Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 1 of 175)

The South’s Mythology, the Northwest’s Bureaucracy: How a Single Football Game Defined Two Eras of Exclusion

January 10, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

One of the most compelling ironies of regional history is the fact that 100 years ago, the University of Washington was on the losing side of “the game that changed the South.” While the 1926 Rose Bowl is often remembered in Seattle as an athletic footnote, for the American South, it was a cultural baptism.

By defeating Washington 20-19 on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, Alabama became the first Southern team to achieve national legitimacy, effectively birthing the SEC and a century of collegiate football dominance. For white Southerners, this victory acted as a symbolic “do-over” of the Civil War, allowing them to reclaim a sense of honor and “manhood” through what contemporary writers called the “Spirit of Lee.”

However, to be honest about the nature of this regional pride, this era of Southern football was an exclusively white phenomenon. It was rooted deeply in the “Lost Cause” mythology. While the victory projected an image of modernization and grit to the rest of the country, it was strictly gatekept by Jim Crow laws and “gentleman’s agreements” that barred Black athletes from the field. Football in the South reflected a new, formidable image of Southern strength to the nation while simultaneously protecting a segregated social order at home.

The 1926 Rose Bowl was The Birth of a Nation on the gridiron.

For decades after, Southern football remained a regressive stronghold. Politicians attempted to block integrated matchups as late as 1955, framing them as a social “Armageddon.” Yet, the South’s near-religious obsession with winning eventually turned the sport into a Trojan horse for progress. Coaches eventually realized that to remain national powerhouses and secure lucrative TV contracts, they had to prioritize the “pragmatism of winning” over prejudice. This forced the integration of Southern athletics faster than many other social institutions, simply because the region refused to keep losing to integrated Northern teams.

While the South used the 1926 Rose Bowl to march toward a new identity, the Pacific Northwest was navigating its own version of a white-centric movement. By 1927, the Ku Klux Klan was losing steam in Washington, with an Olympia rally drawing only a fraction (only 12,000) of the crowds seen during the “mega-rallies” of 1924 (above 50,000). It is easy to mistake this decline for a burst of progressivism, but the reality is that the Klan faded because it had already won its primary legislative battles. Most notably, nativists had secured the 1924 Immigration Act, a law spearheaded by Aberdeen’s Rep. Albert Johnson that codified eugenics and racial exclusion into federal policy. In the Northwest, the Klan didn’t need to keep marching because its vision for a white America had already been signed into law.

There is a striking parallel in how both regions disguised their intolerance to make it more palatable. In the South, white supremacy was repackaged as athletic valor; in the Northwest, it was masked as a weekend family outing or “Christian nationalism.” By framing the politics of hate as entertainment, the Klan in Washington made radical exclusion feel remarkably normal. Historians often downplay this era as a fad, but that overlooks how deeply these everyday prejudices were ingrained in our local culture. Just as the Rose Bowl victory elevated an exclusionary Southern identity, the thousands of people who watched the Klan march through Olympia were witnessing a movement that had already successfully institutionalized its goals.

Comparing these two regions reveals the different ways systemic racism settles into a community. The South used football to hide its regression behind a mask of modernization, while the Northwest used a “liberal” shrug to hide how deeply its nativist victories were embedded in the law. We tend to remember the eccentric spectacle of the hoods, but we often forget the boring, bureaucratic laws that those individuals successfully passed. While Southern identity was being forged on the gridiron, the Northwest was allowing its own radical movements to melt back into the community, leaving behind a legacy of exclusion that didn’t require a uniform to persist.

After the 1926 loss, Husky football seemed to become a barometer for the region’s volatile economic pulse rather than a pillar of regional identity. While Alabama fans greeted their team with brass bands, Seattle met the Huskies with a collective shrug. As the region entered the Great Depression, the team’s struggles mirrored the grim reality of the “Boeing Bust” and other economic downturns. Conversely, our Rose Bowl successes in 1960 and 1992 served as the atmospheric backdrop for the Seattle World’s Fair and the global cultural dominance of the early dot-com era. Football in the Northwest never forged our soul the way it did in Dixie.

However, we cannot ignore what was happening beneath the surface during those years of economic struggle. As the prosperity of the 1920s pulled back like a receding tide, it exposed the jagged rocks of prejudice in Cascadia. The Great Depression turned the region into a desperate battleground where the “first to be fired, last to be hired” rule decimated minority communities. In cities like Portland, white workers began displacing Black workers from service jobs, while Mexican and Filipino laborers were targeted for state-sanctioned purges.

This era also saw the quiet institutionalization of the Klan’s nativist mission through federal relief programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps eventually adopted complete segregation, and the Federal Housing Authority’s 1934 rating system officially gave birth to redlining. By drawing lines around neighborhoods with even a single Black resident, the government strangled minority districts like Portland’s Albina District. This wasn’t the loud, “Spirit of Lee” racism found in the South; it was a cold, bureaucratic version that baked inequality into the very geography of our cities.

Looking back at New Year’s Day 1926 in Pasadena, we see two regions attempting to define themselves through very different means. The South used the football field to march away from its past toward a multi-billion-dollar future, turning regional pride into a national powerhouse. In the Northwest, we won our battles for exclusion early and then largely forgot we ever fought them. We watched the Klan march, allowed them to influence our laws, and then permitted them to return to being our neighbors without much further thought.

Ultimately, we have to remember the laws as much as the rallies. If we only focus on the spectacle of the fiery crosses, we miss the long-term impact of redlining and immigration acts. The South’s shield was football, but our shield in the Northwest was often our own indifference. Understanding this history is essential as we continue to debate policies to combat institutional racism today, as it reminds us how easily these systems can persist once they are quietly integrated into the fabric of a community.

Brier Dudley is wrong about the news

January 3, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Brier Dudley’s recent column, “No wonder election results are wacky: Fewer follow the news,” carries significant weight in Washington State. As a leading voice in the movement to fund news organizations, Dudley often frames the boundaries of what policymakers consider possible for future public funding of journalism.

However, his latest diagnosis of our “wacky” election results rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how voters actually behave and where they are finding their signal in the noise.

Dudley’s thesis is that a lack of news consumption leads to “civic illiteracy” and “wacky” results, such as the election of progressive Katie Wilson as mayor of Seattle. But on his way to create a thesis that builds support for local journalism, he ignores the basic calculus of voting. Voting is an opt-in activity.

In political science, this is called “information efficacy”: the belief that you know enough to make a choice. People who truly feel uninformed don’t typically cast “wacky” ballots; they don’t cast ballots at all. This “voter roll-off” is why local turnout is often a fraction of national turnout. If someone shows up to vote for a “neophyte,” it’s rarely because they are operating in a vacuum. It’s because they have consumed media, be it a TikTok breakdown, a thread on X, or a digital endorsement, that gave them the confidence to act.

The Seattle Blind Spot

Also, if Dudley’s thesis were universally true, Seattle would be a strange place to prove it. He laments the decline of newspapers and TV, yet ignores the vibrant, digital-native ecosystem that currently drives Seattle politics.

While the Seattle Times remains a vital institution, it is not the only game in town. The city continues to fund public television; KUOW is a massive, robust newsroom; and then there is The Stranger. Whether one agrees with its politics or not, The Stranger remains a primary driver of city elections. When “neophytes” win, it is often because they were vetted and promoted by these alternative local outlets. By ignoring these players, Dudley isn’t describing a news desert; he’s describing a landscape where daily newspapers no longer hold the only map.

