Hundreds Protested Gender Fascists Who Called for “Biblical War” in Seattle, the Police Arrested Them and the Mayor Called them “Infiltrators”

cover photo: screenshot via Alex Garland

On May 24th in Seattle, WA, hundreds of people mobilized against a far-Right, anti-LGBTQ+ rally at Cal Anderson Park, located in a historically LGBTQ+ friendly neighborhood and ground-zero for explosive demonstrations in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, and a center for ongoing mutual aid organizing. The organization sponsoring the event, May Day USA, held their anti-LGBTQ+ themed rally under the banner of “Don’t Mess With Our Kids,” and promoted long-debunked conspiracy theories attacking queer and trans people.

The rally included speakers such as former Republican politician Matt Shea, investigated by his own party for “his involvement in domestic terrorism as a leader of the Patriot Movement” and who has called for violence to establish a Christian theocracy. In 2018, Shea made headlines for pushing a “manifesto…titled “Biblical Basis for War” that outlines a coming holy war, a battle that would require killing any non-Christian who does not “yield.”‘

Jenny Donnelly, leader of DontMessWithOurKids, lays out her strategy for mobilizing conservatives to fight against LGBTQ+ rights and against abortion rights. She studies BLM and left-wing protests and wants to imitate their strategy of large street shut-downs and sustained protests. 1/

— SometimesPDX (@sometimespdx.bsky.social) 2025-05-27T23:08:09.839Z

Facing down both gender fascists and the police, protesters outnumbered the far-Right, but saw 23 arrests from law enforcement over the course of the demonstration, which as The Stranger reported, were all “physical and violent.” From The Stranger:

That friction would have been hot enough on its own, but between them were dozens of cops, armed, packing “less than lethal” weapons, carrying batons, and announcing instructions on a massive cruiser-mounted speaker. They set up a barrier between the two groups and stood with batons in hand, always facing the counterprotesters. The protest lasted more than six hours, and in that time the police made 23 arrests. All of them counterprotesters, all of them thrown to the ground and cuffed. An elderly man was shoved violently back over the barrier after sitting in peaceful protest on the other side. Witnesses describe cops dragging protestors over the barrier for shouting in the officers’ faces. Other protesters, seemingly zip tied and incapacitated, were pepper sprayed.

By 7 p.m., SPD asked the far-right group to end the event, three hours ahead of schedule, exactly as Mayday USA wanted it. With the protection of the police, they went to a historically gay park in a historically gay neighborhood in a historically gay city for a “spiritual” battle. They showed their followers queer people weren’t untouchable and that power would side with them over their vulnerable targets. And still, they were able to cry victim—claiming that Seattle is their Goliath, and using it as a rallying cry.

Following the far-Right rally, anger exploded from community, furious that police acted as armed protection for the far-Right, as the Mayor of Seattle denounced anarchists for “infiltrating” the counter-protests, placing blame on violence from the police on those willing to stand up to the anti-LGBTQ+ bigots. Meanwhile, the Seattle police brass in turn attacked the Mayor, calling Cal Anderson Park the “heart of ANTIFA land.”

Following the demonstrations, the FBI, which ironically at one point was investigating Matt Shea, but now under Trump is being run by former MAGA social media grifters, announced that they would be looking into supposed “violence” carried out against far-Right “religious” activists. The president of the Seattle’s police officers association, Mike Solan, also put out a podcast featuring laughable AI generated “ANTIFA” images, further attacking the Mayor.

Wanting to know what this all means, we caught up with 1312 Press, an anarchist and antifascist distro in the Pacific Northwest, to find out just what in the hell this all means.

IGD: On May 24th, our understanding is that 500-1,000 counter-protesters came out to oppose this gender fascist rally at Cal Anderson Park, leading to violent attacks from the police and multiple arrests. This interview isn’t mean to be a report back, but from your understanding, what happened, and who was the far-Right group that held the rally?

1312 Press: The rally was called “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” (DMWOK) and was couched as a Christian-faith, ‘family-values‘ driven rally and speak-out against what the religious far-Right is claiming as an assault on children across the United States. What they claim is pedophilia, grooming, and intellectual brainwashing of children in schools and other public institutions is actually the mere existence and self-expression of LGBTQ+ communities everywhere.

Here's Portland Police Chaplain Clyde Lewis on a flyer for the far-right Christian Nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ rights group "Don't Mess With Our Kids." Their goal is to criminalize LGBTQ+ people, do conversion therapy on them, ban same-sex marriage, ban abortion, and install the theocracy.

