The Lost Local News Issue
Austin Cope is a writer from Cortez, Colo., where he lived while reporting this story. This story is set in Montezuma County (population 25,000), which has a weekly newspaper, the Journal, in addition to a community radio station, KSJD.
It took only a few minutes for Montezuma-Cortez school board member Lance McDaniel to type, “I’m Antifa,” select a background with orange flames and post to Facebook from his iPhone in early June 2020. It was about a week after George Floyd’s murder, and he was upset.
“I was basically just saying I was anti-fascist,” the 65-year-old McDaniel told me the following summer at a Mexican restaurant in Cortez, Colo., the city with a population of about 8,700 where we both grew up. He was not, in fact, a member of a decentralized collection of activists who oppose fascism and have engaged in property destruction and confrontational protest tactics. To him, “antifa” was a philosophy. “But I used ‘antifa’ to make a point … that fascism has no place in the United States and, in the context of what was going on in that time, that a police officer doesn’t have the right to stand on a person’s neck for nine minutes and keep them from breathing.”
McDaniel felt Floyd’s murder — coupled with former president Trump’s promotion of the far right — constituted a tipping point. “I believe, as do a lot of other people, that fascism was certainly something that was a definite possibility at the time, with the administration we had in Washington and the way the Patriots were acting around here,” he explained, referring to a loosely organized group now known as the Montezuma County Patriots that has held vehicle rallies and other local events since the spring of 2020. There have been instances of some attendees displaying flags endorsing a right-wing, self-styled militia group. And three days after his “I’m Antifa” post, McDaniel went to a vigil for Floyd where he witnessed counterdemonstrators playing loud country music while pickup trucks sped past. (The Montezuma County Patriots declined to comment for this story, except to say that they weren’t aware of members attending the counterdemonstration.)
The “I’m Antifa” post was part of a barrage of liberal political commentary that lived on McDaniel’s Facebook timeline alongside school-district-related announcements and other community bulletins. Given that he was a school board member and also served on the city planning and zoning commission, the mix on his personal account unnerved some of his neighbors. Earlier that year, one joking Facebook exchange with a friend who served in the Marines — “damn veterans won again,” McDaniel commented about a park being renamed Veterans Park — had already caused a discussion at a city council meeting.
McDaniel’s liberal views ran counter to his predominantly conservative community, where most of the economic base is generated from retirement incomes, construction, tourism and agriculture. In the 2020 presidential election, 60 percent of the county voted for Donald Trump. McDaniel told me that as a White, straight, cisgender man, he felt he was in a better position than others to make openly progressive comments online.
Not long after McDaniel’s “I’m Antifa” post, resident David Spiegel took to Facebook with a post of his own. “Attention Montezuma County residents we have a member of antifa in our local government,” he began, calling McDaniel a “scumbag” and saying the community should “disrupt his ability to work in government.” Spiegel later told me he found McDaniel’s views contradictory to “good governance and freedom” and did not believe there was room for such philosophies among elected officials.
Another resident, Mindy Nelsen, shared Spiegel’s post on her timeline, which also included public posts sharing videos of Montezuma County Patriots rallies, as well as criticism of Black Lives Matter and pandemic-related restrictions. The following month, Nelsen and another community member, Debbie McHenry, organized a petition for a recall election to remove McDaniel — who had been set to face reelection in November 2021 — from the school board. And so began a political saga that would show what happens when Facebook serves as a primary public forum for local political debate.
Despite his hometown’s conservatism, McDaniel, a self-declared “loudmouth liberal,” has always had progressive leanings. “I remember delivering papers when I was younger, and I won a prize, and I selected a huge, gaudy peace-sign necklace,” he said. “My dad about disowned me.”
At Montezuma-Cortez High School in the early ’70s, he participated in Junior ROTC and student government, helping change a dress code that required boys to keep their hair short and girls to wear skirts or dresses. He also assisted in organizing a schoolwide education session on sexually transmitted diseases and birth control.
A few years after graduation, he moved out of the area to work for a fuel trucking company. Later, after the birth of his daughter, he became involved in parent volunteer groups. When he returned to Cortez in the early 2010s, he volunteered at a domestic violence shelter and joined the planning and zoning commission. His civic involvement and family ties to the community led to his appointment to fill a vacancy on the school board in 2018; he was unanimously approved by the board members present. He ran unopposed for the seat the following year.
