Ever hear of Ottawa County,
Michigan
? It’s the epicenter of the “War on Woke,” the great battle of ideas on which the future of the American republic might hinge.
Ottawa is, of course, one of many, many epicenters. They are dispersed throughout America, for this is a grassroots revolt.
THE ASTONISHING ARROGANCE OF RANDI WEINGARTEN
But the
media
have decided to home in on Ottawa in an effort to discredit a movement led by parents and frustrated citizens to push back on the Left’s noxious ideologies. This week, the Washington Post published a long (over 4,000-word) piece on Ottawa’s new Republican-controlled Board of Commissioners. The piece, which appeared on the front page on Sunday and spilled inside to two entire pages, describes what has transpired since the commissioners took over on Jan. 3 as a battle between staid civil servants and obnoxious insurgents.
This is not an isolated case. In an
op-ed
that ran on Saturday in the New York Times, Brown University President Christina Paxson argued that the many states and localities passing anti-DEI measures represented a grave threat to society.
The Left’s new strategy in its campaign to transmute society is to present the public resisting it as obnoxiously polarizing. The woke would prefer it, of course, if we all just lay low and meekly allowed their cultural bulldozer to flatten everything we hold dear.
All this is playing out in Ottawa, a placid county between Grand Rapids and Lake Michigan, where pious Seceders from the Dutch National Church came over from Holland in 1847 and established a colony.
From its opening lines, the Washington Post’s piece drips with condescension:
The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people. In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran.
The new commissioners — all Republicans — elected to the 11-member board were cast as zealots. They (gasp!) “swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800.”
Changes like this, according to the article’s two writers, unsettle tranquility: “Across America, county governments provided services so essential that they were often an afterthought. Their employees paved roads, built parks, collected taxes and maintained property records. In an era when Americans had never seemed more divided and distrustful, county governments, at their best, helped define what remains of the common good.”
The old board that the voters threw out? Why, it was a bastion of Calvinistic probity.
Under it, “Ottawa County prospered. It had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Michigan and, since 2010, has been the fastest growing county in the state. Board meetings were civil, orderly and, until recently, sparsely attended.” One former commissioner actually boasted that “no one came to our meetings before COVID.”
By contrast, Sylvia Rhodea, the board’s new vice chairwoman, was singled out as the opposite of decorum. She wrote
a motion
that railed against people who “divide people by race” and spoke up for “personal agency.” Rhodea’s motion also opposed teaching children to “hate America and doubt the goodness of her people,” which, as Washington Post readers will tell you, just ain’t happening.
Leaving aside the question of why the Washington Post is bizarrely pining for a disengaged citizenry who bovinely assent to their betters, if the old commissioners were so good, why did Ottowans bounce them out and elect such philistines?
I asked Rhodea and Joe Moss, the commission’s new chairman. Their tale parallels what I hear across America.
What mobilized Ottawans was the old commission’s failure to listen to the people and protect the rights of citizens to make decisions for their families, children, and businesses. The old board allowed draconian COVID responses. It also contracted with national groups such as the
Government Alliance on Race and Equity
, GARE, a very leftist vast network of local bodies, and started using its “Racial Equity Toolkit.”
“They threatened the parents at my daughter’s Christian school with fines and jail time for not complying with certain COVID-19 mandates, like forced masking of little kids. Eventually, they closed the school by force,” said Moss, who, along with Rhodea, ducked out of a conference in Lansing to speak to me.
When the previous county health director instituted a mask mandate for elementary school students in late 2021, the people finally had enough. “Over 1,000 parents showed up at the next county board meeting,” said Moss. “I saw everyday Americans getting involved to defend against progressive government overreach.”
Moss, Rhodea, and others organized and eventually decided to run for the board.
The ground had been paved by the old board’s curious decision to make Ottawa County a “Midwest core member” of GARE as early as 2015, in a county that twice voted for Donald Trump by more than 60%. The county also opened its own diversity, equity, and inclusion office, requiring many seeking employment with the county to align with those values and the ideas of critical race theory.
Moss told me the new board is looking into whether the contract with GARE has lapsed “or if we need to terminate it, which we will.”
“These very progressive ideas were just permeating our county, so when we were knocking on doors, we were not just knocking on COVID, but also on CRT,” said Rhodea. “They started this fight. We are just defending our piece of America.”
The resisters, in other words, get a vote on whether the Left’s strategy works.
But don’t sell the Left short. The insurgents will have to make noise, as the Left has obviously entrenched itself even in places such as Ottawa. The media, its handmaidens, will then make mawkish appeals for comity. It is part of human nature not to want to be the skunk at the garden party, or described as the lout at the board meeting.
Resist that, too. Own the skunk.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of
BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution
.