— SometimesPDX (@sometimespdx.bsky.social) 2025-04-24T19:10:47.678Z

Seattle, WA is long known for being a very gay city, especially the neighborhood of Capitol Hill, where this hateful rally was permitted to occur. These Christo-fascist organizations are seeking to muster their supporters in what they deem as “strongholds” of the marginalized communities they wish to target and harass. They call for the extermination of trans-people, elimination of legal protections and healthcare for all kinds of queer people and sexual reproduction, and conversion therapy (which famously does not work). It’s important to label and identify this group and their followers as part of a multi-faceted network of fascist ideology. They seek to issue intense controls, repression, psychological terror, and forcible removals of all members of the LGBTQ+ communities, not even stopping shy of calling for the execution of trans-people, as mentioned above. Framing these attacks on people’s freedom of self-expression and identity as protecting “family values” represents an attack on the sexual health and well-being of literally every person in this country.

Heads-up Seattle: disgraced former WA legislator, accused domestic terrorist, Christian war manifesto author Matt Shea was in Seattle today at Cal Anderson Park preparing for the "DontMessWithOurKids" rally tomorrow.

— SometimesPDX (@sometimespdx.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T06:29:43.386Z

What happened at this rally is a rather straight forward repeat of most times when a fascist group has attempted to hold space in Seattle, WA and is emblematic of the same instance in many cities in the United States. Under the protection of a permit, DMWOK had a stage and speaker system set-up inside Cal Anderson Park with a fence and police protection. In anticipation of the anti-LGBTQ+ event, several communities groups organized various forms of resistance. While counter-protestors gathered directly across the fence from the rally and yelled at attendees and cops alike, a punk show had been organized in the skate-park across the field with the explicit intention of drowning out the sound system of the Evangelical Christians.

Punk music drowning out band at Don't Mess With Our Kids rally in #CalAndersonPark in #Seattle. DMWOK is an anti LGBTQ organization set up in the heart of #CapitolHill.

— Alex Garland (@alexgarland.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T19:37:48.797Z

Eventually, attendees from the punk show filed over to the counter-protestors, and tensions began to escalate as neighbors became ever more fed up with the hateful rhetoric from the rally and the police assigned to protect them. Inevitably this resulted in physical altercations between counter-protestors and the police, as well as unprovoked physical attacks by police officers against otherwise peaceful counter-protestors. This is not to place a false hierarchy on styles of protest and anti-fascist mobilization, but rather to highlight that the police were willing to and did physically assault and arrest people who had otherwise been simply standing near the fence and holding a sign. This escalation by the police only aggravated things further.

Tense situation at Cal Anderson as SPD violently arrested several counter protestors for what they say was property destruction. They also violated first amendment rights of press yet again.

— Alex Garland (@alexgarland.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T20:58:00.683Z

IGD: There’s a lot of contention that this happened at Cal Anderson Park, a center for activism and a historically queer neighborhood, especially as the rally was meant to attack the LGBTQ+ community as “groomers.” It seems that it was the city that picked this area, (as opposed to Pike Place), as the place that it would allow for a permit, meaning: police protection. Why do you think the city did this?

1312 Press: I personally think that the context of Cal Anderson Park having been the former location of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone during the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 is dwarfed in comparison to the longer history and cultural relevance that the park and the neighborhood serves for Seattle’s queer and gay communities.

Capitol Hill is frequently still referred to as Seattle’s “gayborhood” despite rampant gentrification that has pushed out its more divergent and rebellious queer nightlife. Capitol Hill is the home for the annual Pride festivals that will dominate the neighborhood at the end of June. Many of the city’s best-known and longest-running gay bars are in Capitol Hill. Cal Anderson Park itself was renamed in 2003 after Washington State’s first openly gay elected official. The park remains one of the last free and public spaces that people can gather in the city. In assessing the location of this rally, its political and hate-filled messaging, and the decision of Mayor Bruce Harrell to allow it in such a location, this context cannot be overlooked.

Allowing this rally to occur in Cal Anderson Park should be viewed as part of Mayor Harrell’s and Seattle Police’s broader attempt to criminalize and attack the queer community in Seattle in recent years. In January 2024, Seattle Police raided two separate gay bars in Capitol Hill and issued citations for indecent exposure. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has been attempting to quietly shut down one of the most infamous queer nude beaches in Seattle over the last couple of years. Denny Blaine Beach has been locally and nationally known as a safe space for queer people to gather in the sun and enjoy themselves in their bodies as they are, without fear of contempt or judgement from homophobic viewers.