McDaniel said he never allowed his political opinions to influence his work on the all-volunteer school board, where policy states that candidates do not run by party affiliation. But he felt he was exercising his First Amendment rights on his Facebook wall. In an official response to the recall petition, he noted that he attended every meeting and work session, publicly supported all the board’s decisions and voted against a majority opinion only three times over two years.
But McDaniel’s critics focused on his online speech, specifically on Facebook. The recall petition’s statement of grounds for removal drew a connection between his “I’m Antifa” post and the “mob protests and horrific destruction following the tragic death of George Floyd.” The statement claimed that many of the schoolchildren in the community followed McDaniel on social media (an assertion later disputed by his supporters) and that the community needed “school board members that understand leadership and the power of mentoring, and know not to voice their personal, political, or social opinions that could influence children.”
McDaniel said he found the petition filers’ scrutiny of his Facebook posts absurd. “If I saw something that somebody posted that I didn’t agree with or didn’t care about, I just wouldn’t pay any attention to it,” he told me. “I certainly wouldn’t try to recall somebody.”
I contacted both petition organizers via Facebook to request in-person interviews. Debbie McHenry, a retired 911 dispatcher, sent several brief messages that included her support for law enforcement and her identity as a conservative Christian, but soon blocked me. Mindy Nelsen phoned to accuse me of going behind her back to find information. A few hours later, she called me from a different number to encourage me to write about a pro-police picnic instead but would not engage further when I asked her about our previous conversation. My subsequent voice mails requesting another interview with her weren’t returned.
For insight into the recall campaign, I spoke to Lynnette Ward, one of McDaniel’s most vocal critics and a member of the Patriots group. She got involved after the petition was filed and helped collect signatures at car races, gun shows, businesses and gatherings in parks. During our hour-plus interview at a park, Ward explained how she came from a military family and had always supported law enforcement, so she found McDaniel’s joking comment about veterans “disrespectful, unethical and immoral.” She also saw his “I’m Antifa” comment as promoting hate in the community.
Ward felt McDaniel’s political posts interspersed with school-related announcements — as well as his position as a school board member — showed he was “indoctrinating” students with his ideologies. “You have your freedoms to choose and pick what you want to do. What you want to say. But you do not have the right to tell my child how to feel,” she said. (She had withdrawn her child from the school district that year.) Although Ward said she was occasionally critical of Trump’s and other politicians’ provocative online speech, she found it important to first hold McDaniel accountable: “If we started at a local level and held people accountable … then we can climb up.”
The recall campaign started in July 2020. By the October deadline, more than 1,600 district voters had signed the petition (1,296 signatures were accepted), exceeding the required threshold of at least 40 percent of those who had voted in that seat’s previous election. Later that month, several attendees interrupted a school board Zoom meeting and threatened to “rape [McDaniel’s] daughters.” (McDaniel has one daughter.) A police review of the district’s recording of the meeting and list of names was unable to determine who made the threat. Cortez Police Chief Vernon Knuckles, who signed the recall petition, did not respond to my requests for further comment.
Throughout the recall campaign, fellow school board member Stacey Hall wrote a number of public Facebook posts supporting political causes like the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, though the majority of her postings were links to recipes. (Hall declined my request for an interview.) A then-county commissioner also wrote a number of Facebook posts lambasting statewide restrictions intended to stem covid. Neither official’s posts attracted an organized response from the community.
Meanwhile, McDaniel didn’t stop posting. At a November hearing challenging the petition grounds, where several community members supported him, McDaniel explained that he wasn’t a member of antifa and had no control over who followed his posts. The challenge was later denied. As the coronavirus continued to circulate through the community over the winter, he attended every school board meeting over Zoom, where the topic of the ongoing campaign never directly came up, aside from one update about the recall election timeline by the district superintendent in December.
When the results of the recall arrived in February 2021, voters had chosen to remove McDaniel by a 2-1 margin, though less than half of the 10,193 ballots were returned. Overall, the recall election cost $21,256 from the school district’s general fund of approximately $17 million. According to the district finance office, the funds were taken from $33,250 allocated annually for district election fees.
McDaniel told me he wasn’t too surprised about the results, though he was disappointed. “In my mind, I would’ve been recalled no matter what was said about me, just because I was a progressive. And being vocal didn’t help that at all,” he said. “I wish people had the ability to speak with each other civilly.”
McDaniel may have thought of this as a First Amendment issue, but to Anand Sokhey, an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, it’s a matter of politics, not free speech. “People didn’t like what he said privately, so they chose a public channel to remove him,” he wrote via email. “That’s not a constitutional violation — it’s simply people choosing to remove someone they didn’t agree with via a political process.”