Olympia and Thurston County are a better example of the news desert that Dudley wants to use. The election results here, though, don’t match the results of his thesis. Rather than “wacky,” we tend to elect local leaders who stand in the deep trough of our local version of centrism. This is because the voters who tend to opt in have the time and inclination to do the extra work to research their choices. This is not an argument for less information. A broad and informed public is obviously a good thing for electing good leaders, but ensuring that once they are elected, they do the right thing.

“Social Media” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Dudley, like many, uses “social media” as a catch-all for “no news” or “unfounded opinion.” However, by 2025, telling a researcher that you get your news from social media is a meaningless data point. It doesn’t tell us what you are seeing. Are you following KUOW’s journalists on Mastodon? Are you watching live-streamed City Council clips on YouTube? Or are you reading a post from your neighbor on Nextdoor?

Social media is a delivery mechanism, not a source. The problem isn’t that people are “on social media.” The problem is that we have outsourced our civic square to attention-seeking algorithms.

Credibility is Now Built on Engagement

We cannot recreate the 1995 newsroom. The back-and-forth between media and audience has opened up permanently. Today, credibility is built on engagement, not just clicks to a paywalled article, but the actual work of being present where people are.

However, we must admit the anti-democratic force of current algorithms. Most platforms optimize for outrage because outrage pays more. This is fundamentally different from a newspaper’s old role of setting a shared civic agenda. We don’t just need people to come back to paywalled websites; we need a next way that fixes the digital architecture itself.

The Next Way: Digital Public Spaces

What does a pro-democracy digital space look like? It looks like an algorithm that benefits the community by not stoking outrage, and moderation systems that protect people from harm while inviting debate.

A promising example is Roundabout, a new product from the nonprofit New_Public. Roundabout is designed to revive the civic commons role that local newspapers used to play. Unlike Facebook, it is intentionally built against virality. It organizes local information, events, and shared concerns through structured channels and local stewards who guide the conversation.

Instead of a feed designed to keep you scrolling via conflict, Roundabout creates a digital space meant to help neighbors actually know one another and act together. It prioritizes usefulness over headlines and relationships over “likes.”

Looking back at old newsrooms and tsk-tsking candidates for making social media videos isn’t a strategy for the future. We don’t need to save the press of the past; we need to build a digital commons that treats us like neighbors and citizens rather than data points for an outrage machine.

Seattle Doesn’t Play Itself

December 27, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

For a city obsessed with moviemaking and modern narrative, the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself works as a surprisingly effective local history of Los Angeles and Southern California. Much of how we understand Southern California arrives through the lens of filmmakers.

The core thesis of the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (or at least the one that rings truest to me) is that Los Angeles is constantly captured while being denied the ability to express itself. Even calling Los Angeles “LA” flattens the city, stripping away its complexity. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a typecast actor trying to communicate something real about themselves while trapped in someone else’s script.

My favorite thread in the film is its discussion of mid-century modern Southern California homes, so often repurposed as villainous lairs. Filmmakers turn a distinct and beautiful regional architecture into something cold, cruel, and hostile, warping the meaning of the place itself.

This is the inverse of the problem Seattle (and the broader Pacific Northwest) faces.

Just a note before I go any further: I acknowledge “Seattle” isn’t synonymous with “the Pacific Northwest.” I use it as a stand-in for the urban Northwest, which also includes Portland, parts of Tacoma, Bellingham, and Olympia. There is a broad spectrum of society that is centered deeply in the Seattle experience. There isn’t a moat around the city, so what happens there matters elsewhere. I just wanted to acknowledge that there are missing pieces to what I’m writing about today. Which is sort of the meta-point of the essay anyway.

So, moving on.

Unlike Los Angeles, which plays every city or no city at all, other cities almost always play Seattle. And what this does is it keeps us from approaching our own story. The story necessary for film keeps our own story to one side.

Films set in Seattle routinely shoot somewhere else. Fifty Shades of Grey was filmed in Vancouver, the most common “not Seattle.” More cruelly, The Boys in the Boat was filmed mostly in England, where a historic England market town and a primary school stood in for the Depression-era University of Washington and Seattle.

The first question is whether we can forgive Vancouver as it stands in for Seattle. Both belong to the proto-nation of Cascadia, sibling cities separated by an inconvenient international border. That logic almost works, except Vancouver suffers from its own Los Angeles Plays Itself problem. It plays everyone.

Vancouver has appeared as San Francisco (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), New York (Life or Something Like It), Chicago (I, Robot), Tokyo (Godzilla), and Shanghai (Code 46). It has even played fictional cities like Metropolis (Smallville) and Gotham (Batwoman).

Seattle, by contrast, rarely gets to play itself. When it appears on screen, it matters more as an idea than as a physical place.

Seattle functions cinematically as a concept rather than a geography or community.

The city became shorthand for the foggy shape created when you pull together grunge, Starbucks, and Tech: cultural exports that transformed Seattle into a symbol of urban aspiration and fantasy. As James Lyons explains in Selling Seattle, the city’s rise in film and television accelerated in the early 1990s as it shed its identity as a “rough diamond” lumber town (itself very limiting) and rebranded itself as a center of technology and culture.

One reason filmmakers gravitated toward Seattle was its portrayal as a “safe haven” and “white oasis” for middle-class professionals, especially when contrasted with the media narratives of urban decay and racial unrest that defined Los Angeles in the same era.

Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993) cemented this version of the city: sentimental, romantic, and largely frictionless. Young-ish professionals move through a city unburdened by history, class, or social constraint, living urban-adjacent lives without consequence.

The grunge subculture added a layer of “novel edginess” that appealed to filmmakers without pushing into our actual history or non-white communities. Coffee shops and music venues signaled bohemian credibility while remaining safely contained. Seattle became a metropolitan sanctuary, a cool, mist-covered stage balancing high-tech ambition with rugged natural isolation.

This mythology formed the mental backdrop for stories set in Seattle, but not of Seattle.

Half Steps in Popular Film

The films that do get Seattle and the Pacific Northwest better, if not correct (Singles, Grassroots, The Ring, and the very recent Train Dreams), do so largely because they were filmed here. They often show a different city and region than the friendly, white, urban unicorn of popular imagination.

The Seattle of Singles is jaded and two-faced. In Grassroots, the city turns up its nose at dreamers, favoring politically “serious” projects like light rail over visionary but impractical ideas like the monorail. The Ring forces viewers to confront how dark it gets here (literally and metaphorically) and how much remains unseen. Train Dreams expands the frame beyond the city entirely, emphasizing the overwhelming scale of Pacific Northwest nature, the nature of transitory communities, and asking viewers to sit with uncertainty until the very end.

These films start to reveal what we lose when Seattle doesn’t get to play itself. Nowhere is that loss clearer than in the limitations of Grassroots.

Grassroots feels faithful in spirit, but only if you squint. Adapting Phil Campbell’s memoir, Zioncheck for President, required sanding down something far darker and more unstable. The resulting film is earnest and encouraging, the kind of story that makes local politics feel charming.

