By Mahlon D. Meyer

Candidate Survivor is a zany talent show held by Seattle’s powerful left-wing newspaper, The Stranger. Elected officials lip sync, eat spicy foods, perform music, and wear costumes.

But when City Councilmember Tanya Woo showed up this year, and performed a Chinese flag dance, she was booed.

The Stranger subsequently published a lonely heart ad about someone falling in love with “a cutie” with “curly hair and a flower crown” who was also booing Woo.

“Maybe we can hate on her together,” the aspiring lover wrote.

How had it come to this? That a liberal democrat, from a community of color, in what was once the nation’s most progressive city, with a huge proportion of Asians (over 18%), was shamed in forums sponsored by its most prominent left-wing publication?

As Woo has made her way from the leader of a community block watch into politics, The Stranger and other left-wing publications in Seattle have led a barrage of hate speech. When she led hundreds of elders to protest the county opening its 21st homeless shelter within a one-mile radius of the Chinatown-International District (most neighborhoods have none), the left-wing media called her a “NIMBY.”

Even readers of the highly influential The Stranger routinely call out its hateful rhetoric.

For four years, Woo has been leading a night watch where she hands out food, water, clothing, and blankets to homeless people in her neighborhood. So, when someone scrawled hate graffiti about her, community leaders denounced it as referencing anti-Asian bias. But The Stranger argued it could not have been racist because it didn’t explicitly mention that Woo was an Asian woman.

(Video from Randy Wo-Eng)

“Once again, The Stranger proves it does not understand the gravity of their ignorance of anti-Asian hate,” wrote one reader.

“Is the Stranger some kind of Ku Klux Klan publication?” wrote another.

In her current campaign to hold onto her seat, Woo is now trailing her opponent, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who denounced Woo’s support of the drug-free zones as simply a way to criminalize victims and fill jails. In endorsing Rinck, The Stranger rewrote Woo’s family history by calling her family “landlords.” In fact, they converted their collapsed hotel into workforce housing for low-income residents.

A recent hit piece, on the eve of the election, by another left-wing publication primarily featured a left-wing activist self-described as “a republican nightmare…an Asian American transgender activist who is not submissive” who allegedly lives in the workforce housing owned by Woo’s family. In another piece, this activist stated that, “Rather than be blackmailed and live my life in fear of exposure and knowing that I was already blacklisted for being trans, I came out as a sex worker. Through this transformation, I wanna ask the question: what is truly obscene? Is it nipples? Is it nudity? Is it sex work? Is it sex that is paid for?” Out of 85 units in The Louisa Hotel, which provides housing for people earning between $35,000-$80,000 a year, the author spoke primarily to this left-wing activist and several others (the others complained mainly about elevator problems). There was no context given about the role the Woo family had played in serving and protecting the community over generations.

Former Washington State Governor Gary Locke told me he has not been following any messaging about Woo, but said, “Unlike other candidates who ‘talk’ about the need for more affordable housing for low and moderate wage earners and seniors, Tanya has actually worked to provide affordable housing in the Chinatown-International District. And she cares about the public safety of the residents of the Chinatown-International District by conducting night patrols with other community activists. We need more people on the City Council like Tanya who ‘walk the talk’ of the progressives.”

But you wouldn’t know this from reading the news.

(The opinions expressed are those of the writer and do not represent the views of AsAmNews. Mahlon Meyer was a staff correspondent for Newsweek covering Asia and Southeast Asia before receiving a doctorate in Chinese and American history. He now writes about artificial intelligence and covers Asian American affairs, mostly in Seattle.)

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