This is the first part of our exploration of the private Facebook group Save Anchorage. These staunch Bronson supporters dominated the mask debate last Fall and are currently fielding viable candidates in our upcoming local elections. Here to talk about it is independent reporter for the Midnight Sun Blog Matt Buxton. He is one of the most prolific journalists working in Alaska today and also hosts his own podcast with Pat Race called "Hello, Alaska."
This is the first part of our exploration of the private Facebook group Save Anchorage. These staunch Bronson supporters dominated the mask debate last Fall and are currently fielding viable candidates in our upcoming local elections. Here to talk about it is independent reporter for the Midnight Sun Blog Matt Buxton. He is one of the most prolific journalists working in Alaska today and also hosts his own podcast with Pat Race called "Hello, Alaska."
Matt Buxton:
These are people that are operating in a world where they believe that the elections are stolen here and that the Anchorage Assemblies saw a bunch of self... They're self dealing and enriching themselves through... I'm not entirely sure what method.
Andrew Gray:
Welcome to the East Anchorage Book Club podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Gray. Today, we begin our exploration of the private Facebook group, save Anchorage. These staunch Bronson supporters dominated the mass debate last fall and are currently fielding viable candidates in all our upcoming assembly and school board races. Here to talk about it, is independent reporter for the Midnight Sun blog and newsletter, Matt Buxton. He is one of the most prolific journalists working in Alaska today and also hosts his own podcast with Pat Race called Hello Alaska. Matt Buxton, welcome to the podcast.
Matt Buxton:
Hi, great to be here.
Andrew Gray:
Matt, I just wanted to get a little bit of your background. Where are you from?
Matt Buxton:
So I'm originally from Oregon, where in Oregon sort of depends on who's asking. But I grew up between Bend and Portland. Yeah, Bend in Oregon. And then I went to school in Lincoln, Nebraska of all places, so go Big Red. And then found my way up to Alaska after that. Yeah.
Andrew Gray:
And did you always want to be a journalist?
Matt Buxton:
In school, I was really good at math and science actually. And I kind of wanted to challenge myself, and I knew that writing was difficult and I actually really wanted to become... I found... Really liked being a photographer, actually. And that's what I went to school for. And then partway through, realized that being a professional journalist, photojournalist was not going to ever pay the bills. So I decided the lustrious and lucrative career of being a print reporter instead.
Andrew Gray:
Is that what you did when you got to Alaska?
Matt Buxton:
Yeah. After college, I did a fellowship in Berkeley where I did reporting on the criminal justice system in California. And then did a fellowship, I think it's called a resident intern, which was just a fancy word for, we're really going to take advantage of you, at the Oregonian for about a year after that in Portland, Oregon. And then... Which I thought was going to be a dream, and it really kind of wasn't. And then yeah, opportunity came up in Alaska and moved up and did that.
Andrew Gray:
So you have kind of an interesting independent journalism thing going on with the Midnight Sun. How did that come about?
Matt Buxton:
So I worked at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner for about seven years when I moved here, that's what I originally moved up to Alaska for. It was an interesting job, I was kind of chasing a girl at the time and then that didn't end up working out, unfortunately. And fortunately, I really fell in love with Alaska and fell in love with the legislative coverage and how can I do more political coverage? How can I do more... I just, I really always have liked the idea of public policy and how that works, how a bill gets passed and all... Like, I love the boring agendas in our lives. I covered the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly for a long time. And I found just... Actually, it was after the 2016 election when Trump got elected. I started feeling a little frustrated with sort of the traditional bounds of being a [inaudible 00:03:43] reporter, or being a reporter.
Matt Buxton:
And I think I felt strongly that there is this sort of idea of false equivalency in the media. And so an opportunity came along to take over the Midnight Sun. So to be clear, there's a publisher that owns it, Jim Lottsfeldt. He's a lobbyist political guy. He seems to do a lot of, little bit of everything. And so he owns that. So I do the blog through a contract, and it's been a really great experience. He called me up one day and asked if I wanted to do... Was interested in doing something like this. And yeah, I didn't really know too much about him and he didn't seem to know too much about me. But we had a brief conversation about some of our, like the way we see the world and it worked out.
