American quandary
IN NOVEMBER, LUCAS HARTWELL, A HIGH SCHOOL senior in Grand Blanc, Mich., noticed something strange about his school district’s newest board member.
Amy Facchinello’s Twitter feed was full of apocalyptic images and skulls made of smoke. There were cryptic calls for fellow “patriots” and “digital soldiers” to join an uprising, and vows that nothing could “stop what is coming.” In the posts she shared, the COVID-19 pandemic was cast as a dark plot engineered by Bill Gates, while George Floyd’s killing was “exposed as deep state psyop.” Facchinello, elected that month, was now one of seven people in charge of shaping Hartwell’s education.
After a few hours of research, Hartwell had a name for her bizarre ideas: QAnon. He shared her posts on social media, directing people to a Wikipedia page about the right-wing conspiracy theory, which alleges that a sinister cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running the country. But few in Grand Blanc, a town of 8,200 outside Flint, seemed as alarmed as he was. So Hartwell, 18, decided to bring up the matter at a school-board meeting in January. Reading from a speech on his laptop, he addressed a Zoom audience that included Facchinello. Hartwell noted the FBI had identified QAnon as a potential terrorist threat. How could she serve in this position, he asked, “when it seems you represent none of the values we stand for as a community or, even more importantly, as Americans?”
There was a brief silence. “Thank you. O.K. Next,” said the moderator, moving on to a question about vaccinations.
Today, Facchinello, who did not respond to requests for comment, remains in her post. But Hartwell isn’t giving up. “I think for these far-right conspiracists or radicals to be infiltrating the most basic unit of American government, on an elected level, that’s just really disturbing to me,” he says. “And they just sort of get away with it.”
It’s not only happening in Grand Blanc. From Michigan to California, and Las Vegas to rural Washington State, dozens of recently elected local
