Chapter One

THE GOOD DOCTOR

The Rainshadow Café was a picturesque little place on a side street on the north side of town, its walls lined with paintings from local artists, its outside patio filled with tables for customers. From its grounds, one could look out at the peninsula’s mountains off to the south. It was the sort of hangout where laptop-toting locals would sit and work for several hours while drinking locally roasted coffee and eating fresh-out-of-the-oven pastries. The Rainshadow was, for Allison Berry, also something of a sanctuary—a spot where she knew, from experience, that she was more likely than not to encounter people who would thank her for her work rather than unleash a slew of insults in her direction. She might meet there some of the people who in April 2020, in the early days of the COVID pandemic, had responded to her urgent requests for more N-95 masks to be delivered to frontline medical workers by donating their own precious supplies of masks: stevedores from the nearby docks who had long worked with hazardous cargoes and kept masks on hand, firefighters, and others who had access to personal protective equipment. She had never forgotten their generosity in the face of danger.

Berry was young, smiled a lot, wore knitted woolen sweaters and scarves, and had worked in the city’s small public health department since 2016. Before that, she had been a doctor at a local clinic run by the nearby Jamestown S’Klallam tribe. And prior to that job, she had worked with refugees and homeless people while doing her medical residency at Seattle’s prestigious Harborview Hospital. Harborview was a level-one trauma center, meaning that it catered to those with particularly serious injuries; it was also a county hospital, so it didn’t turn away those who came through the hospital doors without insurance. If you were poor and seriously ill in Seattle, there was a better-than-even chance you’d end up being treated there.

Many of Berry’s Harborview patients had overlapping health crises, including brain trauma, addiction, and serious mental illness; deeply impoverished and often aggressive or uncooperative, they were, in consequence, frequently seen as somehow disposable by those in positions of authority who interacted with them. In her recollection, “They didn’t have a lot of places where people treated them as full human beings.” Some of those she had worked with were violent—one, she remembered, tried to choke her while she was examining him. Why did she continue treating him after that episode? She paused for a long time, then laughed self-deprecatingly. “Well, somebody had to. He was a little scary, but I also cared about him and wanted him to do well.” Berry and her colleagues set up safety protocols so that doctors were never left alone with him, and then they continued to assist the man with his medical needs. Another of her patients was a Somali refugee who had tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. He hadn’t succeeded in killing himself but had shattered both legs in the attempt, and he subsequently became addicted to the painkillers that he was given to treat his pain. When he arrived on Berry’s rostrum, months later, he was heavily addicted, confined to a wheelchair, and unable to hold down a job. Over the course of three years, Berry worked with him, gently weaning him off the painkillers, helping him rehab, and finally assisting him in learning to walk again. By the time she left her residency, he was drug-free and had a job. This was the sort of success story that made her long days and difficult working environment worth it. “We stayed with it and built trust,” she recalled. “It felt good. He did great.”

Allison Berry had known practically her whole life that caring for the vulnerable was her calling. She had first decided she wanted to be a doctor when she was only eleven years old, in 1996, and witnessed her beloved grandmother, Violet Hoar, die an agonizing death from colon cancer in Tacoma, Washington. Low-income and on Medicaid, Violet was denied treatment at many private hospitals. In her final death agonies, she developed peritonitis—a catastrophic infection of the abdomen and the surrounding organs—and was rushed to one of those private facilities in an ambulance. There, the intake staff warned Berry’s mother that because Violet lacked private insurance, the dying woman would soon have to be moved to the county hospital—despite the fact that moving a patient with acute peritonitis was guaranteed to cause her agony. “Thankfully,” Berry says, “she died within twenty-four hours,” before she could be moved.

The experience scarred the young girl, but it also gave her a passion for medicine—and, as she grew older, specifically for public health and working with those on society’s margins. During her college years at Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college in Appleton, Wisconsin, she double-majored in biochemistry and music, playing the French horn in the college conservatory and specializing in works by Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Reinhold Glière, and Shostakovich. But she knew that her passion lay with the healing arts. “My colleagues in the conservatory woke up every day thinking about music. And I woke up thinking about medicine and social injustice.”

Summers, Berry would return home to Washington State and work in a biomedical engineering research lab on a project aimed at developing the scaffolding for esophageal tissues that could someday be used to replace the esophagi of cancer patients. She also volunteered at the Free Clinic in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, working with poor patients who couldn’t even afford the common prescription drugs used to treat the forms of heartburn that, if left untreated, could lead to the very cancer that the lab was seeking to help cure. “We would see people facing shockingly difficult circumstances, based on poverty and racism,” she remembered. Esophageal cancer was only part of it. “Kids with asthma living in vacant row houses. The primary driver of their problem was terrible housing.” Yet she never gave up hope.

With housing very much on her mind, Berry graduated in 2007 and moved to New Orleans for a year to work with Habitat for Humanity, helping to rebuild the poorer parts of the city that had been shattered by Hurricane Katrina two years earlier. “You’d see sewage on the streets, blackouts. The trauma was still very fresh for most of the folks. I interviewed a family living in the scraps of their own home,” she recalled.

When her year with Habitat for Humanity was up, she enrolled in medical school at Johns Hopkins University. The aspiring doctor would spend the next four years there, and after that another year studying for a master’s degree in public health.