Campbell tells the story of Marion Zioncheck, a brilliant, erratic, and tragic 1930s Seattle congressman. He weaves Zioncheck’s life through the 2001 monorail campaign, framing it as a ghost story about Seattle radicalism and its costs. The memoir isn’t really about a monorail or a doomed campaign; it’s about the thin, dangerous line between political idealism and clinical instability.

Removing Zioncheck loses the story’s historical ballast and its most unsettling question: whether Grant’s obsession represents visionary persistence or the modern echo of a tragic mental break, and how Pacific Northwest political culture absorbs and romanticizes both.

The book also lingers on the unease beneath the framing of two white, slacker-intellectuals trying to unseat one of the city’s few Black political leaders. Campbell confronts the ugliness of that tension, questioning how grassroots movements often remain blind to their own privilege and moral certainty. The film acknowledges this dynamic, then quickly retreats to the cleaner abstraction of monorail versus light rail, choosing policy debate over racial and class friction.

Grassroots reads as a love letter to civic engagement in Seattle. Zioncheck for President feels messier and truer, a beautiful, sometimes horrifying autopsy of a midlife crisis unfolding in public. Both love the city, but only one sits with what that love costs and what it reveals about Seattle itself.

This may simply reflect the limits of film versus books, something a smarter person could explain more elegantly. Books allow for nuance that even a three-hour movie struggles to sustain. Film demands loss. A loss that text can afford to keep.

So maybe we’re stuck if we focus only on film.

Broader Narratives

Supersonic and West of Here are two sweeping novels that attempt to wrap in more faithfully the missing context that a true narrative of the Pacific Northwest brings to the table.

But books like Survival Math by Mitchell S. Jackson and No-No Boy by John Okada cut deeper, peeling back the familiar Pacific Northwest mythology of tech, evergreen cutaway shots, and coffee-fueled progressivism in a white space. They reveal a regional story shaped instead by displacement, survival, and the hard geometry of who gets to belong.

Supersonic and West of Here gesture toward these realities, but they stop short of plunging into the disphotic zone of regional narrative.

No-No Boy’s Seattle looks nothing like the Emerald City of boosterism and nostalgia. The postwar International District barely breathes. Streets like Jackson become psychological checkpoints rather than simple routes. The protagonist moves through the city as an intruder, hyper-aware of his body, his history, and his perceived betrayal. The city doesn’t welcome him back; it watches him, measures him, reminds him that reintegration is conditional.

Jackson’s Portland in Survival Math stands as the inverse of the Portlandia fantasy. It isn’t quirky, gentle, or ironic. It is a city designed, architecturally and socially, to contain, monitor, and discard Black residents.

If the cinematic Seattle of the 90s was a “white oasis,” Zia Mohajerjasbi’s Know Your Place gives us the irrigation system, the grueling, uphill labor required to sustain a life in the cracks of the “urban aspiration.” Telling the story of an Eritrean-American teenager on an odyssey across the hills of the Central District to deliver a suitcase of medicine, the film allows the physical geography of the city to sync with the lived experience of marginalized inhabitants. Know Your Place doesn’t settle for the postcard views of the Space Needle that serve Grey’s Anatomy. Seattle is not a “safe haven” but a labyrinth of disappearing landmarks and a society that doesn’t serve everyone.

In Know Your Place, Survival Math’s displacement becomes visual. We see historic Black and immigrant-owned spaces not as footnotes, but as a vibrant, fragile reality being physically overwritten by the expanding white footprint. Like No-No Boy, the film uses the city’s verticality to illustrate social friction. Every hill climbed in Know Your Place is a reminder of the economic and systemic weight carried by the main character. By centering the East African community, the movie moves past the novel edginess of grunge to find the actual city, a complex, multi-layered heritage waiting for a lens.

Seattle Knows Itself

So, in a genre I know better (local history), this is Megan Asaka’s Seattle from the Margins as compared to Murray Morgan’s Skid Road. The quirky, mostly white, working-class history of Morgan’s Seattle presents the anti-Chinese 1886 riots as a dramatic, chaotic, and shameful moment of civic breakdown. Morgan uses his wit to describe the “vigilante” committees and the “horrible friendliness” of the mob herding people onto ships. However, he treats the event as a temporary fever, a singular eruption of “hate” in an otherwise colorful, rough-and-tumble town.

The deeper truth, explained by Asaka, is that the riots were a symptom of a deeper design of Seattle that kept non-white communities in Seattle on the margins.

The difficulty Seattle faces in cultural representation is still the inverse of Los Angeles’s problem: while LA is constantly filmed but denied self-expression, Seattle rarely gets to play itself. Instead, Seattle serves as a cinematic concept that erases our deeper understanding of our own place and our own history. The baggage that white people carry from across the country lands on our regional narrative when they use Seattle to tell stories or to move here.

This preference for the abstraction of grunge, Starbucks, and tech aspiration over geography warps the city’s narrative, overlooking its historical complexity and marginalized communities. But recently, we are seeing films that sync the city’s physical and social terrain with the lived experience of those on the margins.

Unpacking the Cascadian Calm

December 20, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 2 Comments

Twelve years ago, I wrote a blog post attempting to provide a historical context for our regional personality. I wanted to push back against the “Seattle Freeze,” that ubiquitous, slightly whiny framing of Pacific Northwest social life and replace it with something more accurate: Cascadian Calm.

Recently, the “Freeze” discourse bubbled up again in the Stranger, this time through the lens of dog-walking etiquette. A writer recounted an encounter with a “Gen-X white lady” who, upon seeing another dog approaching, ducked into the street to avoid a greeting. The writer’s takeaway was a scorched-earth anonymous rant: “Are you too socially anxious and screen-addicted to acknowledge the existence of your neighbors?”

There is a lot to unpack there, but the most important thing is the perspective shift, which is not something I would have done 12 years ago. To the writer, the woman was antisocial. To the woman, she was likely practicing responsible dog ownership: proactively avoiding a potential conflict between two leashed animals. While the writer sounded angry, they were likely just lonely. But asking “What the fuck is wrong with you?” is rarely the key that unlocks a neighbor’s front door.

This interaction is the “Freeze” in a microcosm. It isn’t a social disease; it is a clash of metabolic rates.

The Myth of the Freeze

What we call the “Seattle Freeze” is actually a reaction inside the Cascadian Calm. It is a mechanism to avoid negative friction. In the Northwest, we practice “assent by silence” or the “dirty yes.” We remove ourselves from situations to prevent the temperature from rising.

The “Freeze” as a brand surfaced around 2005, a period of moderate population growth following the Dot-Com bust. But the grievance is much older.

Knute Berger points to post-World War I when civic promoters attempted to make the entire city friendly. I like to point to the post-World War II era. In my original post, I wrote about a July 1946 letter to the editor by a veteran named D.K. He described himself as a “strange outsider” unable to break into Seattle’s “charmed circle.” This is the Freeze.

Other residents wrote back (this is when letters to the editor were the comment thread), and D.K. eventually agreed that if he worked hard enough, he’d make friends. But, he pointed out, it still was different here.

