunderstanding of
what what we, as James soun as a provider, wanting
to do. There was fear around increasing homelessness. There was
(15:24):
a fear around increasing crime in the area. There was
a fear that we would be attracting more homelessness and
crime to the area. And we just we disagreed respectfully.
And if there happens to be somebody who disagrees, you know,
but then they find themselves in a situation where they
have a family member or they themselves now need that treatment,
we will open our doors. We will open and welcome them. Um.
(15:48):
We do not want to turn anybody away, and we're
going to continue to live respectfully. We're going to continue
to live responsibly and continue to provide for our people
who we now count, you know, the non natives as
our people to be they are there in our community.
Lonnie wanted to help everyone in Squim. It was a
remarkably generous viewpoint, but it turned out a lot of
(16:09):
people in her own community didn't return that respect far
from it. On Facebook, a group called Save our Squim
had organized to oppose the MAT clinic. It formed in
July and very quickly grew into hundreds of members who
were against the MAT clinic. Later that month, the Squim
(16:31):
City Council announced it was holding a special meeting regarding
the clinic. Save our Squim members encourage each other to attend,
and more than five hundred people showed up. It was
standing room only. Charlie Bush was also there. He addressed
the audience, telling folks that at this point the tribe
hadn't even submitted a formal application to build anything, but
(16:54):
he assured everyone that their questions would be answered and
that the city would do its due Delain's when it
came time to review the project. We want to hear
from you tonight and we will be answering your questions
in writing regarding the permitting process and posting those answers
on our website. We will also be submitting questions about
the project that come up to the tribe for their response.
(17:16):
Thank you for being here tonight. Dozens of people got
up to speak that night, a lot of them from
Save Our Squim, one of the group's main organizers, asked
the city to put a hold on the development. People
were angry because they felt like they hadn't had to
say in the project. A lot of them were worried
about the size of the clinic and where it was
(17:37):
going to be located. One local who joined the Facebook
group told me she thought the clinic should have been
closer to other medical facilities in town. Becky Mitchell I
was born in squim Um. I didn't grow up here.
My dad was in the Air Force. Um that we
moved back twenty seven years ago. Oh my heck, Squim
(17:57):
has been developed in such a all you know, this
can go here, this can go there, and I just
would like to see, you know, just totally a little
bit more thought and planning to it. And I didn't
think that was the best location. And then I got
added to the Facebook group and I realized that there
was a lot of people on that for it. But
Becky noticed that other members have Saved our Swim. We're
(18:21):
fixated on a different set of fears, bigoted fears. A
lot of the people on there became just mean, and
there was a lot of stereotypes on. You know, as
it's going to bring people from all over, they're gonna
steal from our cars, They're gonna have homeless RVs in
our yards, you know, looking around, Oh you know, and
(18:41):
you'd see a next door there'd be all these people.
You know, always saw this person up here. We'll wait
till the math clinics open. They're going to be everyone.
And I'm like, whoa. UM. I think I finally had
it when some guy was going off on immigrants as well.
You know, they were adding a lot of um, it
just means stuff about people. You know. What also became
you know, we don't on drug at ex super we
(19:01):
also and the immigrants, and I was like, okay, that's it,
you're I called him out on it, and I think
that was when and I just guessed the ummigrants have
nothing to do with this whereth is coming from? And
then I kind of got I think there were some
other comments I made to some other people, mostly about
the stereotypes, and I got kicked at group. Um, yeah,
(19:23):
that's right. Becky said she got kicked out of the
group for calling out racist comments. I reached out to
the main organizer of Save our Squim for an interview,
but she declined to talk. So ugly rhetoric was raging
on Facebook. Anti Native comments appeared all over the Save
our Squim page. There were awful jokes about digging up
(19:47):
Native bones beneath the mat clinic, conspiracy theories about how
tribal leaders wanted to take over Squim. One poster called
the mac Clinic a quote TP development. Mixed into this
racist doo was the idea that city administrators were conspiring
with the tribe to build the clinic that they stood
(20:09):
to benefit. People started to call for city officials to
be fired, including Charlie Bush, since he was a city
manager and because he seemed pretty supportive of the development process.
So a clear wedge began to form. On one side
was save our Swim and on the other anyone who
supported the mat Clinic, and that put William Armacrost in
(20:33):
an interesting position at this point in time. In twenty nineteen,
Armacrost was a member of the elected city council, and
it turns out he was also against the mat clinic.
Here he is speaking at another city council meeting later
that summer, however, were and appointed. It's just too much
to swallow. It's a MEGAPMATS center. It's in the middle
(20:55):
of a small community that has attracted a lot of
people who choose this. This is where I want to
I want to die, I want to live here, raise
my family, have this good life. The sad reality that
is going to have a dramatic change. Wherever you have
drug addicts, you will have a following trail of drug dealers.
