On Tuesday evening, a panel on Seattle’s homelessness crisis was held at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. The panelists included KTTH radio host Jason Rantz and David Preston, a moderator of Facebook group Safe Seattle, which has become locally infamous for mapping homeless encampments and posting photos of homeless people and drug users with condescending quips blaming Seattle liberals for the city’s homelessness problem. There was also a cop, people from the local business community, an addiction specialist, a leader at Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, and former Washington State Senator Mark Miloscia, who became the executive director of the Family Policy Institute after he was ousted from his seat last fall, a religious group affiliated with Focus on the Family, one of the most well-funded anti-LGBTQ organizations in the country. The event, which was called “Homeless & Addicted in Seattle: What’s the End Game?,” was moderated by KIRO radio host John Curley, organized by the King County GOP, hosted by the UW College Republicans, and leaned almost far to the right as you can get in deep blue Seattle.
That is exactly why Matt, a 33-year-old Seattle native and self-described “left-leaning centrist,” wanted to check it out. “I follow local politics and homelessness issues and I’ve been to various events and panels,” he told me. “I don’t necessarily agree with the right, but I do like hearing opinions on a wide variety of issues. I wanted to hear what they had to say.”
When Matt got there, he initially followed a group into a room in Kane Hall, but when he saw Kshama Sawant, Seattle’s Socialist City Councilmember and just about the last person one would imagine at a GOP panel, he realized he was probably in the wrong place. “I asked someone if it was the homelessness panel and, no, it was next door.” Turns out, Matt had stumbled into the 43rd District Democrats primary election endorsement meetings. “I went next door and it was all these older people and it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this makes more sense,’” he said.
The panel started, but almost before anyone could start speaking, about a dozen protesters stationed throughout the auditorium stood up in the crowd and began screaming and marching up and down the aisles. “It was intimidation tactics, basically,” Matt said. “They were trying to shut down this event. I’ve seen videos of things like that happening but I’ve never experienced it before so it was kind of shocking.”
In video Matt recorded with his phone, you can hear protesters yelling. It’s difficult to make out what they’re saying—they all seem to be shouting at once—but errant screams of “Get the fuck out” are clear enough. At one point, John Curley, the moderator, says from the podium, “This is a panel for people who want to hear solutions.” He then announces that campus security is on their way. “We’re going to have a free exchange of ideas,” he continues, “because I know both liberals and Democrats and Republicans and conservatives love the idea of a free exchange of ideas.” I honestly can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic, but the audience claps and eventually security comes and the protesters shuffle away.
Matt said the protest lasted for about 15 minutes and the rest of the event went on without major incident, although there were more disruptions scattered throughout the panel and protesters used the question and answer period to insult the panelists, especially the cop, who was called a “fucking pig” by someone who then turned around and walked out.
As for the solutions Curley promised, Armen Tooloee, the president of UW College Republicans, said he was surprised to hear how many panelist were in favor of housing-first, a progressive model that provides unsheltered people with stable, permanent housing before addressing ancillary concerns like mental health or addiction. Still, the panelists favored distinctly conservative approaches as well. Some of the panelists support sweeping homelessness encampments—a policy that greatly disrupts peoples’ lives and cost the city $10 million in 2017 alone—and most of them believe in the sort of bootstrap models in which people are expected to lift themselves out of poverty through hard work and individual effort. It was generally what you’d expect from a group hand-picked by the county GOP, but Matt says no one advocated for locking homeless people up or forcing them into the old prison on McNeil Island.
Most of the panelists place a large part of the blame for homelessness crisis on addiction. According to a 2017 survey by King County, only about 36 percent of homeless people surveyed said they had a substance-abuse problem and half of the respondents said they didn’t use drugs or alcohol at all. Research also tells us that the causes of homelessness are multi-faceted and include systemic problems like the lack of affordable housing. But the panel focused on drugs. One of the panelists was Joyce Sundin, an addiction counselor who has been working in the field for nearly 40 years. Sundin told me in a phone interview that King County’s 36 percent statistic is “full-on BS. If you ask someone if they have a problem, are they going to say, ‘Yes, I do’? No. If you have an addiction, you are going to rationalize and victimize and blame.” Sundin, like others on the panel, doesn’t support safe injection sites, which she thinks will enable drug users to keep using, and said more than once that the goal of the city should be to “help people help themselves.” As an example of an effective program, she cited FareStart, a job-training program for homeless people that requires them to stay clean, something that she thinks should be an essential goal of all social services.
