William Armacost (with Julian Feeld)

Hi, everybody.

It's me, Riley, the mayor for this episode, and I'm joined by my co-mayors, Maddie and Nova, who are both, I would say, rolling with laughter and spinning in their chairs at the mention of the fact that the town that we're talking about today is pronounced Squim.

Squim.

So come on, Squim, won't you?

That's a weirdly damp chair.

Welcome, Squim.

And

my co-Squim today, uh my co-mayor today is of course the qaa podcast julian field julian thank you very much for joining us in the scenic town of squim squimming let's go squimming

come on down to the squimming hole

the worst part is it's not it's not spelled squim it's spelled like sequim like a sequimmed dress might be

And then and then minute one of joining the call, I was assaulted with the knowledge that it's pronounced Squim.

Yeah, that's what they use in Hollywood, right?

When they shoot somebody and you see the yeah, that's the plural.

You have a bunch of like one squib, many squims.

Squim, exactly.

Yeah.

So the reason that Julian is joining us today is that Squim is perhaps

one of...

It's like a trash future startup.

Yeah, Squim.

All right, everybody.

It's called Squim.

And what it does is it provides public services for 8,000 people.

But the twist is it gets taken over by QAnon.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is the,

I would say, hey, second most pilled town in America after Washington, freaking D.C.

Am I right?

That's right.

Yeah, unfortunately, I am right.

No matter how many clowns you find in Squim, there's more clowns than dang Congress.

That's right.

Look.

Also, I wanted to provide a few more updates as well.

Before we get into Squim, there there are a couple of

municipal updates.

And now welcome to the subsection of Municipal Update, Chomo Parade Update.

Does that have a theme?

I hope it does.

I have to impress upon you, Riley.

It's Municipal Roundup, and that's why we play the fucking Wildhide song is because it's a Roundup.

Municipal Bonanza.

Whoever calls it mayoral roundup or mayoral update.

Let a thousand mayoral segments bloom.

All right.

Like this is fine.

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

Mayoral Roundup.

Hiya.

Yeah.

Yeah, indeed.

This is what happens when you don't have a script.

Yeah, exactly.

You forget the name of your own segment.

Look, number one, Chomo Parade update.

The mayor of London, Kentucky still appears to not have

held his anti-Chomo parade.

This is bullshit, man.

You put your faith in a politician, and this is how they reward you.

You know, like I've been, I've been burned so many times.

I've been disillusioned so many times.

I can't believe the DSA paid for me to go to London, Kentucky to get this guy in office.

Well, the thing is, doing a national endorsement of the mayor of London, Kentucky is like, it's an awkward position for

the party.

And,

Exactly.

So far,

we do not know

if it's going ahead.

However, we are, of course, following events closely in London, Kentucky.

We will not be commenting on individuals charged unless they were, of course, involved with the accused.

Yeah, apart from that one random EMT.

Yeah, apart from the random EMT who was charged a week ago.

I'm sorry.

What the fuck is it, Chomo?

Oh, sure.

This is a Britishism, I think.

No, it's not.

Is it an onlineism?

No, it's a Fed smokerism.

So Riley and I had our brains reconfigured by seeing the videos of a man who went by the handle Fed smoker.

I am actually familiar with that.

Yeah, I've seen at least one of them.

R.I.P.

Fed smoker.

But one of the things that he used to do in his long career of going up to anyone who resembled an authority figure and badgering them, it was to just provocatively call someone a chomo, which I believe was his argo for child molester.

Child molester, you know, right?

Wow.

Yeah.

So, very quickly, Julian, what happened was that in London, Kentucky, this is a situation we've been following for a while now.

It's a developing story.

It's a developing story.

We've been following the municipal roundup where the mayor of London, Kentucky is under siege by people for his horrible policies and a police shooting, and he's accusing all of his critics of being child molesters just because one of them was and

i don't know if one of them one of them was definitely arrested i don't know if they were actually convicted and so he kind of came out from city hall to say that like i am being besieged by pedophiles and i'm going to hold a parade of all the victims unless they drop their charges i'm going to have a victims parade in town yeah and we're just keeping an eye on that story

like a like an anti-pedophilia parade which has still not happened i'm sorry

a victims parade and then you just have to, you just like have a cop pick up anybody sitting roadside in a chair.

Yeah, that's right.

Perpetrators always return to the scene of the parade.

So, in this case, he's being sued by the three people he said were Chomos.

I mean, it's a good reason to sue someone.

Yeah, that's right.

One of the classics.

Anyway, there's one more.

However, so right now, no major developments in the parade.

An EMT was arrested in London, Kentucky for that reason.

We don't know if it's related to Mayor Randall Weddell's ongoing efforts.

We wish Randall Weddell well in his season of True Detective.

Wait, so like, so wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

So an EMT was arrested for child molestation?

Yeah.

For

possession of

materials.

And we know this because all of us now have Google alerts out for London, Kentucky.

And so

that goes in the news automatically now.

There's no oversight procedure.

The lesser appreciated Paris, Texas.

Maybe one.

Well, that's A Tale of Two Cities 2.

And it's about the efforts of Randall Weddell to clean up London.

London Kentucky.

I'm just realizing I could have done a really good Paris, Texas joke on the Etienne Cabe episode, and I'm king myself.

We'll go back and we'll do a special edition.

Yeah, we'll do a director's cut.

Now with extra joke.

Etienne Cabe with no notes.

Yeah.

All right.

So that's the London, Kentucky update.

And then, of course, we've been sent this by one trillion people.

One trillion people, more people than have ever existed.

One trillion Americans.

Yeah, one trillion Americans have sent me personally

the article about the Tory mayor, so like, you know, the Tory council leader in Britain, in England,

who died doing what he apparently loved, loved, which was smoking crack and choking himself while jacking off.

A classic of the genre.

You can love that.

Yeah, but unless you won't work a day in your life.

Unless what you love is solo breathplay.

And then don't do that because that's very dangerous, as this guy found out.

Also, not thrilled about the crack.

I don't think that helps your decision making.

If you're like jacking it with like a plastic bag over your head and you're also doing crack, that's really going to like endanger yourself.

But this is the thing.

Tory politicians used to do this all the time.

And then there was this kind of drop off.

And so I look at this as a sign that Britain is healing.

Yeah.

I mean, I would say this is a sort of an issue of a male loneliness because normally what you do is you have one of your boys watch you while you do breath play.

Jerking in the age of loneliness.

Jacking in the age of loneliness.

So here's the thing.

He was at someone's house.

They just weren't there.

I'm going to read you the text of the

article detailing what happened.

Breaking into my guy's house.

Like an Airbnb.

I'm going to price my buddy so good.

I'm going to break into his house.

And leave a little surprise for him when he comes back.

Yeah.

So

this is like a Rob.

Let's say it's a Rob Ford style Airbnb.

It's an Etobico Airbnb situation.

Where

it says a former Tory mayor suffocated to death in a cracked den after putting a plastic bag over his head and tying himself to a chair while seeking sexual pleasure at an inquest earth.

Oh, it's a cracked den.

Okay, sure.

Yep.

Les Winwood, 67, was the former mayor of Bridge North, Shropshire and was found dead in Wolverhampton.

If you're a mayor from Shropshire, what are you doing in the trap house?

Like,

the contours that people's lives take is so interesting to me.

How do you get from like church fate to like this?

This shouldn't be happening in a town called Shropshire.

Shropshire sounds like their mayor should be a cartoon barber.

Yeah,

I'm really trying not not to do the like just generic Yankee bullying British people thing.

Please, like that's

Wolverhampton, Shropshire.

Wolverhampton.

Big break here.

These are just different ways of jacking yourself off with a plastic bag over your head.

Yeah, the mayor of Wolverhampton, Paddington Bear, has been found dead.

It's just, it's really inconsiderate, right?

Because the trap house is a commons, right?

And like it's a shared reason.

Yeah, you don't go there to jack off.

That's shitting where you eat.

Jacking off in the trap house?

Don't do it.

It's like jacking off in the library.

You know, people do it, but I wish they wouldn't.

And like, especially if you die.

If you die doing that, and then the trap house is haunted by the vengeful ghost of an MX mayor with a plastic bag over his head.

That's not true.

That crack

trap house might have bad vibes.

Because previously, I assumed, very like whole magic, very like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But now, you know.

Mr.