(21:15):
And the dealers are the cartel. It's big business. He
was repeating the unfounded speculation that the clinic was going
to attract a dangerous element to Squim, when in fact
it was designed to serve people already living in the area,
people who, in large part we're dealing with addictions to
prescription drugs. But see if our Squims demands to stop
(21:39):
the MAT clinic couldn't go very far legally speaking, why not?
That's coming up after the break. The land where the
james Son Skalmn tribe wanted to build a twenty acre
(22:01):
lot behind the Costco was already zoned for medical purposes.
People could send in public comments on the project, but
once the city reviewed and approved the application, the tribe
was essentially free to build, and if the city blocked
the clinic outright, it would potentially open itself up to
(22:21):
a lawsuit. So at that point, ARMACROST was in the
minority among the elected officials on city Council in the
sense that most other counselors didn't seem to see much
point in catering to the concerns of the anti Matt crowd.
But that didn't stop Save Our Squim from continuing its campaign.
(22:42):
As the months went on, the Facebook group grew. They
organized rallies, petitions, and fundraisers. Businesses put up Save our
Swim signs in their windows, and pretty soon it became
a full blown nonprofit with five O one sea for status,
accepting donations for a legal campaign it planned to mount
(23:03):
against the city. Here's one of the organizers rallying a
protest in downtown Squim towards the end of that year, November.
We're having soos goes to Italy. Yeah, dinner at the
Elf Club starting at five. We hope will see you
all there. Let's give a peck. Meanwhile, the anti Native
(23:27):
bigotry kept spewing on social media, and tribal members were
feeling the impact. Here's one resident, a tribal descendant in
Vicky Low describing the harm of all the ugly rhetoric.
She's speaking to Squim City Council in March, right before
the pandemic began. Good evening. My name is Vicky Low.
(23:50):
I'm a lifelong resident of Squim. I've lived within the
Squim City limits for over fifty years. I'm a descendant
of both pioneer families and of the James Town's clown tribe. Tonight,
I am here to speak to you about civil discourse,
about what it's like to be part of a community
where a small group of people attack your heritage on
(24:11):
a daily basis. The s OS facebook page is a
train wreck that people cannot stop watching. Not only are
people making these racist, hateful statements, many are watching and
not saying anything. When a person questions why hateful statements
are allowed, they're blocked from the site. These types of
attacks bring back the historical intergenerational trauma from the racism
(24:35):
our ancestors were victim to, bringing the trauma into today.
Tribal people have express fear of being in public with
a brown face. We feel unsafe to go to the
grocery shopping ride buses, go to the post office, go
for a walk in our own community. We all need
to do what we can do to stop racism, the
(24:55):
hateful behavior in our community. As are elected officials, we
need you all to step up and make sure it
is known that this kind of behavior is not okay.
Doing nothing is doing something. This is also my squid.
As Vicky delivered her comments, she held up big signs
printed with racist comments left in the group. She was
(25:18):
asking the city council to formally denounce the hateful speech,
but that didn't happen right away because things were about
to take a turn. It was March and that month
the pandemic hit. Save our Swim was already a repository
for conspiracy theories and fearmongering. COVID nineteen only poured more
(25:40):
fuel on the fire. Over the course of the pandemic,
the group transformed Save our Swim not only organized protests
about the Matt clinic, but against shutdowns and mask mandates.
Members posted conspiracy theories about the Washington State governor, local
health officials, and Anthony Fauci. And it kind of makes
(26:02):
sense when you think about it. Locals, a lot of
whom were older retirees like the folks I met at
the coffee shop. We're stuck at home, spending even more
time on Facebook looking for answers in a disorienting time.
Groups like Save Our Swim gave them something to do,
but there was also a danger. Soon the group was
(26:24):
drawing people from beyond Squim, from all over Washington and
its neighboring states, and as the Facebook page expanded to
contain a broader swath of far right ideologies, it caught
the attention of a group that tracks extremism, and they
were alarmed. My name is Devin Burkhardt. I'm the executive
director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human
(26:47):
Rights i r h R is a nonprofit organization that
tracks far right activity and helps communities build effective barriers
against bigotry. According to Devon's research, more than seventeen percent
of saber Squam members also belonged to Facebook groups that
his group classified as far right. Groups like I Refused
(27:08):
to Wear a Mask and Washington State both keepers. That
overlap was a red flag, Devon said, because it meant
that Saber Squim could serve as a starting point for
radicalization and possibly lead to real life violence. But there
was in fact efforts underway to try to radicalize a
(27:30):
much larger chunk of the of the population. Individuals who
might have been concerned initially about you know, how the
pandemic was being handled, but were then um deluged with
an endless stream of conspiracy theories and radicalized, radicalizing ideas
that quickly moved people from those entry points on which
(27:54):
they stepped onto that conveyor belt into you know, much
scarier places. And that actually happened, he said. He described
how one member of Save Our Squim was radicalized at
alarming speed, going from being a Bernie Sanders supporter before
the pandemic to following far right sovereign citizen groups less
(28:14):
than eighteen months later. Yet this was the sort of
pattern he was seeing in communities all over the country.