Time upon time, the divides between the haves and the have-nots, between those with opportunity and those without, got up into her face. In Baltimore many of her patients, most of them poor and African American, came to the hospital with debilitating chronic diseases that, had those patients been more affluent, would likely have been treated effectively years earlier. She started working on a syringe-exchange program, driving an old RV around town and giving out safe syringes and birth control, treating open wounds, and doing outreach with sex workers in the city’s adult-entertainment clubs. Late nights, after the rounds were over, she would bicycle back to her house in Charles Village. The work honed her sense of empathy: “They’re interesting folks, and the more you talk to them—they have the same worries: worried about their kids, stress about their relationships; they care about what they’re going to eat, where they’re going to sleep.” “Hey, Doc!” the sex workers and the addicts would shout out to her in greeting. In caring for them, and showing them respect, she had become their confidante, their friend: “It was really nice to have that sense of community,” she said. “I really liked the work; I liked the community. It was a wonderful place to be.”

Like Port Angeles, Port Townsend, and the other picturesque, historic port cities of the northern Olympic Peninsula, Sequim had a cute, intact old downtown complete with boutique stores, high-end eateries and galleries, and clusters of houses—surprisingly affordable despite recent appreciations in real estate values—built into the windswept, rainy hills surrounding the center of the city. It was, in short, the sort of place where retirees and tourists alike came to calm down after years of high-stress urban living. Sell a small apartment or condo in Seattle, and with the proceeds one could buy a large house with copious grounds in Sequim. Those valuable coastal-city real estate dollars allowed a person to trade in all the hassles of urban living for the tranquility of existence in the small towns and rural enclaves of the peninsula.

On the surface, Sequim hardly seemed the kind of place that would play host to a hard-right political upheaval. Underneath that surface, however, tensions had been building to a head for years.

Doctor Berry’s hardscrabble childhood in Tacoma, her experiences in New Orleans, her realizations about Baltimore’s divides, and her work with the homeless and refugee communities in Seattle had all taught her to stay calm under pressure. She prided herself on knowing that she could wake up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and instantly be able to click into gear, to make good decisions in what could be life-or-death situations. She had learned, especially through her work with mentally ill homeless patients, to project calm even when someone was screaming at her or trying to do her physical harm. Yet none of this was enough to fully prepare her for what came her way in the first two years of the COVID pandemic.

“I knew there’d be push-back [to the vaccine mandate],” Berry later recalled, “but I had no idea what was coming.” What was coming was a barrage of hate: much of the county, including several of its elected officials, turned on her during the darkest months of the pandemic, wishing her various ugly permutations of ill as if, in acknowledging the seriousness of the COVID crisis, she was herself responsible for bringing the consequences of a pandemic down upon local residents. The conservative majority on Sequim’s city council even passed a resolution condemning the vaccine mandate, giving cover to many local restaurants wanting to simply ignore the rules that Berry’s office had put in place. But that was the least of it. More worryingly, the longer the pandemic went on, the less seriously Sequim’s mayor, William Armacost, seemed to take the crisis. Some days, he seemed to dismiss the dangers entirely.

After being appointed to replace an outgoing council member, Armacost had subsequently been elected unopposed, in a low-turnout election, to a four-year term on the city council in November 2019. Two months later, the hair-salon owner and motorcycle aficionado was elevated by his colleagues to the position of mayor. At the time, most residents of the sleepy little town probably didn’t even notice. Yet once he became mayor, he seemed to crave controversy as his own peculiar form of oxygen.

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, Mayor Armacost began showing up at official city functions wearing a Blue Lives Matter, Marvel Comics Punisher skull pinned to his lapel. His critics saw this as a vaguely coded shout-out to vigilantism; after all, the Punisher respected no legal boundaries in his war against organized crime and evil gangsters. In recent years the Punisher decal had been embraced by returning Iraq War veterans as well as police officers around the country. Armacost claimed that the elongated skull imagery simply demonstrated his support for law enforcement, that he wasn’t embracing vigilantism. On the national stage, other right-wing figures would make similar claims: Fox News’s Sean Hannity also began wearing a Punisher stars-and-stripes skull lapel pin to work. Early in his tenure, the mayor was caught on camera pushing a shopping cart at a local Costco while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a stars-and-stripes–dyed skull and reading “This is the USA. We eat meat. We drink beer. We own guns. We speak English. We love freedom. If you do not like that, get the fuck out.” In another instance he was photographed at the self-checkout line of the local Safeway wearing khaki camo pants and a shirt with an image of a James Dean–like Donald Trump in a leather jacket and holding the large steering wheel of a car in one hand, a semiautomatic rifle in the other. Atop the image were the words “USA #1,” and at the bottom of the shirt was the pledge “I Support Making America Great Again.”

Armacost didn’t like liberals, he didn’t like racial-justice advocates, he didn’t like undocumented immigrants, he didn’t like people who spoke strange foreign tongues, and he certainly didn’t like public health officials like Allison Berry. The hairdresser had long fashioned himself as a right-wing provocateur, engaging in local versions of the attentat—the political spectacle—as often as possible, frequently, it seemed, just to piss off his opponents. His voice may have been soft, almost velveteen, but the words that he ushered forth were filled with fire and fury. Like Donald Trump, he had crafted a political career—albeit on a dramatically smaller stage than that the real estate mogul bestrode—premised on bombast. Much of the time, he seemed to positively thrive on conflict. Like so many on the alt-right, he gave the appearance of reveling in “owning the libs” in deeds and in words guaranteed to provoke a reaction.¹

But perhaps Armacost’s most egregious act was orchestrating the forced resignation of the popular and extremely competent city manager, Charlie Bush, in the winter of 2021, after Bush pushed back against Armacost’s decision to go on a local radio show on August 27, 2020, at the height of the pandemic and in his official capacity as mayor, and urge his listeners to check out QAnon theories.