Winwood had visited the address of crack cocaine dealer Keith Kennedy several times and was seen to be seeking sexual pleasure there.

That's a weird conversation to have with your dealer as well, to be like,

while I'm here, is it cool if I like tie myself to your chair and like just kill myself?

Yeah.

Hey, do you mind if you're going out?

Do you mind if I jacket?

Can I jacket here?

Is that cool?

Do you have a jacking room that I can use?

Is it a jacking facility?

I just, in my limited experience, I've found that the weirdness in dealer-buyer conversation tends to be mostly on the dealer side.

Like, and instead, this is a real reversal to be like, oh, no, I'm imposing on my dealer.

And out of politeness, he can't not let me

put the plastic bag over my own head.

I'll tell you what it is.

It looks like a mayor thing because remember, Rob Ford was hanging out in his dealer's house doing all of his crack.

He just, we don't know that he was auto-erotically asphyxiating himself.

So you're saying it's maybe a sort of a social contagion within the mayor community?

Yeah.

I think if you, you know, you put on the sash and then you feel pressured to smoke crack in your dealer's house.

Yeah, well, we've established on the show that all mayors on earth are in one big WhatsApp.

So I imagine they're all sort of discussing this.

Yeah, I mean, crack really does just run through the mayoral community.

Like, it's, it's, it's really bad.

Imagine how safe you must feel, though, in like a small town if the mayor himself is like over at your place

smoking the crack with you.

Yeah, you've got the key to the city there.

It's got the big medallion on of the British ones.

Yeah.

You just know the cops can't touch you.

More like the key bump of the city.

Is that everything?

Taking an enormous bump off the key to the city.

It's too big.

It'll kill you.

It's like the starface mountain on the cave

down the street how does he die well he mistook the key for the key to the city for a regular sized key because he was high and he did a key bump that would just was too much that would kill a man and he thought he had gotten he thought he had become very small because he was so high

i just i i i support safe I support safe drug consumption and strangle wank sites throughout the city.

I think it's important to do harm reduction for the mayor community.

Well, if the CIA introduce crack to the mayor community in the 90s.

Yeah, that's true.

Devastating them.

Devastating them.

Fucking God.

Just get your dealer to trip sit your danger wank, please.

Yeah.

This is for mayors.

We need to find exemplars in the mayor community who are going to get this message out for us.

If a civilian dies doing that, whatever, but like a precious mayor depriving us of content.

So if you're a mayor and you're listening, pull up your sash, be a good example from the community.

Take your sash from off your neck and instead just wear it normally.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

All right.

All right, Laurel.

I always like to pinpoint the exact moment when we have a guest on where they regret

coming on to the park.

Well,

the idea of like a mayor auto-asphyxiating with their sash is fucking incredible.

Merotic asphyxiation.

That's so close.

Sometimes, Maddie, you know, I really regret that we just name the episodes after the mayor because neurotic asphyxiation would be a great title.

Really good.

I mean, yeah, it'll go in the, it'll certainly go in the.

I've been putting in the, for the show notes, I've been, I've been naming them municipal meeting minutes, so that'll definitely go in there.

All right.

All right.

Who's ready to squim?

I, I don't know if I'm prepared to answer that or if I ever have been in my life, really.

I'm ready.

I'm diving in.

The water's fine.

Let's go swimming.

We're going squimming.

I'm holding on to the pool floats.

I'm not sure.

Quite anxious.

I'm going to give you a little bit of background on Squim.

Squim is a town of 8,000 or so people located in Washington State near the mountains.

It's a decent amount, though.

I mean, it's like

two Twin Peaks.

Squim Peaks.

Twin peaks.

It's two squim peaks.

Four peaks.

It's a single peak.

I don't know how to count.

No, double how to count.

I said quintuple.

Quintuple is five.

Yeah.

Quadruple.

Quadruple peaks.

Quadruple peaks.

There's nothing wrong with my brain.

I gotta stop.

I gotta stop with this plastic bag shit.

It's not good for me.

Gotta call your dealer and be like, no, no more.

Last time was a close call, but like, yeah.

Sorry,

Bill.

No,

my dealer, Bill, who I also get to supervise my like strangle wanks.

Yeah.

So, so, squim.

It has, weirdly, this is just, this is not pertinent to the mayor.

This is just to help you imagine it.

It has a strangely Mediterranean climate for the Pacific Northwest, making it the second best place in the world to grow lavender.

The first is Course Provence.

Oh, of course, Provence.

So, Squim smells amazing.

Yeah.

Squim is a very pleasant place to smell.

The smell smell of Squim rolling off the hills, you're like, yeah.

So if you're listening to this episode, rub some fresh lavender between your hands right now.

And while you listen to the show and the proceedings in Squim, I want you to smell it and then sort of imagine to sort of bring you to like locate you in the place.

I want them generally to have like a multi-sensory experience that's kind of self-directed where we guide them through it, but they kind of seek out the things to really like ground them in the narrative.

Yeah, like you should have been snorting battery acid during the Mahlberg episode.

What you're going to need is some lavender and a plastic bag.

Just my last conscious thought being like, wow, this smells amazing.

This smells incredible.

They're calling it potpourri.

Kids across the nation.

So Squim is also a magnet for retirees from bigger cities from Washington.

It's for

you.

You finish

your job, you're ready to retire.

You're like, I want to go somewhere that smells nice.

Yeah.

You're in the nicest smelling town.

I'm going to go somewhere that sounds, that smells nice and sounds funny.

Let's hit the bricks and go to Squid.

You said Mediterranean to me and you said lavender to me.

And for some reason, what I pictured in my head was the

like Italian walled town DLC for the Sims 4.

So let me

look up this town on Google Images so I can situate myself.

Honestly, from what you've said so far, and I haven't heard about the mayor yet, I'm going to be asking for rental prices.

Maybe even, you know, what's the purchasing looking like out there?

Because that fucking Mediterranean America that smells like lavender.

Yeah.

The comedian mountains that come up on Google are like incredible.

There's like a fountain with a little lake.

There's like the neat rows of lavender that you see like at the monasteries in Provence.

Oh, like small town.

It's in Washington.

So like the laws might not be.

Yeah, maybe the big mountains are right there.

This is, this is, I mean, the first one we've done where I've been like, I don't know.

Maybe this is a, this is a cool place to live.

It's, you know what it is?

it's it's a it's of not entirely it's like the opposite of wasilla

okay sure no mattresses it's about the same size as wasilla but it's also like very very beautiful as far as i can tell and it's like one of these kinds of little towns that has a clock tower and stuff in it they've replaced the the the all-night mattress warehouse with a sort of like lavender scented

fishing village yeah this is still giving me sims vibes i'm seeing some like isometric neighborhood shots.

And I'm like, yeah,

I could build a house on this.

Yeah.

So, so we're going to get to it, though.

So, Squim is one administrative area, and it's surrounded by Clallum County, which is slightly less white.

It's a little more Latino and also quite a bit more indigenous.

Yeah,

there isn't sort of a grander narrative there.

You just look up the demographics bit of the Wikipedia whenever you're talking about anyway.

I don't know why you do that.

He needs to know the genetic makeup of any place he examines for some reason.

The skulls out in Squim are healthy.

The haplogroups in Squim.

Got a helicopter with a huge Barrett Gallopers.

I promise this is relevant.

Okay, please.

Yes.

Continue.

But this, like, you know, very nice town.

makes headlines last summer when locals become convinced or locals of their and also forks are convinced a nearby place are convinced that antifa is coming to town to like you know do do violence to all of the small business owners.

Not to get the FBI on all of our asses, but we would all consider ourselves broadly Antifa or Antifa sympathetic at the very least, right?

Sure.

Sure, fascist.

And yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so we looked at this town and every single one of us was like, oh, wow, that's beautiful.

Like maybe I could like move my family out here.

I could kind of like move my

small business.

I could start paying like local tax revenues, really like, you know, wander gently, respectfully through the fields of lavender.

Yeah, I could go to the Italian restaurant from Twilight if we go over to Forks.

I could see their beautiful lighthouse, which is really, really like astounding.

Ultimately, though, because the Pacific Northwest, while beautiful, is also one of the most pilled places in America.

Yeah, I saw green room.

Yeah.

This culminates in like guys with guns sort of, you know, forming a posse and like just trapping the first multiracial family they see on a rural road.

