Now more than ever, politicians will not save us and communities must organize and defend ourselves. From the Blade collective, here’s some honesty

Above: Anti-racist graffiti on the Vance monument in June. A more honest statement than any campaign ad. Special to the Blade.

Editor’s note: The past few months have seen unprecedented upheaval in Asheville and around the country. But good things have also happened in these times of uncertainty and tragedy. Over the course of covering protests with the limitations of COVID-19 this summer, the Blade has grown to include several community members. We’re now making decisions as a collective group and are in the process of formally becoming a co-op. This change is a natural one, as the Blade‘s always been a community effort and I’ve always regarded writing and coverage of our city as a collaboration. I enjoy being an editor, I have never wanted to be a boss. I don’t think that power dynamic is healthy for any group. I’m honored to now work alongside some amazing people. This statement is from all of us. — David Forbes

As our readers are no doubt aware, there’s a presidential election going on. Given the Blade‘s stance against fascism and bigotry, we have no doubt that if our readers decide to vote they know which direction not to go.

Ashevillians, save for the many excluded from voting due to the cruelty of the borders and prisons of this crumbling empire, have long experience filling boxes beside the names of terrible or mediocre people in an effort to keep worse out. Indeed, there are plenty of solid rationales — from picking enemies to seeking breathing room for movements to gain more ground — for casting a ballot.

The Blade is broadly leftist. While united by a core of common values, we hold a variety of views ourselves on how communities should engage on the electoral front. Our readers have by this point no doubt seen enough evidence, ads, lectures, viewpoints and campaign diatribes to last several lifetimes. We trust you to make up your own minds.

If you’re voting by absentee ballot, please avoid using the mail. The Buncombe County Elections office (77 McDowell Street) will allow you to drop off absentee ballots Monday and Tuesday, 8 to 5 p.m. and poll workers will ensure the ballot’s received and counted. From experience, we can attest that the process is quick and the safety precautions are solid. If you’re voting in-person on election day, you’ll need to do so at your polling place, which you can find here. If you have issues casting a ballot, you can reach the voter protection hotline at 888-687-8683.

With that, it should be clear that none of what follows is meant to discourage people from voting. Instead, in a time where the bullshit level gets pretty high, we feel it’s necessary to provide a dose of honesty.

The Blade‘s focus has always been on the local front, and there are plenty of elections there this year too. We never endorse candidates but we’ve generally used campaign season as a time to shoot some sharp questions at them, especially about key problems that usually get ignored in election coverage.

But after witnessing the events of recent months the Blade has to decided to not issue an election guide this year. We believe doing so given the events of the past months would give people a false impression of our local power structures, the degree to which they have locked out other options and the damage they’re doing. Journalists are not exempt from the impact of our actions and the signals they send.

This was not an easy call. We’ve issued a guide every campaign season for five years. We did so earlier this year for the Asheville city council primary. While Blade editor David Forbes cautioned the public to remember there’s no such thing as a legitimate government and that they’d have to fight whoever won, we grilled the candidates on matters like cutting the police budget, gentrification and removing confederate regime monuments.

That was in March. A lot’s happened since then.

First, and most obviously, the Republican party has completely embraced the outright bigotry, hatred and descent into fascism that have lurked within their ranks for decades and come ever more to the forefront in recent years. To many of us, part of populations they’ve long sought to wipe off the map, this is not surprising.

There’s also no purpose in sending questionnaires to such creatures. We don’t ask tumors how to cure cancer. We cede no ground to fascists. The fact much of the media has spent decades doing just that is one reason for the injustice we witness every day.

The far-right is a real danger, and while they must be kept out of power the years have shown that many of the most effective ways to do so are outside of voting. Those include tactics like refusing to allow them a platform, outing them to the wider community and the militant demonstrations that liberals and centrists have too often decried, especially in this town.

Also, the far-right doesn’t run day-to-day government in Asheville. When it comes to the actions of the Democrats and “progressives” who do, this year has also been starkly revealing. From officials we have seen a string of disastrous decisions, from those vying to replace them tepid caution in a time that demands everyone with a public platform use it to aggressively fight for change. Instead, ostensibly liberal politicians have even echoed far-right talking points and defended those terrorizing our community.

Let’s review.

