Whatever else you can say about 2022, it certainly wasn’t a boring year, was it?
And 2023 is already shaping up to be San Francisco Values vs. The Way Life Should Be!
Madam Speaker has already introduced LD 2, “An Act to Address Maine’s Housing Crisis.” For now, it’s an empty vessel consisting of nothing but a title. Watch for it to metastasize over the next few months into another power grab by the Nanny State.
As you know, we’ve heard for the past year from politicians on both sides of the aisle wailing about the housing shortage. But wait a minute. How can anyone take these hacks seriously?
Ever since Janet Mills took office in 2019, Maine taxpayers have been forced to provide free rent, free medical care, and free education to thousands of illegal immigrants. Those illegals continue surging into Maine’s premiere Harboring Haven for border-crashers, the Peoples Republic of Portland. All the while, tens of thousands of lifelong Mainers – including homeless veterans – languish on affordable housing waitlists.
How is it possible that this scandal wasn’t in the top tier of campaign issues during the midterm election season?
One thing I know for sure: with your help, 2023 will be a busy year for Maine First Project!
Despite the disappointing midterm election campaigns and the predictable results, Maine patriots do have victories to celebrate.
Most important among those achievements, our free Activist Trainings and town-hall events attracted hundreds of Mainers from Presque Isle to Kennebunkport over the past year. This growing grassroots army of activists is well-equipped to hold the swamp critters’ slippery feet to the fire in 2023 and beyond, from local school districts, town councils, and county commissions – all the way to the Statehouse.
Some of the activists we trained this year will become candidates themselves, as we continue to build a bench of Maine patriots who are committed to restoring Maine to The Way Life Should Be.
Recruiting and training that army is a top priority at Maine First Project. It is the foundation on which successful campaigns are built. That’s why we’re planning right now for next year’s training sessions.
The blue wave that crashed across Maine on November 8th should be a wake-up call for conservatives. And it was entirely foreseeable.
Maine First Project was sounding the alarms back in January — warning candidates from the top to the bottom of the ballot that they shouldn’t count on a red wave to carry them across the finish line. Our message: Maine voters aren’t going to send you to Augusta just because you’re not a Democrat.
And if you’re AWOL in the culture wars, even your own conservative base will stay home in droves. Based on preliminary voting data, that’s exactly what happened on November 8th.
In early February, we called out the Maine Senate GOP leadership for advising candidates to steer clear of the battle over race-based Identity Politics and transgender ideology in Maine’s K-12 government-run schools. With one notable exception, all the Senate Republican candidates followed that bad advice.
So it was hardly surprising when the midterm elections left the GOP mired on the wrong end of a lopsided 22 to 13 partisan divide in the state Senate. The outcome in the House was even more depressing for Republican candidates, with no net gains in a year when the wind was at their backs to retake the majority for the first time in 12 years.
Too many of them opted to play it safe rather than speak out against brainwashing in K-12 classrooms and the Mills administration’s Foreigners First agenda!
Most astonishing were GOP candidates in very red districts — some of them unopposed — who were AWOL on education and immigration policy. With zero political risk, they should have been on the frontlines, taking the slings and arrows of the hostile news media and making the K-12 indoctrination and grooming scandals the central issues of their campaigns.
They were counseled by their leaders to keep their distance from that infamous “lightning rod,” Shawn McBreairty, Maine First Project’s Director of Special Projects.
As you know, Shawn has done more than any single individual in Maine to expose the toxic brew of racist indoctrination and pornographic gender-bender depravity that are the rule rather than the exception in Maine classrooms. His relentless Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) requests have pulled the curtain back on the spectacle of K-12 administrators and teachers driving a wedge between parents and children.
Bottom line for me: candidates who want to avoid controversy are part of the problem, not the solution. My advice to voters is to steer clear of any candidate who wants to steer clear of Maine First Project and patriots like Shawn McBreairty.
Maine First Project is a careful steward of our donors’ money — and that means we are very selective when it comes to investing in legislative campaigns. To qualify for our support, candidates must sign the Maine First Agenda pledge.
The agenda has 25 policy goals. All 25 are vital to putting Maine people first, making education in Maine great again, and propelling Maine from poverty to prosperity,
This year Maine First PAC targeted five House districts with hard-hitting direct mail focused on two issues:
● Proposed legislation banning boys who pretend to be girls from competing in girls’ high school athletics, and
● Proposed legislation shutting off the “sanctuary city” and welfare magnets drawing illegal immigrants to settle in Maine.