For the past few months, Sequim had been lit up with stories about how the mayor’s personal Facebook page was adorned with QAnon logos and links to QAnon videos. He seemed to have bought lock, stock, and barrel into QAnon’s ideas about malfeasance and criminality in high places, into the idea that Trump had essentially received a mandate from God to take down the “deep state” and to expose and bring to justice the pedophiles and human traffickers who had wormed their way into positions of power in the political, financial, and media realms. Armacost’s postings (screenshot by outraged locals before he ultimately deleted them) were tagged with the logo “WWG1WGA,” which, for those in the QAnon-know, stands for “Where We Go One We Go All,” a secret slogan intended to convey, like a nod and a wink, to initiates that Armacost was one of them.

On his Facebook feed the hair-salon owner denounced Lord Jacob Rothschild, whose “banking clan” owns “nearly every central bank in the world.” Armacost claimed that climate-change activists had deliberately started massive wildfires in Australia to highlight their green cause. In late 2019 he posted a YouTube video announcing that, after thousands of years, “the Luciferian Reign is over—The Healing of Nations has begun.” He posted a picture of a smirking Trump against a large US flag, and the words “Pro-God, Pro-Life, Pro-Gun, Pro-American, That’s Our President!”

Armacost had no qualms about pushing the QAnon agenda. On a local radio program, a weekly Coffee with the Mayor morning show on KSQM FM radio—a pandemic-era substitute for the in-person coffee sessions that the Sequim mayor had traditionally hosted—he explained that “QAnon is a truth movement that encourages you to think for yourself. It’s patriots from all over the world fighting for humanity, truth, freedom, and saving children and others from human trafficking—exposing the evil and corruption of the last century in hopes of leaving a better future for our children and grandchildren.”

Armacost continued, musing aloud about why the media spent so much time attacking QAnon as a cult and a purveyor of violence, and why the FBI had labeled the cult a domestic terrorist risk, when there were genuine threats out there like Black Lives Matter.

A few days later, on September 3, Armacost gave another interview about QAnon, telling a local newspaper that “the sad part is, it doesn’t seem to be what the item is, whenever you have an organization that is inclined to expose evil things to humanity, there’s going to be a push-back. It [QAnon] is an opportunity to… dig up the information, maybe look at a different channel.”

Such was the sort of devil fighting that QAnoners specialized in. A storm was coming, they believed, and when that storm was through, America would have been purged of political evil. Unfortunately, there were no guarantees that the upheaval would be peaceful; adherents, who defined themselves as a vanguard of “true patriots,” might have to turn to violence. Indeed, given the messianic paranoia that ran through the QAnon conspiracy, violence seemed inevitable. Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) polling data in the early 2020s found that roughly one in five Americans adhered to at least some of the QAnon belief system’s central tenets and that a quarter of Republicans identified with QAnon’s ideas. Astoundingly, fully 16 percent of American adults who were polled by the PRRI researchers believed that the commanding heights of power were controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

Not surprisingly, Mayor Armacost’s comments attracted an outsized amount of attention. Suddenly, the little retirement hub on the Olympic Peninsula was on the national news. After a false calm in the days immediately after the broadcast, by early September journalists began descending on the little town, a community that until a few days earlier would only have been on anyone’s radar for winning a series of awards for encouraging community engagement, investing in neighborhood revitalization, and promoting local businesses. City staff took particular pride in having been recognized for their work with a coalition of nonprofits to help address the housing needs of local families at risk of homelessness. Out of all the cities in Washington with a population of under ten thousand, it had been picking up quite a reputation for effective governance. Now, with Armacost’s off-the-cuff remarks on QAnon, it was about to become the focus of some very different attention. In the blink of an eye, seemingly everyone wanted a piece of the story. Over the coming weeks and months, a reporter for Bloomberg’s “Citylab” podcast would hit the peninsula to interview locals, national magazine writers (myself included) would journey out to Sequim to see what was going on, newspapers would dispatch teams to get a handle on the story. There was something of the pursuit of a Holy Grail here: it was, after all, one of the first documented instances of what would, over the coming years, become a disconcertingly common phenomenon in locales around the country—an elected official explicitly allying with the QAnon death cult and using his public platform to promote a bizarre web of conspiracy theories to his constituents.

The Washington Post had recently reported that eleven congressional candidates hoping to win election to the US House of Representatives that coming November, including one Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, were QAnon supporters. In public speeches, Donald Trump, as well as his sons Eric and Don Junior, tested out just how many nods and winks to QAnon they could get away with. Trusted advisers to the president, such as General Michael Flynn, actively spread QAnon ideas online and from their speaker platforms, Flynn touring the country to recruit what he called an “Army of God,” a modern-day crusade to recapture the country from people such as Nancy Pelosi, whom he decried as “demons”; to rescue a fallen nation from schools that peddled pornography; and to reestablish the country as a proudly Christian nation. The United States was, Flynn argued, embroiled in a “5G war,” in which social media, the law, and the news media had all been taken over by an assortment of socialists and Communists who were now busily using these tools to wage psychological war against ordinary, God-fearing Americans. The controversial general’s views overlapped well with the fundamentalist worldview of the Dominionists, with those who believed in the Seven Mountains Mandate, a theory increasingly adhered to among those on the Christian Right that spelled out how, separation of church and state be damned, Christians could—and should—organize to capture the commanding heights of society and of government.

After Armacost’s public embrace of QAnon, City Manager Charlie Bush, whose even-keeled managerial style had kept Sequim on a firm footing for the past six years, felt that he had no choice but to intervene.

Bush had just returned from a hiking and backpacking trip with his brother-in-law Zev along the Timberline Trail, deep within the Mount Hood National Forest, in Oregon. An avid hiker, during the pandemic he would frequently hike fifteen to twenty miles per day, sometimes more, shouldering a large orange backpack containing food, water, super-lightweight camping gear, and other necessities for backcountry expeditions, communicating via text with his wife on a satellite gizmo named the Garmin Mini. On these trips he would often film and narrate his excursions, posting vlogs that frequently got upward of a thousand views.