Matt Buxton:
And frankly, I was really wary, I think a little bit about it just because it's such a different model than what we are used to with journalism. For me, it's been really freeing. Jim doesn't have any day to day say. I get a text from him maybe once every three months and it's, "Hey, the website's down." That's about it. And it's been really great. I think the new emerging model is Patreon and sort of patronage politics. And you kind of look back too, [inaudible 00:05:08] centuries and there sort of has been a history of people in the community, who've got the resources who value this kind of thing existing and help take care of it. And so yeah, I've been doing that and I keep on doing freelance work here and there. And then we launched the Midnight Sun Memo newsletter about a year ago, and it's been going great.
Andrew Gray:
Okay, Matt. Save Anchorage. What is Save Anchorage and why do we need to know?
Matt Buxton:
From the really basic viewpoint, it is a Facebook group that is now closed, that we don't have a particularly good insight into anymore. In a bigger sentence, it's like really virulent "grassroots right-wing political effort" in Anchorage that has... I think it's impossible to really separate it from a lot of what else is going on right now in the country, as far as the political motivation on the far right when it comes to COVID. It's February 10th right now when we're recording this. Today, the House, Military and Veterans Affair Committee held a very lengthy hearing on the Oath Keepers. I think there's just a lot of ways where those two things sort of mesh together, which is basically, there's long been anti-government, conspiratorial factions out there, to say the least that I think were really sent into overdrive during the pandemic. I think that there was this sort of almost violent backlash to the mandates, I think it really blossomed sort of wickedly with a lot of coronavirus conspiracy theories, with the election conspiracy theories, with all these sort of different things that kind of all sort of created this perfect storm of anger.
Matt Buxton:
Save Anchorage quickly became the organizing place to oppose the leftists that were ruining this city and, "Look at these kind of milk toast health mandates that they're shutting businesses down." And so it was an organizing point, but it was also a place of ramp and misinformation and disinformation about what's going on. The most sort of simple terms on the other end, it's this alternate reality, I think that has sort of been created within our community that has enough followers and enough energy behind it, that it's almost its own reality at this point.
Matt Buxton:
These are people that are operating in a world where they believe that the elections are stolen here and that the Anchorage Assemblie's all a bunch of self... They're self dealing and enriching themselves through... I'm not entirely sure what methods. I think it's really difficult to sort of grapple with for the traditional political things. But one of the really important things that I want to talk about as far as this hearing today in the legislature about the Oath Keepers, which is this whole... It's about David Eastman and the legislature and right-wingers and white supremacists and all this sort of stuff. But one of the, I think the really key points there and I think that applies here, is that the foundation is built around an alternate reality of where yeah, everyone's stealing money from you, all this sort of stuff. And they're violating the law and they're violating the constitution, and they're just tyranny. I think...
Matt Buxton:
And I listened to some stuff in advance for this, I think I heard words like, the demonic press and the cold civil war. It creates really, this sort of alternate reality that serves as a permission structure to be awful. The city was truly stealing from you, it was truly tyrannical. It really wanted just to muffle kids and do all this sort of stuff. Like, some of the reactions that are grown out of it, the anger that you saw at these masking hearings almost makes sense, right? Like, you're going to battle against this tyrannical, horrible, evil government that is out to get you at every turn. And the lies and the misrepresentations in here feed into that anger, and then it's this big... Becomes a big feedback loop.
Matt Buxton:
And I think that's what's really interesting about it. The researchers today were talking about, there was a number of just everyday people that got swept up into January 6th, they truly believe that they were saving the country from tyrannical leftists who want to instill Marxism. And it's like, you listen... And the wild thing is that it's so difficult, I think to really grapple with, for a lot of people, is just that the reality that they're arguing against is so different than the reality that we are living in. The way they talk about the health mandates is like, I have to step back and be like, "Wait. Do we want to shut down the schools? Do we want to..." I didn't think we did, I thought we all wanted to get through the pandemic in one piece, I thought we all wanted to care about each other and get through it.