I’m pleased to report that those mailers were well received by voters. In fact, four of the five candidates we supported with mail were elected to serve in the Maine House of Representatives! They are:
● James White of Guilford, House District 30
● Randy Greenwood of Wales, House District 56
● Mike Soboleski of Phillips, House District 73
● Tammy Schmersal-Burgess of Mexico, House District 77
The other House candidate we supported with mail – Donna Dodge of Denmark, House District 83 – came within 196 votes of unseating a two-term incumbent. She ran a great first-time campaign, and we expect to see her name on the ballot again!
In another five House races, Maine First PAC made the maximum $425 contribution to candidates who signed the pledge. Ben Hymes of Waldo (House District 38) was the only winner in those five races — but the others – Elizabeth Jordan of Kennebunkport, Heather Anne Sprague of Cushing, John Linnehan of Ellsworth, and Stephen Hemenway of Northport – deserve credit for stepping up in districts where conservative voters are outnumbered by woke progressives.
In any case, this midterm election should have served as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks Maine is going to flip from blue to red in a single election cycle — the way Virginia did last year — if our candidates are AWOL in the culture wars.
The sad truth is, Maine is a 55-45 blue state. That didn’t happen in one or two election cycles, and it won’t be reversed in the short term. The woke Left has been very smart in its long march through Maine’s institutions.
The radicals own education and the news media in Maine. And they’ve conditioned too many Mainers to prefer handouts to gainful employment.
My friend, be wary of anyone trying to sell you a quick fix to problems caused by the left-wing elitists’ “social justice” experiments here in the Pine Tree State.
I know you’re in the fight for Maine’s future for the long haul, and rest assured, so is Maine First Project. And no matter what the Fake News media are telling you, we have good cause for optimism heading into 2023.
To begin with, the Left always over-reaches…they just can’t help themselves. With one-party rule by extreme Leftist leaders in the House and Senate, topped off with a lame-duck Leftist in the Blaine House, the only restraint on the triumphant Democrat mob is self-restraint. In other words, don’t hold your breath!
Count on Mills and her minions to double down on their campaign to transform Maine’s way-too-white demographic profile. After all, self-styled “progressives” on both sides of the aisle view Maine’s whiteness as a huge problem.
Their solution is to offer more freebies to the steady stream of unvetted foreigners making their way to Portland after breaching the wide-open southern border.
You can also count on Pender Makin keeping her job as Janet Mills’ chief indoctrinator and groomer at the Maine Department of Education.
Expect K-12 student achievement to continue its decades-long slide as Maine’s government-run schools churn out graduates who don’t know much about history or math or English – but they do know how to explain their personal pronouns of the week.
The big bonus for the party in power right now is that when these indoctrinated kids reach voting age, they will lean left in the voting booth. They learned in school that “A” is for “Activist.” You can bet very few of them will be checking boxes for right-of-center candidates, or lobbying legislators for common-sense, family-values legislation.
That’s why Maine First Project is working to expose what’s going on in the K-12 indoctrination camps that stretch from York County to rural western Maine and all the way up to the St. John Valley on the Canadian border.
Maine First Project will take the fight to the Nanny State totalitarians and their allies in the Fake News industry. We will fight in school board races, and advocate for educational freedom and parental rights.
To turn Maine from blue to purple to red, we must liberate the next generation of Mainers from the twin plagues of educational malpractice and Identity Politics. But we also need to attract persuadable Democrats who – thanks to Fake News false narratives – haven’t realized yet their party long ago left them and no longer represents their best interests.
We need to reach non-political Mainers who feel left behind by both parties. Our task is to show them that conservative-populist policies are what is best for them and best for Maine.
And last but not least, we need to reach our base and give them a reason to be excited to go out and vote. Something more than, “we’re not Democrats.”
Maine First Project has the plan, the team, and the drive to attract those Mainers and take the fight to the virtue-signaling tyrants who dominate state government, academia, and the K-12 swamp.
Going forward, members of the conservative minority in the 131st Maine Legislature need to be relentless in their pursuit of roll-call votes. Their objective should be to get every member of the House and Senate on the record as often as possible with roll calls that will define the majority as not just out of touch with Mainers — but hostile to our liberty and prosperity.
Those roll calls will provide ammo for Maine First candidates in the next round of legislative elections in 2024.
And again in 2026. And 2028. And 2030. This will be a long march.
In 2023, Maine First Project is doubling down our efforts, unleashing our grassroots army on two battle fronts:
● Maine First patriots will be fully engaged on the legislative front at the Statehouse, offering public testimony in person and online, and holding legislators accountable for their votes in committee as well as in the House and Senate.
