One of the lead stories in this Sunday’s New York Times was all about Orange County, and it wasn’t the White Power Protest in Huntington Beach. The focus — a 4th grade teacher in San Clemente who attended the January 6 “rally” in Washington DC.
Here’s the link (and subscribe to the NY Times please).
A summary of the piece follows:
Word got around when Kristine Hostetter was spotted at a public mask-burning at the San Clemente pier, and when she appeared in a video sitting onstage as her husband spoke at a QAnon convention. People talked when she angrily accosted a family wearing masks near a local surfing spot, her granddaughter in tow.
Even in San Clemente, a well-heeled redoubt of Southern California conservatism, Ms. Hostetter stood out for her vehement embrace of both the rebellion against Covid-19 restrictions and the stolen-election lies pushed by former President Donald J. Trump. This was, after all, a teacher so beloved that each summer parents jockeyed to get their children into her fourth-grade class.
But it was not until Ms. Hostetter’s husband posted a video of her marching down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 that her politics collided with an opposite force gaining momentum in San Clemente: a growing number of left-leaning parents and students who, in the wake of the civil-rights protests set off by the police killing of George Floyd, decided they would no longer countenance the right-wing tilt of their neighbors and the racism they said was commonplace.
That there was no evidence that Ms. Hostetter had displayed any overt racism was beside the point — to them, her pro-Trump views seemed self-evidently laced with white supremacy. So she became their cause.
Hostetter’s activity in DC became the subject of a petition to remove her and counter petitions to keep her. And the activity on Facebook groups has divided San Clemente with “spies” entering the groups to see who is posting what. This happens in Irvine, Anaheim, Costa Mesa, HB and a number of cities. The ability to create a false identity in order to monitor who’s saying what has existing long before this story was published by the Gray Lady of New York.
Been on NextDoor lately? Moderators are often closely aligned with certain political leaders and these moderators do not apply the same standards of speech towards neighbors posting. But back to San Clemente.
More from the article:
Each petition attracted thousands of signatures, and San Clemente has spent the months since embroiled in the divisive politics of post-Trump America, wrestling with uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech and whether Ms. Hostetter and those who share her views should be written off as conspiracy theorists and racists who have no place in public life, not to mention shaping young minds in a classroom.
It has not been a polite debate. Neighbors have taken to monitoring one another’s social media posts; some have infiltrated private Facebook groups to figure out who is with them and who is not — and they have the screenshots to prove it.
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Complicating matters is Ms. Hostetter’s relative silence. Apart from appearing at protests and the incident at the beach, she has said little publicly over the past year, and did not respond to repeated interview requests for this article. People have filled in the blanks.
To Ms. Hostetter’s backers, the entire affair is being overblown by an intolerant mob of woke liberals who have no respect for the privacy of someone’s personal politics. Yet Ms. Hostetter’s politics, while personal, are hardly private, and to those who have lined up against her, she is inextricably linked to her husband, Alan, who last year emerged as a rising star in Southern California’s resurgent far right.
An Army veteran and former police chief of La Habra, Calif., Mr. Hostetter was known around San Clemente as a yoga guru — his specialty is “sound healing” with gongs, Tibetan bowls and Aboriginal didgeridoos — until the pandemic turned him into a self-declared “patriotic warrior.” He gave up yoga and founded the American Phoenix Project, which says it arose as a result of “the fear-based tyranny of 2020 caused by manipulative officials at the highest levels of our government.”
Throughout the spring, summer and fall, the American Phoenix Project organized protests against Covid-related restrictions up and down Orange County, and Mr. Hostetter’s list of enemies grew: Black Lives Matter protesters. The election thieves. Cabals and conspiracies drawn from QAnon, the movement that claims Mr. Trump was secretly battling devil-worshiping Democrats and international financiers who abuse children.
By Jan. 5, Mr. Hostetter, 56, had graduated to the national stage, appearing with the former Trump adviser Roger Stone at a rally outside the Supreme Court.
His appearance there and the next day at the Capitol prompted some of San Clemente’s more liberal residents to make bumper stickers that read: “Alan Hostraitor.” It also led the F.B.I. to raid his apartment in early February, though he was not arrested or charged with any crime. (He, too, did not respond to interview requests.)
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And now Ms. Hostetter is back in the classroom. The district reinstated her last month after its investigation found she had done nothing more than protest peacefully in Washington.
hat may have settled the matter as far as the district is concerned. But for many people, nothing has been resolved. If anything, Ms. Hostetter’s case has served as a still-unspooling coda to the Trump years.
“Frankly, it’s hard to get stoked about sending flowers and birthday cards to a classroom teacher who appears to align herself with a conspiratorial social movement and embraces the racist values of QAnon,” one mother wrote in an email to other parents.
The parent said she was waiting for an explanation from Ms. Hostetter, or even “an apology in the event she did something she now regrets.”
She is likely to be waiting a long while. In an email sent to a fellow teacher days after getting back to work, Ms. Hostetter betrayed no hint of regret.
“If I was teaching students about journalism, I might consider a discussion about bias in the media, fact-checking and journalistic integrity,” Ms. Hostetter wrote to the teacher, who advises the student newspaper at San Clemente High School.