This time around, the weather was hot, the sky only slightly discolored by smoke from massive fires that had been raging in California to the south for the previous couple of weeks, and he hiked out in shorts and T-shirt, a large white floppy-brimmed hat and reflector sunglasses protecting him from the sun. The forty-mile trail, circling Mount Hood, ascended at times above the tree line and through bare, rocky, sometimes sandy terrain, with little shade to offer respite from the heat. Elsewhere, it descended into the lush forest. There, on fallen tree branches, Zev and Charlie carefully forded the rapidly flowing Zigzag River and passed the cascading Ramona Falls. Overnight, that first night, the fogs rolled in, the temperature cooled, and when they dismantled their camp and began walking early the next morning, for the first few hours they were trekking through the clouds and mist.

It was a hard hike, and on their return to Sequim, Zev and Charlie were looking forward to some good food and drink, to showering, to doing not very much for a few hours as they recuperated. Instead, immediately on their return on September 6, the city manager was suddenly presented with a rush of information about Armacost’s comments on the Coffee with the Mayor radio show two Thursdays previously, comments that he had been unaware of before he left on his hiking trip.

The forty-four-year-old city manager, his beard just starting to fleck with gray, realized that the city was facing a crisis. He felt that it was unacceptable for the mayor, ostensibly a nonpartisan who was selected by his fellow council members to focus on the nitty-gritty of local governance, to have used his official role—and a radio show intended to link the mayor up with his constituents, no less—to put the seal of approval on QAnon’s noxious theories.

Bush went into crisis mode. He contacted the mayor, with whom he felt he had always had “a cordial, respectful relationship,” to try to work out how to quell the growing firestorm. With all the vast pressures of the pandemic, Armacost’s comments on QAnon were, Bush felt, simply adding fuel to an already volatile situation: “There was just a lot of pressure. People in the community were more heated than they would have been if there wasn’t a pandemic. Everyone had time to isolate and to reflect and to get way deep into social media. Issues that had been there for years got magnified. It felt like the volume was turned up on everything. There was no sport, nothing to help people cope with life. For people’s mental health, it’s not a bad thing to have distractions.”

By Tuesday afternoon, the city manager had drawn up a statement that the mayor reluctantly signed off on, acknowledging that the radio comments had been inappropriate. “Any responses to questions reflecting the personal opinion of the Mayor do not reflect policy positions of the Sequim City Council,” the statement read. Armacost was also quoted directly, issuing something of a begrudging nonapology apology for his words: “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 Sequim issues.”

It was released on Wednesday morning, and Bush dearly hoped that would do the trick and quell the furor. But perhaps to no one’s surprise, the controversy continued to fester. Armacost might have signed off on the mea culpa, but in private he was seething. Already at odds with the county’s public health team over pandemic-mitigation measures, he now found himself at loggerheads with the city manager. He likely resented the imputation that he was fascinated by irrational conspiracy-thinking when, he felt, QAnon was simply blaring warnings to a quiescent public about a host of clear-and-present dangers.

Armacost and his allies would never forgive the city manager for the slight. From then on, they were on a war footing, looking for any opening they could find to retaliate for Bush’s humbling of the mayor.

Jodi Wilke lived in Port Hadlock–Irondale, a small, rural community outside of Port Townsend in neighboring Jefferson County. From the 1870s, Port Hadlock, nestled on the steep banks of a bay, had been a rough-and-ready sawmill town, complete with the sorts of seedy establishments that catered to sailors from around the world. A few years later, the area was the first in the Washington Territory to host an iron-producing blast furnace, hence the town’s hyphenated name. In the relatively brief span of time that it had been in operation, the foundry employed hundreds of men who produced thousands of tons of pig iron.

Wilke was a soft-spoken nurse who looked considerably younger than her years—she was, in fact, in her early sixties—had a shock of unruly dark-brown hair, wore spectacles, and rouged the cheeks of her otherwise pale face. In her spare time, she played the guitar and piano (she loved 1970s rock anthems, but her true passion was Christian rock and old hymns) and liked to sing.

The Port Hadlock–Irondale resident’s area of expertise was elder care. For much of the more than three decades that she had been a nurse, she had worked in nursing homes; she specialized in caring for Alzheimer’s patients, as well as those with other forms of dementia. Not surprisingly, when she talked about the human traits that she most valued, empathy was high up on her list. Like Berry, she also had direct experience working with the homeless; Wilke had, she said, taken dozens of homeless men and women into her homes over the decades (twenty-eight was her best-guess estimate), had helped pay for their clothes, had worked with them to navigate bureaucracies as they tried to get copies of their identification documents, and had coached them in how to fill out job applications. She understood addiction intimately; indeed, the nurse had met at the AA meetings that she had been attending for thirty-plus years many of the homeless people whom she ended up temporarily housing. “What made me do that?” she asked rhetorically. “Humanity. A sense of wanting to make the world a better place one person at a time. For every homeless person, there’s a different experience. Some of them are injured, damaged people. The solutions we have have to be as diverse as that population.” But at the end of the day, she regarded it as a moral imperative to help the needy. “Anybody that wants help should have help available to them,” she said quietly.

But none of this history and none of this sense of moral urgency that, at least on the issue of homelessness, she shared with Berry made Wilke sympathetic to the local Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s idea for a large medication-assisted treatment (MAT) clinic with wraparound social services catering to 250 drug-addicted clients being placed on a 19.5-acre site in the middle of Sequim.

