In mid-May, a gang of women, craving attention for their sundry agendas (see VAWA hyenas bully Arcata mayor, in the sidebar), attacked former Arcata Mayor Watson in the public sphere and tried to distort his inoffensive behavior into something dark and twisted, with a divisive and accusatory letter demanding that he resign.
In so doing, they revealed themselves to be a threat to the rest of us - men and women alike.
Who will be next? This issue merits attention.
We have heard from fifty women. We have not heard from fifty men. Nor have we heard from Humboldt County's transsexual, transgender, and gender-fluid population. That doesn't seem very balanced.
We decided to audit the contents of the letter, to see what we would find.
The first thing we call to our readers' attention is this sentence, in the third paragraph of their 17 May 2022 letter, and its use of the word 'just':
We know that leadership is not just about power for ourselves.
Here's the entire paragraph, so that the sentence can be seen in its full and correct context:
We know that leadership is not just about power for ourselves. We have responsibilities to ourselves, each other, and the community to use our platforms for the greater good. As such, we stand together in this letter to make a demand:
We take exception to almost every single word in each of those three sentences. These womens' words expose a major philosophical split with the rest of us which cries out to be addressed.
Let's start with paragraph 3, sentence 1:
We know that leadership is not just about power for ourselves.
If we understand this sentence correctly, the author is asserting that "power for ourselves" is a primary and legitimate motivation for seeking public office.
If these people seriously believe this is true, then they have disqualified themselves as candidates for elective office, in our view.
As we understand the natural order of things, we, the people, have raised ourselves a government, via an informed electorate, which appoints individuals displaying superior maturity and judgement (quit laughing! - Humboldt County is an aberration) to offices, with titles like 'officer', and 'official', to represent the rest of us - and for purposes of exercising that judgement and engaging in that representation, a certain amount of power and influence is temporarily granted to that individual. This is fundamental to North American governmental systems.
That is, the power follows the responsibility - not the other way around. Power does not also entail responsibility. You have it backwards, ladies. Responsibility entails power. Please make a note of it.
Moving on to paragraph 3, sentence 2:
We have responsibilities to ourselves, each other, and the community to use our platforms for the greater good.
It seems to us that 'We have responsibilities to ourselves, each other, and the community' goes without saying. One doesn't need to be elected to office, though - you should have learned about picking up your own trash and washing your own dishes back in childhood.
The more interesting part of this sentence to us is 'to use our platforms for the greater good'. Platforms? Is the author of this document referring to elected office ... or, is she referring to the various offices occupied by many of the women signing this letter - offices that they were appointed to, by parties unknown?
As we read the latter half of this sentence ... it is a portentous reminder to all the women who received the letter, from its author ... along with a demand that they sign it ... a reminder, that they were placed in their various offices, and not some other woman, for exactly this reason - to use their leverage to inflict political change upon the landscape, all for the greater glory of their common sisterhood.
When we say "placed in their various offices", of course, what we refer to is favoritism, and influence-peddling - the heart of Humboldt County's political problem.
So we are going to suggest that the anonymous author of this letter slipped and exposed more than she meant to with this sentence.
Moving to paragraph 3, sentence 3:
As such, we stand together in this letter to make a demand:
The only reason you would need to stand together is to get more attention. There is nothing stopping anyone from submitting their demand individually. There is nothing stopping anyone from setting up their own website.
Honestly, we don't think you are standing together. We think you were herded together. Who herded you? Probably the anonymous author of the letter.
Why do you need to make a demand? Why are you not satisfied to let normal democratic processes proceed, normally? There was going to be a public hearing on the matter. There was nothing stopping any one of you from drafting a declaration describing your own personal experience with Brett Watson, signing it under oath of perjury, and filing it with the Court. Why didn't you?
It seems to us this group of fifty sheep, while pretending to be deeply supportive of the democratic process, are actually trying to do an end run around democracy, trying to force the decision of every body that considers this matter, by provoking fear, uncertainty, doubt, and prejudice. They are making a mockery of the legal process that they claim to respect. Clearly they have no faith in its natural operation.