We’ve seen Democratic commissioners team up with the GOP to re-open hotels and spur a massive COVID-19 outbreak. We’ve seen them fail to test at critical points in a pandemic, then use those artificially low numbers to excuse re-opening, spreading the virus further and forcing locals back to work in dangerous conditions.

At each step of a worsening plague, they have acted in concert not to protect the public, but to satisfy tourism barons, guarantee profits for the wealthy and prop up the illusion that everything is fine. They have pointedly refused to inform people of the locations of outbreaks, valuing marketing over locals’ lives. The Latinx community has been particularly hard hit, but this summer officials halted the testing most accessible to working class residents the second headlines started to get really bad (testing later re-opened with significantly more obstacles to access).

While they rush to pour funds into gentrification and hiring more cops, over $40 million sits useless in local government reserves as testing declines and many in this city wonder if they’ll be able to eat. Nearly two out of every 100 locals has sickened with the virus. Over 100, probably far more, have died. We are heading into a winter that epidemiologists warn will be the darkest part of the pandemic, and we do so with a city as packed as any season of the times before.

For months, locals on front lines have declared “tourism is killing us.” So it is.

But the hotels still stay open, well-off visitors keep using our city as their amusement park and the rest of us keep suffering the damage. What federal and state governments had already made a catastrophe, local government turned into a nightmare. For all their supposed difference from the far-right, in the end the centrists and liberals in power here made exactly the same calculus: sacrifice the lives and health of the people to protect profits for the wealthy.

The fact they shout less while doing so does not heal the sick or resurrect the dead.

This summer hundreds of locals were tear gassed for daring to stand up to a notoriously racist police department. They were assaulted, shot at, even hospitalized. Asheville made international headlines when police attacked medics and destroyed their supplies. Meanwhile the APD let the far-right and fascists run rampant. They hobnobbed with gun-carrying klan members and took $1500 in gift cards from a “Back the Blue” caravan they let cover up license plates and tear around town.

The violence did not stop. When protesters picketed the Renaissance hotel in August — answering a call for solidarity from workers there facing dangerous pandemic conditions — the police brutally beat and arrested them. They did so while sheltering fraternal order of police president Rondell Lance, who had been stalking and attacking protesters. The next day a Blade reporter was dragged out of their car, assaulted and arrested for covering a protest. They still face charges today, as do over 70 others whose crime was to fight for actual change.

When in September a notorious far-right harasser’s armed “security” tried to shove their way through protesters and one of them stumbled into him causing him to fall, city officials sided not with locals but with the far-right, echoing their talking points about anti-racists. Police gave him a massive escort.

Bluntly, tear gas doesn’t burn any less when “progressive” governments are firing it.

Ashevillians have seen city hall do its damndest to turn this town, already a virtual police state for many in Black and Latinx communities, into an even more repressive hell. When confronted by an unprecedented wave of public protest and anger, their reaction was to lock things down. The APD began publishing activists’ personal information. Council members declared protest banners and tombstones (listing Black people killed by the police) left at their homes a threat. They made even the basic act of commenting at a meeting nearly impossible after hundreds of locals demanded the mayor and police chief’s resignation.

Faced with an overwhelming call to defund the police department, they shuffled around some of its duties on paper and left it with the same guns, cops and money as before. They kept the same police chief in power. Even city hall’s own equity officer resigned, condemning the city manager’s lack of support for any meaningful effort to fight racism as she did so.

That should disturb not just those seeking the abolition of the police, but anyone seeking to halt the rise of fascism. As yesterday’s assault on a march to the polls in Graham reminds us, the police function as a far-right paramilitary themselves. City hall’s refusal to defund them keeps the public in danger, especially in the case of upheaval like a disputed election.

Over the past two years the GOP and establishment Democrats conspired to gerrymander Asheville’s elections and give all the current elected officials an extra year in office to boot. While that alliance may seem off, it makes sense when you realize they both have an incentive to keep some version of the status quo. Growing Black voting power and an increasingly angry left-leaning public challenged that. So they changed the rules. While the gerrymander was finally thrown out due to public outrage, the extra year stayed. Conveniently, that allows the Democratic party establishment to put its machine behind status quo council candidates this year, something they’ve done relentlessly.

For good measure council connived with the city attorney so departing council member Vijay Kapoor’s planned resignation wouldn’t take effect until it was too late to hold an election for his seat.

Somehow, they still have the nerve to tell us they care about democracy.