Andrew Gray:
I'm going to try to make an awkward segue, but I think it's an important one that'll get us into an important area. And that is, the defacto leader of Save Anchorage is Assembly Member, Jamie Allard. When I listened to Dan Fagan's show last Friday and he had her on the show, his introduction to her was that she is their biggest hero and truly the one person in Alaska who could do whatever she wants. Be the mayor, be governor, the sky is the limit. This sort of overwhelming upswell of, "Hey, geography." Like, "The Saint Jamie Allard," coming from Dan Fagan. I think to those of us who have been to all these Assembly meetings, hearing that was just shocking. What are your thoughts on leader Jamie Allard?
Matt Buxton:
Well, I think we talked a little bit about the polarization, right? I think I would argue that the one thing that I think everybody would want, is a fair system, free of hypocrisy in our leaders, right? I think you can look at all sides and see some level of hypocrisy in there. But for Allard, it's just wild to me. I think that there's two different pictures being portrayed. There's what we see with your eyes and then what you hear through Dan Fagan's lens. And I don't watch a lot of the hearings, I'll preface it with that first. But it looks to me like somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. And so this idea that she's being painted as the next mayor to me, is laughable.
Matt Buxton:
I'd rather have four more years of [Dunleavy 00:12:13], at least he seems to get the ropes of it. So there's that and I think my introduction to her, was this wildly detached from reality defense of these Nazi license plates. How willing somebody is to lie about stuff and misrepresent it, because it was so clearly a Nazi reference, it so clearly would ought to have been an easy layup for everyone to condemn. But I think what we saw, is just a level of political opportunism that I think is really disheartening. I think we could definitely be more critical of people on the left that engage in similar going with however the wind blows. But man-
Andrew Gray:
I want to speak a little bit about that. I think that impression that she doesn't know what she's doing on the Assembly, is appealing to people who don't understand how an Assembly meeting works. And [Joel 00:13:27] Hall had spoken to us a while back about how there is an impenetrability of Assembly meeting process, a level of complexity that makes it really hard to read that agenda, to understand what is happening at the meeting tonight. And that inscrutability of what's happening in front of you causes the person on the other side, the person who's not up on the [inaudible 00:13:59] to feel unequal. Like, "They have some like crazy knowledge to understand what's happening and I don't." And so I think when they see someone who also doesn't seem to get it, there's a relationship. They're like, "Well, she doesn't get it either. This is impossible."
Matt Buxton:
I think that the masking fight was a really great example of, it's cultivated. Like, I think her image of not knowing what's going on and being angry about all this stuff is a cultivated and sort of intentional sort of look. And I think right, it plays well. And especially, it plays well because I think I've tuned into times where she's like, "Well, could we hear the last two people in line? They've been waiting for an hour." And then you have someone stand up and go, "Well, does that... What does our charter say?" And it's like, you just lost the argument right there. She might not have a great handle of it, but I think she's got a better handle, the political situation. Especially the Save Anchorage, that far right political situation, than anybody else in the room does.
Matt Buxton:
She knows how to... She basically knows how to... She's like a conductor almost. On that level, she's beaten everybody at the game. I think there are times where, I think that the progressive members on the Assembly are their own worst enemies. I think that you look at some of the way that they handle the meeting and with some of the ways that they approach things, where you go, "Shoot, let's recall them. Let's get them all out of here," because they sound uptight, they sound holier than [inaudible 00:15:28]. I think there's a lot of that sort of stuff that I think 100% feeds into that anger that I think Jamie Allard harnesses well. I think she gives them direction and gives them area...
Matt Buxton:
And I think that's what is difficult though about it, is when I say hypocritical and stuff, is that yeah, there are problem... There are places where the transparency could be better. But so much of it, of what is going on, is instead of being in service of a fair, equitable process is just there to score more, rack up more political points within that realm. If political success was defined solely by how Save Anchorage or however, whatever beholden audience you have feels, then great. But it doesn't... I don't see how any of it really moves us as a city forward.
Matt Buxton:
There's no equitability, there's no fairness, there's no opportunity in a lot of this. And that's what I think for me, I find so frustrating and so difficult with it, is that it's almost creating drama and angst and division for the sake of it. And I think it's useful to have a side to direct your anger and to... So it's like, you look at elections that are coming up. If the Bronson side gets their way, there would be much more Jamie Allard types on the Assembly. And my question is like, for what... What's the end goal in that? Is that more no bid, no oversight contracts? What is the end goal there?