Larger political space created by the COVID denial activities has
exposed a much larger chunk of the American public to
these ideas. In fact, I think at our last count
we found that there were about different Facebook groups operating
(28:38):
the hun about two point four million members in them,
and virtually all of them have had, you know, to
one degree another exposure to this unending churn of conspiracies
and moving people ideologically much further to the right. As
some of Save Our Squim's most vocal supporters were moving
(28:58):
into the fringes of far right world, many of the
more moderate members members like Becky who you heard earlier,
stopped engaging. A lot of them were resigned to the
Matt Clinic getting built because it looked like that was
going to happen. In May, the City of Swim approved
the tribe's application Save our Swim die hards kept fighting,
(29:22):
filing a legal appeal that alleged that city officials had
acted improperly and violated the municipal Code, but the evidence
looked pretty thin. By the end of Save Our Swim
seemed to have only one big advantage, and that was
the composition of the city council. Because by that point,
the city council had voted to make William Armacrost the mayor.
(29:46):
He was in charge, and like so many members of
Save Our Swim, he was letting his far right flag fly.
He was posting right wing memes and q and On
videos on his Facebook page, and in late August he
made his infamous comments on the local radio show praising
q and on Remember this is when Charlie Bush put
(30:07):
out a statement distancing the city from the mayor. The
mayor apologized, but he didn't denounce what he said, and
at this point he wasn't in the minority on city
Council anymore. By the end of he had allies. In
a total coincidence of timing, three vacancies had opened up
(30:28):
on city Council. To fill those openings, the council, led
by Mayor Armacrost, appointed three new people. They would be
his allies on a number of consequential votes. So now
the pieces were in place. For months, Save Our Squad
members had been calling for Charlie Bush to be fired
(30:49):
because they believed baselessly that he was conspiring with the
tribe to build the mac clinic, and on January eleven,
the turmoil finally boiled over. Mayor Armor Cost called for
the resignation of Charlie Bush, and the three newly appointed
city council members voted with him to approve the motion.
(31:12):
This executive session we discussed the city manager Charlie Bush.
As a result of this discussion, I am prepared to
make the following motion. I move to direct the mayor
to negotiate with the city manager relating to his resignation.
I've spoken to dozens of people around Swim, and here's
what some locals think. Maybe Charlie Bush's austair was the
(31:35):
mayor's final attempt at stopping the MAT clinic. Or maybe
it was even simpler than that. Scapegoating Charlie Bush was
maybe a way for the mayor to flex his power
in away his supporters would appreciate. In the end, all
of this, the Save our Swim campaign, Charlie Bush's forced
(31:56):
resignation amounted to very little in terms of MATT Clinic.
The next month, a judge ruled in favor of the
Tribes project, effectively ending Save our Squims legal campaign. The
new opioid addiction treatment facility was going to be built,
whether locals liked it or not. It all sounds so familiar,
(32:18):
doesn't it. Swim shares many of the same themes as
Shasta County. Knowing all this backstory, it reminds me of
something an expert told me about the far right. Broadly,
he said, these groups often seek to destroy the institutions
they cannot legitimately control. But this story does not end
(32:39):
the same way as Shasta County because all along there
were people in Squim who were horrified by their racism
blaring on social media. They had been watching how Save
our Swim supporters were becoming radicalized, and they saw Charlie
Bush's dismissal as a dangerous shot across the bow. This
(33:00):
group is determined to prevent their city from falling further
into conspiracy theories and political chaos. They wanted to rebuild
the nonpartisan leadership that was supposed to be the foundation
of local government, and they wanted an end to the
racism that had boiled over online. Would they succeed and
(33:21):
how would they do it? That's next time on bed
Rock USA. This episode was reported and hosted by me
Laura Bliss. Kathleen Cilliant is our senior producer. Samantha Story
is our story editor and executive producer. We had additional
editing help from Nicole Flato, original music and scoring by
(33:44):
Zachary Walter, and audio engineering by Blake Maples. Jennifer Sandag
is head of Bloomberg City Lab. Bed Rock USA is
a production of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H
Over the last few episodes, I took you deep into
the heart of Shasta County, California, where a group of
far right activists recalled their Republican county supervisor for not
being radical enough in response to the pandemic. Faced with
these extreme politics, a lot of people in Shasta fell silent.
(00:23):
They were afraid to stand up for the facts, to
stand up for democracy. Later in the series, will head
back to Shasta for another high stakes election where right
wing activists tried to win even more county positions. First, though,
I want to tell you a different story, one with
(00:43):
similar themes but a different outcome. It's a story about
how a normal issue for a town government, a heated
battle over a proposed development, brought far right extremism to town.