I'm not thrilled about the guys from this town going out and building a kind of like lavender ghillie suit and then just kind of like waiting by the side of the road to see what happens.

I mean, like Julian, as someone who follows like pilledness generally, like Squim is kind of in many ways ground zero for people to get really fucking weird with it.

Yes, I think it was the first case of like a local town having upper echelon,

you know, municipal people being clearly and publicly pilled and i remember people writing in um

from there very early on since then we yeah there's there's there's been a few but but yes this is the og yeah

now just real quick because you've been saying it a lot and maybe you someone listening is normal when you say pilled what do you mean specifically it it has become a little bit of a a kind of generic term but usually it means you've spent a lot of time online and you have like really strange beliefs probably cribbed from like hours and hours of like YouTube combined with maybe reading message boards or chan sites, you know, and it's essentially just a catch-all term for saying like you've gone down a few too many rabbit holes and you have beliefs that,

you know, don't even pass like a cursory kind of examination.

Those beliefs might be particularly called fa if you're like you know if you're as we are anti-fat yes usually this is it is it is some form of esoteric fascism like underneath it um

but then it it has so many variants these days there's so many flavors that it's you know it could mean almost anything but in general it does mean that there's a right-wing component when we say pilled um unless so yeah sorry go ahead I was going to say, unless you put a word in front of it and then it's a joke like, oh, I'm pumpkin pilled.

Like, ha ha ha ha.

We're carving pumpkins.

I'm lavender pilled, which it turns out means I'm building the ghillie suit.

And I'm like,

well, it's, it's very good for taking your sniper shots to be relaxed.

So

I'm lavender pills.

Just like just

lying prone with my sniper rifle with my spotter by my side in the lavender fields.

We're just maximally relaxed.

Yeah, I was like falling asleep again.

Heart resting heart rate 50.

I'm chilling.

I'm lavender pilled.

My wife and I never touch, but

we make amazing dinner parties.

The thing is, I feel a great deal of affection just from looking at this town for this town.

And like reading about it really cursorily, I'm like,

they do an irrigation festival every May.

And

I don't know.

They celebrate the concept of irrigation, I guess.

I love that.

It's important.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

I would love to go.

I would love to see, you know, like Miss Irrigation,

you know, the irrigation queen for that year.

And I mean all of this sincerely.

These are people that I'm getting the sense feel

not just like threatened, but also laughed at.

And I'm like, I'm not laughing at them.

It looks not lovely.

I love going on Grindr and changing my bio to irrigation queen.

Yeah, there's a big, there's some piss play,

tones of piss play.

Yeah.

Well, open up, like, they have like floats in the irrigation festival as well, which I think is really sweet.

They've been doing it for 128 years.

Yeah, yeah.

But let's talk about, let's talk about not just the town, which appears to be lovely by all accounts.

Let's talk about...

Well, the thing is, lovely places are kind of repositories of fascism a lot of times, you know?

Do you think, November, that there might be behind the white picket fences a darkness?

It's all red ants, it turns out.

I just clicked on this Squim Gazette link that you sent me, and it's because I'm browsing in in private mode, first of all, it's not going to show me the article.

But at the top, there is an ad and it says, are you due for a colonoscopy?

Yeah.

I'm getting the same ad.

That is not a, this is not, Squim Gazette does not have like AdSense.

They are just selling ads to local, local businesses.

Well, there's a thousand assholes to service.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This, this is an old place.

Yeah, I'm just hearing as we as we think about how beautiful the town is.

I'm just hearing the sort of David Lynch whoosh as we go into.

yeah so william armacost

he was and is the owner of a hair salon called changes which uh you gotta read the google maps and yelp reviews for since he became mayor oh boy as well as a keen motorcyclist and in his spare time he's a representative for juice plus a multi-level marketing scheme that sells vitamin supplements uh which also made some claims that it could prevent covet 19 infections this is this is very uh like, well, I mean, he's a small business tyrant, first of all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And an MLM guy, which is

very obviously

co-terminus with being an insane right-wing person.

Just to kind of re-emphasize

the David Lynch here, two reviews of Change a Salon in Squim are

in order.

The owner is insane.

Definitely stay away.

And you won't be sorry to exclamation marks you will be beautiful to exclamation marks i'm on my way right now i mean i'll say i most every good hairdresser i've ever had has been insane

so i'm actually not really turned off i'm not really turned off by this at all i i'm just struck by the you won't be sorry you will be beautiful you will be witness to a great becoming

all hail the new flesh it changes

there's one here five stars william is the quotes best

I like that.

Is that a sarcastic review?

No, five stars.

It's a review from a very old person.

Yeah, it's a boomer.

It's a boomer review.

This is a very boomer town.

Yes.

That's just how Trump tweets.

Trump loves to do that.

Yeah.

So William Armacost was first appointed to the city council in 2018 because just someone died, so he just got appointed.

And then was elected unopposed to a four-year term in 2019 and was appointed mayor by colleagues in 2020.

So in in this case, the mayor is not directly elected.

There's a town council of five, and then they choose a mayor from among them.

Sound like Venice.

Basically.

So, this is all sort of, you know, chugging along merrily.

The inciting incident is actually in May 2019,

where in a wet market in Wuhan,

in May 2019,

May 2019, a $20 million medically assisted treatment facility for opioid addiction was going to be developed by the Jamestown Sikhlalam tribe.

So this is like the Indigenous tribe that has sort of holdings nearby.

They have, you know, they've like they have quite a lot of development.

They've also built like clinics and stuff.

Bloomberg said of the facility that it's situated behind the local Costco in a parcel zone for health services.

Construction plans were by right because it's an Indigenous tribe.

No public hearings required.

It was co-sponsored by two local medical providers and was later provided $7.2 million in state funding to address Washington's raging opioid epidemic, like inland Washington, some of like ground zero, some of the worst bits of America for opioid addiction.

Sure.

So it is, this is

a tribe that is

building something that they are just fully allowed to build as part of a larger public health infrastructure that they just provide that.

This will not drive anyone insane.

There are mole children in that place.

And that public health infrastructure is like used by everybody.

It's not just for the tribe.

That makes it sound like every person in that town is addicted to opioids.

This is used by everybody.

8,000 people go through that facility every day.

Sorry, it's part of a larger like medical facility that's used by everybody.

It's just now has this clinic attached to it.

So, Bloomberg continues.

By early July 2019, a Facebook group had launched initially to fight this clinic called Save Our Squim.

Save it.

Please, our Squim.

It's very sick.

It's the idea that like bringing, I don't know, like addicts in treatment or in recovery near the town is some sort of like net negative, like a porn store or something.

Yeah, this sounds like some NIMBY shit.

Basically,

yeah, absolutely.

You don't get a town and maintain a town that has like 125 consecutive years of irrigation irrigation festivals and like lots of lovely trellises and stuff without also being

catastrophically reactionary.

It's fucking behind the Costco.

Like, come on,

there's a great, I mean, this is, they're not trying to like, you know, shove it in your face.

Yeah, they're not replacing the clock tower with the medically assisted opioid treatment tower.

Just a big needle.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

So basically, it starts with people in this group saying they were feeling blindsided by the news of a big new development

and the fact that they, because it was being built by Wright, there was no public consultation.

And so they basically, through this Facebook group, fundraised.

They tried to stop the project with lawsuits.

About 2,500 people or so join, as well as William Armacost, who, again, according to Bloomberg, asked which coffee shops he should frequent to support the group's cause.

By the way, I should note, as the group goes on, as the years go on, the group gets crazier and crazier and crazier.

Oh, that's weird.

i've just seen a photo of the mayor you're talking about in the costco in squim we will get to that uh-huh

costco in an 8 000 person town and they have a costco that's pretty awesome presumably it's like the regional costco yeah yeah so it's um

the group gets like a little more wild right and q anon memes start appearing on it after like you know a few months maybe a little under a year yeah what your what year is this again so this is 2019 so it gets the group is started in July 2019.

That's so early in QAnon too.

Like, that's funny.

That's before it even broke into like larger public consciousness.

There were maybe a couple articles.

These people were like, were like waiting for something like this, you know?

Well, it's like, I think that just as Portlandia was for like, you know, the liberal hipster type in 2010, Squim is for the, you know, like reactionary militia member in 2019.

It's like all the cool stuff that's happening is going to be there.