For years, local tribes on the peninsula had played a critical role in providing health-care access to the community. Since 2002, the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe had run a large health clinic employing more than twenty health-care providers that saw up to 17,000 patients per year, Native American and non-Native alike. In 2017 another tribe, the Swinomish, had opened up a medication-assisted treatment clinic that used a wraparound services model created by researchers at Johns Hopkins University to help opioid addicts wean themselves from their addiction. The Swinomish’s center had achieved strong results—and hadn’t encountered much push-back from local residents—so soon the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe also decided that they wanted to operate a similar clinic.

That was when Wilke—a gun-rights enthusiast who had once shown up at a Second Amendment rally at the state capitol holding a sign reading “RNs for ARs” (Registered Nurses for Automatic Rifles)—decided that enough was enough. It would, she felt, bring huge numbers of mentally ill, addicted men and women, and the concomitant criminal justice and health challenges that would likely come in their wake, into the Olympic Peninsula from Seattle and other large cities to the south, and, she argued, it wouldn’t even serve the addicted population well, forcing them to take daylong bus rides for treatment at this one big center. Far better for all concerned, she believed, to build a number of smaller clinics in a variety of locales around the region. That, at least, was her rationale. Her opponents felt, perhaps unfairly, that she was merely a NIMBYist, that she and her allies didn’t want those less fortunate than them to live and get services in their neighborhoods.

In 2018, as the planning for the tribe’s methadone clinic picked up steam, Wilke—who was an active member of a nearby county’s Republican Party, who had run for (and lost) an election for public office, and who didn’t herself live in Sequim—set up a group called Save Our Sequim (SOS) to organize against the tribe’s proposed mega-clinic. The whole approval process was, she felt, too secretive: the city and the tribe working together in the shadows to bypass the will of the people. She and her allies began posting anti–MAT clinic messages on Facebook—messages that some supporters of the clinic viewed as veering into racist, antitribal language. They claimed that at SOS meetings and on the group’s Facebook page, opposition to the tribal plans frequently degenerated into the delivery of racial slurs. Vicki Lowe, a fifty-six-year-old longtime public health worker with the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, who was also executive director of the state’s American Indian Health Commission and who traced her lineage both to tribal ancestors and to pioneer stock, recalled hearing phrases such as “Indian idiots” and “playing cowboys and Indians” during the meetings. When Lowe asked the SOS organizers to tone down the rhetoric that she and others saw as being anti-indigenous, they were simply blocked from accessing the Facebook page. When they managed to get back on anyway, they were shocked to encounter still more racially inflammatory postings. Later, after she successfully ran for and won a seat on the Sequim City Council, Lowe remembered how during those days when the anti–MAT clinic rhetoric was at its height, she called out SOS at a council meeting by holding up, and discarding one at a time, cardboard signs emblazoned with each offensive, racist phrase, à la Bob Dylan in the music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It was, for Wilke, a particularly painful allegation. She had always prided herself on being color-blind. “We should love one another and be kind to one another,” she believed. “And your race doesn’t make any difference to me. I look in your eyes and see a human being.”

SOS hired an attorney out of Seattle to file a lawsuit against the clinic, but the courts ultimately told SOS that it didn’t have legal standing to bring the case. Nevertheless, the swirl of anti–MAT clinic activity only grew. Within a few months, Wilke recalled, thousands of people from across the peninsula, and across the political spectrum, had become SOS supporters.

For Charlie Bush, when he read the letter of the law and explored Sequim’s zoning regulations, it was an open-and-shut case. The tribe had gone through the required process for getting the clinic approved, with it to be situated on land between a large Costco and Highway 101, and the city council really had no say in the matter. Following the letter of the law meant that Bush was obligated to sign off on the clinic once the tribe submitted its permit application in early 2020 and once opponents had run through their initial legal challenges in the months following. For Mark Ozias, the county commissioner for the Sequim region, who wrote an open letter to his constituents in support of the project, the clinic being situated in Sequim “makes great sense due to its central location, ease of access, appropriate zoning, availability of necessary services and critical mass of health care resources. As property rights advocates understand, it is the right of any individual or business entity to purchase land that has been put up for sale, and to build an allowed facility on appropriately zoned land.” For an array of public health advocates, first responders, and law-enforcement officials—grown tired of responding to one overdose after another, as America’s opioid epidemic raged untamed—the MAT clinic was a rare ray of light in an otherwise bleak addiction landscape. Ozias pointed out that national studies had demonstrated that in areas where MAT clinics went up, property-crime and personal-crime rates plummeted, in some instances by as much as 80 percent.

The opponents of the clinic weren’t mollified. Ozias accused them of attempting to “bully and intimidate public officials through angry and aggressive threats” and of sending out “inflammatory and provocative” mailers. He finished his open letter by warning that Save Our Sequim could actually “destroy what makes us special.”

In mid-2020, as the COVID pandemic raged, with the peninsula on lockdown and the city of Sequim in emergency-management mode, Bush’s office finally issued the permits. Despite Ozias’s efforts to calm the waters, the city manager ran into a buzz saw of opposition. Infuriated residents, many already on edge after months of pandemic-induced isolation and fear, immediately began launching more challenges: six in short succession. All were reviewed by the hearing examiner, and all failed—although the examiner did approve a few modifications to the initial permit.

Later, Wilke would assert that her side in the conflict was entirely peaceful—that she was sick and tired of all the fighting and shouting and crudeness that passed for political debate in contemporary America, that too often the “lizard brain” kicked in and people stopped talking with each other and instead acted as if everything could be reduced to a fight for personal survival. She said that people on her side were entirely civil in their voicing of opposition to the proposal, that it was the clinic’s supporters who jumped the shark into verbal warfare. Those supporters, perhaps not surprisingly, remembered otherwise. In truth, with tensions running high, insults were likely flung on all sides.

