Reaction to Elaine Willman

An article in last week’s La Conner News, “A lively workshop on property rights and tribal governments,” portrays the principal speaker, Elaine Willman, as a reasonable person who just wants tribes and the rest of us to get along.

“Willman is not against Native American rights,” the article baldly states. Nothing could be further from the truth. Beneath her reasonable façade Willman is an anti-Native American extremist. She calls, emphatically, for the abolition of tribal sovereignty, and believes it is being used to destroy the U.S. At a 2015 meeting in Kalispell Montana, she asserted: “Federal Indian policy is being tied in and coordinated with international and United Nations goals, and the long-term goal of the U.N....is that states will go away.”

So – and I’m not making this up - she believes that Native sovereignty is being used as a wedge by the U.N. to take over the U.S. government. Still sound reasonable?

Willman is also a contributor to the magazine of the John Birch Society – you know, the folks who still believe that President Eisenhower was a communist. There she outrageously alleged that “Indians are conspiring to tear down the fabric of this country.” If space allowed I could fill a book, as she has, with her paranoid, frankly racist nonsense – that’s her specialty. Still, she’s entitled to her views, no matter how delusional.

What she is not entitled to, however, is the kid-glove treatment this paper has given her, which ignores or soft-pedals her outrageous positions, for what reasons I can only guess.

The First Amendment does not apply here – it protects our ability to speak from government interference, it most certainly does not guarantee clowns and charlatans a forum for their hate-filled agendas. An editor/publisher’s duty is to use his or her good judgment, an obligation which in this case Sandy Stokes, this paper’s editor, has chosen to ignore.

Willman’s hate-filled, raving agenda – easily accessible for anyone with a computer – should not be allowed to pass without comment, as if it weren’t relevant in explaining her real mission. This is the second time in the last months that Elaine Willman has been given a free ride in the News, which is fast slithering into the position of being an organ for outrageous lies which serve to tear our community apart, not bring it together.

Ms. Stokes, do your job – you’re supposed to be a journalist, not a ventriloquist.

Tony Harrah

La Conner