Washington is kind of the like,

or the Pacific Northwest is kind of the cultural incubator, I guess.

So this is again, so this is also research republished by Bloomberg.

They said at least 17% of Save Our Squim members also belong to Facebook groups, including Reopen Klallum County, sort after COVID.

I refuse to wear a mask, defend Eastern Oregon, and Washington State Oath Keepers.

Okay, the Oath Keepers.

I'm looking at the photos of Squim again, and I'm like, there are very few places.

It's like wide open, beautiful scenery.

If you don't want to wear a mask, you can just like

walk away from every other person very easily.

Get in your fucking kayak.

This is Costco-related, though.

That's why they had to wear the mask in Costco or something like that.

It's all these businesses that like Americans are pissed off about wearing masks.

They're like half an hour you're in Costco for

before you like get into your kayak and paddle down the like completely placid strait outside.

So, you know?

The other thing, the other thing is that very quickly, the, hey, we weren't consulted about this messaging morphs into quite extreme anti-indigenous posting, such as, you know, people saying, why don't they just house the homeless in their teepees?

By the way, also at the same time,

at the same time,

everyone on Save Our Squim coalesces around the belief, basically out of, like, they just, someone says it, they all coalesce around it, that this medically assisted treatment clinic is actually a like trans shipment point for homeless people to be moved into Squim from Seattle and Tacoma.

Wow.

You can't deploy transdomina cross like that because my ears just pricked up completely.

Sorry.

I mean,

I would be unsurprised if there was a kind of like transphobic element to this as well.

I'm certain there would have been.

Some of the anti-native statements were like, well, if they're going to bring the homeless here, they should house them in their teepees

or they should just sleep at a totem pole.

I don't understand how that would be.

He doesn't even make any fucking thing.

You're just doing like free association for racism.

There was a joke about construction workers digging up Indian remains, and others expressed just simply open resentment that the tribe was like too influential on its land and therefore in the town.

So basically like, hey, you know, we should have finished the job, basically, is the sentiment in in Save Our Squim.

I'm shocked.

I'm shocked people in the oath keepers would behave like this.

Yeah.

In all of this, January 2020, William Armacost runs for mayor within the council, right?

Because he didn't run for mayor broadly.

He was appointed to the council, re-elected to the council.

It's like an electorate of four.

Yeah, excuse me.

It's seven total in the council.

He wins five to two.

And Armacost said, We've often heard the expression, the right person at the right time.

Well, I'm that person.

At the age of 65, I share many of the same morals and beliefs as Squim residents, and I've run a successful business for 35 years here.

I have a pulse for the needs of business owners and employees.

That pulse is very low because of all of the

lavender.

Yeah, that's right.

I'm so relaxed.

He also cited, this is from like the Squim Gazette.

He also cited his experience working with alcoholics and drug addicts for 16 plus years as invaluable with the high interest around the Saklalem tribe's proposed medication assisted treatment clinic.

Quote, there's no one sitting on the other side of the counter who understands the struggle, the fear, and the tragedy that affects individuals and families.

I have that understanding.

So he seems a bit like, to just read that, to just read his public statement at the time he's appointed mayor, it would sound like he's pretty, I don't know, not

supportive, inconsequential, right?

Like, this is,

I'm going to be the mayor that doesn't make the town the subject of an hour-long podcast episode.

Yeah.

No, no, no one's ever going to talk talk about us unless they're like a podcast about funny festivals around different American

European towns.

Irrigation Weekly,

they might do a thing for us.

Copyright, a podcast about the funny little festivals that small towns throw.

I think this is just the detail that we look up anytime we do a small town.

That's right.

What is their weird festival?

So then

all of this is sort of bubbling, right?

But it hasn't become the high politics of the locality until the moment that I think a lot of people sort of decided, okay, I'm going to become an esoteric fascist now, which is the summer of 2020.

And, you know, Black Lives Matter.

Classic time to become an esoteric fascist.

Yeah.

I've been reading the works of this guy, Gabe Announcement.

Yeah.

So

350 people do a peaceful march in Squim.

And

then the marchers are confronted by

entirely justified given that Squim sounds pretty fucking racist.

Well, they're sort of stopped by a local gun shop owner and the same posse that trapped that family

on the rural road.

Oh, cool.

So

the guys from the end of Easy Rider are here to insist that actually, no, it's fine.

Yeah.

So

Armacost refused to denounce the posse, even though people were obviously petitioning the government.

Don't they have cops?

Like, what?

Well, cops are woke.

Okay, sure.

I know the cops are on the fucking oath keepers or whatever, but like,

is there not a kind of like apex predator cop above that cop?

Because it's like, it's.

Where's the sheriff?

Yeah.

Where's the like state whatever they have in Washington?

Washington's supposed to be kind of woke.

Like, we're probably all in the posse.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Washington outside of of like seattle and maybe tacoma is a much different kind of place yeah yeah so armacost does not condemn the posse he makes a very weird statement where he's just like hey racism is all in your head all of this is going to blow over in a couple of days and we should let the dust settle interesting

i i i'm looking at uh the the squim police department right now and this is a real washington kind of vibe in that it's a roughly i I would say, 50-50 split between the oldest, most racist man you've ever seen and a butch lesbian.

The livery has got the badge has the lighthouse right on it.

Nova.

That's cool.

I appreciate that.

Yeah.

That's just a little detail for you.

So basically, right.

He, after, and after this point, after he starts saying, okay, racism, it's all just made up.

Racism is just bad ideas and everyone just has to stop having the ideas and then we can all get along fine.

It'll all blow over.

After that, armacov starts turning up at city functions wearing a punisher pin okay what

and then he's like okay this just shows my support for law enforcement the punisher hates cops by the way i just

like a bunch of cops

as the as the comics professional on the podcast i do have to say but aren't they like a posse i mean so they kind of probably see themselves as a little more like the punisher no the punisher is still like a fascist symbol yeah yeah well like there was this period in 2020 onwards where they where like cops started adopting the punisher skull specifically with like a thin blue line on it yeah i've seen that you still you still see it around you oh yeah i see it here grim yeah so he's also like posting a lot of messages where like that are quite like very anti-semitic about george soros and so on and so on like he is oh i see the punisher pin that's a big pin that's not a sussle like that's a big like it's more of a badge He's wearing a Punisher fascinator.

That's interesting.

Pretty, you know, accentuate the lapel of this Punisher fascinator.

So he's wearing a Punisher cosplay.

And so the other thing is, and this is like, this is all building, right,

throughout like 2020.

He's getting publicly weirder, basically William Armacost is.

It's a little microcosm of the U.S.

now where everyone's like,

is it getting weird around here or is it just me?

While the people who are making it weird are getting much weirder than that, it feels like.

So, the um, the thing, the other thing to note is that in 2020, he makes a pilgrimage to a super spreader motorcycle convention.

Like in summer 2020, he's like

the Sturgis rally.

Yeah, I remember this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All of the like, uh, bikers who are like, oh, COVID's a hoax, and then all got COVID.

Yeah, so, um, he he went to Sturgis and then he refused to either wear a mask or self-isolate.

And

this guy gave everybody who went to that Costco COVID.

Well, he gave everybody who went to his salon

COVID, certainly.

Okay, but I'm beautiful now, so who cares?

This was a great time for

like sort of small business owners to become like this.

Like my dentist became like an anti-vax guy, for instance.

And it's just like,

what do you do?

Why is this?

It was this sort of inflection point, you know?

Yeah, I went to a guy that was like a tropical diseases specialist to get a COVID test because I was getting surgery.

And he was anti-mask.

What the fuck?

A doctor.

Anti-mask pro-fem.

That's why he was helping with the surgery.

So

an August episode of KSQM's Coffee with the Mayor call-in show, which used to be like an actual event where you would go have coffee with the mayor at a diner.

They put it on the radio in COVID.

Yeah, but yeah, and he wouldn't stop coughing on you.

Yeah.

Coughing with the mayor.

So

a caller calls in and says, hey, you seem, are you a QAnon believer?

You seem weird.

We all know what you're supposed to do if you're a QAnon believing public official when asked if you believe in QAnon, or or at least what you were supposed to do before 2024.

And Julian, I believe, can give us the answer.

There is no QAnon.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what you're supposed to say.

You're crazy.

There is no mafia.

Yeah.

Armacost did something different.

He didn't say there is no QAnon.

