When you’ve watched the city you love disintegrate before your eyes, you learn to keep your expectations low.
Such is the sad state of Seattle – a once vibrant and growing tech hub whose activist class turned it into a national posterchild for wokeness gone awry. The worst part is that many of them are still blind to the damage they’ve done.
At several points in my decade-long career here, I tried to convince myself that things couldn’t possibly get worse. City Hall couldn’t possibly go lower. Downtown couldn’t possibly be less safe. The local press couldn’t possibly lose another ounce of self-awareness.
Let’s just say I am now intimately acquainted with disappointment.
From relentless attempts to tax Amazon out of the city, to endless riots and unrest, to the defunding debate, to the occupied protest zone, to a mass exodus of police officers, to rising 911 response times, to a worsening homeless crisis, to an unfettered drug market, to unsustainable levels of shoplifting and vandalism – Seattle has become an utter embarrassment to those of us who expect elected leaders to act in the best interest of the people they represent.
Enter Mayor Bruce Harrell.
Because he served on the Seattle City Council during a period of worsening crises around homelessness, drug abuse, and mental illness, I was skeptical that Bruce Harrell represented a meaningful solution to the city’s woes. But when he made it past the primary in 2021, there was zero doubt he was the better of two questionable options (the other being former City Councilwoman Lorena Gonzalez, a progressive who supported police defunding, made enemies of the city’s largest employers, and stirred up unproductive public tiffs with former Mayor Jenny Durkan).
On the campaign trail, Harrell said all the right things. He pledged to hire more officers and support the ones the city still had (except for unvaccinated officers, who he supported firing even at a time of low staffing). He promised to remove dangerous homeless encampments that were allowed to proliferate out of a mistaken sense of compassion. He promised to be a bridge builder and heal fractured relationships between councilmembers, the police department, the city’s top prosecutor, and the business community.
But talk in Seattle is not only cheap, it’s unreliable.
After all, three sitting councilmembers ran for their jobs in 2019 on the promise of hiring more police officers. Then they turned around six months later and pledged to defund the agency by 50% without an ounce of shame.
Harrell would have to do more than just talk to convince this emotionally depleted political pundit that he actually meant business.
And how is he doing six months into his first term?
I’ll be damned – Bruce Harrell has it in him.
The first real clue that the new mayor intended to make good on his campaign promises came during a February 4 press conference on public safety. For the first time in a long time, someone spoke with common sense at Seattle City Hall.
“I want to be very clear – we will not tolerate crime in Seattle.”
What?
“I inherited a depleted and demoralized police department – this status quo is not acceptable.”
Come again??
“We will not look the other way while the fabric of our neighborhoods and city is destroyed.”
Swoon!
I had to calm myself down and remember what city I was in. Surely the mayor of Seattle wasn’t brave enough to state the obvious. Besides, these were just more words.
But then came the action.
Open air drug markets in the International District and near Pike Place Market were first. Officers were sent in to clear the areas and directed ne'er-do-wells to move along. Work continues to keep the areas from reverting back to criminal hotspots.
Then the sweeps started – angry activists be damned.
Downtown to Ballard. City sidewalks to public parks. Residential neighborhoods to business districts. City workers were directed to move in, clear tents, and make final attempts to connect the unhoused to services.
And the best part? Mayor Harrell hasn’t flinched.
So far, Harrell appears impervious to an Achilles' heel that has rendered even Seattle’s most formidable politicians powerless: fear of the far-left fringe. It is what paralyzed former Mayor Durkan into allowing rioters to seize six square blocks of the city in the summer of 2020, rendering an entire police precinct useless.
Luckily for Seattle, Harrell doesn’t appear to give a damn what 10 loud voices on Twitter and Leftist bloggers at The Stranger have to say about him. How refreshing.
The same is true for two other newly-elected leaders: City Attorney Ann Davison (left) and City Councilwoman Sara Nelson (right). Both promised to put an end to performative politics and get to work righting the ship. So far, both have delivered.