And it's about how people stood up, organized and fought back.
So let's return to Swim, Washington, the small town where
(01:07):
this series began. Yeah. Hello, my name is Josh. I
live in Squim. I would request that Mayor Armacrost denounce
Q and on. You're listening to Bedrock USA, a production
of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio, a podcast
about political extremism, small town life, and the fight for democracy.
(01:32):
I'm your host more a bliss real quick, I want
to remind you of where the story of Squim left off.
Here's the play by play, so you just heard Josh Sutcliffe.
Days after January six, he called into a city council
meeting and asked the mayor of the town, William Arma Coost,
(01:56):
to denounce Q and On in a nutshell. Armac Coost
had posted memes about the baseless conspiracy theory on Facebook
and had praised it on live radio, and by this
point Josh had had enough and wanted to say so publicly.
He was freaked out because Q and On had just
been on violent display at the Capitol riot. But the
(02:19):
mayor completely ignored Josh's comment. He didn't say a word.
Then later in the meeting, seemingly out of nowhere, he
announced he was telling the city manager, Charlie Bush, to resign.
Charlie was a beloved long time official in Squim, the
guy who basically helped the city government function. To some locals,
(02:43):
it looked like Mayor Arma Coost was attempting to overthrow
his own local government in a sort of gesture of
support the January six protesters. Not only that, there were
other people on the council who voted to remove Charlie
Bush as well. That meant the mayor had allies, and
(03:04):
that's when I came across the story. I read a
tweet describing Charlie Bush's allister as a kind of mini
insurrection at the hands of Mayor Armacrost. The aftermath drew
national attention, including a big report on CNN. The small
community of Squim, Washington, question after question, Q and on
(03:25):
and the mayor are the talk of the town? Mayor,
excuse me? We you owe it to the citizens of Squim.
Residents fear that Squim population seven thousand, maybe the first
to have a Q and non conspiracy theorist and power.
The whole thing was so bonkers. There was so much
to unpack. A mayor who spread the word of Q
(03:49):
and on and what locals were calling an attempted coup.
My question was, did Charlie Bush's aust really all come
down to Q and on or was there more to it?
Because in small towns like Squim, there's almost always a backstory.
I had to get to the bottom of it, so
(04:11):
I started working the phones, calling up locals who could
tell me more. And what I heard was a little
more complicated, and this version of the story, well, it
was kind of like a parable for the rest of
the country because, like virtually any town in America, I
learned that Squim has had cracks in its bedrock that
(04:33):
go back years, metaphorical cracks formed by racism, fear, and resentment.
Long before the pandemic, extreme ideologies had begun to seep
into those cracks, threatening to destroy community trust and relationships.
Things began to fall apart with something called the Matt Clinic.
(04:57):
A larger perspective, I think that went drove a lot
of that was the Mat Clinic. It was after the
Matt Clinic, was the Matt clinic. The MATT clinic. That's
short for medication assisted treatment, meaning a facility or patients
dealing with opioid addiction received medication to handle their cravings.
(05:19):
It's similar to a methodone clinic, but with other services too,
like mental health, counseling, dentistry, and job assistance. These kinds
of clinics are nothing new, But what I came to
learn was that back in twenty nineteen, a proposal to
build a Matt Clinic in the heart of Squim tore
(05:40):
the town apart. One side it was very very opposed,
and the other side saw it as greatly needed. And
I also heard that Charlie Bush was supportive of the idea,
but Mayor arm Accost was not. Perhaps that was part
of why Bush was pushed out, locals believed. But there
(06:02):
was even more to the story, they said, because it
was a local Native American tribe that was proposing to
build the Matt Clinic, and some people really resented them.
This was too much to untangle over the phone. I
had to get a feel for the town myself, to
talk to people face to face. So earlier this year,
(06:24):
my producer Kathleen and I decided it was time to
visit Squim. We flew into Seattle, got our rental, and
drove on I five to Edmunds, where we caught the
ferry to Kingston. We made our way along the highway,
passing a dense forest of evergreens. Along the way, we
(06:46):
have crossed the Sound Pugeit. I had learned that the
county Squim is located in Clallam County, happens to be
America's longest running bell Weather, meaning it's the Lee County
in the whole United States that has voted for every
president in every election since nine, from Ronald Reagan through
(07:09):
Joe Biden. It made me wonder, if the Squim area
is a bell weather for the nation's president, what else
could it be a bell weather for? The landscape opened
up into a sunnier valley, and we turned off the
highway towards downtown Squim, a stretch of restaurants and boutiques
with a big box shopping center at the far end.
(07:32):
I'd read that the town attracts a lot of retirees
from urban places like Seattle in southern California, and I
could see why it felt like a land apart. But
I also knew it wasn't the fact that this area
was a bell weather that it swung back and forth
between political parties to pick the president every four years.