Last summer, local news media The Stranger revealed that Mayor Harrell has been texting with a local millionaire philanthropist Stuart Sloan about their shared “disgust” of the beach and the need to “clean up” the “sub-groups” that populate it. Earlier this May, Seattle Police Chief had to backpedal and apologize for the police’s response to “the situation.” With the backdrop of the federal and national level attacks on queer rights and access to sexual health services for trans-people, Mayor Bruce Harrell and the Seattle Police Department appear to be in lockstep with the Trump administration’s rampant homophobic policies and disregard for civil rights.

The anti-LGBTQ+ MAGA Christian Dominionist group is facing some opposition in Seattle for tomorrow's rally so they have to keep reassuring their followers that they're on God's side and their opponents are controlled by Satan. #cognitivedissonance

— SometimesPDX (@sometimespdx.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T18:39:50.851Z

But I would be remiss to neglect from mentioning the importance of the recent history of the George Floyd Uprising. In 2020, these protests and riots convened at the Seattle Police Precinct in Capitol Hill and attempted to march on its front doors for over a week before the police abandoned the precinct, and protestors established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). This geographic significance will forever play a role in anarchists, anti-fascists, communists, radicals, in their commitment to preserving the space as a site for autonomous and free experiments with living. The failure to prevent the establishment of the CHAZ will always be a stain on the legacy of the Seattle municipal government and its police force, but the cultural and political importance of Cal Anderson Park extends far beyond the memory of the CHAZ. Cal Anderson Park served as a meeting point for protests and rallies long before 2020, and many political demonstrations in the city start there, regardless of their political persuasion. While this is worth considering in analyzing why the city elected to grant a permit to homophobic Evangelical Christians and thus facilitate and cop-beatdown of counter-protestors, I believe it is overshadowed by the grander context of Capitol Hill as a “gayborhood” and the city’s attack on its queer communities.

IGD: The response from the city mayor, a Centrist Democrat, was to claim to be in support of the LGBTQ+ community but also denouncing anarchists for infiltrating the protests. What is your response to these attacks from the mayor. Obviously anarchists did not “infiltrate” the protests, they were part of them and have a long history both in Seattle and in local organizing projects. Why is the mayor pushing this nonsense?

1312 Press: Since I wrote above quite a bit about the mayor’s false claims to being an ally of the LGBTQ+ community, I’ll focus on the demonization of anarchists here. Harrell was on the Seattle City Council from 2008 – 2020, and is well acquainted with the Seattle municipal government’s tradition of criminalizing anarchists for protest chaos. On August 30, 2010, Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk shot and killed Native American woodcarver John T. Williams, and the city exploded in a long campaign of anti-police protest that sometimes included violent clashes with police and property destruction.

Anarchists were heavily involved in these initiatives against the police, committed to pushing movements for reform closer to what we now commonly refer to as “abolition.” On May 1, 2012, the local rendition of “Occupy” climaxed into an incredibly riotous May Day demonstration with hundreds of anarchists in black bloc committing property damage and attacking police in the city’s commercial downtown shopping district. In 2014 and 2015, Seattle was one of many cities across the country taking to the streets in solidarity with the Ferguson Uprising against the police as part of the beginning of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. During all three of these instances of popular protest, anarchists have been criminalized by the mayor and city council and described as “outside agitators” committed to disrupting peaceful protest and ruining otherwise legitimate attempts at collective action and social change.

SPD pushing counter protestors out of the park with batons.

— Alex Garland (@alexgarland.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T21:45:23.988Z

Mayor Bruce Harrell is no stranger to this attempt to discredit rowdy and unmanageable protests by identifying them with society’s most historically hated boogeyman, the anarchist criminal. The city largely noticed that this rhetoric was unsuccessful, however, with the first election of Donald Trump and the ensuing anti-fascist street battles, where anarchists and militant anti-fascists were seen by many as the only people protecting anyone from violence at the hands of Proud Boys and their allies.

During the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, which in Seattle stretched into much of 2021, anti-police protests and sentiment had become too generalized to successfully associate street militancy with a minority political position. In attempting to attribute the trouble of the counter-protest in Cal Anderson to anarchists, Bruce Harrell aims to accomplish several things: isolate and criminalize a faction of protestors known for instigating conflict, discredit any rowdy elements of protest that rightfully critique police and city government complicity with homophobic rhetoric, assert that there is a correct way to protest, just not like that, and in doing so, simultaneously attempting to appear on the side of the LGBTQ+ community, and lastly, split the Seattle queer community from the anarchist movement (a gutsy move to be sure), by deflecting blame for the violence at the counter-protest from the police, to the outside agitator anarchists.