The acrimony flowed both ways. Many on Wilke’s side felt that a bunch of well-meaning but thoughtless do-gooders were working to spoil their little bit of paradise. At a city council meeting in early January 2020, one critic, Jenna Rose, argued that studies of other MAT clinics and their patients suggested that around half of the clinic’s participants would likely be “homeless drug addicts.” It was, she said, an appalling prospect. “Have you considered how a regional MAT facility would be the ruin of Sequim?” she asked the council members, her voice rising in agitation. “Have you thought about your legacy, city council?”

Wilke herself believed that the decision to locate the twenty-million-dollar clinic in Sequim was a betrayal of local people’s freedom to choose what sort of environment they wanted to live in, yet another example of unaccountable bureaucrats stomping on fundamental liberties. “I’m very concerned about where we’re going as a world,” she explained. “My biggest interest is the common person. How does all this affect the average person’s life? Most people love their family, want to go to work, have a nice meal in the evening, have fun with their friends on the weekends, watch movies, live a life that’s kind of normal. Here in America, we have a lot of freedom to choose what this is. Americans treasure that freedom. What bothers me is when things outside of their control start to interfere in people’s lives.”

Regardless of the merits of the MAT clinic, and regardless of the soundness of the legal reasoning behind Charlie Bush’s decision to approve it, Armacost and his supporters apparently believed that the controversy gave them cover to take the city manager down. The closer the clinic project came to being realized, the louder the voices of opposition got. Backed by Armacost and several other councillors, opponents descended on council meetings to vociferously air their views. Throughout the fall and early winter months of 2020, the city manager would frequently be in the verbal crosshairs during these meetings. By early 2021, Armacost’s allies believed they had drummed up enough support to at last remove Bush from his job.

For Charlie Bush, the onslaught against him was a kick in the teeth, to say the least. He was a veteran of city government, having been employed by a number of cities throughout Washington since the mid-1990s, and prided himself on his professionalism. For most of that almost quarter century, his work environment had been fairly calm, his decisions made and implemented largely out of the public eye and certainly out of the way of the ideological storms sweeping the country. Although national politics was being reshaped by movements such as the Tea Party and, before that, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” by an often-inchoate sense of anger against expertise and against public officials and institutions, local government tended to be sleepier, more technocratic—and that suited Bush’s temperament just fine. He liked simply being left alone to get on with his work, and he believed that he was good at his job. But in recent years, as the tone of national politics grew ever uglier, the Sequim city manager had noticed something that disturbed him: even at the local level, politics was becoming so polarized that the middle ground was disappearing. Constituents were getting angrier. The rough-and-tumble of local politics was becoming more unforgiving. And the decisions he made were now being filtered through the lens of social media, where his motives were routinely impugned and his values sometimes derided.

A few years earlier, members of the school board had put a measure before voters to pass a bond that would have allowed for the building of new schools in the county. A group called the Concerned Citizens of Clallam County (known to locals simply as the “Four C’s”), which grew out of Tea Party organizing efforts on the peninsula early in the Obama presidency, opposed the bond. By 2015, with the refugee crisis from the Syrian civil war in full bloom, members of this group latched on to a growing wariness of refugees, especially those from Muslim countries, to hone their arguments. The bond, they argued, was a front: it wasn’t about building new schools; rather, it was about opening up school buildings to house Syrian exiles. Their argument was nonsense, but it also resonated. Four times in a row the bond, which required a 60 percent supermajority to pass, got support from more than half of the electorate but nevertheless went down to defeat by failing to cross the 60 percent threshold.

At about the same time as the Four C’s was ginning up anti-Muslim sentiments on the Olympic Peninsula, on the other side of the country Donald Trump, campaigning to be the Republican presidential candidate, was unveiling his plans to block any and all Muslims from migrating to America, or even coming for a vacation. On January 4, 2016, Trump’s campaign unveiled one of the most demagogic television ads in American political history. Against a backdrop of photographic images of terrorism victims, the narrator intoned, “The politicians can pretend it’s something else. But Donald Trump calls it radical Islamic terrorism. That’s why he’s calling for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on.”

No matter the impracticality of this proposal—or the fact that Trump himself had myriad business contacts in Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 terrorists had originated—the real estate mogul’s growing legion of followers ate it up. Here, at long last, was a straight-talking politician willing to call things like he saw them. On the stump, Trump would recycle a convoluted story (one that historians doubted was even true) about how the Americans defeated Muslim independence fighters in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century by shooting them with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, a death so horrific that it sapped the enemy of their will to fight. The more he dialed up the ferocity of his rhetoric, the more he energized his crowds.

When I traveled to Sparks, Nevada, a few weeks later to talk to Republicans caucusing on his behalf, one after another they told me, without any sense of shame, that Muslims in America ought to be deported. Several went a murderous step further. They would give Muslims in the United States a choice: either they could opt to leave the country or they would face the possibility of execution. “You can’t tell the good from the bad,” one caucus-goer explained to me, as if it were the most self-evident thing in the world. “So you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’d give them a choice—a trench on one side or a ticket out of here.” I asked him to clarify: Was he talking about mass executions? “Absolutely. That’s what they do to us in their countries. I’d give ’em a choice: get out of here, or else.”

Another Trump-supporting caucus participant told me, “You fight fire with fire. The Bible says, if they don’t want to conform to what society is like, get rid of them. What did God tell Joshua? Get rid of every man, woman, child and beast. If the Lord says it’s OK, He has the final say-so.”

