On Saturday, an extremist anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion group called Mayday USA took over the center of Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill. And this far-right invasion wasn’t a shock. It was a city-permitted prayer rally at the center of Seattle’s queerest neighborhood.
On the first day of Memorial Day weekend, when queer Seattleites would typically be sunbathing in the grass, Seattle’s parks department granted the group a 15-hour permit to dominate the park with stadium speakers. Across the field that once hosted the Black Lives Matter Memorial Garden, they set up tents for children’s haircuts, facepainting, a bike give away, and a raffle for grocery store gift cards. In front of the public bathrooms, there was a towering stage with a pink and blue banner that read #DontMessWithOurKids. From a distance, with your ears plugged, the saturated colors could have been mistaken for a Pride rally.
But the voices thundered over the Hill: California-based Minister Ross Johnston speaking in tongues, the choruses of “Our God Is an Awesome God,” and the crowd 500-people deep with their hands raised, crying out about the Godless destruction of the American family.
We knew they were coming. They’d been promoting the event for weeks, and Seattle’s Department of Parks and Recreation permitted the event from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. that day. Hundreds came from as far as Boise and Spokane, where On Fire Ministries is based. Hundreds more Seattleites staged counterprotests. The first was by the fountain, where punk bands tried to drown out the megachurch rock—and offered fascism-free haircuts. The second, called “Keep Your Bibles Off Our Bodies,” was organized by Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity, Puget Sound Mobilization for Reproductive Justice and Radical Women. LGBTQ advocates made a crescent around the event, booing and chanting with signs that read “Republican Lies Kill Trans People” and “The LGBTQ Agenda is a peaceful existence.”
That friction would have been hot enough on its own, but between them were dozens of cops, armed, packing “less than lethal” weapons, carrying batons, and announcing instructions on a massive cruiser-mounted speaker. They set up a barrier between the two groups and stood with batons in hand, always facing the counterprotesters. The protest lasted more than six hours, and in that time the police made 23 arrests. All of them counterprotesters, all of them thrown to the ground and cuffed. An elderly man was shoved violently back over the barrier after sitting in peaceful protest on the other side. Witnesses describe cops dragging protestors over the barrier for shouting in the officers’ faces. Other protesters, seemingly zip tied and incapacitated, were pepper sprayed.
By 7 p.m., SPD asked the far-right group to end the event, three hours ahead of schedule, exactly as Mayday USA wanted it. With the protection of the police, they went to a historically gay park in a historically gay neighborhood in a historically gay city for a “spiritual” battle. They showed their followers queer people weren’t untouchable and that power would side with them over their vulnerable targets. And still, they were able to cry victim—claiming that Seattle is their Goliath, and using it as a rallying cry.
Why did the City of Seattle willingly hand the far right a win this weekend?
It helps to understand Mayday USA. On Saturday, hours into the rally, a young woman in a Mayday shirt walked up to me and asked, “Does this shock you?”
That was, most likely, the plan: to bring loud, boisterous, joyous hate speech into progressive areas as a media stunt. Worst case, they can show good, Christian “principled struggle,” bringing the Word to the heathens. Best case, they get a reaction out of Seattle, and can claim that the Christian right is being attacked by “far left trangender radical leftists.”
This tactic is showing its roots. Mayday USA is new, but it has decades of far-right activism behind it. Most notably, it’s supported by former six-term Washington State Representative Matt Shea from Spokane. In 2019, the far-right politician was investigated by the Republican party for his involvement in domestic terrorism as a leader of the Patriot Movement. Shea was involved in training young people to fight a “holy war,” created a pamphlet called Biblical Basis for War, and advocated for replacing the government with a theocracy and “the killing of all males who do not agree.” In 2022, he was caught by Polish authorities bringing Ukrainian orphans out of the country, and trying to place them with American Christian families.
Shea was at the rally on Saturday, representing his Spokane-based church, On Fire Ministries, and making Instagram reels about how beautiful it was that the men were on the front lines, protecting the worshiping women from the counterprotestors. (They were standing behind the cops, alongside their own private security.)
So how was this far-right group granted a 15-hour permit in Capitol Hill?
In a public statement on Saturday night, Mayor Bruce Harrell acknowledged that the “far-right rally was held here…to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city’s values, in the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood.” But neither the Mayor’s office nor the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation have responded to The Stranger’s questions about their decision to grant the permit.