Of course, as you mention, anarchists are and have been part of Seattle’s LGBTQ+ community for decades. To leverage that they are separate is create an entirely false dichotomy that seeks to depoliticize queerness and decouple anarchism from its long history of critiquing the nuclear family, patriarchy, and heteronormative supremacy. Likewise, anarchists and anti-fascists have a long history of countering the fascist attack on gender rights; we are not simply allies of the queer community, we are of and within the queer community.

IGD: Let’s now talk about the response from the cops. After the protest, the police on their own podcast, put out this strange AI image, featuring masked “ANTIFA” militants with a sign that said, “ANTIFA for Mayor.” They also attacked “ANTIFA” as a group in a statement, claiming that Cal Anderson park was a hotbed of “ANTIFA” extremism. Is this position and the Mayor’s essentially two sides of the same coin?

1312 Press: It’s worth pointing out here that six Seattle Police Department officers attended Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, 2021. Two of them have been fired, and the other four remain unidentified due to a battle in the courts over whether to release their names to the public.

The podcast that posted this ridiculous AI-generated image is run by Mike Solan, the president of the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild (SPOG), which is essentially their union. Throughout 2020, the Seattle Police were rightfully made out to be public enemy number one – while they were embattled by literally months of nonstop protests and riots, the King County Labor Council voted to expel SPOG. The black bloc elements of popular anti-police protests during the George Floyd Uprising were nominally referred to as “ANTIFA”, for better or for worse, and SPOG have come to identify any and all anti-police sentiment as “ANTIFA-coded.”

They very clearly saw this return to Cal Anderson Park to protect homophobic Evangelicals and fight protestors as a return to the battles for the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. SPOG and SPD have been at odds with Seattle municipal leadership since 2020, and this can perhaps be attributed to the decision to vacate the police precinct and its evading culpability. While then Mayor Jenny Durkan issued the call for police to clear the surrounding streets, the command to vacate the precinct remains without claimed origin. Text messages between then Police Chief Carmen Best, then Mayor Jenny Durkan, and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins have mysteriously vanished.

AI generated image for “Hold the Line” podcast

Following this sequence of events, Seattle Police and their labor union SPOG have increasingly become politically isolated while financially over-inflated with increasing annual budgets from the city. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s statement, while attempting to criminalize anarchists, was clearly lacking in defense of the police given the city-wide backlash against police violence on that day. In the end, there is no legitimate device for any kind of accountability for the Seattle Police or their union and its president Mike Solan.

They stand to gain political capital through attempting to manipulate Seattle municipal government into giving them increased support and backing, and by painting Seattle as a city ruled by “ANTIFA” they continue Harrell’s criminalization of anarchists by seeking to justify past, current and future acts of repression and violence.

IGD: It’s 2025, Trump is in power. The connections between the far-Right, MAGA influencers, and even some fringes of the white nationalist movement are blurring. What do you make of how far-Right groups, like the one that rallied in Cal Anderson Park, are moving in this terrain? And what does this mean for antifascist resistance?

1312 Press: The interesting thing about DMWOK is that they don’t fit this same image and characterization of fascist street-level groups that we successfully pushed off the streets under Trump’s first presidential term. They’re mostly families, extremely oriented in their Christian faith, united by spirituality and Christo-fascist ideals of a nuclear white family. Interestingly enough, they are also not organizing in the same way that the street-level fascist groups were during Trump’s first term. While the Proud Boys and Identity Evropa, among others, sought to instill terror and physically attack our communities in the streets, groups like DMWOK are attempting to effect policy at the state and federal level through public rallies. I don’t think they actually want to incite and instigate violence between opposing sides, but rather through their rallies they aim to highlight what they believe is the “rabid horde of LGBTQ+ Drag Queens attempting to groom children” and through this, convince policy makers and lobbyists to push through the anti-trans and anti-queer policies we are seeing nationwide.

During 2016 – 2021, militant anti-fascists very successfully pushed fascists and neo-Nazis of several varieties off the streets. Identity Evropa completely disbanded. The Proud Boys lost their leadership and their rank-and-file come and go before anti-fascists determine they’re worth identifying. Patriot Front is forced to hold surprise rallies in isolated locations, and even when they happen, they are confronted and outnumbered by neighborhood residents, sending the fascists running scared into a box truck. However, this overwhelming victory in the streets was not accompanied in the halls of state power, as far-Right conservatives have made successful pushes for elected policy-making decisions at many different levels of local government. The emergence of groups like DMWOK signifies a shift in far-Right and fascist organizing away from street fighting to policy and optics, and frankly anti-fascists today are not well equipped to counter this move.