In fact, Councilwoman Nelson recently unveiled a plan to attract more police officers to the city through financial and other incentives. What’s more impressive is she somehow got one of the council’s most anti-police members to work with her: Lisa Herbold.
Mayor Harrell was so proud of the teamwork that his office sent out a statement.
“As my administration continues to develop a comprehensive plan to restore police staffing, this is a reminder that when we work together and unite around shared values and common purpose, we develop better ideas that put us on a path toward better results.”
I texted a member of the mayor’s staff and included a link to the press release.
“This makes me happy,” I wrote. “Love seeing cooperation and collaboration for a change.”
Does Seattle still have a long way to go? Of course. Do its newest leaders still need to prove themselves? Without a doubt. But when you’ve covered politics here for as long as I have, sometimes a little common sense is worth celebrating.
Everything you need to know about what happened this week during the legislative session in Olympia.
If there were ever an episode we’d be removed from social media over, this is it! Citizen sleuths look into Washington’s spending, and what they find is gag worthy. National civil rights complaint filed on behalf of Tumwater basketball player. Is Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell being punished for his bad basketball joke?
Prefer to listen? https://audioboom.com/posts/8656992-doge-washington-digs-up-dirty-dirty-dirt-2-20-25
Brandi Kruse and Zach Abraham dive into all things Department of Government Efficiency in this weekly series. On this episode: Elon wants to open up Fort Knox to check for gold. $4.7T in untraceable payments. Vampires getting Social Security!? Trump considering DOGE Dividends for Americans.
These remarks were delivered to the Snohomish County Lincoln Day Dinner on May 17, 2024.
The following remarks were delivered to the Whatcom County Lincoln Day Dinner on March 23, 2024, in Ferndale, Washington.
I struggled with what to talk to you about tonight.
Well, that’s not true. I didn't struggle with what to talk to you about – I struggled with whether I was brave enough to say what I wanted to say.
When I'm invited to speak to groups, I don't want to offend anyone or be too controversial. So, I reached out to a few of your fellow party members to ask whether any topics were off limits or wouldn't go over well with the crowd.
I got some good advice.
Then I decided to ignore that good advice entirely.
Too much is at stake to be polite.
As we sit here tonight, we are in the final battle of a war.
A war that has pit sanity against insanity.
Pragmatism against idealism.
A war that has sacrificed the public good, in favor of a twisted idea of progress.
It's a war that began long before I moved here 15 years ago. It started silently and it was mostly waged in the shadows.
Most of us didn't even realize that a war was being fought. We were too caught up in our own lives and our own problems. ...
If there were ever an episode we’d be removed from social media over, this is it! Citizen sleuths look into Washington’s spending, and what they find is gag worthy. National civil rights complaint filed on behalf of Tumwater basketball player. Is Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell being punished for his bad basketball joke?
[Video] Only students designated as females at birth can participate in girls competitions, WIAA says
Source: News8000com WKBT News 8
https://share.newsbreak.com/bm02e0qe
Silent Majority Foundation sues to challenge the validity of a masking rule that led to charges against election observers. Teachers’ union deletes post targeted at female athlete. Happy Aromantic Sexual Awareness Week! Seattle animal shelter gets political.
When I first started dating my husband in 2018, I avoided asking who he voted for in the 2016 presidential election. Part of me already knew the answer, but I wanted to bury the uncomfortable truth: he’d voted for Donald J. Trump.
If I’d asked him the question then, I’m not sure we’d be where we are today: happily married and head-over-heels in love.
When we met in the fall of 2018, I was a political reporter at the local FOX-TV affiliate in Seattle and President Trump was less than two years into his first term. While I’ve always been right of Seattle’s hard-left politics – it was difficult to break free from the groupthink of a newsroom. Especially a newsroom in one of the bluest cities in America.
Donald Trump had declared the “fake news” media the enemy of the American people and, in turn, we waged war against him, too.
