"Coincidence doesn't happen a third time."

Alternate title: "What's the point?": Profile of a state house contest in rural Missouri

After a first foray into politics with a failed run for US Congress in 2012, Mike Moon won a special state election in 2013 that sent him to Jefferson City representing the corner of the Ozarks where I grew up. It’s been three decades since my high school graduation with forty other country kids. Our small hometown is the kind of place we now take our own kids for visits to the family farm, the drive-in, the bowling alley, the creeks and lakes, but not the kind of place whose local politics often register on the radar of those of us who left in search of educational and economic opportunity.

Then my sister threw her hat in the ring to challenge Moon in his last run for state rep before he terms out.

The AP filed a note about the primary challenge

A local reporter did a proper write-up: Unconventional incumbent facing challenger with local focus

So, that happened. And now here’s the part where I need to explain my choice of diary title, which was a toss-up between quoting Alethea Kontis or going with this variant from Ally Carter:

"First time, it's a stranger; second time, it's just a coincidence; third time, it's a tail."

The first thing I noticed when Karen mentioned her intention to run, looking back at the challengers Moon has faced, is that she’s the third woman to sign on for this challenge in one of the country’s reddest districts:

2014: Julie Ruzicka primaried Mike and took 45% of the (open) GOP primary vote

2016: Stephanie Davis ran as an independent and managed to get 25% in the general

2018: The outcome for Karen’s primary challenge on August 7th... TBD

Looks to me like these gals are tailing Moon, and I set out to figure out why.

Which led me to the second thing I noticed when I went to Moon’s campaign website: he’s apparently a big fan of someone named Matt Trewhella and his Lesser Magistrate Doctrine (follow that link or click on either “The State is not God” or “Defy Tyrants” buttons on Moon’s site). Googling Matt’s name led me down a rabbit hole of underground extremism, with its weird Defensive Action Statements in support of murderer Paul Hill and the kind of debates that signing such documents provoke on the fringes of our politics.

In all of that weirdness, here’s the quote from Trewhella that caught my attention in the context of the tripartite history of biennial challenges from Julie, Stephanie and Karen for Moon’s seat:

“I was almost ready to vote for McCain and Palin myself. Almost. But I won’t. I was never keen on McCain to begin with, and his decision to add a woman to his ticket sealed my decision. I won’t vote for them. Why? Because I’m a sexist (as many accuse)? No. But because I’m a theist.”

So, now a hypothesis begins to form. These women who live in Moon’s district understand on a visceral level that they’ve got a state rep who likely believes that Sarah Palin ought to have been disqualified — not for her politics — but because of her gender.

I’m in uncharted territory at this point, grappling with the consternation that folks back home are sending a rep to Jeff City who views the nomination of Sarah Palin (!) as some kind of sop to evil liberal/secular forces… and so I start educating myself on Mike Moon by reading the local and regional papers. The best summary I’ve found to date was filed by a regional paper:

Our Voice: Rep. Mike Moon's chicken video latest in inexplicable history

A bulleted list of the highlights:

The point of the board’s editorial seems to be that — after three terms in office — even the locals aren’t quite sure what the point is to Mike’s continued representation of his district, outside of leveraging his seat as a platform for pointless grandstanding. Per some local MO political chatter I noticed on Twitter: Moon is nominally Republican but mostly an oddball contrarian who cast the lone vote in Jeff City against a Republican-sponsored bill to expand rural broadband in his (exceedingly rural) district.

Inside this small district’s borders, at the truly local level of the contest’s coverage, a small-town reporter noticed Karen’s local focus and got the contrast right. I’d like to believe Alethea’s motto that “Optimism is the true Resistance” … but Karen’s campaign was always going to be an uphill battle, and as far as I can tell, ironically enough, that’s because...

The same folks who spread the word sotto voce around our corner of rural America that Palin was somehow suspect because of her gender, are the same folks copying a Palin-inspired "Wasillafication" of our local politics by winning low-level offices with showboating around national issues and buzzwords that have little to do with finding solutions to local problems like opioid/meth epidemics, underfunded schools, how to advocate for local farmers, and where to find business investment that can provide good-paying jobs.

I went looking for what Moon has said lately on any of those local issues. Oddly enough, Moon seems to have hit the pause button on what had been an active social media presence:

twitter.com/realmikemoon has been dormant since May

facebook.com/RealMikeMoon … quiet since announcing his June 27th chicken (heh… lol) dinner

Not to mention… his infamous YouTube channel seems to be gathering dust

So, with that closing barrage of linkage, a final theory: After his ‘chicken video’ and other assorted online shenanigans went national, Moon attracted plenty of ‘followers’ on social media from outside his circle of extremist ideologues (folks like reporters, perplexed constituents, etc.) who he has no intention of inadvertently alerting to the current primary contest by doing anything other than keeping quiet.

Is Moon trying to fly under the radar until Aug. 7th? Is the strategy to keep the real Mike Moon under wraps until the general election contest begins?

Additional reading:

Miranda Blue, "Matt Trewhella Trying To Convince Elected Officials That Women Who Have Abortions Should Be ‘Tried For Homicide’"

Amanda Marcotte, "Death of a legislator: Dan Johnson’s suicide and the GOP’s far-right drift"

Murray Bishoff, “Stone age laws and Missouri’s girls”