When I asked one woman what she thought of the ideas of killing terrorists using bullets dipped in pigs’ blood and of barring all Muslims from the country, she answered generically: “I like what he [Trump] stands for. I want us to love our country and be proud of it. I want to bring God back into our country. He loves our country so much. He loves our country.”

Each time someone said something so extraordinarily dangerous that it veered into the language of genocide, I looked around, hoping against hope that the other caucus-goers would distance themselves from these sentiments. Each time, however, I saw thumbs going up in agreement.

As the political rhetoric coarsened at the national level, so the policy discourse on the ground, in places like Clallam County, Washington, also devolved. The debate around the Clallam County school bond and the xenophobic, anti-Muslim tactics of the Four C’s had gone a long way toward poisoning political discourse in Sequim, toward turning neighbor against neighbor, one community against another. Then, a few years later, another wedge issue, this one around drugs, homelessness, and whether placing a MAT clinic in Sequim was appropriate, burst onto the scene with equal intensity. That issue also bitterly divided the community.

When the pandemic hit, far from everyone rallying together to meet the exceptional needs of the moment, the fracturing picked up pace. As 2019 gave way to 2020, the MAT clinic controversy was temporarily sidelined by the horrors of the new pandemic. Many of Bush’s staff took to working remotely; Bush himself, who had moved into an emergency-response office co-populated by staff from the Fire Department and other emergency services, spent many of his working hours navigating Zoom meetings. Retirement parties were replaced by drive-through gatherings in which Bush and other senior staff would give out prepackaged boxes of food to staff as they drove by, with everyone masked, and would then walk alongside the slow-moving cars for a few yards, talking through the open windows with the drivers. In-person staff meetings, traditionally so important in any office environment, gave way to the occasional gathering, via Zoom, of clusters of employees. Even the outdoor meetings on the little plaza in front of the city offices, to which the employees did at times resort, had to be meticulously planned, making sure that all state protocols and requirements about social distancing, masking, and so on were carefully met.

Now, however, in the wake of the Armacost-QAnon controversy, the MAT clinic was once again serving to highlight the broader political divides in the community. It had become a homegrown, made-in-Sequim litmus test, an easy if not always precise way of working out where people stood on Armacost and QAnon, where their sympathies lay on public health restrictions in the face of COVID, and perhaps even who they were likely to support in the upcoming presidential election. Bush himself was either loved or loathed, his presence as city manager arousing the same sorts of impassioned emotions that were generated by Allison Berry.

Among Bush’s most determined opponents was Mayor Armacost. The hair-salon owner was joined in this opposition to Bush and to the MAT clinic by another fiery council member elected at the same time as he was: Troy Tenneson, a young man with a chiseled jaw and an Instagram profile tagged with the words “God, good people, this country, and financial freedom in that order.” At one point Tenneson had been in the military, then he had worked as a firefighter, and finally he had moved into construction. He came out of the Young Republicans, liked to throw verbal slingshots, and—critics observed—seemed to model himself on Donald Trump. He would attend right-wing street-corner rallies waving his Stars and Stripes, surrounded by a bevy of young supporters. Periodically, he would explode in anger at local and state politics, telling listeners that he wanted to move to a state with a more right-minded governor. At least one councilman recalls him having theatrically stormed out of a council meeting in which he didn’t get his way.

Tenneson’s had been one of the four votes cast, out of seven council members, on behalf of making the newly sworn in William Armacost mayor of the little town of Sequim. Tenneson’s and Armacost’s tenures had been kicked off by chaos. During the rambling two hundred-plus-minute January 13, 2020, meeting in which the new council members were sworn in, the new mayor and his acolytes seemed not to know how to follow basic rules about how council meetings would be conducted. They let their allies in the audience bust through their allotted speaker times. They made comments that could be construed as being sympathetic to QAnon—comments that so enraged some audience members that they wrote furious letters to the new council members immediately afterward.

Armacost, in his three-minute speech that day—the tone suggesting none of the anger that would come to characterize his time in charge of Sequim—urged his colleagues to vote for him as mayor: “I’ve had the blessing of thirty-five years of running several very successful businesses. At one point we ran five salons and had as many as sixty-five employees.… I have a pulse on what’s the need for both the business owner and the employee… and the public uniting with concern around the MAT center. I have sixteen-plus years of working with alcoholics and with drug addicts; that experience is invaluable.” The hairdresser concluded, grandiosely, “I’ll take a quote from Winston Churchill: ‘We make a living from what we get, but we make a life from what we give.’”

By day’s end, Armacost would be Sequim’s new mayor, Tenneson would be one of his wingmen, and the MAT-clinic–supporting Charlie Bush was about to become a punching bag for conservatives throughout the peninsula.

In hindsight, Bush would come to think that what unfolded during those months, as the city fractured around the MAT clinic, then fractured again around responses to the Black Lives Matter movement and the street protests around the country that followed the police killing of George Floyd, then tore into itself yet another time around how locals responded to Armacost embracing the QAnon conspiracy theory, was at least in part a product of all the pent-up fears and frustrations that accompanied the COVID outbreak. “I think it was a high-stress time for everybody,” Bush said. “You had a lot of uncertainty in the world. And there was opportunism by a lot of individuals. There was a lot going on. It was a perfect storm for volatility.”

In February 2021, all of that volatility came to a head. In a closed session, Armacost and his colleagues, still smarting over Charlie Bush’s intervention in the QAnon controversy, voted to ask him for his resignation. He no longer enjoyed the confidence of the majority on the city council.