He said QAnon is real and it's a truth movement that encourages you to think to yourself.

Think for yourself.

Hell yes.

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah.

He then said, said to the caller, that QAnon shouldn't be considered a terror movement because Black Lives Matter and Antifa commit more domestic terrorism.

I remember that summer pretty well.

I think we all do.

And I really,

I must have missed when

like Antifa did 9-11, too.

Yeah.

I mean, that was always like, look at the chaos, look at the violence.

No wonder it was becoming a lot of people.

They looted Walmart and like a couple of burned-down police stations.

Like

even even if you don't think burning down a police station is a good or cool thing to do, it's still like, okay, this is not a good enough reason for you to change your entire world view around to become a kind of follower of an esoteric fascist movement.

I mean, ultimately, I think it's just these are people who are looking for it.

Right.

Yeah.

They're looking for the reason to like really

there's growing unease in this like small old town that's like beginning to sort of try to adopt resolutions condemning racism, like supporting a dialogue, right?

This is supported mostly by like two counselors and the city manager, a guy called Charlie Bush.

Charlie Bush is actually very important to this whole story.

Charlie Bush is the apolitical like head civil servant technocrat that runs the place.

Sure.

It's just if you have the name Bush, you become like that.

It's fundamentally like it's nominative determinism, but for neoliberalism.

So,

and so obviously, and so Charlie Bush, after the Coffee with the Mayor segment, Coffee with the Mayor segment, where he's like, yeah, QAnon's the Truth Movement, basically goes public against ArmaCost.

He says, the intent of the meeting is to discuss issues specific to the city of Squim.

Responses to questions reflecting the personal opinion of the mayor do not reflect the policy positions of Squim City Council or the organization.

It is a microcosm.

It is just like running through this like establishment that has no clue how to deal with any of this and it's just like

decorum, I guess.

Yeah.

The Coffee with the Mayor program has taken place under four different mayors.

So you are impugning the dignity of Coffee with the Mayor right now.

This is the first time.

I hate when the Coffee with the Mayor parliamentarian tells me that actually he has to do the QAnon round.

Being given the ceremonial giant spoon to stir stir my coffee.

So this is the first time since I began working for the city that a mayor has commented on national politics that have nothing to do with Squib.

So this was, so what the city manager, a popular, a popular guy, right?

What he did was he criticized the mayor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can't be criticized.

Who again was elected by seven people?

Yeah, the mayor who the last time he was elected was 2019 as a counselor.

He owns a hair salon and every photo i've seen of him his hair looks like

that's he's not cutting his own hair

exactly he goes to a worst salon yeah if you if you own the best you got to go to the rest that's an old hair salon saying

uh i know you worked in the industry

the industry because it's uh

yeah we call non-snippers civilians

so armacost also comments on this he says to date as mayor I've kept my personal life separate from my professional life.

And as a result, I will not comment as mayor on my personal social media presence.

During our recent coffee with the mayor, I was asked about QAnon.

While I believe that people should fight for truth and freedom, it was inappropriate to respond to this question as mayor during a program designed to talk about city of squim issues.

In my personal decision to take a vacation this summer, yes, I attended Sturgis.

While there, I took proper precautions to protect my health, the health of my patrons, and the health of the Squim community, said Mayor William Armacost, which of course...

Okay, so he gets his knuckles wrapped one time and he's like, okay, sure.

Sorry.

I'll go back to being normal.

I'm out for blood.

By the way, though, secretly, I will kill every single one of you fuckers.

Yeah.

So, I mean, where we are, I just want to sort of throw to Julian for a second, right?

Like, this is, this is sort of a radicalization journey where he's like, he's not fully comfortable showing his power level yet.

Yeah.

I mean, it is still very,

I think most people, even around this period, would have known better than to make this like an issue that the town has to deal with.

Like, just, just keep it to yourself, you know?

I think he could have gotten away with being like an insane pilled person attending Sturgis, but he has to like, he just like can't wait to tell other people.

And that's, that's the very like common QAnon thing where it's like,

have you fucking hurt?

Like, they're just so excited to red pill someone else because they, they believe, um, like evangelical Christians, that, that, like, spreading the message is what gives it like kind of power, you know?

It's, it's waking people up.

You're doing them a favor.

Like, I think they really do imagine themselves like Morpheus every time they sit down with somebody who like vaguely liberal.

Here's also one other thing, right?

I was trying to see what this is a sort of a little bit of a preview of what we talked about at the end.

He mostly governs kind of normal.

Yeah, because there's no, like, what does it, yeah, because Qnon rarely has to interact with the tangible world.

So you can actually just hold those, both those things like concurrently.

It's amazing.

It would be.

Sorry, go ahead.

Weirder if he did decide to try and like force any of the Q stuff where it's like, yeah, you know, Squim City Council passes a resolution applauding the secret execution of Nancy Pelosi.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

The closest you're going to get is like UN non-binding resolutions calling Nancy Pelosi demonic.

Yeah, like every, like all the QAnon stuff, as I'm not an expert, obviously, but like all of it seems like

you can't make laws about it because it's all governing like the machine elves nobody else can see, you know?

Yeah, it's also like it's kind of by design, it's like super intangible.

Like you believe

these, you know, you, you deeply believe that there's like a hidden world, but it is so far from anything that you're actually dealing with in your day-to-day that you never have to like

put two and two together because if if what you believe as part of q and on is true then you would have to like truly arm yourself rise up immediate violence action and so but that that obviously is not what people do you know they they they just kind of want to like know and then spread the message it's awareness it's kony 2012.

they've waste they they've wasted upwards of 300 of city money putting up a big vinyl banner at the entrance of town that says, Squim welcomes the storm.

The other conclusion I'm drawing between

this thing, where he backs off of it, and another thing with the t-shirt that I assume we'll get to is this guy's a massive pussy.

Like anytime he's like...

He sort of like shows up with a big sign that's like, I will have all of you executed at Guantanamo Bay.

And then the second anyone with any power over him goes, I don't know, I don't really think that that's appropriate.

He immediately does like a fulsome apology.

Yeah.

So basically.

I will give you a kiss at Montego Bay is what I meant to say.

So

the other thing is like, when I say he governs normally, I mean, he governs normally for a like right-wing local government guy.

Like he's, there are some like unsealed text messages from him that show it's like, yeah, he did believe a lot of some of this stuff but a lot of the stuff that he seemed to believe was very like that he let influence how he governed was very like early period save our squim rather than like late period mall children save our squim yeah well like i there's a there's different kinds of kind of kind of like brainworms here where i i think some there's a kind of like lesser stage of it where you think, oh, all of the like Pizzagate child trafficking stuff is happening, but like obviously not near me because I retain enough like attachment to consensus reality that like I can, I know they're not fucking trafficking MS-13 guys through the fucking lighthouse that we have that is beautiful, by the way.

So it must be happening somewhere else like over the horizon, right?

As opposed to the people who are fully like, I believe that I'm being gangstalked or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess I think it's because he was a little, he was a little earlier when QAnon was a way to talk about like the news rather than a total lens through which to experience reality.

That's my read on it anyway.

I think this is one of the most elaborate ways of like making friends in your 50s that anyone's ever come up with.

So

we're now getting to like the conflict, right?

The sort of the climax here.

Charlie Bush also was the person who like signed off on the fact that from the town's point of view, they didn't need to provide permission to the tribe to build their medically assisted opioid treatment clinic, right?

He was the one who said, yep, you don't need our permission, you can do that, go ahead.

I mean, it's more like, not like, go ahead, you have a permission, but just like acknowledging, yes, you don't need our permission, we agree.

At this time, also, the council was undergoing quite a bit of turnover.

And weirdly, more and more, more of the members who were getting appointed or elected were directly supported by the Facebook group.

And so Charlie Bush gets his like, he has the support of the old council.

And then like people die because everybody in Squim, especially on the council, is like 90 years old.

Basically, like these new, these new counselors get appointed.

We'll get to them in a second, but that's just like, know that in the background.

By the way, this is all now happening in January 2021.

Just weeks earlier in December 2020, Squim named 2021 the year of kindness.

I have the press release here.

The proclamation stated the social and economic impact of the global pandemic, racial and equity tensions, and the restriction on in-person gatherings, the presidential election, and community polarization due to the treatment clinic as reasons to encourage community members, businesses, and non-profits to initiate a series of activities in support of kindness to reignite our sense of community.

