(Travis Mayfield was a longtime Seattle TV news anchor. He is currently a contributor at KIRO Newsradio. Travis, his husband and their kids live in Seattle. You can find him on Instagram @TravisMayfield, Twitter @TravisMayfield and on Facebook @TravisMayfieldTV.)
Pride has always been a radical political protest demanding equality, equity and full inclusion for those of us with different gender and sexual identities.
It has also always been about having a damn good time.
With that spirit in mind, I was disappointed to read that the Seattle Pride organization has asked uniformed police officers not to march in the annual parade on Sunday.
I’m a queer man and I am also the son of a retired police officer.
I understand why many in the LGBTQAI+ community feel targeted by police. After all, Pride is a product of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City, which was sparked after police raided a gay nightclub and brave patrons fought back.
I also understand why LGBTQAI+ police officers who have been welcomed in uniform in the Pride parade for three decades suddenly feel othered by their own community.
The harm is done. There is blame on all sides. At some point we must choose to start fixing things.
What our world doesn’t need more of is unproductive anger. Especially since Pride can give us all so much more. There’s enough unmitigated anger hurled back and forth online, in the media and even face-to-face.
Yes, anger can spark movements for change – like Stonewall and Black Lives Matter. Yet progress demands that we push past anger alone.
At a time when our community needs as many people as possible to hear us, see us and know us, we are ourselves refusing to hear, see and know others.
That must stop.
We won’t solve systemic racism, bigoty or bias until we choose to look each other in the eyes and begin to acknowledge the other is human too.
The LGBTQAI+ community has been harmed for years at the hands of police. Communities of color have been harmed for years at the hands of police. There’s a throughline that connects it all and necessitates strong allyship. But we can hold space for all of it – even the anger – while still choosing to look officers in the eye and believe them when they say they are working to change and authentically asking to do it with our help.
That will make some of us deeply uncomfortable. It should make us uncomfortable. It is that discomfort that can help us bury the old ways and build something new.
It doesn’t happen overnight. It won't happen overnight. There is so much more work to do. So why take even one step backward? Even if that step feels righteous in the moment.
Bygones don’t have to be bygones, but progress means acknowledging past harm and working toward something better.
Be angry.
But be brave too.
Have a damn good time.
But take Pride in doing the work together. Imagine where that kind of Pride will lead us next.
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.
