By Clara Coyote

The Seattle City Attorney’s race has been dominated, thanks to recent mass mailings and a huge online ad in the Seattle Times, by criticism of left-wing candidate Nicole Thomas-Kennedy’s tweets. The Seattle Times, Q-13 FOX, and KOMO News (among many, many others) have taken the bait, framing Thomas-Kennedy’s online history as “reckless” “toxic” and “crude.” The tweets, most of them posted during the nationwide summer 2020 protests against police violence, are intentionally inflammatory, referring to police as “pigs” and “serial killers,” and celebrating damage to SPD’s East Precinct and the county’s youth detention center. Thomas-Kennedy addressed the tweets in a recent interview with PubliCola, saying she was “outraged” by the way police retaliated against protesters and repeatedly tear-gassed her neighborhood.

In comparison, Thomas-Kennnedy’s opponent, Ann Davison—who joined the Republican Party after Trump was elected and ran for state lieutenant governor on the Loren Culp ticket last year—has received relatively little coverage for her own social-media history, in which she has aligned herself with far-right figures like Ben Shapiro while referring to her own city as a lawless, “Marxist” hellhole where homeless people are allowed to “choose” a “lifestyle” that makes it impossible for housed people to sit on their porches.

Davison’s Twitter account  @NeighborsforAnn, which she has used in three successive bids for office, reveals a candidate with political views that are deeply out of sync with most Seattle voters.   

Last year, for example, Davison recorded a video conversation with Bradon Straka, a right-wing influencer for the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theory and a recently convicted January 6th rioter, in which the pair encouraged people to leave the Democratic Party. Davison used her Twitter account to promote the event, which she described as “Bradon & I on a livestream talking about the far left takeover of the Democratic Party in Washington.

Davison embraced radical Republican positions during her run for lieutenant governor as well. During the early days of COVID, she argued for “local control” over mask requirements, railed against “cancel culture and Marxism,” trashed the centrist Washington Women’s Caucus as “extreme far-left” because they did not endorse her, and referred to Democrats as “Socialists” for waiving bar exam requirements for law students during the COVID crisis.

During a 2020 legislative debate over whether to require comprehensive sex education in Washington state’s public schools, Davison relentlessly promoted a far-right disinformation campaign against the bill, joining a nationwide right-wing effort to mischaracterize the legislation as an attempt to teach five-year-olds about sex using “graphic photos and descriptions of sexuality and sexual acts.” During the same period, she also promoted a conspiracy theory about homeless people being a “COVID threat” to housed people promoted by right-wing radio personality Jason Antebi (“Rantz”), frequently tagged far-right Youtube pundit Ben Shapiro and his outlet, the Daily Wire, and began regularly adding the hashtag “#republican” to her tweets and touting her support from Republican elected officials and pundits from across the state.

Perhaps more noteworthy for a city attorney candidate, Davison’s social media history shows her embracing Seattle Police Officer Guild President Mike Solan. Solan notoriously blamed the January 6th riots on the BLM movement, and publicly follows known white supremacists on social media. Davison, who posted a graphic of a Thin Blue Line flag at the height of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, featured Solan on her “After Homeschool” video series in May 2020. In the video, the two championed the reactionary statement that the “overwhelming majority of homeless people in Seattle choose that lifestyle.” 

Given her history of espousing right-wing talking points alongside conspiracy theorists, it’s not surprising that Davison has called state mask mandates an unfair “double standard” compared to the “lawless” existence of people living in homeless encampments.

Davison has portrayed herself as a centrist, middle-ground alternative to Thomas-Kennedy, but her own radical Twitter history suggests otherwise.