Sequim, QAnon Politicians, and White Supremacy in the Pacific Northwest

No one who has ever lived in the Pacific Northwest should be surprised that a QAnon mayor took over the town of Sequim

Washington coast beach at sunset

Dungeness crab. You find it on restaurant menus from New York to Seattle. And you find it stumbling over rocks in the Salish Sea’s quiet bays and estuaries, all along the coast near Sequim, Washington (pronounced “skwim” in the Klallam language). Windswept bluffs rise above the famous crustacean’s namesake, Dungeness Bay, so named by Captain George Vancouver on April 30, 1792, when he decided that it looked like the English coast of Kent. Captain Vancouver’s own name is also plastered over the communities of what we now call Vancouver, B.C., Vancouver Island, and Vancouver, Washington. When my little sister was homeless, she lived on these bluffs. Over the phone, she laughed and told me that when she lived in Dungeness Bay in a tent, she had a million-dollar view before she was sentenced to prison after protecting herself from an abusive boyfriend.

All this is to say that the Olympic Peninsula is a place of breathtaking landscapes, juxtaposed with sinister poverty, violent classism, and centuries of white supremacy. In high school, to a classroom full of mostly students whose families received food…