To be clear, not all our coverage was unfair. It’s the media’s job to hold politicians accountable and there’s no doubt, when it came to Trump, the Fourth Estate took that job seriously. The problem, as I’ve come to realize, was they took it less seriously when it came to Democrats. They still do.
During my years at FOX 13 News, I like to think I did my best to hold Washington state progressives accountable for their failures on homelessness, crime, and the anti-business policies that were driving companies like Amazon to move jobs elsewhere. But, in truth, I spent far too much time as a local news reporter covering the White House. I even convinced my bosses to send me to the border in 2019 to cover the so-called family separation crisis – an unusual expense for a local newsroom to agree to. It’s worth noting that local FOX affiliates are different from the network and don’t necessarily share the same conservative bias. Ours certainly did not.
My family and friends knew I was vehemently anti-Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and often chided my older brother for flying a Trump flag outside his home in Minnesota. By 2019, I’d moved in with my then-boyfriend – but still avoided talking to him about Trump and left the room when he’d turn on his favorite network news show.
In hindsight, I had what the right calls Trump Derangement Syndrome. And my diagnosis had the potential to be terminal.
But things started to turn at a most unexpected time.
The January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol had a different effect on me than you might expect. Rather than deepen my disdain for Donald Trump, it opened my eyes to disturbing depths of hypocrisy that I cannot unsee.
I’d just spent six months covering acts of leftwing political violence in Seattle that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
I watched as cop cars were torched in the streets downtown. My security guard disarmed rioters of stolen police rifles. Stores were looted to the studs – bare manikins left strewn in the streets. Officers were assaulted and hit with improvised explosive devices. My crew was mobbed in what later became known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHOP) – six square blocks surrounding a police precinct that were taken over by armed anti-police extremists. A few days into the occupation, rioters tried to light the precinct on fire after putting quick-drying cement on a door to lock officers in.
Those are just a few examples of what unfolded in Seattle during the racial justice movement of 2020. Our mayor at the time, Jenny Durkan, famously referred to it as a “Summer of Love.” The acts of that summer were ignored and even supported by many in our city’s Democratic leadership. Then-Councilwoman Tammy Morales scolded anyone who questioned the behavior of criminal demonstrators.
“What I don’t want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told that looting doesn’t solve anything,” she said during the unrest.
Our state’s chief law enforcer at the time, Attorney General Bob Fergson, stayed mostly silent about the destruction happening on our streets. He had by then made a national name for himself by suing the Trump administration dozens of times and had his eye on the governor’s office (which he went on to win in 2024). There was no way he’d risk angering his base by condemning leftwing extremism. Instead, he issued a short statement focused on criminal justice reform.
The media downplayed the violence, too. Even my own station took great pains to excuse or ignore criminal acts and play up non-criminal elements of the protests.
No such pains were taken with J6ers.
That hypocrisy was the beginning of my yearslong red pilling.
In 2021, frustrated by new management and our coverage of both the riots and the pandemic, I quit my job in news to launch an independent show.
The biggest supporter of me walking away from my $185,000/year dream job?
My sweet, Trump-voting boyfriend.
I married him in the fall of 2023, five years after I almost let his support for Donald Trump steal the joy we now share. There’s little doubt that had I asked him in the early days of our relationship who he’d voted for in the 2016 election, I would have ended things.
Typing that now makes my heart hurt.
This past November, I voted for Donald. J Trump for the first time. And yes, my husband did too.
Today, more than any other emotion, I am full of hope and optimism for our country – finally free from the echo chamber that once soured me on Trump and his agenda. But I am also battling a tinge of guilt. Guilt for the viewers I let down in those early days of the Trump administration. Guilt over the wonderful life I almost cost myself.
For that, I offer a sincere apology to our 47th President (and my husband, for that matter). And I offer this advice to anyone upset by a second term of Donald J. Trump: Never let politics stand in the way of your happiness. And never be too stubborn to change your mind.