But, here the context was important. Seattle in 1946 was going through jarring transition as a region. Seattle was pivoting from a resource-extraction outpost to a global tech hub. After the war, Boeing slashed its workforce from 50,000 to 9,000 almost overnight. Thousands of African Americans who arrived for defense jobs were finding their place in a shifting social hierarchy, while the Japanese American community returned from internment to find their neighborhood effectively erased. In this era of high turnover and economic “post-war blues,” the “Freeze” was the friction of a city trying to redefine its boundaries while new residents hammered on the glass.

The Science of the “Sane”

If we look at the academic data regarding regional personality, the Pacific Northwest is defined by High Openness and Low Neuroticism.

The academic study of “Regional Personality” is a relatively young but robust field, led by psychologists. Research suggests that personality traits aren’t just randomly distributed; they “cluster” geographically through a process called selective migration. People don’t just move for jobs; they move toward “psychological fit.”

The “Cascadian Calm” is placed squarely within the “Open and Creative” profile of regional personalities. Researchers found that the Northwest consistently ranks among the highest in the nation for Openness to Experience. This isn’t just about trying new foods; it’s a psychological marker for curiosity, non-traditional thinking, and a high tolerance for ambiguity. We are a region of people who are comfortable with “not knowing,” which allows for a certain social looseness that outsiders often mistake for a lack of structure or care.

Crucially, this high openness is paired with consistently low Extraversion. This is the scientific bedrock of the “Freeze.” The region skews heavily toward introversion, recharging through solitude, the “middle of nowhere,” or quiet intellectualism rather than social performance. While a transplant from a “Friendly and Conventional” region (like the Midwest) might view a quiet sidewalk as a social failure, the data suggests that for the Cascadian, that silence is a sign of high emotional stability. We aren’t panicking in the quiet.

This creates what academics call a Cognitive Resilience factor. Because we also score low on Neuroticism, we tend to be less rattled by emotional swings. This produces a “stable” atmosphere that can feel “robotic” to someone from a high-stress, high-energy urban center. You see a neighbor in distress and think, “I should respect their privacy so they can process this,” while the newcomer thinks, “Why isn’t anyone rushing over to help?”

Furthermore, the PNW is part of the “None Zone,” the most secular region in the country. In the South or the Midwest, the “charmed circle” D.K. wrote about in 1946 is often held together by the glue of the church or civic clubs. In the Northwest, those institutions are historically weak. Without these pre-packaged social on-ramps, our natural introversion becomes a walled garden. You aren’t being excluded because of a lack of manners; you’re being excluded because there is no formal onboarding process for the neighborhood. We are a society of high-trust individuals who simply lack the performative rituals to show it.

Think of the Pacific Northwest as a peaceful library. The environment values quiet, respects your personal space, and offers a sympathetic nod if you drop your books, but it won’t necessarily rush over to help you pick them up. This isn’t rudeness; it’s a “live and let live” philosophy that assumes you value your autonomy as much as we value ours.

DK and Kim’s Journey

The most fascinating part of this 12-year conversation has been the comment section of my original post. Specifically, the evolution of a commenter named Kim. There are specific echoes with Kim’s journey as there were with DK when he was integrating into Seattle in 1946.

In 2013, Kim arrived from Atlanta in a state of “culture shock.” Her early comments were vitriolic: “It’s called MANNERS. It should be taught during childhood.” She viewed the Cascadian Calm as a moral failing.

But by 2020, after moving to Southern California and San Francisco, Kim returned to Seattle by choice. Her perspective had undergone a radical shift. She realized that while other regions might offer more “performative” hospitality, they didn’t offer the “fit” she required. She stopped demanding the city change for her and started navigating it, joining meetups, volunteering, and “pushing through.” She moved from cultural combat to cultural integration. The “Freeze” didn’t melt; she just learned how to dress for the weather.

Looking back at D. K.’s 1946 grievance is to see the “Freeze” in its ancestral form: a raw, post-war loneliness that felt like a moral indictment of the city. D. K. was a man beating his fists against a “charmed circle,” interpreting Seattle’s lack of immediate, back-slapping hospitality as a sign that he was an “intruder” in his own country. His evolution, however, was stunted by the era; he viewed the responsibility of “community spirit” as a debt the city owed him, a service to be rendered to the returning veteran. While he eventually expressed gratitude for the few who reached out, his letters remained anchored in a sense of exclusion. Unlike the modern Kim, who eventually realized that the city is a landscape to be navigated rather than a wall to be climbed, D. K. represents the tragic first stage of the transplant’s journey: the belief that a quiet city is a dead city, and that a neighbor’s silence is a locked door rather than a boundary of respect.

The Social Capital Paradox

Critics call our behavior “passive-aggressive” or “cliquish.” They argue that the regional culture is a “monoculture” that forces extroverts to “tone down.”

However, there is a paradox at play. While regions like the South rank high in “social graces” (the “Southern Charm” model), they often rank lower in verifiable social capital, institutional trust, and actual community engagement. The Pacific Northwest ranks higher in these metrics. We may not say “hello” on the sidewalk, but we trust the library system, we show up for the public hearing, and we maintain the trail.

Our “Calm” may be the byproduct of a society that feels socially secure enough that it doesn’t require performative politeness to maintain order.

The New Friction

The complaints about the “Freeze” always peak during eras of high migration: the post-WWI era, the post-WWII era, the 90s tech boom, and the post-Great Recession surge.

The angry dog-walker from the Stranger was right about one thing: “Community takes a little effort.” But empathy is a two-way street. Assuming the worst intentions of your neighbor, assuming they are “screen-addicted” rather than simply “dog-cautious,” is the very energy that keeps the “Freeze” intact.

The regional personality isn’t going to change. The Cascadian Calm is a feature of the landscape. We aren’t unfriendly; we are just waiting for you to realize that in this library, silence is a sign of respect.

The “Cascadian Calm” is a sturdy psychological chassis, but even the most resilient systems have a breaking point. Since the “Seattle Freeze” moniker was minted in 2005, the region has been battered by the curse of living in interesting times. We have endured the Great Recession, the social fracture of the Trump eras, the global pandemic, and a housing crisis that finally saw the dam break on affordability. The civic trust that once allowed us to be “quiet but kind” is fraying. In Seattle itself, the political pendulum swings wildly from progressive experimentation to reactionary moderation, a symptom of a city that has lost its steady hand on the tiller.

When our larger systems (zoning, housing, and the mayor’s office) seem to fail us, our reliance on that old tradition of social capital is shaken. In this high-anxiety environment, the “Freeze” stops being a respectful boundary and starts looking like a defensive crouch. We are leaning into the withdrawal aspect of our personality because we are tired, but as our angry dog-walker from The Stranger proves, leaning into the Freeze doesn’t do us any favors. It only deepens the isolation.

We are, as a region and a people, imperfect. We cannot reach back into 1946 and fix D.K.’s loneliness, nor can we undo the administrative erasures of the last century. We can only do better today by refusing to let our “Calm” turn into coldness.

I will say that living in and writing from Olympia seems to be calmer water than I described above. We tend to vote towards the middle of our choices. Not necessarily progressive or moderate, but definitely not reactionary in either way. The recent election results since 2021 have solidified this belief for me. There is a bare minimum of progressive politics that any candidate needs to pass, but the other requirement is both engagement with the community and a seriousness in their approach that rejects reactionary politics. This reminds me that while Seattle may get all the attention and attempts to drag the region around, the rest of Cascadia still exists and may be a better example of what we strive for.