The recall also fits into broader social patterns, explained Sokhey. “In this case, I think it speaks to how both the right and left in our current environment have sought to move against public figures that violate norms or hold positions (etc.) with which they disagree.” The outcome in Cortez didn’t surprise Sokhey. “School board politics/elections have always been really heated,” he wrote. He pointed to data showing that by one count, 60 percent of U.S. recall elections from 2011 to 2020 were successful. But McDaniel’s recall was the first of any type in the county in over a decade to result in removal — and the first related to online speech.
[Perspective: Conservatives have long embraced ‘cancel culture’]
Following the election, McDaniel was adamant that the result hadn’t silenced him. It had only made him more progressive. “I felt my role was to give others confidence that speaking up won’t kill you or won’t destroy your life,” he said. “I think that being ultraleft or having social views that are extremely to the left — I think that keeps the [political] center centered, instead of [it] moving completely right.”
Dawn Robertson, a friend of McDaniel’s who has co-organized downtown marches supporting racial equity and LGBTQ rights, rolled her eyes when I mentioned the reaction to several of his most-criticized posts. Robertson, who identifies as mixed race, said she appreciated McDaniel’s and other local liberals’ online and in-person support of racial justice movements. But she also noted that some online speech can do more harm than good. “I’m delighted and inspired when White males ally with marginalized communities — Brown women, liberal, progressive sentiments — but if you’re in an elected position, your words and your behavior carry a lot of weight,” she told me. In his online speech as a board member, McDaniel could have shown “more caution and perhaps more attention to the ripples that this person would make.”
The all-White school board never made an official statement about the recall election. And by its March meeting, McDaniel was no longer on the board or in attendance. The board oversees a district composed of approximately 2,800 students, about 50 percent White, one-quarter Latino and one-quarter Native American. This summer I contacted each of the seven board members; three signed the petition and four did not. The three members who chose to speak to me did not sign.
“I’ve heard a lot of people saying ‘freedom of speech’ and stuff like that. I still think … if that much of a community thinks that somebody needs to be removed, it’s hard, because that’s also their prerogative,” said Cody Wells, 28, a real estate agent who ran unopposed to fill McDaniel’s seat. Board secretary Jack Schuenemeyer, 83, a statistician who was in his third term, thought the costs of the election could have been better spent, noting that the average starting salary for a teacher in the district is about $32,000 per year.
Chris Flaherty, a 48-year-old electrical lineman who had been on the board since early 2020, was more outspoken about the recall’s implications: “When you’re trying to silence an oppositional mind-set or political party and you’re doing it through intimidation … it’s very dangerous.” In September, following our interviews, he and Schuenemeyer both resigned from the board, citing concerns over its support of anti-mask policies and its opposition to critical race theory.
The recall “injected some confidence in them that they could influence” the board, Flaherty told me after he resigned, referring to Nelsen, Ward and others who attended recent school board meetings to criticize the presence of a middle school club supporting LGBTQ students and to oppose pandemic restrictions.
The other board members at the time, all women, declined interview requests. When I approached president Sherri Wright at a board meeting in the summer, she told me she did not want to speak about “old news.” “The community spoke. That’s all I have to say,” said Wright, who signed the petition.
McDaniel’s “I’m Antifa” post is no longer publicly visible on his timeline. (He and I are not Facebook friends.) He still serves on the planning and zoning commission, and continues to post multiple times a day. The public content has shifted more toward music videos or announcements about school food drives, though he still addresses social or political issues, like recognizing Black, Indigenous and women’s history, or calls for better Indigenous representation on the school board.
When I asked him about his privacy settings, he didn’t directly say he had changed the visibility of the “I’m Antifa” post. But he said he has become more intentional with his audiences when posting now. He told me that there are “a couple of groups that we have” where he writes his more controversial political posts, “just because it’s more comfortable and not so reactionary.” However, he didn’t think it made much difference: “Everybody in town knows who I am and what I stand for; there’s no surprises that I know of.”
McDaniel said he has thought about the “I’m Antifa” post several times since his removal from the board. He sometimes wonders what might have happened had he called himself “anti-fascist” or explained his views more clearly. But he doesn’t regret posting it. “I knew it would cause controversy,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be as big as it was, but maybe it makes people think. And that’s another reason I do things, to make people think.” He paused. “Or try to get people to think.”
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