On Saturday, one of the Mayday USA organizers told the Seattle Times that Cal Anderson wasn’t the group’s first choice. They said they’d originally asked to go to Victor Steinbrueck Park by Pike Place Market, but, they claimed, the city said no. (When reached for comment, the Seattle Parks and Recreation said that Mayday USA had first applied for a permit for a street location through the Office of Economic Development. Their first request to Seattle Parks and Recreation, the mayor’s office said, was for Cal Anderson. “We are required to enable the expression of free speech throughout the parks system,” they wrote. “As the park was available and met the size and logistical needs for the event requested, the permit was granted.”)
Whether or not the park was their first choice, the organizers took advantage of their position in Cal Anderson.
In an Instagram reel at the event, Shea and Wenatchee minister Folake Kellogg celebrated being in Capitol Hill. “In 2020, we know what happened on this ground,” Kellogg said, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests. “We are in a spiritual battle. We are holding the ground.”
In the evening, the event pivoted from Jesus jams to religious testimony. One raspy-voiced woman told her life story from the stage: how she was raped and molested, how she turned to drugs and landed in federal prison. She spoke directly to the counterprotesters, parroting an age-old piece of anti-gay propaganda: She understood their pain, that she too had been molested like they all had, that they could find Jesus if they chose him.
While the speakers inflamed the crowd, SPD maintained a physical wall between the alt-right event and the counterprotesters. They put up metal barriers, and for most of the event, maintained a wall of cops as well—with their backs to the stage, trained on the counterprotest.
The barricade created a line that the police could enforce, and the cops appeared to take every opportunity to do so. All 23 arrests were physical and violent. Charlette LeFevre, the director of Capitol Hill Pride, had set up a booth near the fountain to show support for the counterprotesters. The small, greying woman in a high-vis vest paced the barrier, scolding the cops.
“They’re using whatever excuse—just even somebody yelling in their face—to pull them over [the barricade] and arrest,” LaFevre told The Stranger on Saturday. “It’s not illegal to yell in somebody’s face. But I actually saw it happen firsthand.”
The only elected official at the park that day was Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who was working with SPD and city leaders, asking them to shut down the event before it escalated further. (Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who represents Capitol Hill, did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment before publication, and has not made a statement about the event.)
After SPD finally asked the far right group to shut down around 6:30 p.m., Mayday USA couldn’t help but take a last swipe at the counter protesters. “We got you to come to church,” one of them shouted. “You see how happy we are!”
The cops maintained a stiff physical barrier between the protesters and the Mayday attendees filtering out of the park.
Throughout the weekend, elected officials and campaign hopefuls reprimanded the City and the parks department for permitting the event. The Seattle LGBTQ Commission “condemned” the event. “Eyewitnesses and press reports suggest that SPD escalated tensions instead of protecting community members from the far-right group’s targeted anti-LGBTQ rhetoric,” they wrote, and called for an investigation into SPD’s actions, a review of the permitting process, and “meaningful community engagement.”
Mayday USA used the mayor’s statement correctly identifying them as a far-right extremist group as proof they’d been oppressed by the City of Seattle.
They called for a “Rattle in Seattle”: a protest at City Hall on Tuesday against “the religious bigotry of Mayor Bruce Harrell,” calling for him to “apologize or resign.” “We’ve done 3 Mayday events with perfect peace,” they wrote on Instagram. “But in Seattle, we hit Goliath.”
Vivian McCall contributed additional reporting to this story.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Matt Shea as a US representative. He was a Washington State representative.
@8: “If only you had felt the same way when Sawant went to Durkan’s house, since that’s way worse than protesting in a public park.”
@44: “… then, as that’s illegal, enjoy a stay in jail.”
The Stranger has taken an abolitionist position. Coincidence? I think not.
@44: “And I would suggest that, regardless whether it is legally permitted, people of conscience have a moral obligation to beat up, for example, Nazis.”
You just torpedoed your morality with such an evil statement about morality. In your eyes, it’s totally subjective on who gets beat up. You’re just a renegade vigilante.
@50 it was a permitted event. The city told them which options were available for permitting.
This is all moot anyway: first amendment says they could be at any park they wanted to, even Cal Anderson.
Unfortunately our local violent thug set decided that acting out and giving them exactly what they wanted was more important than recognizing basic fundamental human rights in the United States, presumably because they’re uneducated morons who don’t understand the first amendment.
So now, consequences.
Learn to use your words. The normies are done with this bullshit. It has been a very long decade and violent activists have been tolerated far too long in this city.