William Armacos said, Before we speak, ask yourself, is it kind?

Is it necessary?

And is it loving?

It costs nothing to share kindness.

And remember, the greatest gift you can give someone is forgiveness.

We're looking forward to the community to spread to work.

We're looking forward to working with the community, spreading more kindness in 2021.

And everybody in the posse nodded.

These like fucking Barnes and Noble scented candle quotation guys are like that's that's the same person who believes in QAnon because QAnon, like, if you really kind of like look at it

more deeply, like you will see that essentially it is like a strangely compassionate movement.

It's totally imaginary, but if those children are disappearing, if there's like a demonic cabal of child molesters, and it's almost everybody that you, you know, have seen in movies and everybody that is in government, then like you see yourself as like a, you know, like a caregiver of some sorts, like a

person who cares about like the most disenfranchised, imaginary mole children hiding in basements.

You know, I mean, like, aren't the, the QAnon people are always going on about, like, I feel like they were like the power of love and community and stuff, which I always found so fascinating.

And it's all very like, live, laugh, love.

It's just, it's going to be so exciting to all get killed by like a chiropractor who believes in his heart of hearts that you have to be kind because everyone you meet is going through a battle that you don't know anything about.

It's just that he thinks that the battle that we're going through is how to traffic the most children.

So, in, by the way, during that election campaign for like for the of the filling the new seats of these appointments, William Armacost uses his official cell phone that was provided to him by the city to do a couple of things.

Number one, to send text messages to his fellow

conservative council members saying

that if we don't hold on to our seats, we'll end up with radical liberals that will give the tribe the keys to the city.

Specifically, saying that like Lowell Rathburn, Vicki Lowe, and Kathy Downer are going to be, are these radical liberals?

They need to, like, we need to get rid of them, essentially.

There's another COVID aspect to this as well, which is that a large part of this appears to have been making a really like private war against the county health officer, who was just like a, you know,

nice woman who wore a lot of like sweaters.

And that, that's the kind of thing that really is like a red rag to a bull for these guys.

Oh, you know, keep, keep Kathy Downer, especially in mind.

Uh, but yeah, he sends this text message from his like official phone to like his constituents.

It's like, hey, the radical liberals, Kathy Downer and the rest are going to give the tribe the keys to the city.

And then when you call that phone back, his outgoing message is a message promoting the juice plus vitamins.

Giving the tribe the keys to the city is like, again, it's very lynchian, right?

The idea that like all of these people have like a latent sense that they they know that they're living on like stolen land, right?

And they have a real kind of like fear that it's going to, you know, the bill for that is going to come due at some point.

But

yeah.

So the new, so basically this

sort of election slash appointment happens.

Some are appointed, some are elected.

And they're two, and a few new counselors join.

Two of them in particular are of interest.

Sarah Kincaid, 76, married for 55 years with two great grandchildren who in her spare time is active with the Clallam County Republican Party.

And then Mike Pence, no relation, 68.

No.

You got to start going by Michael, right?

Or something?

Especially if you're like a QAnon guy after Jan Sick.

Yeah, that would be so embarrassing.

Yeah.

It's like showing up for the QAnon meeting, and you're like,

hey, how's it going?

My name is Jeffrey Epstein.

It's just a total coincidence.

Robert Clinton.

So these appointees, as well as William Armacost.

Sorry, I'm looking at a photo of Mike Pence from Squim, and you could never confuse him for Mike Pence.

He's got a Fuman Chu.

That's hard.

So many of these guys have weird facial hair.

Like Armacost has like a kind of Hulk Hogan.

That's that's the

Mountaineer's delight.

He's got a Mountaineer's delight, except it's really like gray and wispy.

Would you be wild to know that number one apparently uh mike pence uh there let's just say there were discrepancies in his cv and then he died

what

he died he died pretty recently in 20 he died in 2022 did did did did did fucking dark woke get to him like what what happened did we do that

damn no

he was uh he was it was he after all this happened he remained a a counselor for a while.

Um, but like, I just find it so funny that so many of the people in this story are just like died in 2022 or three.

Because they're all like in their 60s and refused to get vaccinated.

Yeah, well, the 60s is young for this place.

Like, Mike Pence, 68, is like one of the younger people on the council who isn't like a sort of sweater liberal.

Jesus.

It's one of the things that depresses me, right, is the pincer attack generationally of fascism, where it's it's like all the most online people that you know who are all engaging with like gabe announcements kind of fascism are either 70 and own everything and waiting to die or under 25 for some reason.

Well, uh, so all these appointees, as well as Armacost, were trained by an organization called the Independent Advisory Association, which trains local government officials around Clallam County, was instrumental in setting up Save Our Squim.

Uh, it they hand-picked Armacost to be mayor, and it was run by this Republican strategist called Donald Hall, who also died in 2022.

Jesus Christ.

I love the end credits for this episode.

It's like, where are they now?

It's just a bunch of graves with like squim growing behind them, like the end of Gangs of New York.

I just.

With squim growing behind them?

Yeah,

fields of lavender.

Oh, I see.

Oh, I see.

The beautiful field of squim.

I think the thing about this is

you had a sort of like miniature scale Steve Bannon here, right?

To be like, this is how we completely destabilize and then take over local government in Clallum County.

Yeah.

It worked for a bit.

Also, Donald Hall in an interview with Weiss about Marjorie Taylor Green, once, you know how like sometimes you'd like they you'd interview like James Carville or whatever, and he'd be like, well, what I would have said is this, right?

And this was after Marjorie Taylor Greene made her Jewish space lasers comment.

He said, yeah, when she said that about Jewish space lasers starting the forest fires, I was like, oh, geez, what are you up to?

But if she'd said something like Israeli space lasers, I would have been like, yeah, okay, because who knows what Israel's up to in space?

Okay.

Haven't you seen the end of Space Balls, man?

That's right.

That's what it's all about.

It's all about the big vacuum cleaner lady.

So Hall, giving an unusually candid interview to NPR, says, when a group like QAnon comes along and says, hey, there's this international child sex trafficking ring out there, you have to be careful because that makes sense to me, right?

Yeah, I do have to be careful because that makes sense to you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this election season, Hall, this is from NPR.

Hall is helping a slate of candidates all across the Olympic Peninsula run for office, including Mike Pence.

So they uncovered an email that Pence once forwarded to William Armacost.

In it, the author of the email, because it's like an email chain, forward, forward, forward, claims, quote, a storm is coming and calls for a QAnon gathering in Squim and thanks Armacost for saving the children who, quote, suffered so much at the hands of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

Did he?

Well,

clearly, because he was pilled, he has done this, right?

Like, how do you?

I guess that I guess this might be just like a a sort of, you know, pillardness amateur question, right?

But how do you thank Armacost for saving, if you're Armacost and you get like, thank you, sir, for saving the children, you know,

how do you, you've never saved a child, but you raise awareness and awareness is actually action.

Yeah, this is one of the weird kind of overlaps with like fucking like lift strong bracelets.

You know, like, yeah, it's all, it's all just like, hey, man, you helped bring attention to, to, I mean, that is kind of what we've trained people to think like action is within society.

Like, well,

we have a lot more awareness of breast cancer and the mole children.

That's what the other ribbon is for.

Yeah.

That's what the Punisher skull is for.

The yellow ribbon Punisher skull.

Hey, when the police department do a special like vinyl wrap for their cars for mole children month.

So the PAL mole children awareness game so like what what so what happens is right there is this like municipal lotario donald hall

who through like facebook groups seems to have orchestrated the q anon takeover of this town using william armacost this like you know combative hairdresser as his patsy he just didn't really he didn't really twig that armacost was going to be too dumb to not say yeah q QAnon's a truth movement on the radio.

Yeah.

That's it.

I hate to do Bannon Trump again, but like, what do you want me to do?

It writes itself.

So basically, what Donald Hall says, right?

He says, the city is being run by a bureaucracy and what I would call the Squim Elites.

The people just don't have a voice.

8,000 people.

How many elites can there be?

I don't know, like eight, 10.

They're running the town.

So finally, this group, Save Our Squim, comes along, and all of a sudden, people say, let's get on that bandwagon.

In an interview with City Lab, Hall says that he had nothing to do with the council's decision to fire Charlie Bush, though he thought it made sense given how much the two had clashed.

