Reward: I will talk with you for a full hour about universal basic income if you just tell me who made these signs.
Reward: I will talk with you for a full hour about universal basic income if you just tell me who made these signs. AC

Late last month, one of my colleagues here at the Stranger saw these two posters wheat-pasted to the carapace of the construction project next to our office. And yet still, they haunt me.

To save you the trouble of zooming in and squinting, the all-caps fine print on the Molly Moon / Cary Moon poster reads:

Neither Molly Moon Nor Carry [sic] Moon were responsible for paying a convicted child molester $90,000 to maliciously entrap two mentally ill Muslim men into a terrorist conspiracy, sleep with their wives, and steal their money, unlike Jenny Durkan, who defended her actions by stating "You can't always use saints to catch sinners." For legal purposes, we would like to repeat that neither of the Moon sisters are responsible for paying a convicted child molester $90,000 to maliciously entrap two mentally ill Muslim men into a terrorist conspiracy, sleep with their wives, and steal their money. The only person responsible for this is Jenny Durkan. She bears no relation to the Moons.

The artist is slightly misquoting a line Durkan gave the Seattle Times during their coverage of a "a troubled terrorism" investigation she prosecuted back in 2013.

The Times quotes Durkan saying, "It's not the saints who can bring us the sinners," after she faced criticism for paying convicted child molester Robert Childs $90K to serve as an informant in the case against Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahihd. As my former Stranger colleague Brendan Kiley noted in a piece about Childs "prowling the anarchist scene" months after Abdul-Latif and Mujahihd were sentenced, the case was "troubled" because both men had histories of mental illness, and it was Childs who approached the Seattle Police Department with the news that Abdul-Latif was planning an attack, and one of the detectives on the case, Samuel DeJesus, deleted 400 text messages from Childs despite the fact that he was told to keep them. So, hm!

Anyhow, all of this raises a few questions.

Why did the artist only slightly misquote Durkan? Why is the artist sort of implicating Cary Moon in this madness by associating her name with an event she wasn't involved in? And why perpetuate the myth that Cary Moon is related to Molly Moon? Is it because the whole Seattle industrial-mayoral race complex must be burnt to the motherfuckin' ground, and putting up some posters around town to rouse the suspicions of an overworked writer is the only way to light that fire?!?!?!?!?!?

I want to know.

So, slide into my inbox, you anarchist apparently looking for freelance graphic design work! Or you misguided Moon operative! Or you jilted Jessyn Farrell fan!

rsmith@thestranger.com