43: IOTW, you’d have effectively told the antifascists to give up on fighting fascism, effectively, since fascists never act in good faith and since it isn’t possible to use bland timid “free speech” to defeat fascism- it never has been- whatever you can say of how the Republican(antifascist) side in the Spanish Civil War fared(and it was never an actual civil war, it was nothing but an extended military coup against a democratically-elected left-of-center government the military had no justification for trying to overthrow) the Republicans held Franco off for three years- had they done what you wanted and just blandly, mundanely given speeches, he’d have ruled Spain in 1936, not 1939.
And no, the fact that, out of nothing but a narrow sense of “national interests”, the British government finally fought Hitler and fascism when it was too late to matter- when Hitler had already taken over Europe and when it was too late to save all the peoples Hitler had planned all along to exterminate- doesn’t vindicate that government’s refusal to stop Mosley in the 1930s or what it had done to enable fascism before then
There was no way to use bland, mundane, passionless “free speech”, by itself, to stop Mosley- and there was no way to protect the overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood of Cable Street from Mosley’s Black Shirts and the violence they had announced they were going to inflict without physically blocking the Black Shirts from getting to Cable Street. Nothing “respectable” would have worked.
“Free speech” can only defeat oppression in conflicts where it isn’t the only method used and in conflicts where what free speech tried to defeat acts in something like good faith, so it can never, by itself, be used to defeat fascism, racism, or hate.
It was a victory for nothing but hatred and injustice that this hate rally in Cal Anderson Park went forward. There is no way that the City’s cooperation with bigots- all of which will inevitably choose violence at some point- can ever lead to those bigots ultimately being defeated.
And if you’re going to bring in Dr. King’s movement- btw, from what I’ve heard, all Black people are disgusted with timid white centrists invocation of that movement’s nonviolence, and especially with its implication that Black and Brown and LGBTQ+ and Indigenous and Immigrant people(s)
have no right ever to fight back against their oppressors and owed it to the timid “respectable” white centrists like yourself to be sitting ducks against those who show up to kill them, you should know that Dr. King realized that and started having armed security at his rallies and marches…the “Deacons for Defense and Justice”, led the activist and musician Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick.
People like you, who live in privilege and complete safety- as all rich people do- have a limited right to judge the tactics of those who are actively fighting for their lives. Yes, you’re supposedly LGBTQ+, but your wealth guarantees your safety. Nobody in that neighborhood has any protections, and the cops in that neighborhood have never protected or defended LGBTQ+ people.
43: IOTW, you’d have effectively told the antifascists to give up on fighting fascism, effectively, since fascists never act in good faith and since it isn’t possible to use bland timid “free speech” to defeat fascism- it never has been- whatever you can say of how the Republican(antifascist) side in the Spanish Civil War fared(and it was never an actual civil war, it was nothing but an extended military coup against a democratically-elected left-of-center government the military had no justification for trying to overthrow) the Republicans held Franco off for three years- had they done what you wanted and just blandly, mundanely given speeches, he’d have ruled Spain in 1936, not 1939.
And no, the fact that, out of nothing but a narrow sense of “national interests”, the British government finally fought Hitler and fascism when it was too late to matter- when Hitler had already taken over Europe and when it was too late to save all the peoples Hitler had planned all along to exterminate- doesn’t vindicate that government’s refusal to stop Mosley in the 1930s or what it had done to enable fascism before then
There was no way to use bland, mundane, passionless “free speech”, by itself, to stop Mosley- and there was no way to protect the overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood of Cable Street from Mosley’s Black Shirts and the violence they had announced they were going to inflict without physically blocking the Black Shirts from getting to Cable Street. Nothing “respectable” would have worked.
“Free speech” can only defeat oppression in conflicts where it isn’t the only method used and in conflicts where what free speech tried to defeat acts in something like good faith, so it can never, by itself, be used to defeat fascism, racism, or hate.
It was a victory for nothing but hatred and injustice that this hate rally in Cal Anderson Park went forward. There is no way that the City’s cooperation with bigots- all of which will inevitably choose violence at some point- can ever lead to those bigots ultimately being defeated.
And if you’re going to bring in Dr. King’s movement- btw, from what I’ve heard, all Black people are disgusted with timid white centrists invocation of that movement’s nonviolence, and especially with its implication that Black and Brown and LGBTQ+ and Indigenous and Immigrant people(s)
have no right ever to fight back against their oppressors and owed it to the timid “respectable” white centrists like yourself to be sitting ducks against those who show up to kill them, you should know that Dr. King realized that and started having armed security at his rallies and marches…the “Deacons for Defense and Justice”, led the activist and musician Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick.