● We will also be deeply involved on the political and electoral front in communities across the state. In particular, local school board races are an arena where we are winning the hearts and minds of Mainers who sense that something is terribly wrong with government-run K-12 schools.
You may have read news accounts of the huge turnout for the November 1st public forum at the Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School to consider a proposed “Gender Identity of Students” policy. The auditorium was packed with close to 300 people.
Maine First Project helped drive turnout to the forum with email blasts the week before, and again the day before the event. I was there with Maine First Project co-founder and Executive Director, Zach Gelpey.
We watched and listened as scores of parents, grandparents, and taxpayers stepped up to the microphones to voice their opposition to the dangerous and demented policy proposal.
Maine First Project gave Maine parents a voice — and their objections led the school board to hit pause. After hearing from parents, the board voted unanimously to indefinitely postpone adoption of the proposed gender-bender policy.
But before we take too many victory laps, we must be aware, it will be back!
And that’s why Maine First Project is leading the charge in the recall election of two of the radical school board members who spearheaded the anti-parental rights protocols.
These board members voted to require teachers and other school officials to actually coach students on how to keep their new “gender identity” secret from parents.
Boys pretending to be girls would be allowed to choose their own pronouns, join the girls’ athletic teams, and use whichever restroom or locker room they believe aligns with their new “gender identity” on a given day.
700 voters in South Paris signed the petitions to recall two of the school board members who voted for the policy on its first reading.
Those recall elections will take place on January 10th, 2023, with absentee voting already underway as of December 6th, 2022.
Another battle is brewing in mid-coast Maine, where more than 200 people attended a school board meeting on October 20th at the Medomak Middle School in Waldoboro.
Steve Karp of Waldoboro presented a petition with more than 1,000 signatures of district residents in MSAD 40, calling on the board to keep the notoriously pornographic memoir Gender Queer out of the high school library. You may recall that this book features graphic illustrations depicting a boy with his penis in another boy’s mouth.
At the end of the four-hour long meeting, the board voted 11 to 4 to keep the book in the library!
The good news is that Steve Karp will be a candidate for a seat on the MSAD 40 board of directors in June of next year. And he will be helping other candidates as well.
All across Maine, parents and grandparents are showing up to tell the transgender cultists: “Enough is enough! Leave our kids alone!”
But don’t expect the gender-bender zealots to listen. They are committed to bringing down the nuclear family and installing the state as universal parent.
In 2022, along with the victories I already noted, Maine First Project supporters crushed a proposed gag order on parents at the Statehouse, launched a petition drive calling for the resignation of MDOE boss Pender Makin, and won unanimous acceptance of a GOP platform plank in support of banning transgender ideology in K-12 classrooms.
It was a momentum-building year in 2022, but we are poised for an even bigger 2023!
Together, you and I will stand firm with a loud and clear message to the Swamp Queen of the Kennebec and all her toadies and court jesters:
We will protect our families. We will protect our homes. We will protect our freedom. We will protect our livelihoods. And we will protect ourselves.
As the year comes to a close, I’m asking you to join our grassroots army of Maine First patriots, fighting to restore Maine to The Way Life Should Be. The battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation of Mainers will be fought in small-town Maine — from Van Buren to Eliot, from Topsfield to Rangeley.
Now that more Mainers are reporting for duty in the culture wars, it’s more important than ever that we strike while the iron is hot and convert momentum into even more victories.
From blue to purple to red — no trick plays, no shortcuts, no half-court buzzer beaters – just solid planning, sound execution, and hard work. And so it should be, it’s how Mainers do business after all!
Larry, I understand how discouraging the results from the 2022 midterm elections here in Maine were – especially in the wake of the grand promises made by so many short-termers on our side of the political divide.
It wasn’t what any of us were hoping for just prior to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year.
But a deeper look at 2022 shows silver linings, momentum, and reason for optimism.
So here’s my New Year’s resolution:
Maine First Project stands ready, willing, and able to
take this fight to the next level – with you by our side.
Together, we will pull our beloved state back from the precipice, and restore Maine to The Way Life Should Be.
Sincerely,
Hon. Lawrence Lockman
Maine House of Representatives, 2012-2020
Co-founder & President
Maine First Project
P.S.
For anyone who wasn’t already willing to accept it — the 2022 midterm elections should have delivered a clear message:
Maine is a blue state – but it doesn’t have to be.
Maine First Project has a history of great achievements – including many this year that I listed above. We also have the plan, the team, and the drive to put in the hard work in the long fight to turn our beloved state from blue to purple to red.
I see the momentum and am optimistic for our future.
From my home to yours, best wishes for a healthy and prosperous New Year!