Andrew Gray:
I think the end goal... I think you've got... This is really where it comes down to Trump and the big lie. That you have one party that is willing to accept a loss in an election and another party that isn't. And I think that we see that at a local level, Bronson wanting to have the municipal clerk be an elected position, trying to get control of the election. Because I think it was Stalin who said, "It doesn't matter who votes, it matters who counts." Getting the counter in place to create sort of a one party rule. Dan Fagan speaks about this. Yesterday on his show, was talking about how it's fine for people...
Andrew Gray:
Like, he was talking about a certain Assembly member that he doesn't like. He's like, "It's fine for this type of person to exist, just as long as they never have power." And the point being, like we're okay with the other side existing, they just cannot be in government. And I think that is kind of the end goal. The end goal is to create an environment in which people with expertise, people with experience won't have a shot because that won't be the deciding factor. It will be loyalty to the party, loyalty to the leader. I do think... And it sounds like I'm talking about like, Soviet Union, but that is kind of what I see.
Matt Buxton:
It is. Oh, it's totally what it is. And that, I think to me, is what is so dark about all this, right? That the... That is the glint that we saw in the masking mandate, was that it was, there was an overarching threat of violence. Yeah, it was that threat of violence. And I think that it's this sort of willingness to break the rules, as long as it's the side that's right or the side that you believe is right. And I think the legislature's doing a lot of talk about... There's a good hearing this week about the Governor Dunleavy's veto of their per diem. And one of his members was talking about, "Well, he vetoed it because you guys didn't do what he wanted." And it's it's a repeat of the governor's veto, basically of the court system over an anti-abortion ruling that he didn't like, that is sort of breaking the rules.
Matt Buxton:
It is interfering with a separate co-equal branch of government, because they're not acting the way you want them to. And that is such a fundamental to me, violation of how things are supposed to work. You look at the Anchorage Assembly, there's a huge battle over the security in the room, huge battle over the plexiglass, all the... The meeting feed, all that sort of stuff. And to me, that... Yeah, I think it totally speaks to this sort of totalitarian, strong arm thing where it's like if... It seems like if Bronson gets his way, might as well just get rid of the Assembly, might as well just have a king. You might as well...
Matt Buxton:
And same with Dunleavy, might as well just get rid of the legislature and get rid of the courts and just let Dunleavy do what he wants. And I think that is so foundational to where this is going right now and it is enabled by this sort of line about the lawlessness and the tyranny of the left. And that frankly, the left sometimes gives them reason to believe it, I guess. This week also, there's the State of the Judiciary, Chief Justice, Daniel Winfree delivered it. He's the first Alaska born chief justice. And it was the 50th State of the Judiciary. And he was reflecting on how 50 years ago, there was all this political division and uncertainty and young people who didn't know their place in the world. And he was a young person back then.
Matt Buxton:
And now, he is part of the establishment. His core message there, is the reason... Basically, we've gotten through all of this. We've gotten through the good governors, the bad governors, the indifferent governors, we've gotten through all sorts of different flavors of the legislature, and attitudes and the budget and all that sort of stuff. But we got through it because of the foundation that we've set, which is the legislature is the appropriate... Or the Assembly is the same thing is the law making group, the administration is executive branch, they're tasked with carrying out the policy. And the judiciary's there to basically call balls and strikes, right? And on both levels, on the state level and on the Anchorage level, you're watching very quickly, an erosion of those kind of norms. And as having an Assembly that is not fully [inaudible 00:22:16] up with the mayor is a good thing.
Andrew Gray:
Big thanks to Matt Buxton not only for being on the show today, but for his incredible output of high quality journalism. If you haven't already subscribed to the Midnight Sun Memo, head over to the midnightsunak.com and sign up. Big gratitude to [Corey Coolidge 00:22:34] for making this podcast listenable. We continue today's conversation in March with two experts on the group Save Anchorage, community organizer and original Save Anchorage member, Yarrow Silvers and the anonymous blogger, The Blue Alaskan. But next week, we have a very special episode with the founders of the Alaska Coalition of BIPOC Educators, Danielle Kemp and Rosalyn Weiss. They discuss their backgrounds and why they stepped up to advocate for better racial representation and curriculum in our school district. Please tune in.