Activists who have failed miserably over the last decade to end homelessness are losing their power to average citizens and boy are they mad. So mad, in fact, that they resort to bizarre attacks and willful mischaracterizations in an effort to bully people from speaking out.

On Friday, after council members such as Mike O’Brien played defense on very poorly written homeless legislation that provides a new right to camp at parks, the public got to speak. While there were moments of shouting, the majority of Seattleites who spoke out against the radical ACLU-inspired plan spoke passionately and from the heart. They had a legitimate concern over both their safety and the safety of the homeless when some activists seem content casting them aside to live on the streets in filth.

Some activists hate not having control of meetings; they hate not being able to monopolize the conversations. So, they attack. And it’s almost like they’re coordinating their attacks.

One activist pretended the scene was like a Trump rally, complaining that the activists were akin to anti-Muslim bigots. He went on to downplay the number of people who showed up and claimed they don’t really represent the voice of the city (after all, they don’t support his views, so they must not represent the city!).

Similarly, another activist said these voices speaking out against the legislation don’t represent much more than “very agitated people” before laughably claiming “they were screaming and shouting down council members in a way that I found, frankly, very uncivil and very reminiscent of certain rallies that have been happening at the national level.” She ended up walking back what appeared to be an obvious claim of comparing this to a Trump rally.

Let’s push aside this revisionist characterization of the meeting and focus on the hypocrisy of it all. Progressive activists routinely show up and shout down council members, too often forcing the council into recess because they’ve taken over, won’t follow rules, and won’t respect speech. And they’re small in numbers. Yet, somehow, those people represent the average citizen? Nice try.

The people who show up to these meetings almost never represent the average person because the average person has a job. They’re not bused in by activist groups, they’re not professional activists; the average Seattleite is a mom or dad, husband or wife, who works hard at their job and spends their free time devoted to their families. The Council holds public comments in the middle of the day; it’s a system professional activists can use to give the appearance of being a representative voice of Seattleites. The ones who took time from work to show up on Friday actually represent the voices of Seattle. They were so fed up by what this legislation would mean, they were driven to finally speak up in a nearly unifying voice to say NO to the homeless living in the parks the Council just used to justify yet another tax on all of us.

The activists in the community are getting desperate, and when they get desperate, they go on the attack. You can see on Twitter daily. Loud-mouthed, mean-spirited, arrogant activists surround themselves with their activist friends and they seek out diverse voices to bully and silence.

But now people are standing up to the attacks because they realize that some of these very activists have been working this issue for the last ten years. What happened during the 10-year plan to end homelessness? It’s gotten worse and we’re all sick of it. And because we’re about to take away the power these people have had for so long, they’re lashing out.

Let them. Let them call you names; let them lie about you; let them tweet snarkily at you. It’s okay. If we keep up this fight, if we continue to show up to meetings, if we finally tell politicians like Mike O’Brien that we’re not going to keep putting them in office despite their track record of botched results, we’ll win, we’ll stop bad legislation, and we’ll get one step closer to actually solving homelessness.

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