Exactly what went on in that closed session was never made public. The council members wouldn’t talk, and as part of the severance deal that Bush negotiated with the city, he had to sign a nondisclosure agreement limiting what he could divulge about these events. For his supporters, however, the message was clear: Charlie Bush had enforced the letter of the law around the MAT clinic, and Charlie Bush had pushed back against Armacost’s QAnon-supporting comments. Both positions had riled up the mayor and his allies. And in the end, the popular city manager had fallen victim to the take-no-prisoners timbre of modern American politics.

Over the next few years, as the debate around the clinic gave way to bigger concerns—to what the community thought about responses to the COVID pandemic; to how the region and the country responded first to the George Floyd killing, then to the November 2020 election, and after that to the January 6 assault on the US Capitol; to issues around what can and cannot be taught in the classroom and whether transgender people have a right to choose their gender identity—Jodi Wilke’s grievances became broader. One fear fed into the next, and one suspicion reinforced another until, over time, a worldview was set into stone. Not trusting the experimental science behind mRNA vaccines and desperately worried that the spike protein on which the vaccine was based would both damage the human body and require an endless whack-a-mole game of booster shots every time the virus significantly mutated, she refused to take the shots. She was convinced that the major international medical journals, the public health departments, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with Big Pharma, were imposing a system of censorship that was designed to hide evidence of the vaccine’s dangers. But then, resolutely unvaccinated, she found that public health vaccine mandates for medical personnel essentially froze her out of regular employment, so she was left scrambling to find what hours she could at one of the private clinics in the region that still allowed unvaccinated nurses to attend to patients. For someone who had spent most of her adult life in the caregiving business, it was a heartbreaking denouement—enough, she said, to almost make her want to reconsider her career choices.

Later, when she saw the events of January 6, 2021, she was horrified at the mainstream media’s interpretation of what had happened. Where she got her news—on YouTube, Rumble, and the gaming site DLive—she had seen not insurrectionists but peace-loving demonstrators. “We can agree it was a protest. Other people would use other words. But I would call it a protest,” she would subsequently explain. “More information will come out about what happened. Tucker Carlson put out some information on it. Who was shot? Ashli Babbitt got shot. Did anybody get hit with a fire extinguisher? Riddle me this: why did they keep the video of that event under wraps for so long? They would not release it.”

In her quiet voice, Wilke continued on, talking of election systems that had been compromised, of widespread voter fraud, of children being subjected to all sorts of medical treatments without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Two generations earlier, the mid-century historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter had coined the phrase “the paranoid style in American politics.” In 2020s America, that style was, it appeared, retro chic.

Meanwhile, as Sequim’s political dysfunction gathered pace, so Allison Berry’s nightmare intensified. With the COVID pandemic running amok and the public health restrictions put in place to try to limit the virus’s spread and minimize the number of fatalities it would cause triggering a frequently violent political backlash around the country, all of Berry’s life lessons were being put to the test.

The more that Donald Trump and his team knocked public health officers for partisan advantage—the president took to publicly mocking Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert in charge of crafting America’s pandemic response—the more a section of Clallam County’s populace responded in kind. When Trump urged people to ingest bleach to counter the effects of COVID, poison-control hotlines around the country reported increased numbers of people poisoning themselves with bleach. When he urged people to take unproven medical cures such as Ivermectin, demand for these drugs soared. The more Trump attacked lockdowns, tweeting that voters in Democratic-led states such as Virginia, Michigan, and Minnesota should rise up to “LIBERATE” themselves, the more Berry struggled to get out her public health message. When commentators on Fox News came out against the public health interventions, large numbers of Republican-leaning voters simply opted out of anti-COVID preventative measures. Fox News and other conservative media gave cover for up-and-coming GOP politicians such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, people looking to make a name for themselves on the national stage, to try to out-Trump Trump in opposing any and all public health restrictions. Where much of the rest of the world was closed down that first pandemic summer, with parties and large social gatherings banned by law, places of worship shuttered, sports events played in empty arenas, and even funeral attendance numbers strictly limited, in Florida, with the blessing of local political leaders, tourists were still flocking to beaches and bars and theme parks.

“That was when we started to lose our footing,” Berry recalled of those months of political conflict. Yet for several more months, Clallam County managed to contain the fallout. “In 2020 we really didn’t have COVID deaths, but then the Delta variants and the lifting of mitigations really took us out. We had people who delayed care and then took Ivermectin,” the horse medicine that Trump erroneously claimed was a COVID cure. “We had people who died, elderly people who stayed home for two weeks and took Ivermectin and came to the hospital when they couldn’t breathe.”

As the deaths mounted in 2021, so the deflected fury against Berry and her colleagues in public health picked up steam.

One man took to regularly emailing a slew of particularly fantastic threats to Berry, especially his claims that she was committing crimes against humanity and should be tried accordingly, as well as ever-more-picaresque insults and name-calling, and copying the messages to a slew of other public health officials, to elected politicians, and to miscellaneous journalists. After Governor Inslee shut down high school athletics, an infuriated mother, apparently believing that Dr. Berry had personally decided to penalize local teenage athletes, wrote to her to tell her she knew where Berry’s young daughter went to daycare. There was no explicit threat. There didn’t need to be. The menace was clearly intended to simply linger in the air.

Footnote

¹ He also didn’t like journalists. He ignored my phone calls and email messages, and when I caught up with him at his hair salon, Changes, late one afternoon in mid-December 2021, he flatly stated that he had no time and wouldn’t agree to an interview either then or any other time. When I left, I could see him whisper something to the man whose hair he was cutting, and they both looked out the window in my direction and laughed. Over the next two years, he ignored, or in other cases turned down, numerous additional requests to talk for this book. All his allies on the council from the 2020‒2021 period and his friends in local conservative organizations either ignored my interview requests or, when reached by phone, likewise declined to comment, to tell their side of this story.