The work of community is surprisingly simple, though not easy: it requires us to do exactly what the anonymous ranter failed to do: assume the best of the person standing next to you. Whether they are ducking into the street to manage a nervous dog or simply keeping their head down in the rain, they aren’t your enemy. They are just another Cascadian, navigating the same landscape, waiting for someone to prove that the circle isn’t quite as “charmed” (or as closed) as it looks.

Olympia as Ghost Town

December 13, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 3 Comments

When I wrote last week about Tono, I was thinking about all the non-Tono ghost towns we don’t think about, the ones lost to inaccessibility, or those that never managed to keep their ruins standing. Lewis County has a dozen or so of these across the timber and coal industries (Hurn, Mendota, and others): towns that simply ran out of reason to be.

Tono taught us that history survives the physical. It was a place erased by corporate action and resource exhaustion, its memory surviving in old maps and the stubborn curiosity of GIS layers. I argued that the built environment is not the memory. The detailed records (what we can piece together) are the memory.

But what I’ve always wondered about is a ghost town lost in plain sight. What if Puget City, north of Lacey, had grown during the resource era, died, been forgotten, and then completely paved over in the name of urban progress?

While not a perfect example of growth, decline, and erasure by suburbia, the East Capitol Campus in Olympia is a lost, ghosted city. And it explains a lot about what went wrong in Olympia’s growth after the 1950s.

The Lost City

Tono was a company town that faded out. This Olympia neighborhood was healthy, dense, and killed.

The destruction spanned 18 blocks, bounded by Capitol Way on the west, Jefferson on the east, 11th on the north, and Maple Park on the south. This is now the collection of state office buildings across from the Capitol Campus proper. The neighborhood included a rich tapestry of density that Olympia today desperately tries to rebuild: no fewer than six apartment buildings (two with over 30 units), duplexes, the Girl Scouts clubhouse, and at least one store.

It was also the second location of William Winlock Miller (aka Olympia) High School. The state’s appetite for land here was so great that this was the second time the expanded Capitol Campus displaced Olympia High School. The original Olympia HS was on Water Street, a location that no longer exists but was roughly between the diagonal drive and the big old oak by the Sunken Gardens.

The catalyst for this violence was not a coal vein running out, but a court case: State ex rel. Lemon v. Langlie (1954). The ruling, which forced state executive offices to maintain their main offices in Olympia, solidified the city as the seat of government, and in doing so, condemned this residential district.

The Bureaucratic Weapon

The killing wasn’t a sudden demolition; it was a long, cold administrative death. The original buildings: Highway Licensing (1961), Employment Security (1961), and Archives (1964) came first. But the real destruction happened in the 1970s, after the city eliminated the historic cross-streets by vacating rights-of-way in the mid-1960s.

This is the big deal. You can build around a neighborhood; you can’t sustain a community once its streets have been wiped off the map. Ironically, the original right-of-way for 12th Avenue still exists, running straight through the 1991 Natural Resources Building. The built environment was literally erased.

In the 1960s, the state set out to take over 75 properties. The struggle put a human face on the process through the saga of Roy H. Bergh, 77, and his wife Leila, 72. The Berghs resisted the state’s efforts for about 13 years, leading to a prolonged legal battle involving condemnation and, ultimately, their eviction and jailing in 1973. They felt the state had “stolen” their property. The land they went to jail for is now part of the northern flank of the Natural Resources Building, at what used to be the corner of 12th and Franklin.

This ideological erasure was compounded by massive infrastructure projects that completed the destruction. Interstate 5 was constructed along the back edge of the neighborhood, and Plum Street was expanded via Henderson Boulevard into Southeast Olympia. We can’t overstate how radically this shifted access, suddenly, getting into that end of town by car mattered more than moving through the old city grid. While citizens voted to save Watershed Park in 1955, just five years later we were putting a road through it on the way to the third Olympia (William Winlock Miller) High School.

The Brutalist Betrayal

The final product, designed in the 1970s, was a monument to the state’s ambitions, and it failed to provide value to Olympia.

What we have now was designed in the Brutalist tradition, characterized by austere, monolithic concrete forms and monumental scale. This architecture prioritizes power and control over human-scale interaction and community. The new East Campus, most notably the manically vaguely named “Office Building 2” (1975) and the massive underground garage (1975), which famously began leaking almost immediately, was a policy failure if the goal was to create a human-scaled, useful addition to the city.

The creation of the East Campus shifted the center of civic life (the high school) to a contested border with another city (Tumwater) and promoted the development of car-centric districts, reinforced by millions of dollars in bonds for parking facilities.

The result is a landscape largely divorced from human use or utility: massive, useless expanses of lawn that no one occupies; a long stretch of Capitol Way with no sidewalk on its east side; and the bizarre arrangement of walkways threading around the buildings.

This is a space most often transited rather than enjoyed. Protests happen across the street at the Legislative Building. Community events take place downtown or around Capitol Lake. This is a broad civic space that no one uses, or even thinks about, unless they’re forced to inconveniently walk through it because they parked somewhere else.

Around OB2 and the Natural Resources Building, paths curve toward nowhere. A grand staircase ends in grass. Rounded walkways circle a vestigial OB2 entrance along Jefferson.

This area was supposed to be the beginning of “Ceremonial Drive,” a road that would have snaked around the buildings near where the Natural Resources Building now stands and where the old courthouse (now Capitol Court) remains.

What did we lose for that odd arrangement of nothing on Jefferson? Five houses and four duplex units. The East Campus is the grandly designed version of a exclusively zoned single family neighborhood. Nothing in walking distance, so if you leave your house on foot (or accidentally walk through East Campus) it is only for the act of walking, not going anywhere there.

Tono taught me that losing physical structures isn’t the same as losing history, you can reconstruct the past from afar. But the East Campus teaches something else entirely: some change is an ideological act of violence against history.

I’m not arguing the neighborhood should have been frozen in time, or that the state shouldn’t have expanded. But this neighborhood was never allowed to evolve. Today, state offices are at least expected to weave into neighborhoods, imperfect as that system is. The East Campus, by contrast, was simply killed, wiped off the face of the city.

And I point this out without irony as residents of the South Capitol Neighborhood fight a pitched battle against legislative-centric businesses expanding into residential homes, that they were the original target of campus planners’ expansionist ambitions.

Before heading east, the proposal envisioned a southern expansion of the campus. More than 20 acres of the South Capitol neighborhood would have been razed and replaced with new government buildings, along with a rounded road system that would have largely replaced the existing street grid.

But we all know how this ended. The campus expanded east, not south. Instead of annexing a more affluent neighborhood, the state razed a more middle-class community on its eastern flank.

You can’t stand today in the middle of this vast, empty expanse and pretend the past is intact. But because the architecture and landscaping are so empty and silent, the history still exists, in the sad story of the Berghs, the memories of the high schoolers, and the ghosted street grid beneath our feet. The built environment is not the memory. And thank goodness, because in this case, the builders made sure the built environment was a lie.

Tono, actually

December 6, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 8 Comments

One of the historic rabbit holes I’m prone to falling down is the lost cities in Washington State. I don’t mean ghost towns, because some of them, like Tono in southern Thurston County, don’t exist at all anymore.