County Democrats’ slogan, “a community for everyone,” would in any other election year already be a joke. This time it’s an outright insult.

We’re tired of seeing local officials exhort us to vote while taking every possible action to ensure that nothing changes and no one in power ever faces any consequences.

Pull no punches

In such unprecedented times one would expect that at least some candidates would rally wholeheartedly behind some of the more popular public demands (like defunding the police), even if just to grab votes. Elections are not set up to foster change — indeed they’re intentionally hostile to it — but at local levels officials are more vulnerable to public pressure.

The Blade‘s no fan of city hall under any administration or party, and has put the emphasis around informing communities about what they’re facing so they can act accordingly. Some of us hold that there won’t be true justice until the day the state is abolished entirely, all of us believe that the only legitimate power is people working with each other to fight the evils that face them and build something better. Over the years the Blade‘s maxim has been that while we never endorse candidates, we will damn sure criticize and condemn them.

This year, turning a critical — even harsh — eye towards those candidates serves the public better than any list of questions and is what’s been largely missing from the public sphere. Actions, after all, speak louder than words and these are telling times. While there are some real differences between some of the candidates running for city hall, there’s not nearly as many as they’d like you to think.

We’ll note that when the Blade issued its primary questionnaire, none of the candidates would support even fairly modest cuts to the police department. Since then public outrage has shifted stances a bit, but not much.

We will make one exception to our condemnation, thought it’s not for a current candidate. Longtime anti-racist activist Nicole Townsend ran during the primary, probably the most left-leaning candidate Asheville’s ever seen. Late this summer, Townsend resigned from the race and issued a statement notable for an honesty missing in an electoral political culture defined by evasion and cowardice.

Townsend left the race in part to reject “the role I would play in the continual perpetuation of systemic harm,” condemned the local Democratic party pushing heavily into council elections to exclude any candidate not blessed by them and accurately described an electoral political culture that is “elitist and centers personal gain as opposed to community.”

“Our healing will not be funded by the government. Our healing will not be funded by a nonprofit. We have the pieces we need. We just need to learn how to put them together.”

On that, we agree.

Beyond that, well, there’s a lot of danger around and a slew of candidates that have, if one’s being charitable, failed to face the urgent needs of this city. Let’s go through them based on how they finished in the primary.

Sage Turner has run as the embodiment of the establishment, both Democratic party and Asheville gentry (two groups that heavily overlap anyway). Turner’s record in power at the French Broad Food Co-op and as an influential member of several city commissions is heinous enough that it merited an extensive investigation into her record. That article contains extensive evidence of Turner’s history of worker mistreatment, her attempt to get city hall backing for a shady hotel deal and her relentless record of pushing for more police to punish the poor and ramp up gentrification.

Then there’s Council member Keith Young, the only incumbent running for re-election. Young’s election in 2015 did end two years of an all-white council. He ran on pushing for racial justice and against rampant gentrification.

But with the exception of the occasional move against some of the more blatantly racist proposals that come before the dais, Young’s record has been a marked contrast to the hopes many Ashevillians had when he took office. He’s endorsed the city manager’s austerity plans and even mocked activists pressing for more city funds to go towards public needs. Notably, Young has become infamous for giving lengthy criticisms of damaging proposals such as hotels, unaffordable housing or expanding the police department, only to vote for them anyway, time after time.

He did so just a few months ago, when he provided a key vote for a police budget he’d just finished condemning for doing little to rein in the department. The year before he voted without question for another budget that gave the police even more funds. When proposals he’s seriously backed — like NAACP-supported stop and search reforms — have been defanged or ignored entirely by city staff, Young has largely sat by.

The next candidate is Kim Roney, who brings to her second attempt at office a record of community activism, including as a transit board member often sharply critical of city hall. But Roney’s approaches in running for office, both in 2017 and now, have been a disappointing contrast to that work.

Roney is the most left-leaning candidate remaining a race largely marked by establishment types promising to change nothing except in the vaguest, jargon-laden terms. But in a time where public demands for defunding the police, removing the Vance monument and far more have been louder than ever, Roney’s been notably hesitant or even silent at key points. Back in March, Roney took issue with the Blade raising the very question of cutting the police department.