(07:54):
Told me that Squim's population was pretty bipartisan, that it
was a mostly white cross section of America. One of
my sources told us to go to the Hurricane Coffee Company,
a cafe on the downtown strip. He said it was
a good place to talk to residents and get a
feel for local life. That's coming up after the break.
(08:29):
What are we having today? Kathleen and I introduced ourselves
to a group of older folks seated in the back
of the cafe. It turned out they met there every
morning to shoot the breeze over a cup of coffee. Yeah,
most of them hadn't followed the drama with Mayor arm
Accost and Charlie Bush too closely. But when I asked
(08:50):
them what they thought about the Matt Clinic, well, they
were thoroughly opposed before they come down here, and they
give us all these insurances and it's I was like, uh,
like they're lying, you know. It's like, um, the people
that go to those uh the clinic are gonna create
a problem. That's what they feeling of the people think.
(09:14):
And I explain it away with lame uh statistics. Where
are those people gonna go until they go back again
to get there next dose of of what do you
call it? The the fake heroine that they use nothing?
(09:34):
Where are they gonna know? Where are they gonna go?
They have to be housed locally or else on the street,
and I think it will be on the streets. The
thing I'm most worried about, and as a teacher and
a grandmother and a mother, is that the they're gonna
probably some of them are going to come in by
(09:55):
bus uh and be dropped off up near there. But
then they get their treatment and then there let go
and the Yeah, they're supposed to go back to where
they came from, but I don't know. They planned it
right ahead of time. They even told us it was coming.
(10:16):
And we've talked to members of the tribe and they say,
we're independent. There's nothing you can do about it. You
just heard from Jim Nichols and Sharon and Joe Walsh.
They all lived in the Squim area, and they were
against the Matt Clinic for a variety of reasons. I'm
going to tell you more in a moment about what
the Matt Clinic was and who it was designed to serve,
(10:40):
but first I want to just sit for a moment
with what you just heard. Jim, Sharon, and Joe all
shared a fear of the people the Matt Clinic would
attract people with addiction. They said, homeless people, people with
problems coming in by the bus load. And there was
another thing. Joe mentioned the tribe, and he talked about
(11:03):
this tribe as if it was in control of everything
in the town and that people like him had no
say at all. We chatted for a while, and my
biggest takeaway from the conversation was that Jim, Sharon and
Joe were afraid, afraid of the Native American tribe who
(11:23):
was building the clinic and of the people who might
one day use it. They reminded me of other people
I've met before reporting on other local stories, people who
were shouting not in my backyard. Their detractors called them
nimbies for short. They'll often come in with critiques about
(11:44):
things like the size and sighting of an affordable housing
project or transit station in their neighborhood. They come from
all kinds of political persuasions and live in all kinds
of places, from New York City to small rural towns.
And for sure, some nimbies have legitimate concerns, but for others,
(12:04):
critics say their concerns are rooted in uglier fears about
other people. So what was this Matt Clinic? Actually? After
we said goodbye to the folks at the coffee shop,
I knew we had to go straight to the source.
And this is a specific treatment center for opioid use
(12:25):
disorder opioid addiction. So for folks that have been on
heroin for folks who have been on maybe opioid pills
or medications and they're trying to come off of those things.
This would be the treatment center for them. That's b
Lonnie Grenninger, the tribal vice chair for the Jamestown Scolumn
tribe that was the tribe that was proposing to build
(12:46):
the clinic. We as Jamestown for us UM, I know
our our clinic staff say it's a no brainer. This
is something that we should just provide for everyone, Native
and non Native, because we know that it's here in
our communit. We know that addictions here, we see it,
we live in. It's in Native communities, especially Um in fact,
(13:07):
you know, having disparities of this particular issue, any substance
use is more so in Native communities. But because we
so are intermingled, were intermarried, we're interdispersed with our checkerboard reservations,
so to speak, we know that we need to be
able to provide services for everyone. Lonnie is speaking to
the need for opioid addiction treatment in the area. Clallam County,
(13:31):
where Swim is located, has one of the highest rates
of opioid related death in all of Washington State, and
She also mentioned something unique about the Jamestown Scolumn tribe,
the fact that it is deeply integrated with the non
native Swim community. Unlike a lot of Native American tribes,
there is no single separate reservation. The businesses and homes
(13:56):
of tribal members sit alongside those of non native people,
and those businesses, including a medical center and dental clinic,
are open to everyone, not just tribal members. I say
all this to give you a sense of how the
tribe fits into the community. Jamestown Squalum is not some
other entity. It was already providing healthcare and other basic
(14:20):
services to everyone in Squim, and the Matt Clinic, similarly,
was designed to serve patients who were already in Kallum County.