Over the years, I’ve tried to pinpoint exactly where Tono was located. Recently, I was looking at the parcel layer (the map showing property boundaries) in southern Thurston County (as I’m sure we all do from time to time), just below Bucoda. And, I noticed a long, skinny parcel that, to me, indicated a road or a railroad was once there.

So, I went back and found a fairly decent map of Tono that included a train line. The train line’s contour matched the parcel’s shape, and it lined up nearly perfectly.

This is the best I’ve been able to produce of how Tono was laid out.

This is significant because the landscape of Tono disappeared when mining techniques changed after the town itself was abandoned.

In 1969 coal mining in the fields around the Tono site was revived when the Pacific Power and Light company bought the land and built a new steam plant to produce power. It was during this era that the Tono site saw its largest change. The ground on which the town had sat was scraped up in order to get to the coal beneath it. The coal mining terraforming was so severe that the town site is currently dominated by two massive ponds.

For decades, Tono had been a fairly significant town in Thurston County, on par with Yelm, Tenino, and Tumwater. But because it was a company town, when the resource ran out, the town itself ran out of reasons to exist.

What I keep coming back to is how completely Tono was erased. There was no fight over historic districts, no argument about “character,” no committee meeting where someone insisted their grandfather once lived in a particular house and demanded the coal company spare the building. The ground was literally peeled back; the past scraped away to get at what the land still had left to give. What’s left now are ponds big enough to swallow the entire town grid.

And yet, somehow, Tono survives.

Tono survives in census tables, photos, mining reports, and the stubborn curiosity of anyone who has ever tried, like I have, to find the ghost of a town that isn’t even a ghost.

It’s funny: we spend so much energy today trying to keep the past standing upright. We landmark houses whose only real significance is their ability to slow down a duplex development. We wrap ourselves around “character” as if it were a fragile antique rather than something living communities constantly renegotiate.

Tono is a lesson in impermanence so complete I can’t help but be amazed. An entire town, just gone.

Two ponds where families once lived. You couldn’t “preserve” Tono if you tried; the coal company settled the question half a century ago. And yet, that doesn’t make it any less historical. If anything, it makes it more so. Tono forces you to engage with history as a process, not a museum exhibit. You can’t stand in the middle of a preserved streetscape and pretend the past is still intact, because the flow from the past to today is change. Change even includes the scraping of an entire landscape until there is nothing left.

You have to reconstruct it. You have to work for it. And there’s something freeing in that.

The lesson of Tono, the one that historians, preservationists, and anyone who loves their community ought to sit with, is that losing the physical stuff isn’t the same as losing the history. The built environment is not the memory. The map I matched by lining up an old railroad grade with a weirdly long modern parcel tells me more about Tono’s rise and fall than any building would. The ponds tell a truth the hardware store never could: the town’s existence was always dependent on what lay beneath it.

We forget that history is supposed to breathe. Towns grow, plateau, disappear, reappear in footnotes, and get rediscovered in GIS layers. Some places make it. Some fade. And sometimes the fading is the story.

Tono reminds me that you can lose every house, every street, every trace of a community’s physical presence, and still have history worth knowing. You don’t need to encase it in glass to make it matter. You don’t need to keep a structure standing to let the story breathe.

From Wheelmen to Highways to Bike Lanes: Olympia’s 130-Year Loop

November 29, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

On more than one muddy Saturday in the 1890s, groups of Tacoma bicyclists pedaled south toward Olympia, only to turn back in frustration. The road between Nisqually and the capital was a slog, a stretch so notorious that “weekend wheelmen” abandoned their plans rather than push their gleaming new safety bicycles through miles of muck.

For decades, Olympia had already endured the political humiliation of defending its status as the state capital against the ambition of cities Tacoma. So to have Tacoma cyclists literally turn up their noses at the condition of the road to Olympia? For men like Dr. P.H. Carlyon, that was simply too much. If the state capital was going to command respect, it needed passable routes. If the county wasn’t going to build them, Olympia’s elite would do it themselves.

Thus began the first organized effort to construct bicycle paths in Thurston County.

The Bicycle Craze Reaches Olympia

The 1890s bicycle boom wasn’t unique to this region; it was a national mania. The safety bicycle, with two equal wheels, a chain, and pneumatic tires, transformed cycling into a middle-class pastime. By 1897 the U.S. was producing up to two million bicycles a year; by 1900, as many as five million Americans owned one.

As crazes sometimes take a while longer to reach us, Olympia’s residents were still no exception. While the nationwide fascination of bikes crested in 1896, in 1897 we formed the Olympia Bicycle Path Association, which grew into the Thurston County Bicycle Path Association by 1899. The membership rolls read like the social directory of the era: physicians, businessmen, former territorial officials. This was not a club of hobbyists, it was a political organization capable of getting things done.

Building the First Bike Network

The Association’s work didn’t focus primarily on city streets. Olympia’s dirt roads were rough but rideable. Most of their work was on the countryside. The challenge wasn’t commuting; it was leisure. Riders wanted smooth, scenic routes to Woodland (now Lacey), to South Bay, to Tumwater, to Little Rock, and even toward Nisqually, where a connection to Tacoma awaited.

Several projects stand out:

Franklin Street Path (1899): Construction began in May and marked one of the first formal, graded bike facilities in Olympia.
Little Rock Path (1899): Completed by July and praised as a “splendid path,” it demonstrated the Association’s ability to finish large, coordinated works.
Olympia–Tumwater Route: Following Cleveland Avenue to Custer, this corridor provided one of the most useful regional connections.
Olympia–Nisqually Path: A bold link aimed at stitching Thurston County into the broader Puget Sound biking network.

In a sense, these paths were the 1890s equivalent of mountain bike trails or ski slopes, recreational amenities more than transportation necessities. Their funding and maintenance depended entirely on public enthusiasm to pay a fee toward the path association. So when the bicycle craze collapsed around the turn of the century, the paths faded too. By 1901, the association was effectively defunct.

But for former association president P.H. Carlyon, his few years of advocating for bike path construction set him up for his career defining task.

Carlyon’s Next Act: From Wheelmen to Earthmovers

Dr. P.H. Carlyon had been the president of the Bicycle Path Association in 1898. Just over a decade later, he would become mayor of Olympia. And from 1910–1911, he oversaw one of the largest landscape transformations in city history: the Carlyon Fill, which used more than two million cubic yards of dredged material to reshape what is now downtown Olympia.

In 1913, Carlyon was elected to the state legislature, where he became one of the driving forces behind Washington’s early highway system. Long before the interstate system, Washington built an ambitious network of paved highways connecting cities, routes like Martin Way and Capitol Boulevard that we now take for granted.

It was Carlyon, the former bicycle-path enthusiast, who championed the funding, engineering, and political will for this transformation.

The irony is almost too perfect: the man who once built bike paths so Tacoma riders wouldn’t mock Olympia eventually built the paved roads that would help bicycles vanish from everyday use.

Why the Early Highways Stuck—and the Bike Paths Didn’t

The bicycle paths of the 1890s died because they were built for fun. Highways, on the other hand, were built for commerce, growth, and a modern identity. People had traveled between cities by boat or train. Paved highways were a radical new form of freedom and a new type of economic infrastructure.