People like you, who live in privilege and complete safety- as all rich people do- have a limited right to judge the tactics of those who are actively fighting for their lives. Yes, you’re supposedly LGBTQ+, but your wealth guarantees your safety. Nobody in that neighborhood has any protections, and the cops in that neighborhood have never protected or defended LGBTQ+ people.
@53, That’s not factually correct, based on the evidence you supplied. Since you encourage people to use their words, please show proof that these were the only two permits available based on evidence to support your claim. What those texts you link to show is that those were simply two recommendations. You have made the leap to assuming those were the only permits available based on what exactly?
@53 The text from the city that Johnson provided says “You can contact the parks department to inquire about permits at those parks OR OTHER PARKS.” Did they inquire about other parks? Where is the evidence that they were told Cal Anderson was the only park available? Even Johnson’s intro to his post says they were “suggestions.”
Using your words to argue is also my preferred method, but it’s obnoxious when the people encouraging that choose to be deliberately misleading in their counter arguments.
@53 “Unfortunately our local violent thug set decided that acting out and giving them exactly what they wanted was more important than recognizing basic fundamental human rights in the United States, presumably because they’re uneducated morons who don’t understand the first amendment.”
You had a good run but you exposed yourself as a troll here, especially given I had just explained the First Amendment to you a few comments above.
@52 since the other person mentioned Skokie, here’s a quote from an article about it:
“The Jewish War Veterans organization said they would mount a counter demonstration. Others said that would give the neo-Nazis the publicity they were seeking. Better to stay off the streets.
“But there was a time we were told to stay at home when the Nazis marched through the streets,” Gans said. “That won’t happen again.”
In her youth, the strategy of the European Jewish leaders was to avoid confrontations with Hitler’s followers. Eventually the German people would be tired of his antics. Rule of law would be restored, and life would return to normal for Jews.
Instead, the Holocaust followed.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/01/22/vintage-chicago-tribune-in-1977-skokie-was-a-refuge-for-thousands-of-holocaust-survivors-then-a-group-of-self-styled-nazis-planned-a-march/
@44: “people of conscience have a moral obligation to beat up, for example, Nazis.”
But the police have a legal obligation to detain, arrest and/or charge people engaging in violent acts. Furthermore, did anyone check to see if they were members in good standing of the Nazi party? Or just someone you don’t like?
@60 “did anyone check to see if they were members in good standing of the Nazi party? Or just someone you don’t like?”
You’re asking whether anyone checked if the marchers in Skokie, which is what we were talking about, were Nazis? Are you not familiar with what happened in Skokie?
@55: “…had they done what you wanted and just blandly, mundanely given speeches,”
Your persistent making of ignorant assumptions does not actually satisfy your need for actual knowledge. Last time, your illiteracy, in believing “tens-” and “trans-” were the same thing (they’re not), misled you to the conclusion I’d changed my nym simply to spite trans’ persons.
In this case, please read my comment @34, wherein I proposed if the May Day USA bigots return to Cal Anderson Park, the local LGBTQ+ community should take positive (and baldly provocative) actions, to monkey-wrench the May Day USA event. (Please note I wrote nothing about the LGBTQ+ community making speeches.)
As you missed it completely, my point @43 was to refute @13’s claim. @13 wrote that active opposition to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists by left-wing Britons in the 1930s harmed Mosley’s Fascist cause in the UK. In fact, the left-wing opposition’s methods played straight into Mosley’s hands, strengthening his Fascist movement in Britain. The British Fascist movement was destroyed not by any leftists, but by the British government, after the UK went to war with Nazi Germany. And the leader of that government, who refused to make peace with the Nazi government of Germany, was none other than Britain’s most famous Tory, Winston Churchill.
“…from Mosley’s Black Shirts and the violence they had announced they were going to inflict…”
At what time prior to the Battle of Cable Street did Mosley claim, either in private or public, that the British Union of Fascists would inflict violence upon any citizens of London? His purpose in the march was to show the Fascists were law-abiding citizens, by contrasting the Fascists’ peaceful march against the intolerant violence of left-wing agitators. Thanks to those very same violently intolerant left-wing agitators, he succeeded completely. It was a victory for him and his Fascists, not for the left-wingers who first advocated censorship, and then used violence, against expression of views they (rightly) despised.
“And if you’re going to bring in Dr. King’s movement…”
I didn’t, but yes, the provocative actions I advised the LGBTQ+ community of Capitol Hill to take against the May Day bigots, were inspired in part by Dr. King’s use of peaceful-yet-provocative actions against racist Southern bigots.
