Don't Make Me Clear This Room

the cultural style of late imperial authority, at every level

The relationship has changed. They’ve bolted the door.

In a deservedly famous piece of gonzo journalism, Tom Wolfe wrote about the performatively wild activists who would stage rage-inflected protests in San Francisco government offices in the late 60s and early 70s — what he called the “Ethnic Catering Service.” One particularly effective activist, he wrote, showed up alone with a bag of weapons, which he poured out onto a desk, and then he reported that he’d just today taken all these guns and knives off the dangerous young men in his neighborhood, right as he talked them out of murdering a cop. The city promptly funded that activist’s violence reduction non-profit.

Grant money flew to the loudest performers, Wolfe wrote. Politicians created a program to mollify poverty-driven rage from the street by spending money, so the performance of poverty-driven rage from the street became lucrative, steering cash not to the people who were poorest and angriest but to the people who put on the most outrageous rage-theater of “poor” and “angry.”

As sick as that failure was, the door was open to a form of outrageous extractive theater because of a foundational premise in American government: the view that city hall has to be accessible, and the public, that sacred thing, has to be heard. That basic feature of the governing model was exploitable because it couldn’t be turned off, at all, ever. Government had to listen. Bureaucrats were “flak-catchers.” They couldn’t refuse the protestors an audience, and they would never be without a group of citizens marching downtown to deliver their demands to people who couldn’t possibly stop them from speaking. Tocqueville:

In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded.

Of course a bunch of Americans get together and go down to the town council and express their grievance, and of course the officials sit there and listen. Have to — this is America.

Now, watch the city council in the small town of Sylacauga, Alabama prematurely end its meeting and eject the public because local residents expressed concern about the presence of large numbers of recent Haitian immigrants in the city (fast forward to 5:29 to watch the mayor end the meeting):

“I’m gonna cut it off….There’s no reason for us to discuss this any further.” A mayor thinks she has the sole and absolute authority to decide for the entire community what topics may be discussed and what concerns are permissible to express. She didn’t want to hear that, so the public meeting ended.

Similarly, a recent meeting in Arvada, Colorado was intended to address neighborhood concerns about tentative city plans to build a housing facility for the homeless, but the neighbors continued to openly disagree with the city’s mayor — at which point she issued a firm warning: “If this becomes unproductive, I can clear this room.” You can watch the extraordinarily unpleasant mayor give this warning here, but Twitter still won’t allow embedded video to play on Substack. We love you, Elon. We could…bake you a cake? Or something?

This cultural inflection is a few years old, now, and started in its current form with school boards — like the one in Mankato, Minnesota, that warned against critical public comment with the explanation that a school board meeting “is not a meeting that belongs to the public.” They’re public schools, but the public somehow has a duty to not speak to the people who run them.

I’ve been writing about the pivot to be silent, peasants for years, and writing about the underlying assumptions among the governing class. In California, the much-decried “bullying” of the poor Los Gatos City Council — people came to council meetings and disagreed, the monsters — led to the passage of SB 1100, allowing local legislative bodies to eject the public from allegedly unruly meetings. I’ve been waiting for a local legislative body to be dumb enough to use the new law so we can test it in court, but no one seems to have taken the bait, yet.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about a parent in Pennsylvania named Chad Williams who had complained to his local school board over its pandemic-era mask mandate for children. You can read that detailed story here if you missed it. Williams, a lawyer, asked the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District to explain the legal basis for the mandate — and got no response. Then the school board repeatedly cut microphones and walked out of board meetings to avoid discussing the question with him. The district eventually dropped the mandate when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court concluded that officials had no authority under existing laws to require that students wear masks in schools.

Eleven months later, the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District is still refusing to discuss their implementation of a legally unfounded policy — and is now also refusing to discuss sexually focused student surveys, given to students without parent consent, that Williams discovered while looking at school district policy choices. Williams continues to pursue regulatory complaints against the district; you can watch him discuss the conflict in front of a silent school board here. He has complaints pending with the district, with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and with the federal Department of Education — while gaining the new leverage of being represented by a lawyer from the Pacific Justice Institute.

Recently, Williams says, a federal investigator called: “He said that given that the school has now admitted to the violations and there is evidence that the superintendent covered it up when I first asked questions in May 2023, the DoE will most likely take administrative action against the school district.”

I talked to Chad Williams this week, and I couldn’t help but say out loud how little was at stake for the recalcitrant school district. The district could end a more-than-year-long conflict by saying that yes, we shouldn’t have implemented that mask mandate, and we shouldn’t have administered those surveys. They aren’t being sued; there’s no money at stake. A parent wants school officials to say that they did something they shouldn’t have done. All they have to do is own up to it. And they won’t.

Locally, “no school official has ever met with me, no investigation has been conducted and my request for a hearing before the school board has been ignored,” Williams says.

That’s where we are. Simple discussions, plain acknowledgement of things everybody already knows. Normal behavior. Local governments, small town governments, school boards in towns where everybody knows everybody else — they can’t talk to people.

“I’m gonna cut it off….There’s no reason for us to discuss this any further.”

“If this becomes unproductive, I can clear this room.”

There’s a deep cultural sickness underneath those words, and it isn’t limited to a few locations. The culture of even minor authority has been corrupted by a view of criticism as illegitimate behavior that has to be crushed into silence.

We’re going to have to fix that. Chad Williams is one of the people who are working on it, but the needed changes are a generational problem. Remember the dad who complained to the Loudoun County school board that his daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a transgendered classmate? Remember the school board’s response?

Intolerable.