Quote, that was a strong act of disloyalty on Bush's part, referring to Bush critiquing ArmaCost.

Yeah, of course.

He is a traitor.

Yeah.

Disloyalty, Jesus fucking Christ.

He's a traitor to Squim.

You're like a fucking mountain town.

You're not doing anything.

There's no loyalty.

What are you talking about?

This isn't the godfather.

This is you trying to get along with like the other three people in your fucking town.

It's the perfect microclimate for the storm.

What are you talking about?

That's true.

So Donnie, Donald, Donald Hall then applauds the council for taking action against Bush and then trying to fight the MAT clinic.

The council then, and he then goes further and he says the council should consider alternatives for governing Squim, Squim, such as strong mayor or council administrator.

Dude, such a strong mayor.

As opposed to previous weak mayors.

Instead of like strong mayors create good towns, you can say.

Also, it sounds to me like he's taking strong man dictator.

And he's like, yeah, we're going to be a strong mayor dictator.

You're going to be a municipal strongman.

And he says, look, everyone's been too deferential to minorities, specifically

the Jamestown Scalalum tribe.

So

he says there will be a pressure on Williams as mayor to effectively move forward.

And if he does, I think the removal of Bush will be a positive.

If there's no change, if we have the status quo, then it won't have made any difference at all.

Now, in response to this, another thing happens, which is all of those sweater people that you referred to earlier, November,

they all get together and form something called the Squim Good Governance League or the SGGL, specifically to fight save our squim.

Let's fucking go.

No, no, no.

Yeah.

No, we don't need more organizations.

We need to dissolve the social bonds.

Here's the crazy thing.

It works.

It actually works.

That's great, man.

That's the thing is like, if you get organized and you have like a little more in your brain than just like, well, the children, they're hiring them on the tunnels.

Then it's like, yeah, you can get something done.

Local bureaucracy.

It's, yeah, it's a scale model, right?

A little scale model experiment of

how you can actually like resist any of this stuff.

And you can do it in a squishy liberal, like wear a quarter zip, a lot of sweater vests kind of way, right?

Like

turquoise jewelry, big hat, kind of like, sure, whatever.

You can do that.

And these people did do that, it looks like, just by virtue of talking to their neighbors and like door knocking and stuff.

And then you scale that up to the entire country and a bunch of Democratic Party consultants thought they were too good to do any of that shit.

And now look what's happened.

Yes.

Yes.

I do think that like recentering people in the physical world and what they're actually dealing with.

It is probably the only way forward because this stuff festers when you spend too much time alone on your computer, where you're visualizing the world as like this intangible thing.

But when you actually have to show up to annoying meetings and talk to all your actual neighbors, like this stuff does calm down.

So I actually, I take it back.

Don't dissolve the social bonds.

Actually form

social bonds.

Social bonds, good.

Social bonds good.

It's like, do you want to be like a kind of a reformist or an accelerationist, right?

Because like there are two ways out of this, I feel like one of them, one off-ramp to this is you talk to the, the, you know, the, the nice liberal quarter zip guy and you realize that actually he doesn't have 50,000 children in his basement.

And you kind of decide that maybe you want your city government or your federal government to focus on doing the governance stuff, or

somebody's putting somebody in a mass grave.

And it really feels like right now, we just blasted past one of those off-ramps.

Yeah.

Well, I think that it slightly overestimates the

level of engagement these people often want is posting to a Facebook group.

The reason why it so often involves a Facebook group is because that's that's their version of like the mass grave.

Like it's just posting something outrageous or just like putting that horrifying image

on the internet and being like, take a look at this.

You're going to wake up.

It's a problem.

It's a problem for the left and the right that a lot of people think posting is activism.

100%.

I'm sure there's a right-winger out there who's like, you know, people will claim that.

loading a bunch of liberals into a mass grave is more effective than voting and then not load a bunch of liberals into a mass grave.

You know, who knows, right?

Yeah, it's well, it's a little different because I feel like on the right, that this sort of posting isn't just like people on the left will post and feel like they've done something, but here the people on the right are like living in like a really immersive ARG.

Yeah,

you know, yeah, it's like people always talk about the leftist echo chamber.

It's like, I wish I fucking lived in the leftist echo chamber.

It sounds great.

Instead, I have to find out about how terrible everything is.

Yeah, sorry.

Um, so the other thing is, right, around this time that like the Squim Good Governance League is sort of coalescing, like the mayor starts doing weirder and weirder stuff in public.

So he says, he, for example, visits a Costco wearing a Punisher.

The Costco.

The Costco, the Costco at the center of it all,

wearing a black t-shirt with a Punisher skull that says, this is the USA.

We eat meat, we drink beer, we own guns, we speak English, we love freedom.

If you don't like that, get the fuck out.

I'm fucking telling you.

The ferry is like half an hour.

The ferry to Canada is half an hour's drive.

You can easily get the fuck out.

Like, that's not that much of a threat.

That's just posting in real life.

Like, what if I dressed as the meme and then walked into a public place?

Like, it's just an extension of like, look at my horrifying message.

Does it offend you?

Does it offend you?

He's wearing a mask in his photo, too, which is very funny.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Do you remember the video of the guy filming himself with a like, I voted for Trump t-shirt?

Yes, that's it.

It's watching the people go by on the plane and be like, huh?

And it's like, I am picking up blueberries for the salad I'm making.

Like, please, please don't make eye contact with me.

Apparently, you can get some great deals on Lego at the Squim Costco.

So, everybody like walking past this guy who's just got the like, I will kill you shirt on is just like looking for some like Lego Star Wars.

But even the shirt doesn't say I will kill you, it just says like what I like to buy at store.

Ah, beer, beer, meat meat gone

he is by the way in front in this photo it looks to me like he's in a bunch he's in front of a bunch of like bulk recolla

we do not have sore throats this is the episode all right this photo this photo is too good i it's right what what i did was i refused to get vaccinated and now for some reason unrelated to this i have to buy like a bulk pack of Ricola every week.

So the crazy thing is, right?

It's again, now that there's like this quite muscular resistance against him in town.

Muscular liberalism.

They made it real.

Yeah, at a local level.

But now that there's this like big resistance to him in town, he's on the back foot.

And then he's getting like roundly criticized by all of a sudden people who are very, very active in local politics who never thought they would be.

So he said, he then responded, because again, the other thing about William Armakov is he's a gigantic pussy who like will be like, oh,

wear a shirt that's like, yeah, I'm about to offend you.

And then someone's like, I'm offended.

And he's like, I put the shirt on by accident.

I'm so sorry.

It's the proximity to Canada.

Just the apology field extends over the strait.

And so

they have the American drive to offend and then the Canadian drive to apologize.

So he said, I had no idea and I wasn't even conscious of the t-shirt that I had put on that morning before I attended AA was the one that I was indeed wearing.

Bro, you're going to a fucking, like, we like beer and you're going to an AA meeting?

Well, maybe that's the problem.

I like beer too much.

We drink beer kind of too much.

So he explained that he wore the shirt to the AA meeting because he wanted to use the skulls as a way to symbolize that we are all created equal in order to help fellow group members with their addictions.

Okay.

Yeah, I was, Your Honor, I was doing the title card at the end of Barry Linden.

Yeah, yes.

Your honor, I did walk into the AA meeting wearing a one tequila, two tequila, three tequila, four t-shirts.

I was not aware it was laundry day.

I wanted to highlight the dangers of drinking too much tequila.

Also, so much of this is just the retirement wars as well.

Like it's

whether or not you...

Whether or not you retire and you're like, thank God, I'm finally out of the woke People's Republic of California.

Or you retire and I'm like, and you're like, oh, thank God, I'm finally out of the like fascist hellscape of California.

Yeah, and then it's it's all like legislative, like, it's all just like arguing over who's allowed to wear what t-shirt and like what you subjected your neighbor to.

I've created a tolper for myself with that second one.

I can't not think about Maoist standard grandpa.

So

we've gone long, so I want to get to the end here.

It was weird.

I went to my grandparents for Christmas and he called me a settler.

No,

Lishin here, you kick-a-k-cracker.

So

he said, if I'd been thinking other than a quick 10-minute run to Costco, I would have turned my shirt inside out.

I apologize for those that were offended.

I also regret that we are living in a time in our society that we give paparazzi that are looking for any opportunity they can take to have a gotcha moment.

