ALPENA, Mich.—“There was a lady who would take pictures of the library staff, put the pictures online, called them groomers,” said Diane O’Connor, a resident of Alpena, a little Michigan town situated right on the coast of Lake Huron. She told People’s World that this woman would sit outside the town’s library almost every day in a van plastered with signs that accused the staff of “Library Grooming” and depicted them passing off books labelled “X-Rated” to young children.
The money and manpower fueling these intimidation tactics come from the NE MI League of Conservative Education. While this organization sounds like it would be right at home in a town where straight party ticket votes for Republicans outnumber Democrats by over 2-to-1, their calls to shutter the community library have earned them few friends.
74% of the Alpena Public Library’s annual budget rests on a local tax levy, which provides the town with essential services. “There are homeschoolers that totally depend on the library for educational materials,” continued O’Connor. Once the League’s “Vote NO on Library Grooming” signs popped up in a few yards across town, alleging that the library did not deserve to keep their funding if they would not ban books that the League frowned upon, (namely works that mention sex and/or reproductive health), O’Connor and other concerned citizens canvassed with the Friends of the Alpena Library to oppose the three-quarter budget slash.
The Friends’ efforts paid off, and the millage preserving the Library’s funding passed with 59% of the vote. Diane and her colleagues were overjoyed. “Our library is outstanding, it’s like a jewel in our town, and people recognize that,” she said. “Although it’s very conservative here [in Alpena], there is a bridge too far.”
This display of bipartisan support did not deter the League; League member Monica Dziesinski currently sits on the local Board of Education and uses her position to propose and endorse seemingly outlandish measures, like adopting a Fairview Area Schools policy that would dictate student bathroom usage based on “the biological condition of being male or female as determined at birth based on physical differences, or, when necessary, at the chromosomal level.”
Students, parents, and other community members made their concerns for the measure known, as well as their concerns for what was left off the docket. At a March school board meeting, local high schooler Colin Hainstock characterized the bathroom initiative “more as a political stunt than a genuine effort to improve student well-being.”
Resident Diane Bower seemed to speak for many when she said, “There’s been no reports of problems from administrators, you’ve been told many times that there are gender neutral bathrooms available to anyone [who] wants privacy … when are you going to start talking about student achievement and measurable outcomes?”
Resident Ryan French stressed Bowers’s final point with a few of his own. “What are we talking about tonight?,” he asked. “Bathrooms and locker rooms. And what does last month’s agenda have? Banning books. Every second we debate these subjects is a second not spent debating how to prepare our children for college or a job after school, or improve the reputation of our schools for recruiting businesses to our community.”
After the repeated and urgent calls for community welfare, board member Monica Dziesinski suggested tabling the discussion for their next workshop meeting.
Southwest Michigan
Alpena is not the only small Michigan community fighting initiatives such as these; across the state, at the Indiana border, residents of a town called Niles are batting away Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project as they fight to control the local schools and legislature.
Moms for Liberty describes itself as an advocacy group for parents, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) states the organization is “a far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities and self-identifies as part of the modern parental rights movement.” The 1776 Project PAC states on its website that it supports “reform-minded conservatives who oppose political indoctrination.”
“They’ve been attacking the public school system through the school boards, trying to ban books in the Brandywine school district and other smaller districts,” said Angela Jones, who recently ran for office as the Representative for Michigan’s 37th district. “They were successful and then they weren’t—the parents fought back.”
Jones lost her race to sitting Representative Brad Paquette, who calls library books about transgender teenagers “pornographic materials” and has tried to make gender-affirming care a felony—two positions among many that ignore his own constituents’ views.
Another recent display of Paquette’s constituent neglect involves HB4140, his proposal seeking to repeal the “Extreme Risk Protection Order Act.” This Act, commonly called a “red flag law,” allows courts to accept petitions from family and police that would declare someone a danger to themself or others and restrict their access to guns for an established period of time.
The legislation he’s trying to repeal is incredibly popular; polling conducted by the APM Research Lab in 2019 indicated that over 75% of Americans supported family-initiated ERPOs, and Gallup polling from 2023 showed that only 12% of Americans supported deregulating guns in any capacity.
In what could be seen as another direct attack on popular sentiment, Paquette joined with nearly a dozen Republican lawmakers in Michigan to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to declare several successful ballot measures on election laws unconstitutional because they were approved via direct vote rather than Representative votes.