In the neighboring county. Patients were not going to be
bust in from far away and dumped on the streets
of Squim, So the tribe's proposal was to build a
(14:40):
twenty million dollar opioid addiction treatment clinic on an empty
lot behind the Costco. When that plan became public in
spring twenty nine, Lonnie expected people to welcome it. When
we brought this idea forward to Squim, and the community
saying we're providing this on a leave. We were actually
(15:01):
surprised by some of the pushback that we received, but
even in the pushback, the way that we interpreted it
was there's just a misunderstanding. This is a misunderstanding of
what problems we're facing right now and a misunderstanding of
what what we, as James soun as a provider, wanting
to do. There was fear around increasing homelessness. There was
(15:24):
a fear around increasing crime in the area. There was
a fear that we would be attracting more homelessness and
crime to the area. And we just we disagreed respectfully.
And if there happens to be somebody who disagrees, you know,
but then they find themselves in a situation where they
have a family member or they themselves now need that treatment,
we will open our doors. We will open and welcome them. Um.
(15:48):
We do not want to turn anybody away, and we're
going to continue to live respectfully. We're going to continue
to live responsibly and continue to provide for our people
who we now count, you know, the non natives as
our people to be they are there in our community.
Lonnie wanted to help everyone in Squim. It was a
remarkably generous viewpoint, but it turned out a lot of
(16:09):
people in her own community didn't return that respect far
from it. On Facebook, a group called Save our Squim
had organized to oppose the MAT clinic. It formed in
July and very quickly grew into hundreds of members who
were against the MAT clinic. Later that month, the Squim
(16:31):
City Council announced it was holding a special meeting regarding
the clinic. Save our Squim members encourage each other to attend,
and more than five hundred people showed up. It was
standing room only. Charlie Bush was also there. He addressed
the audience, telling folks that at this point the tribe
hadn't even submitted a formal application to build anything, but
(16:54):
he assured everyone that their questions would be answered and
that the city would do its due Delain's when it
came time to review the project. We want to hear
from you tonight and we will be answering your questions
in writing regarding the permitting process and posting those answers
on our website. We will also be submitting questions about
the project that come up to the tribe for their response.
(17:16):
Thank you for being here tonight. Dozens of people got
up to speak that night, a lot of them from
Save Our Squim, one of the group's main organizers, asked
the city to put a hold on the development. People
were angry because they felt like they hadn't had to
say in the project. A lot of them were worried
about the size of the clinic and where it was
(17:37):
going to be located. One local who joined the Facebook
group told me she thought the clinic should have been
closer to other medical facilities in town. Becky Mitchell I
was born in squim Um. I didn't grow up here.
My dad was in the Air Force. Um that we
moved back twenty seven years ago. Oh my heck, Squim
(17:57):
has been developed in such a all you know, this
can go here, this can go there, and I just
would like to see, you know, just totally a little
bit more thought and planning to it. And I didn't
think that was the best location. And then I got
added to the Facebook group and I realized that there
was a lot of people on that for it. But
Becky noticed that other members have Saved our Swim. We're
(18:21):
fixated on a different set of fears, bigoted fears. A
lot of the people on there became just mean, and
there was a lot of stereotypes on. You know, as
it's going to bring people from all over, they're gonna
steal from our cars, They're gonna have homeless RVs in
our yards, you know, looking around, Oh you know, and
(18:41):
you'd see a next door there'd be all these people.
You know, always saw this person up here. We'll wait
till the math clinics open. They're going to be everyone.
And I'm like, whoa. UM. I think I finally had
it when some guy was going off on immigrants as well.
You know, they were adding a lot of um, it
just means stuff about people. You know. What also became
you know, we don't on drug at ex super we
(19:01):
also and the immigrants, and I was like, okay, that's it,
you're I called him out on it, and I think
that was when and I just guessed the ummigrants have
nothing to do with this whereth is coming from? And
then I kind of got I think there were some
other comments I made to some other people, mostly about
the stereotypes, and I got kicked at group. Um, yeah,
(19:23):
that's right. Becky said she got kicked out of the
group for calling out racist comments. I reached out to
the main organizer of Save our Squim for an interview,
but she declined to talk. So ugly rhetoric was raging
on Facebook. Anti Native comments appeared all over the Save
our Squim page. There were awful jokes about digging up
(19:47):
Native bones beneath the mat clinic, conspiracy theories about how
tribal leaders wanted to take over Squim. One poster called
the mac Clinic a quote TP development. Mixed into this
racist doo was the idea that city administrators were conspiring
with the tribe to build the clinic that they stood
(20:09):
to benefit. People started to call for city officials to
be fired, including Charlie Bush, since he was a city
manager and because he seemed pretty supportive of the development process.
So a clear wedge began to form. On one side
was save our Swim and on the other anyone who
supported the mat Clinic, and that put William Armacrost in
(20:33):
an interesting position at this point in time. In twenty nineteen,
Armacrost was a member of the elected city council, and
it turns out he was also against the mat clinic.