Despite the disruptions and drama, Matt said the panel was kind of boring. “Mostly they talked about things on a more philosophical level, like, what is the correct way to help people who have a problem.” Nothing about it would have been notable had the meeting not been disrupted. Instead, it’s been covered by various media outlets—including this one, right now—and caused something of a mild shit storm over on Twitter. And that is exactly the point. Tooloee, who took over as head of UW College Republicans after the previous president Chevy Swanson graduated this year, told me in a phone interview that every time one of their events gets disrupted, more people show up to the next ones.
“It’s made us more popular,” he said. “Before Chevy showed up, [UW College Republicans] were basically non-existent. It was five or six people who would play board games and that’s it about it.” Under Swanson’s tenure, the group organized events designed to piss liberal students off, including an “Affirmative Action bake sale” where people of color were charged less for crappy muffins than white people. The previous president, Jessie Gamble, also invited controversial speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos, surely knowing that the outcry would get more attention than the event itself ever would. That, of course, is exactly what happened—and when one of Milo’s fans actually shot a protester, the College Republicans got more and more attention from the media and from the public. “If they are trying to turn people away from us,” Tooloee told me, “it’s not working.”
The College Republicans may very well be genuine political believers, but trolling is now written into the club’s DNA. “I only want to invite speakers I want to hear, but if it causes outrage, that’s an added benefit,” Tooloee said. He’s trying to create a sense of fury, and it seems to be working because not only does attempting to deplatform speakers usually fail (the panel was delayed, but it happened), it also hurts the protestors’ cause, not the speakers’. Protesters have every right to stand outside a talk with picket signs and slogans if they like—the right to assemble is as protected as that of free speech—but as soon and they try to shut down an event, it becomes another story of intolerance on the left. And conservative organizers know this. While King County GOP did not respond to my request for comment, I’m a little suspicious about why they decided to hold this event at UW in the first place. They could have held it someplace private, but instead, they enlisted the UW College Republicans to host. It was a genius move, because holding the event at UW both protected them under the First Amendment and almost guaranteed there would be protests. The organizers knew what was going to happen—they warned the panelists beforehand to expect disruptions—and the protesters played right into their hands.
This happens over and over. Last month, a masked protester tried to padlock the UW College Republicans into a room. Not only did he fail (Chevy Swanson opened the door while he was trying to lock them in and the students then chased the would-be protester across campus), when the UW student paper published a wildly off-base story about the incident and accused the College Republicans of “violently” interrupting a queer picnic while they chased the protester through campus—the right-wing press had all the more grist for the mill. And of course they did. It’s hilarious.
Of course, despite what you’ll hear on Fox News, it’s not true that the right is more tolerant of dissenting speech than the left. Trump only cares about free speech when it comes from people who like him, and Tooloee told me that he would never invite Milo Yiannopoulos to campus after he endorsed adult men having sex with post-pubescent teen boys. That offhand statement so appalled the conservatives who’d been supporting Milo’s troll tour of America that Yiannopoulos largely lost his career. The right’s support of free speech is selective at best. Still, left-wing attempts to shut down speakers does have an impact, and when I asked Matt if watching this play out in the larger culture has affected his own politics, he replied, “Absolutely. No question.”
“I voted for Obama and Clinton because I support a lot of their policies, but when one side, and it is mostly the left, is not standing up for the principle of free speech, that supersedes a lot of the other issues that I care about,” Matt continued. “That is just so fundamental. There were people at that panel who I don’t agree with or even like, but that’s besides the point. They still have the right to use this public university space and say what they want to say. I’m going to support people who are going to stand up for that.”
Note: This post has been update to reflect that Jessie Gamble, not Chevy Swanson, was president of the UW College Republicans when Milo Yiannopoulos was invite to campus and that Chevy Swanson opened the door on the masked protester who was attempting to lock the UW College Republicans in.