Paquette broadcasts neither his fight to repeal incredibly popular gun control legislation, nor his efforts to strip Michiganders of their rights to participate in the legislative process. His very active Twitter page is instead full of declarations like “Gender theory is a legitimate threat to every Christian and conservative family as it seeks to divide parents and their children.”
Jones had some thoughts on Paquette and his style of politicking: “It is so enraging to hear these ‘solutions’ to problems that don’t exist. It’s a smokescreen, so we’re not paying attention to them systematically dismantling our protections, our constitution. It’s a distraction.”
Who loses?
With such pressing issues as books and bathrooms, it is easy to overlook the fact that both Alpena and Niles saw major production plant closures within a month of each other.
When Decorative Panels International closed in Alpena in February of 2024, they laid off more than 150 employees overnight. Security escorted workers out of the plant at around 4:00 am and barred those who had not yet heard about the layoffs from entering the next morning.
In March of that same year, the National Standard production plant in Niles closed and laid off 84 people, 51 of whom were AFL-CIO union laborers. A business owner next door to National Standard maligned the shutdown by telling WSBT, “Every time we lose an industry around town, it affects our bottom line. That’s more income that’s just not available to people … I think it’ll have a drastic effect on a little town here.”
Rather than addressing this blow to the town’s economy, Paquette posted about an unrelated bill attempting to bar minors from accessing pornographic websites. It is no wonder that the AFL-CIO gave him a rating of 3.8%.
Union members aren’t the only Michiganders unhappy with Paquette’s priorities; recently, the politician faced contention at some town-hall-style library gatherings where, by his own admission, “most were worried about cuts at the federal government.”
Ryan K, a Niles resident who attended one of these gatherings, told People’s World, “Rent is almost double of what I was paying when I moved here in 2008, and it’s becoming difficult to afford living in the area. Many people at the town hall agreed with me on this, but Brad didn’t speak to it at all.”
This coming election will see Paquette defending his seat against two opponents: Gerik Maverick, a newcomer, and Angela Jones, a second-time runner. Neither candidate is backed or financed by a major party, but both desperately want to address the community concerns that the incumbent routinely ignores.
Maverick put it bluntly: “Government, when it’s working well, is representative of working people and their views and wants and needs … When it comes to jobs going away, or workers’ rights, Brad doesn’t have an answer.”
This unresponsiveness is, seemingly, by design. Far-Right politicians in small towns across the country work to divide people based on superficial markers like race or gender identity, and while neighbors fight amongst themselves for who deserves to live undisturbed and who needs to be monitored, large private companies quietly cut losses, pack up, and move onto bigger, more profitable ventures.
“I thought people needed to know what the hell is happening,” said Jones to People’s World about her first campaign. “I focused on educating on policy and the whys: why is the cost of housing going up? These are the policies that, while we’re fighting a culture war, allow private equity to suck up all the resources in small communities.”
Jones’s ambitions touch on what is becoming a national trend: public services are defunded in the name of public good; businesses close once the infrastructure meant to support their workers and clientele falls apart; community wealth dries up alongside the jobs; landlords vying for their last chance at a return on investments hike up the rent in their properties until people are priced out of their neighborhoods altogether.
Entire towns get scrapped for parts, all in the name of squeezing more money and more power into fewer places and fewer pairs of hands.
How to win
Perhaps Diane O’Connor, friend of the Alpena Library, best described the situation: “…these extremist views are the minority. But they’re vocal, and they’re funded and they’re well-organized, and the more moderate people don’t react to them soon enough—everybody has to speak out.”
It could be argued that fledgling small-town organizers and initiatives could learn from larger groups in larger cities, like United Auto Workers (UAW); reporters at People’s World have documented the group’s successes in negotiating with Stellantis, a car manufacturer that has agreed to keep production in Detroit rather than outsourcing to Canada, reopen a plant in Belvidere, and reinvest in existing facilities in Indiana and Ohio.
It would seem that the culture war is not a battle, but a magic show. Like a beautiful assistant, it distracts the audience while ultra-conservatives hide doves in their shirts and pretend to produce them out of thin air.
The UAW’s efforts and organizing tactics have now revitalized thousands of jobs across the Midwest. UAW President Shawn Fain makes their strategy clear:
“We fight for a political program that serves humanity, not the inhumane interest of the wealthy and corporate greed. Part of that means not falling for division…they act like how you live your life or your gender identity is a threat to the person on the assembly line next to you or the work site next to you. They talk about who you love, who you marry, which bathroom you use, so they don’t have to talk about who you work for, where the profits go, and who benefits.”
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