Here he is speaking at another city council meeting later
that summer, however, were and appointed. It's just too much
to swallow. It's a MEGAPMATS center. It's in the middle
(20:55):
of a small community that has attracted a lot of
people who choose this. This is where I want to
I want to die, I want to live here, raise
my family, have this good life. The sad reality that
is going to have a dramatic change. Wherever you have
drug addicts, you will have a following trail of drug dealers.
(21:15):
And the dealers are the cartel. It's big business. He
was repeating the unfounded speculation that the clinic was going
to attract a dangerous element to Squim, when in fact
it was designed to serve people already living in the area,
people who, in large part we're dealing with addictions to
prescription drugs. But see if our Squims demands to stop
(21:39):
the MAT clinic couldn't go very far legally speaking, why not?
That's coming up after the break. The land where the
james Son Skalmn tribe wanted to build a twenty acre
(22:01):
lot behind the Costco was already zoned for medical purposes.
People could send in public comments on the project, but
once the city reviewed and approved the application, the tribe
was essentially free to build, and if the city blocked
the clinic outright, it would potentially open itself up to
(22:21):
a lawsuit. So at that point, ARMACROST was in the
minority among the elected officials on city Council in the
sense that most other counselors didn't seem to see much
point in catering to the concerns of the anti Matt crowd.
But that didn't stop Save Our Squim from continuing its campaign.
(22:42):
As the months went on, the Facebook group grew. They
organized rallies, petitions, and fundraisers. Businesses put up Save our
Swim signs in their windows, and pretty soon it became
a full blown nonprofit with five O one sea for status,
accepting donations for a legal campaign it planned to mount
(23:03):
against the city. Here's one of the organizers rallying a
protest in downtown Squim towards the end of that year, November.
We're having soos goes to Italy. Yeah, dinner at the
Elf Club starting at five. We hope will see you
all there. Let's give a peck. Meanwhile, the anti Native
(23:27):
bigotry kept spewing on social media, and tribal members were
feeling the impact. Here's one resident, a tribal descendant in
Vicky Low describing the harm of all the ugly rhetoric.
She's speaking to Squim City Council in March, right before
the pandemic began. Good evening. My name is Vicky Low.
(23:50):
I'm a lifelong resident of Squim. I've lived within the
Squim City limits for over fifty years. I'm a descendant
of both pioneer families and of the James Town's clown tribe. Tonight,
I am here to speak to you about civil discourse,
about what it's like to be part of a community
where a small group of people attack your heritage on
(24:11):
a daily basis. The s OS facebook page is a
train wreck that people cannot stop watching. Not only are
people making these racist, hateful statements, many are watching and
not saying anything. When a person questions why hateful statements
are allowed, they're blocked from the site. These types of
attacks bring back the historical intergenerational trauma from the racism
(24:35):
our ancestors were victim to, bringing the trauma into today.
Tribal people have express fear of being in public with
a brown face. We feel unsafe to go to the
grocery shopping ride buses, go to the post office, go
for a walk in our own community. We all need
to do what we can do to stop racism, the
(24:55):
hateful behavior in our community. As are elected officials, we
need you all to step up and make sure it
is known that this kind of behavior is not okay.
Doing nothing is doing something. This is also my squid.
As Vicky delivered her comments, she held up big signs
printed with racist comments left in the group. She was
(25:18):
asking the city council to formally denounce the hateful speech,
but that didn't happen right away because things were about
to take a turn. It was March and that month
the pandemic hit. Save our Swim was already a repository
for conspiracy theories and fearmongering. COVID nineteen only poured more
(25:40):
fuel on the fire. Over the course of the pandemic,
the group transformed Save our Swim not only organized protests
about the Matt clinic, but against shutdowns and mask mandates.
Members posted conspiracy theories about the Washington State governor, local
health officials, and Anthony Fauci. And it kind of makes
(26:02):
sense when you think about it. Locals, a lot of
whom were older retirees like the folks I met at
the coffee shop. We're stuck at home, spending even more
time on Facebook looking for answers in a disorienting time.