Even as protests erupted and locals faced beatings and tear gas, Roney endorsed an equity audit. After public pressure, she did become a bit more vocal in supporting defunding the police. She claims to back the 50 percent-plus cuts called for by local Black collectives in her positions on her website and has alluded to it in some of her comments to city council. But that seems to have faded over the closing month of the campaign. Her latest fliers mention the issue nowhere, instead offering vague proposals and listing her endorsements. Instead of defunding the ads even use city hall’s favorite term, “reimagining public safety.”

This, sadly, mirrors Roney’s failed 2017 run, where she claimed to stand with a push against gentrification but suddenly hedged on key issues like stopping airbnb. That year, she was also in favor of removing the city attorney and manager, but largely abandoned such stances in public forums.

There are good arguments that activists’ best work comes from staying outside runs for office entirely. Certainly the history of multiple council members who’ve flipped from community advocate to supporter of the status quo offers a stark warning. But if one’s going to wade in to change things, one shouldn’t run like the people who aren’t. Recent years have demonstrated that the city hall establishment is dead-set against even mild reforms and can co-opt activists who step onto their terrain without being ready to fight. So Ashevillians need far more than vague promises about things being better.

Then we have the perennial candidate Rich Lee, known for rapidly-changing views and the occasional wonkish proposal that never quites hold up to scrutiny. When he last ran in 2017 Lee claimed, of all things, to be a socialist (his proposals, like subsidies for landlords, were mild centrism). This year he’s dropped that pretense and run fully in line with the establishment.

This tracks with his record as a city multimodal committee member, where he backed city hall’s line on every issue of importance. While he frames himself as a community advocate, other than a brief stint with some neighborhood causes, Lee’s actual record is minimal. This is particularly telling because it’s not like the past years have offered a shortage of opportunities for even a reformist to fight city hall. He did, however, cultivate an influential facebook group that became mostly known for letting bigots run rampant while kicking out leftists and pro-union workers.

Lee’s most vigorous believers have also become notorious for demanding left-wing support and criticizing any journalism that doesn’t read like a press release. Given three election cycles of witnessing Lee’s shifting stances, the Blade has to conclude that his main political cause is himself and his main value is entitlement.

The final candidate, Sandra Kilgore, is also an establishment favorite, a well-off realtor who espouses some of the most conservative stances in the race. Faced with widespread protest organized from local Black activists and communities, she’s instead condemned a robust multiracial movement. It is worth reminding our readers that Black communities are not monoliths and it’s long past time for non-Black locals to stop seeing them as such.

Again, none of this is intended to tell people not to vote, but too often we’ve seen elections serve as the graveyard of social movements. They guzzle up resources and can give the public a false sense of change while people’s lives keep getting destroyed. Campaign season promotes a culture of saviorism instead of people cultivating their own skills and strengths with each other. Over the years plenty of locals have even heard the occasional council member express their wish (usually outside the dais and after a few drinks) that locals would only show up to vote every two years and then go home, leaving things to their betters.

Put not your hope in politicians. Ever.

We keep us safe

From our view, the cause for optimism on the local level this year came not at the ballot box, but at locals showing their power outside it. While “Tourism is killing us” has spread, so has the reminder and promise that “we keep us safe.”

Thousands have been fed, helped or supplied during the pandemic by people pooling their resources and establishing their own mutual aid networks (here’s five solid local groups if you’re looking for some ways to support).

Faced with tear gas and violence for daring to walk on their own streets and marching down interstates plowed through Black neighborhoods, locals stood strong night after night, until the APD faltered and had to call in the national guard. Ashevillians routed the far-right again and again, often exposing the connections between the official right-wing and outright fascists as they did so. They turned longtime demands like tearing down the Vance monument and defunding the police into serious challenges to the status quo despite elected officials pulling out every stop to prevent that.

Where officials, establishment nonprofits and businesses have failed or been actively malignant, communities have poured countless hours into keeping each other safe, fed and supported.

This is not the Asheville of the sanitized marketing brochure, but instead the city so many of us love: communal, defiant, endlessly creative. That city has showed up in force this year. It will not be the last time.

So remember that your vote is not your voice. Your voice is your voice, and you can do so much more than vote. Whatever happens on election day and in the weeks after, Asheville must keep fighting if we’re to have any hope. Prepare with those you trust as best you can.

We’ve got a hard path ahead. Together we can make it.

In solidarity,

The Asheville Blade collective

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