The poker paparazzi of Squim, who took a picture of the mayor wearing a big t-shirt that said, like, fuck you.

The same guys that killed Diana must have done that.

Oh, fuck.

It's so true.

It's just like, ah, fuck.

I left the house again with my fuck you, suck my dick t-shirt.

And

everyone's offended.

I should have turned it inside out.

So, but in the spring of 2021, this is where the SGGL forms.

And also, it's.

The Wokes.

The Wokes.

Yeah, the Wokus.

It's also notable that two of the people who are leading it are two Indigenous women, Vicki Lowe, and I believe the other one is called Rachel Anderson,

along with other regular people who found themselves radicalized to like the lib by the experience of having QAnon take over their town.

The initial goal.

I'm not thrilled about anyone being radicalized to the lib, but it's, you know, I'd rather you be radicalized to the left, but better than being radicalized to the right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, this is America.

They're radicalized to like never Trump Republicanism.

Oh, yeah.

So initially it was going to be, okay, well, let's stop Charlie Bush from resigning, but then stuff like the t-shirt incident happens and more and more people get more and more politicized and the Facebook group gets bigger and bigger.

And they expanded their, they then started fielding like candidates.

So this is a quote from The Nation.

which did a whole sort of profile of the SGGO.

It says, all these conservative people snuck onto the city council and nobody opposed them, said Ron Richards, a 77-year-old one-time Clallam County Commissioner.

And then they appointed their friends to government.

It resulted in the most right-wing people you can imagine running Squim.

Richards then got involved in the SGGL.

And like, it's, again, it's just like all of the oldest

libs you can imagine getting together to fight all the oldest conservatives you can imagine.

So on the night of the election, this is from the nation, it became clear the organizing had paid off.

In one race after another, from city council to school board, hospital commissioners, SGGL candidates swept aside those backed by the IAA, that Donald Hall organization.

Let's fucking go.

Yeah, I'm living out.

Let's all live out.

It's the city that lived out just in the twilight of its years.

So Armacost then was voted out of mayorship by his fellow city councilors, but he remains a councillor.

The only counselor to vote for him remaining mayor was himself.

So now he's still a mirror.

He's just a mere counselor, and he's still in, but he's still in power.

In 2023, there's another election, and Kathy Downer, who was elected to council in 2021, runs against him for his council seat.

So Kathy Downer said in a previous interview that she ran in 2021 in part because she did not feel like council meetings were following Robert's rules of order.

And that councilors.

Oh my God, there's fucking hats.

And that councillors passed an ordinance that indicated to merchants they didn't need to follow COVID vaccination guidelines.

And

she couldn't take that.

For 2023, Downer ran against Armacost specifically for his stance on QAnon.

As he left the city,

as he left power, he did stay living there.

Armacost said, it was an honor to serve citizens.

I was raised in an environment to always leave a situation better than you found it.

And with the honor of selecting our new city manager, I think he's been a huge contribution to that fact, and it will be a balance of amazing stuff, technology improvements, and the vision and energy that he brings to the table.

I truly believe our best is yet to come for Squim.

That is awesome because the best is yet to come is kind of a little bit QAnon-ish.

Like they do love that saying, that has been the two Q drops.

He's fucking dabbing.

He's stinging the tail.

He's dabbing on them lives.

God, I just, all you have to do, if to be successful as a liberal, it turns out, is to get like the tiniest amount of bass in your voice and go from you're not following Robert's rules of order to this guy is insane and keeps wearing the like, fuck you guys, I eat meat

to the Costco.

And

that's enough.

Maybe a lesson there.

I don't know.

So that's the town of Squim and the mayoralty of William Armacost, which I thought was absolutely fascinating.

I mean, so what you're telling me is it is now in our hands.

It is now woke, right?

So we can all move to Squim.

It's one of the woke holding.

Yeah, I'm updating my risk map of America.

That's a woke holding.

What I can't get over with this is that

most of the mayors we cover, right, are brought down when they're like, we're inventing cronyism too, which is when

I'm in charge of the cronyism.

And this guy just posted his way out of office despite not really doing anything that bad.

Like he wasn't corrupt.

He wasn't like, he was corrupt in that.

He got all of his friends to be in the council with him and stuff, but it just seems like every other mayor would have been funneling thousands and thousands of dollars into like looking for the mole children.

But he's just, he just wore a t-shirt and then got booted out of office for wearing the wrong t-shirts.

Yeah, the worst he did, it seems from what I can tell, is he refused to condemn like Patriot Front.

He said that, you know, you don't.

Yeah, but like, it's not like he was channeling money to them, right?

He refuses to condemn them.

He also

says you don't have to abide by like mask rules and doesn't do that himself.

But

he probably killed everybody, but he killed

him.

Squim is so old.

He probably killed everybody.

I mean, this is one of the towns that I feel like if COVID had gotten slightly more out of control, this is the like road-style survivors roll into town and everybody's dead.

And it's kind of like environmental storytelling, right?

And you find all of these people like dead in the council chamber, literally at each other's throats, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Heavy-handed storytelling in squim um but yeah so it's like as you say maddie it's like he so many of the other mayors that we talk about in this show commit what can only be described as turbo crime and

yeah his what he does is bad but it's not as like big

i guess

yeah unless you count killing people as big which i don't but let's see he's he's got enough steps removed from from him doing it that he's not sort of you know he's it's all it's not like he's kwame kilpatrick ordering his like goons his mayor goons to do in squad yeah yeah anyway so julian do you just want to give us your what is your last word on squim the town that got pilled for a while Yeah,

it's great.

I love it because it's so low stakes.

Everything is so aesthetic, right?

It's like, I don't want to hear this on the radio.

I don't want to see a t-shirt that says this or whatever.

I think that this hopefully develops into like an overlook hotel situation where the isolation of being in a mountain town combined with the local Costco

will

generate a situation more interesting even than one or two people there supporting QAnon.

I think this place is

a real boiling teapot and it may explode.

I can't wait.

And by that I mean it seems lovely and I don't know.

I mean, I'm wondering how much per square meter, like how can I invest?

Can I move there?

Given the whole country's pilled, it's like Squim is one of the few places that's now developed immunity.

Yeah, yeah, if it's pilled and smells like lavender, it's like, is it, you know, pretty good?

I'm feeling, feeling, feeling positive about Squim again.

Hey, I'm feeling pilled.

Squim.

I do have like fantasies about moving to like a mountain town, but then I also know that I would go insane.

I mean, it sounds like it's pretty easy to become the mayor and then stay the mayor as long as you don't wear the wrong shirt to the Costco.

Yes, exactly.

Wearing my don't call me a faggot, I'll come shirt to the Costco and getting like deselected by the same libs from the left.

Okay.

All right.

I think that's what we have time for today.

But Julian, I want to thank you so much for coming and talking to us today.

It's always a pleasure to have you on the show on any show, really.

Thank you for having me included.

This was great.

I love to find out what happened to that story.

Yeah.

Listen to QAA.

This is a free episode.

Is it?

I've just checked the file.

Yeah.

So the next one's going to be a bonus episode.

It's my choice of mayor.

Yeah.

I'm going to leave that a mystery for the moment.

I'm going to start writing that soon.

A mayoral mystery, a municipal mystery.

If you want to listen to the bonus episode next week, go to no gods, no mayors.com and sign up for our Patreon.

And you can get an extra two mayors a month.

Yeah.

Or you could listen to the Kwame Kilpatrick episode I alluded to just now.

You all have to make like a fucking deck of mayors, you know, like either either a playing card deck or like a tops, like collector, like Pokemon type thing.

Playing card deck like the invasion of Iraq.

Yes, no, exactly.

Which a very nice, a very nice reader sent me one of those a couple months ago.

What you don't understand is that all of the mayors that we do are actually cards in the mayor's deck.

Yes.

A salute from the three of diamonds.

Yeah.

And then when we, and then the thing is, it's like there are multiple mayor's decks in the municipal carnival basically yeah they're all shuffled together you need

the order is a mysterious thing that we are divining using a series of sort of divining instruments and a deck of cards is but one of the the tools at our disposal

the mayor's tarot

the mayoral arcana it's right there yes the mayor nomicon that's another one of my devices all right all right the mayor's gotta run We got to run.

We got to go.

We've got to run.

Julian's got a hard time.

We've got to let him go.

Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.