It would be interesting to know how many people - ah, we mean, women - this letter actually went out to, and how many people, er, women, refused to sign it. Perhaps former Arcata mayor Watson's lawyer can subpoena that information during the proceedings.
It would also be interesting to know what channels were used to distribute this demand to participate in a lynching, and who is cultivating a mailing list, and polity, of Humboldt County women, but not men, anyway ... and, why?
This conduct seems prejudiced and sexist and just perpetuates the very behaviors that these self-described feminists claim to be opposed to.
What comes through, loud and clear, is this group of women is very demanding, and very confused, and that their leaders are, as we previously suggested, in need of cognitive therapy. We stand by that statement today.
(When we encounter people with this condition in our personal life, we advise them to begin, by eliminating all adjectives and adverbs from their language. Forcing people to describe their current situation in life without using adjectives or adverbs makes it hard to claim victimhood and hard to blame others, we have found. One cannot claim the moral high ground without a good and a bad. Eliminate the morality from your language - all the judgements - and focus on the observable facts. Consider this a pro tip.)
Paragraph 7 also deserves a dishonorable mention:
For the safety of current and future colleagues - especially women and girls - and to model for others what taking responsibility for your actions looks like, we demand that you resign from your position on City Council.
As we said previously: If you have a criminal allegation to make, file it. If you don't have anything that reaches the level of a criminal allegation, you, and your girlfriends, should give serious consideration to finding something better to do - such as, bake cookies for your hypothetical grand-children - instead of gossiping, like a bunch of old hens.
And, again, we remind you that nobody is stopping any of you raging bulls from drafting a declaration and filing it in court - where you can be held liable for not adhering to the truth. You want everyone else to be held liable. Why not you, too?
Next, we decided to audit the organizations these individuals were affiliated with.
We wondered: How did these organizations, and their peer employees, managers, and directors feel about being mixed up in a personal attack upon former Arcata mayor Watson? After all, many of them surely voted for him. Doesn't this translate into an attack upon their judgement?
It turns out that when you sort the list of names, by the agencies with which they are affiliated:
• Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District
• Humboldt Community Services District
• Humboldt County Planning and Building Department
• Manila Community Resource Center
• McKinleyville Community Services District
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Family Resource Center
• McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee
• McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee
• McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee
• Morris Elementary School
• Native Women's Collective
• Newborn Foundation
• Northcoast Environmental Center
• Northern Humboldt Union High School District
• Northern Humboldt Union High School District
• Northern Humboldt Union High School District
• Northern Humboldt Union High School District
• Northern Humboldt Union High School District
• Northern Humboldt Union High School District
• Open Door Community Health Centers
• Redwood Coast Energy Authority Board
• Redwood Regional Economic Development Commission
• Stepping Stone Consulting
• Stepping Stone Consulting
... a few patterns emerge:
• Nearly 20% of the signers associate themselves with something called the McKinleyville Family Resource Center. Which is odd, because Brett Watson isn't married, doesn't have kids, isn't in a relationship, doesn't have a family, and doesn't live in McKinleyville, either. So it's not clear why the McKinleyville Family Resource Center would be interested in Arcata city politics.
My sense is that the employees of McKinleyville Family Resource Center don't have enough to do and that the resources of the organization have been hijacked for other purposes not in the best interests of McKinleyville, its families, or their Resource Center.
• Similarly, employees of McKinleyville Community Services District and McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee are also underwhelmed by their responsibilities and have spare time and energy for managing Arcata's problems, as well. Arcata should be grateful.
• Over 10% of the signers were associated with Northern Humboldt Union High School District - which is odd, because Brett Watson is neither teacher, administrator, student, nor parent. Apparently the Northern Humboldt Union High School District has time on its hands, too.