Groups like Save Our Swim gave them something to do,
but there was also a danger. Soon the group was
(26:24):
drawing people from beyond Squim, from all over Washington and
its neighboring states, and as the Facebook page expanded to
contain a broader swath of far right ideologies, it caught
the attention of a group that tracks extremism, and they
were alarmed. My name is Devin Burkhardt. I'm the executive
director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human
(26:47):
Rights i r h R is a nonprofit organization that
tracks far right activity and helps communities build effective barriers
against bigotry. According to Devon's research, more than seventeen percent
of saber Squam members also belonged to Facebook groups that
his group classified as far right. Groups like I Refused
(27:08):
to Wear a Mask and Washington State both keepers. That
overlap was a red flag, Devon said, because it meant
that Saber Squim could serve as a starting point for
radicalization and possibly lead to real life violence. But there
was in fact efforts underway to try to radicalize a
(27:30):
much larger chunk of the of the population. Individuals who
might have been concerned initially about you know, how the
pandemic was being handled, but were then um deluged with
an endless stream of conspiracy theories and radicalized, radicalizing ideas
that quickly moved people from those entry points on which
(27:54):
they stepped onto that conveyor belt into you know, much
scarier places. And that actually happened, he said. He described
how one member of Save Our Squim was radicalized at
alarming speed, going from being a Bernie Sanders supporter before
the pandemic to following far right sovereign citizen groups less
(28:14):
than eighteen months later. Yet this was the sort of
pattern he was seeing in communities all over the country.
Larger political space created by the COVID denial activities has
exposed a much larger chunk of the American public to
these ideas. In fact, I think at our last count
we found that there were about different Facebook groups operating
(28:38):
the hun about two point four million members in them,
and virtually all of them have had, you know, to
one degree another exposure to this unending churn of conspiracies
and moving people ideologically much further to the right. As
some of Save Our Squim's most vocal supporters were moving
(28:58):
into the fringes of far right world, many of the
more moderate members members like Becky who you heard earlier,
stopped engaging. A lot of them were resigned to the
Matt Clinic getting built because it looked like that was
going to happen. In May, the City of Swim approved
the tribe's application Save our Swim die hards kept fighting,
(29:22):
filing a legal appeal that alleged that city officials had
acted improperly and violated the municipal Code, but the evidence
looked pretty thin. By the end of Save Our Swim
seemed to have only one big advantage, and that was
the composition of the city council. Because by that point,
the city council had voted to make William Armacrost the mayor.
(29:46):
He was in charge, and like so many members of
Save Our Swim, he was letting his far right flag fly.
He was posting right wing memes and q and On
videos on his Facebook page, and in late August he
made his infamous comments on the local radio show praising
q and on Remember this is when Charlie Bush put
(30:07):
out a statement distancing the city from the mayor. The
mayor apologized, but he didn't denounce what he said, and
at this point he wasn't in the minority on city
Council anymore. By the end of he had allies. In
a total coincidence of timing, three vacancies had opened up
(30:28):
on city Council. To fill those openings, the council, led
by Mayor Armacrost, appointed three new people. They would be
his allies on a number of consequential votes. So now
the pieces were in place. For months, Save Our Squad
members had been calling for Charlie Bush to be fired
(30:49):
because they believed baselessly that he was conspiring with the
tribe to build the mac clinic, and on January eleven,
the turmoil finally boiled over. Mayor Armor Cost called for
the resignation of Charlie Bush, and the three newly appointed
city council members voted with him to approve the motion.
(31:12):
This executive session we discussed the city manager Charlie Bush.
As a result of this discussion, I am prepared to
make the following motion. I move to direct the mayor
to negotiate with the city manager relating to his resignation.
I've spoken to dozens of people around Swim, and here's
what some locals think. Maybe Charlie Bush's austair was the
(31:35):
mayor's final attempt at stopping the MAT clinic. Or maybe
it was even simpler than that. Scapegoating Charlie Bush was
maybe a way for the mayor to flex his power
in away his supporters would appreciate. In the end, all
of this, the Save our Swim campaign, Charlie Bush's forced
(31:56):
resignation amounted to very little in terms of MATT Clinic.
The next month, a judge ruled in favor of the
Tribes project, effectively ending Save our Squims legal campaign. The
new opioid addiction treatment facility was going to be built,
whether locals liked it or not. It all sounds so familiar,
(32:18):
doesn't it. Swim shares many of the same themes as
Shasta County. Knowing all this backstory, it reminds me of
something an expert told me about the far right. Broadly,
he said, these groups often seek to destroy the institutions
they cannot legitimately control. But this story does not end
(32:39):
the same way as Shasta County because all along there
were people in Squim who were horrified by their racism
blaring on social media. They had been watching how Save
our Swim supporters were becoming radicalized, and they saw Charlie
Bush's dismissal as a dangerous shot across the bow. This
(33:00):
group is determined to prevent their city from falling further
into conspiracy theories and political chaos. They wanted to rebuild
the nonpartisan leadership that was supposed to be the foundation
of local government, and they wanted an end to the
racism that had boiled over online. Would they succeed and
(33:21):
how would they do it? That's next time on bed
Rock USA. This episode was reported and hosted by me
Laura Bliss. Kathleen Cilliant is our senior producer. Samantha Story
is our story editor and executive producer. We had additional
editing help from Nicole Flato, original music and scoring by
(33:44):
Zachary Walter, and audio engineering by Blake Maples. Jennifer Sandag
is head of Bloomberg City Lab. Bed Rock USA is
a production of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H
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