Once the state invested in roads, every subsequent decision reinforced the automobile’s dominance. Land was platted for cars. Businesses oriented their entrances around them. Neighborhoods sprawled out to follow them. By the mid-20th century, the original bicycle network was not just forgotten, it was unimaginable.

Today, we can’t picture tearing up paved streets and going back to gravel. The world Carlyon helped build is so complete, so normalized, that even questioning it feels disruptive.

Now, more than a century later, Olympia is again working to expand bike infrastructure. But today’s bike lanes aren’t recreational corridors stretching into the countryside. They’re transportation, intended to help people move within the city, through the very corridors Carlyon and his peers carved out for cars.

Confusion wins

November 22, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

This is a second blog post reflecting on some of the meta-lessons that came out of local elections in Thurston County this year.

The New York Times recently ran a story about how The Stranger sets the tone in Seattle politics. This is not breaking news for anyone who has watched Seattle politics for the last two decades.

The secret is simple: The Stranger shows up. It is consistently present, consistently relevant, and consistently part of the political conversation.

On a recent episode of The Olympia Standard, campaign consultant Rob Richards talked about the failure of the Workers’ Bill of Rights and how the yes campaign faced an uphill battle from the start. The opposition narrative was already circulating almost a year before the campaign really got rolling. And he’s right. The first public attention the idea got wasn’t from the campaign; it was from a flare-up of misinformation about a possible minimum wage increase more than a year earlier.

The campaign eventually launched with a petition drive last spring, but real messaging didn’t start until August. And in a town with fewer than half a dozen full-time local reporters, what earned media campaign can you realistically run? There simply aren’t enough people covering local government closely or consistently to help counter a false narrative once it takes hold.

We saw this same dynamic in the Regional Fire Authority vote a few years ago. The JOLT, in particular, published a lot of stories leading up to the election that, while not necessarily inaccurate, clearly shaped the public conversation. The RFA election became a turnout election. The precincts that voted “no” were the ones where people just didn’t vote at all. Many voters were confused, caught between the campaigns’ messaging and the churn of coverage and commentary on social media. Faced with confusion, they defaulted to the “safe” choice: not voting or voting no.

I’ve heard some fair criticism that JOLT’s model (reporters overseas watching meetings remotely and writing from the recordings) made it difficult to provide the broader context of why the RFA mattered. That coverage tended to highlight debate and points of disagreement, because that was what stood out in public meetings. Without interviews, on-the-ground sourcing, or deeper reporting, the coverage didn’t really capture the larger picture of why the RFA might be beneficial. That isn’t a slam on the reporters; they were doing the best they could with limited resources and time.

Could the cities or RFA supporters have engaged more with JOLT? Absolutely. But it’s also fair to say that the resulting coverage skewed toward highlighting the questions and the drama, not the underlying case for the proposal. That imbalance, born from limited capacity, not ill intent, helped create confusion.

And that’s the common thread between Proposition 1 and the RFA: a negative discussion, powered by limited local reporting and social media algorithms that amplify emotional scepticism, grew in the absence of steady, contextual information. Confusion became the common voter experience, and in low-turnout elections, confusion is fatal.

What we need is clarity.

I generally appreciate news coverage. I’m not someone who gets angry every time a reporter writes something that makes a campaign uncomfortable. But we have to be honest about something: in a community with shrinking traditional media, campaigns still spend money on mailers and consultants and ads. But aren’t investing in the thing that makes campaigns possible in the first place: local media.

There’s been a lot of talk about how much the Prop 1 campaign spent on signature collection and basic campaign work. But how can complex, structural policy changes succeed when there isn’t a consistent media presence helping the public understand them? A community cannot hold informed elections without informed voters, and voters don’t have the time or energy to attend every meeting, read through every governing document, or fact-check every post on Facebook. That’s what journalism is for.

Which brings us back to The Stranger. It is only one outlet in a city that still has a relatively healthy Seattle Times. KUOW spends a significant amount of airtime on Seattle politics. Smaller niche outlets like PubliCola and The Urbanist also contribute to the political conversation. But for capturing the mood and narrative arc of Seattle politics, The Stranger is uniquely powerful, not because it is perfectly neutral, but because it is present, consistent, and willing to frame debates with a point of view.

In Thurston County, with so few journalists, coverage is often reactive. Journalism focuses on the easiest available material: summaries of meetings, recaps of official statements, and the occasional story on a high-profile incident. There isn’t enough capacity for the proactive, explanatory reporting necessary to unpack something like a Workers Bill of Rights. And when a reporter tries to be fair in that environment, “balance” can easily look like “There’s a real debate here,” even when one side is working with a year-long head start fueled by fear, confusion, and online misinformation.

Without sustained reporting, balance becomes ambiguity. And ambiguity becomes a “No” vote.

The absence of robust journalism means our community lacks the civic infrastructure necessary for democratic decision-making. The cost of a policy failing, of housing going unaddressed, fire services going unfunded, worker protections never advancing, is far higher than the cost of supporting journalism that helps voters understand what’s at stake in the first place.

If campaigns can’t count on local media to provide that clarity, then some of that investment needs to shift. Local media is not optional. It is foundational civic infrastructure. Until we treat it that way, we will keep re-running the same story: big ideas, complex policies, passionate campaigns, and a confused electorate that never gets the chance to truly understand the choice.

It matters how we talk to each other, but it matter more where we talk to each other

November 15, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Recently, I came across three interesting, overlapping stories about how government communicates with us. Each highlights tensions between joy, seriousness, and the incentives built into social media.

1. During the 2025 legislative session, the House Democratic Caucus (HDC) developed content described as having a “man on the street” perspective. The Legislative Ethics Board recently ruled against it.

Examples include:

March 17, 2025: A post featuring Rep. Zahn asked, “What music pumps you up?”
January 24, 2025: A post directed to Rep. Leavitt asked, “What is your go-to coffee order or snack during session?”
January 24, 2025: The caucus asked several legislators, “Describe your district in three words.”

These posts, along with others highlighting personal journeys, were criticized in a complaint suggesting these “puff pieces” were more appropriate for campaign materials than official social media posts. The Board concluded that the posts violated state rules on the use of public resources for campaign purposes because they lacked a legislative nexus.

Here we see a small example of harmless, joyful content being shut down simply because it was in the wrong bucket.

2. Meanwhile, the Center Square took a highly critical, detail-heavy approach toward similar content developed by the state Attorney General’s office. At first glance, the video was actually fun. Yet the criticism focused on the AG “wasting time” on a light-hearted video while other office issues demanded attention. It’s almost like the NFL cracking down on harmless end-zone celebrations: nobody is hurt, it’s just joy.

The broader lesson is that on official government channels, we’re expected to be serious and not have fun. This expectation exists despite the consistently creative, people-focused work the Department of Transportation produces every week.

3. By contrast, other officials use the cloak of “unofficial” channels to abandon even the pretense of harmless fun. State Representative Joel McEntire’s Facebook activity illustrates this clearly. While he previously claimed an unauthorized party ran a Twitter account in his name, he now openly manages his personal Facebook page.

Occasionally, he posts serious political content, but more often he engages in highly partisan and aggressive behavior, echoing the divisive rhetoric seen at the federal level. This includes ad hominem attacks, inflammatory comments (like suggesting a political opponent “needs to burn”), and calls for a boycott of a community activist’s business. One target, local activist and business owner Kyle Wheeler, recalled McEntire calling him a “pansy boy” and “delicate flower boy” in 2024—even while acknowledging Wheeler’s community work.