People - really, women - who managed to get themselves appointed as trustee or director for some group somewhere seem to never, ever forget that they were a trustee or director, once upon a time, and do not hesitate to bring it up, whenever it gains them political leverage. And so, in all fairness to these organizations, some of these people are former trustees, and former directors. Hopefully, they won't be back - not after dragging the name of their sponsoring organization through the mud like this.
• Stepping Stone Consulting smells like a racket - just sayin'. The organization has a vague mission statement. Co-directors. If the two co-directors live together, game over - this is not difficult, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, there's so many of them.
Stepping Stone Consulting is not alone. If we had $100 for every dodgy 501(c)(3) in just this one county, alone, we'd be millionaires. Humboldt County is awash in tiny little 501(c)(3)s.
Our intuition is that the county - maybe the entire state of California - is a giant network of tax dodgers cooperating, to prop each other's tax-free status up, by doing gigs for each other, in a giant "you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-your-back" circle jerk.
The problem has gotten really bad in the past twenty years - ever since Craigslist (itself, a nonprofit - associated with a website that offered anonymous sexual solicitations - which service was used by the owner of the website, leading some to speculate that this was the end game, all along) ran a series of comprehensive seminars teaching anyone who wanted to know and had the cash, how to set up their own 501(c)(3), about fifteen years ago.
Most of the people operating these nonprofits seem to be women. They describe themselves, and think of themselves, as entrepreneurs. But the value of the work they do is questionable. All we see is money changing hands. We don't see Humboldt County getting better. We see Humboldt County getting worse.
If peddling fentanyl to one another, and dodgy 501(c)(3)s, are the best that the county can come up with in the way of opportunities for self-employment, then we think that the Redwood Regional Economic Development Commission needs new directors.
(We have some thoughts about tangible ways for Humboldt County to generate income and add value to the local and regional economies, taking some of our lessons from the culturally similar but economically much more accessible Tillimook County, in Oregon - but this is a topic for another article.)
(Ink People is another organization where something doesn't smell right to us - they enable a lot of these other non-profits, by providing an umbrella of services, but all the managers of these tiny non-profits, and the recipients of the services, seem to be female, and it all seems pretty one-sided, to us.)
• In conclusion, neither Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, Humboldt Community Services District, Humboldt County Planning and Building Department, Manila Community Resource Center, Morris Elementary School, Native Women's Collective, Newborn Foundation, Northcoast Environmental Center, Open Door Community Health Centers, Redwood Coast Energy Authority, nor Redwood Regional Economic Development Commission have any skin in this fight.
(Correction: Manila Community Resource Center is actually located in Arcata. This is because Manila is about three city blocks of ancient, decaying, dried-out, barely legal homes built before World War II. To call Manila a 'community' is pretentious and misleading - it is, at best, a neighborhood ... but graveyard for dying houses would be more accurate. A community resource center, without a community, that's not even located within walking distance of the community it purports to serve, is another way to say, 'tax dodge', in our opinion.)
It's fairly obvious these employees, directors, trustees, and has-beens involved their organizations in this fracas without organizational approval. It's really not Open Door's place to meddle in local gender politics, for instance. That sort of behavior closes doors, not opens them, geniuses.
Lacking evidence to the contrary, there are grounds for dismissing many of these people and replacing them with people who understand how to separate their official responsibilities from their personal politics - a skill that seems to have been forgotten, but which was once a prerequisite for considering oneself a professional.
There's just one more question that needs to be asked.
Who wrote the letter calling for Brett Watson to resign? Come out, come out, wherever you are.
Maybe a better question would be: who would benefit if Brett Watson were to resign ... and, how?
There appear to be many people who work in City Hall who did not sign onto this. Some of them stand to directly benefit from this attack upon former Arcata mayor Brett Watson.
If we were going to look for the anonymous coward who composed this, and published it, without signing it ... we would start by scrutinizing those individuals within City Hall who agreed with the contents of this anonymous letter but did not have the integrity to sign it - as Occam's Razor says they are likely to be complicit.
Food for thought.