Quite a week for disinformation...

Hey all, I've been up to my eyeballs this week, so it might be a short one, but there is some important info I need to pass along. I'm going to start with the relatively normal news and try to lead you gently into the weirder parts of my week.

Absentee ballots are being re-printed

The County screwed up a candidate's name in the Montague School Board race, and the candidate didn't catch the error until after people started voting. Personally, if I was in this situation and my name was on the ballot as "Waldo Fry", I would laugh it off and tell people to vote for Waldo. (Heck, if I was on the ballot as Waldo Fry I'd be ahead of where I am now as a write-in candidate.) But the candidate in question has the right to demand a re-print, and that's what she's doing.

So if you're an absentee voter in the Montague School District, you're going to be getting a new ballot in the mail soon, and you're going to need to fill out your entire ballot again. The original ballots will not counted towards the election. You'll also be getting a letter from your city/township clerk explaining the whole situation. (Incidentally, this is an excellent time to shower your city/township clerk with community support and baked goods, because they're the ones bearing the brunt of all this, and they're the ones who are least responsible for it.)

Speaking of my City Council campaign:

A few local culture warrior types have gotten very weird about me running for city council. I've been trying really hard to reach out to them on a person-to-person basis and give them a chance to see that I'm not some scary threat, but that doesn't seem to have worked.

This week one of them tried to get me disqualified on the assumption that Wiley wasn't my "real" name. It's a common tactic for transphobes to try to use against trans people who run for public office, so I guess he assumed it would work on me.

(Sidenote: some trans candidates have faced lawsuits demanding they be listed under their "biological name", which is a truly amusing concept to ponder. "I'm sorry, the blood tests came back Herbert-positive. There's nothing we can do.")

Unfortunately for him, my name's been the same since Nate and I got married more than ten years ago, and my first name's been the same since I was born. (Apparently he also thought Nate was my brother, so he's really batting a thousand on the investigative front.)

I need endorsements!

Anyway, I've got a couple of folks running against me now, so I'm going to be sending out a rare paper edition of the Montague Commoner on Monday to make my case to a wider audience. I would like to include as many endorsements as possible from local folks who are familiar with my work and think I'd do a good job on the Council.

If that includes you, I would love to get a sentence or two about why you think I'd be a good Council pick, along with your name and your role in the community. Typed is fine, but a picture of a hand-written note is even better. Mickkayla and I are going to take any notes that we get and mosaic them together on the back of the mailer. My opponents have been posting a lot of very generic AI slop graphics, so I want to emphasize how much my work is about genuine person-to-person community.

I didn't even get to the weirdest part!

It's super late and I need to get to sleep, so the full story of Q-anon Chris is going to have to wait for next week. The short version is that our weekly Dance for Democracy protest seems to have picked up a new counter-protestor. Nate and I spent an hour last week doing some pretty intense de-escalation work while he did his best to pick fights with the other protestors. We're working to organize a protest safety and de-escalation team, and a police officer who's been able to talk Chris down in the past is going to be on hand tomorrow in case he comes back.

Recommendation Corner

While you wait for the full story about our new constantly yelling friend, get some context for why he's acting that way by reading The Storm is Upon Us by Mike Rothschild. It details the origins of the Q-anon "Patriot" movement, how it lures in believers, and why it can be so hard for people who fall down that rabbit hole to find their way out.

This Week's Nails

This week's nails celebrate the leaves turning, with green pigments that shift to yellow and gold under the right lighting conditions.

Stay dry out there over the next couple of days! If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.

Pre-meme-ium Content

Now that we've got a few people supporting us with premium subscriptions, we wanted to find a way to thank our supporters without putting anything useful behind a paywall. So I've started tacking on a couple of memes to the end of each newsletter! If the paywall feature is working, free subscribers will see one meme below, while paid subscribers will get to see all five. If you're living on less than $35k/year, please do not give us money. Just let us know and we'll hook you up with the memes for free.