“Yes, you’re supposedly LGBTQ+…”
Actually, I identify as cis-het’ white male. So now, you’ve gone from claiming I’m anti-trans’, to claiming I’m LGBTQ+? WTF?
Why are Progressives so violent and full of hate?
@60: “Are you not familiar with what happened in Skokie?”
Yes, I am. But that group identified itself as the NSPA. And still, the Supreme Court held that they had a right to march. But you, pulling the term “NAZI” out of your butt every time you disagree with someone, gives you no special rights. Nor moral justification.
The Mayday group identifies itself as Christians. Are you suggesting that this gives you the right to resort to violence?
62: I think most people had assumed you were LGBTQ+- if you’re not, I’m sorry- I was going with a general assumption- particularly after the time you made the absurd claim that Kshama Sawant was not an LGBTQ+ alley- and made that assumption in support of the Bill Clinton-type center-right candidate you supported against her for re-election the last time. If you’re straight- and if you are, you are, though I doubt I’m the only person who’s surprised to hear that- why would you ever use the LGBTQ+ cause as a cudgel to attack a progressive politician and advocate replacement by a much more conservative candidate- somebody who was on the side of landlords against tenants, and therefore could not have been progressive on anything but a handful of trivial side issues that are guaranteed to require no sacrifice from the wealthy.
And I didn’t confuse “trans” with “tens”- that would be stupid. I already apologized for making that mistake and it’s childish to keep throwing it at me when it’s a dead issue.
As to Mosley- there was no way a march of uniformed fascists would not have violent intent- everyone who lived on Cable Street assumed Mosley was there to beat up Jewish residents and leftists, and it is incredibly suspicious that the police, who were and are supposed to be politically neutral were leading the Black Shirts towards Cable Street in a protective cordon.
What matters is that the Black Shirts were kept out of East London none of the timid “respectable” methods you’d have used instead would have achieved anything- and while the (mostly working-class) troops sent by the British government- a government which spent years trading with Hitler and Mussolini and thus legitimizing and helping perpetuate their regimes- showed incredible valor in defeating Hitler on the battlefield, it never had to come to a shooting war- a tough all-out international economic embargo would have brought Hitler- and Mussolini- down in a matter of months, preventing the Holocaust and all of the other horrors of “the European theatre” and probably preventing the creation of the useless postwar “permanent war economy” that created the lethal political consensus in the US that the war budget could never be reduced again.
And the British government you hero-worship, the one which waited to break with the Third Reich until it was too late to matter, had had a heavy pro-fascist component within it who saw Hitler, Mussolini and Franco as “lesser evils” and supported them solely to keep Germany, Italy and Spain from having Left governments. I hope you’re not going to defend THAT line of thinking.
I made a couple of trivial mistakes about your identity- based on assumptions I doubt I was the only one on this board to have held- for which I immediately apologized and put to rest as soon as I became aware that they were mistakes, and you are acting as if those are the only things that matter. That obsession with trivial mistakes marks you as the arrogant, inherent-superiority-assuming verbal bully most people see you as on this page.
@65: “…there was no way a march of uniformed fascists would not have violent intent-…”
Assuming what you need to show does not actually validate it. @54/55 you claimed, “…Mosley’s Black Shirts and the violence they had announced they were going to inflict…” How did they “announce” this, and when did they do so? Because so far, it seems you have simply assumed they were going to become violent.
“What matters is that the Black Shirts were kept out of East London…”
And Mosely made great PR value for his Fascists out of it, too. Left-wing East Enders fought the police, the police asked Mosley not to march into the East End, and he agreed not to march there. The Fascists looked like calm, reasonable, law-abiding citizens, whilst the police and East Enders suffered almost all of the casualties (and the East Enders suffered almost all of the arrests). How any of that could possibly be taken as a victory for the hard left in the East End remains difficult to explain.
Now, in Seattle, a group of hard-right activists has made Seattle, and Seattle’s very liberal citizens, look violently intolerant. They have replicated Mosley’s victory. Until you and others in Seattle (like @13) stop describing these defeats for the local left as victories, you’re going to get more of them.
67: Any of the polite, useless “respectable” methods you’d have approved of would have produced nothing but defeat. Why even pretend that respectability politics works against fascists when it never has anywhere?
@67: Sigh. Please actually read @34, third and fourth paragraphs. Then please tell me what you found “respectable” in my suggestion the LGBTQ+ community on Capitol Hill should actively sabotage the next MayDayUSA event there, with the explicit intent of provoking those visiting bigots to violence.