We must fine tune our analyses of how policy and state law effect our bodies and how to resist it. We are well aware and have articulated many times over that voting is not going to save us – the elected politicians throughout this country have shown that they are not interested in representing the wishes of their electorate, or they are powerless to protect access to reproductive and sexual health care. While the national-scale attacks on LGBTQ+ communities do possess both a street-violence aspect and a policy aspect, militant anti-fascists have only shown to be able to successfully fend off the street-violence aspect in broad, popular settings. You simply cannot have a fist fight with a policy.

Patriot Front crashed Springfield, MO Pride festival. Driving a Penske truck. U-Haul banned Patriot Front from renting their vehicles. It’s time for people to tell Penske to do the same.

— LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social) 2025-06-16T01:16:02.203Z

While it is incredibly necessary to openly oppose groups like DMWOK whenever they seek to mobilize and rally, we have to look deeper into how these attacks on our communities are being effected in the halls of power and how to resist them. Mobilizing as a black bloc can only fight certain kinds of enemies, it is not going to get you gender-affirming health care. Learning how to fight by yourself or alongside your friends will hopefully protect you from bigots in the streets, but it is not going to guarantee your access to hormone therapy, safe and secure abortion, or the countless other ways that the Trump administration is currently attempting to instill its fascist, patriarchal, hetero-normative regime of reproduction. It is perhaps clearer now more than ever that every element of the fight against gender fascism is required, if they wish to take the battle to our bodies, we have to meet them there at every front, not just the ones we know we’ve already won.

IGD: It seems clear that both the establishment politicians and law enforcement are only going to double down on conspiracies of “outside agitators” and “ANTIFA” supersoldiers. What does this mean for us? We’ve seen these bullshit narratives for years, what does it mean to push back against them now in 2025?

1312 Press: This rhetoric and attempt to de-legitimize radical, rowdy, unmanageable political forces is not new, nor contained to the United States. Anarchists, communists, Wobblies, and anti-fascists for over 100 years have struggled with largely successful attempts by the state to discredit our movements and separate us from the popular classes. They do this as a way to justify the impending repression that often looks like years in prison, police violence, or generalized trauma resulting from never-ending court dates and media sensationalism.

The first response to these outlandish conspiracies is two-fold: we must resist imposed isolationism, and we must resist populism. Our projects, regardless of their political slant, must seek to make themselves relevant to people struggling to address the material conditions of their suffering under capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. This is incredibly vague language so I’ll try to be more specific for a moment: when anarchists were criminalized for committing property damage in a commercial shopping district, it was difficult to stir up a broader sense of support and anger at the police and municipal government. When anarchists were criminalized for standing up against the police and homophobic Christians, everybody knew this as an immediate and complete farce. We have to make our struggles relevant to the lived reality of people we are not directly organizing with.

The City Let Anti-LGBTQ Religious Zealots Take Over Cal Anderson

— The Stranger (@thestranger.com) 2025-05-27T00:01:25.591Z

However, we have to simultaneously resist the urge and pull of populism. Populism requires the watering down of political convictions in an attempt to attract the largest amount of followers, the defanging of street action so as to not scare away potential believers, and the insistence on victimizing narratives that are not only factually incorrect but dangerous. While pursuing populism may increase group numbers, it drastically limits the possibility of action and its potentials for effecting societal change. We must be bold in our actions, honest and daring in our discourse, and unwavering in our goals. Additionally, we have to be frank with ourselves and understand that huge swathes of the U.S. population believe in and agree with Trump’s stances on gender, sex, and abortion access. We are simply not going to convince these millions of Trump voters to join our ranks on behalf of queer and trans communities. We have to stake out our positions against the rising tide of populist homophobia and protect our communities.

Finally, we cannot forget our prisoners, the victims of state repression resultant from criminalization and state ostracization of our movements. We have to be honest with ourselves that repression and jail time are not only possible, but in most instances they are inevitable. Serving time in jail or prison is simply a continuation of the struggle, and we must center anti-repression in all of our struggles if we are to successfully overcome the fear of police violence and incarceration that so often forecloses on our abilities to resist the state and fascism. When the state successfully imprisons a comrade or a friend, they are attempting to remove them from the struggle and erase their bold decision to break the law from our memories. Just as every struggle must also be a struggle against the police, it necessarily must be a struggle against repression and for our prisoners. Breaking the borders of isolation, speaking through the walls or telephone wires, and extending the struggle from the streets to the prison cells is how we counter the isolating and silencing intentions of repression. We have to make sure there is room in our struggle for our imprisoned comrades when they come out of jail, otherwise we are condemning ourselves to failure.