McEntire’s self-proclaimed “unofficial” page status, along with his title of “Chief of Mischief,” has allowed ethics complaints to be dismissed, since the Legislative Ethics Board lacks jurisdiction over personal accounts. Yet his behavior has drawn public criticism, including from a self-identified Republican who called it “childish insults” and an “embarrassment.”

How do we let ourselves be free?

These are small examples in Washington State, but they illustrate a broader trend: social media algorithms giving us different social incentives, and our institutions are not equipped to respond. The decline of local journalism, combined with attention-maximizing algorithms, means our online environments amplify the worst content.

As much as I respect the Project on Civic Health’s efforts to encourage civility, it’s not enough to ask people to control their own behavior. Smoking cessation is one thing; addressing the industry that created the addiction is something else entirely. Social media is designed to maximize attention, often at the expense of civility and community. People like McEntire are using these platforms exactly as intended: stoking outrage, drawing attention, and triggering the emotional rewards built into the system.

Real-world communities thrive on politeness, modesty, and small gestures of mutual care. Online platforms operate in almost the opposite way: they reward conflict, outrage, and self-promotion, which amplifies hate and division. This environment contributes to rising loneliness, anxiety, and mental distress, especially among young people.

Social media can be addictive, much like tobacco, and increased use correlates with worse mental health. Platforms are designed to keep users engaged, making regulation and conscious limits essential to prevent long-term harm.

I’ve been critical of school districts that adopt phone-free policies under the guise of student mental health when the real goal is classroom control. If schools were serious about the impacts of social media, they would ensure their own communications teams weren’t actively posting on spaces that are demonstrably harmful. They have not.

And there’s a reason for this: that is where the people are. We are trapped in a system where some people are finger-wagged for being “not serious” on official channels, while others are incentivized to be the worst versions of themselves on unofficial channels because it works. Meanwhile, serious communicators are stuck posting on platforms that reward outrage.

Kelly Stonelake captures this trap very well here.

The network effects are real. We can’t leave until enough of our actual friends, people we love, leave first. I’ve experienced this myself. I put Meta platforms on pause earlier this year, but returned because of the deaths of two men in my life and the need to connect with people during my mourning period. I could not fulfill my duties as a friend without the platform and the network. And now, I’m even raising money for Movember there because I couldn’t find another way to do it.

A step forward

One thing government could do is explore self-hosted, ActivityPub-powered social media. This idea had some momentum but seems to have stalled. Technically, it’s straightforward, and a handful of governments have experimented with it.

The first step in countering harmful network effects is to build a new network. Putting official government communication on a platform that no corporation can ever own is a vital first step toward reclaiming civility, community, and public trust.

Because yes, it really does matter how we talk to each other.

All Politics Is Local, All Politics Is Complicated

November 8, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

It’s the Saturday after Election Day, and I’ve been thinking about why people don’t vote in local elections. The answer, I think, is baked right into how local politics works, and how we talk about it.

Earlier this week, KUOW aired a “Sound Politics” episode that tried to untangle one piece of that puzzle: why school board elections in Washington are so confusing. It was a fascinating conversation about how state law allows school districts to run elections differently, but it got tangled up in language, using “city” and “school district” as if they were the same thing.

In Seattle, for example, school board candidates must live in specific “director districts,” but every registered voter citywide gets to vote for all of them in the general election. This unusual system exists only because Seattle’s population tops 400,000, a threshold that triggers a special rule in state law. Smaller districts like Highline and Tacoma operate differently.

It’s a great civics lesson, but also a perfect example of how confusing our systems can be. One of my broader theories about elections is simple: if people don’t understand the choices in front of them, they often just don’t vote. When confusion is built into the very structure of our elections, turnout doesn’t just sag, it sinks.

What bothered me about the KUOW piece wasn’t the reporting, but the terminology. Mixing up “school district” and “city” only deepens the public’s misunderstanding. I’ve seen this confusion play out locally in Olympia, where the city, the school district, and the port district all share the same name but have completely different boundaries. In Seattle, it’s even more complicated: the school district’s governance depends on the city’s population, even though the two are technically separate entities.

This is a microcosm of a much larger problem: state law makes local government more complicated than it needs to be. And that complexity collides with how we communicate about elections, especially in odd-numbered years when only local offices are on the ballot.

Another Sound Politics episode this week encouraged listeners to send it to “procrastinating voters.” It was a nice idea. Except that, unless you lived in the 26th Legislative District, Seattle, or King County, only one segment of the show actually applied to you. Even within those areas, it covered just a fraction of what was on people’s ballots.

That’s not a dig at the reporters, though they might have oversold it a bit (“Send this to someone who hasn’t voted in Western Washington, or, you know, anywhere in Washington…”). The truth is, no local NPR station (even in Seattle) could possibly cover the hundreds of races happening across dozens of cities, school districts, and special districts.

Think of it this way: Bellevue, Kent, Renton, Federal Way, Kirkland, Redmond, and Auburn together have about the same population as Seattle. If election coverage were proportional, those cities together would get the same attention as Seattle. But they don’t. There are simply too many races, so coverage outside Seattle gets rounded down to zero. The result: even more focus on Seattle, even less on everyone else.

And as local print newspapers and radio newsrooms continue their slow decline, the information gap just keeps widening.

The biggest reason people don’t vote locally isn’t apathy (which would be an internal flaw) it’s confusion (caused externally). Don’t blame voters for not turning in ballots, blame the system we’ve created. The system is hard to understand, and the information needed to make sense of it is vanishing.

The Texting Election

This year, I’ve had more friends than ever ask why they’re being bombarded with campaign texts. The short answer: vote, and they’ll stop. If your name is not on a list of people who voted, the campaigns are going to keep on bugging you.

Anecdotally, it seems that local campaign texting is way up. It makes sense. Texting is personal and intrusive, but it’s also cheap. In a low-turnout year, every vote is precious, and traditional media reach is limited. When you’re voting for everyone from park commissioners to city council members, odds are you haven’t heard much about any of them through your normal news sources. So campaigns reach past the media and straight into your phone. It’s not elegant, but it’s effective.

What “All Politics Is Local” Really Means

All of a sudden, there is a popular saying now that “all politics is national.” It reflects how the presidency and federal politics loom over everything. That’s true, to a degree. Since the television era, local election turnout has steadily declined compared to national races.

But when Rep. Tip O’Neill said “all politics is local,” he wasn’t talking about turnout rates. He meant that good politics starts with understanding your community, and connecting those local needs to national decisions.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez captured that spirit recently when she said she “just refused to let this race be nationalized. It’s not about the message. It’s about my loyalty to my community.”

And if you zoom out and look at this week’s results from New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City, you can see that dynamic playing out. Each place faces the same national currents, but each community came up with its own answer.

Simplify the System, Raise the Turnout

If we want better turnout in Washington, we should start by making local government simpler. I don’t have a perfect fix, but I know that when voters look at their ballots and think, *“What the hell am I even voting for?”* those ballots are more likely to end up in the kitchen recycling bin.

All politics is local. But if we keep making “local” this complicated, we shouldn’t be surprised when fewer people show up to participate.