As 2021 comes to a close, our team at Maine First Project hopes you had a very Merry Christmas.
And we hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s ahead in 2022.
As you know, we aren’t shy about using military metaphors to highlight the cultural and political conflicts that set you and me apart from the authoritarian Leftists who dominate state government, academia, and Maine’s very Fake News media.
Believe me, they aren’t laboring under any illusions that this conflict is some sort of polite sporting event, or an exercise in civil discourse. The Left wrote the rules and paid off the umpires a long time ago.
Let’s be clear: our adversaries aren’t interested in winning the Good Sportsmanship Award, even if that’s the prize some conservatives want more than anything else.
I believe it’s long past time for our side to understand what’s at stake for the next generation of Mainers, and what happens if we lose the long game.
With that in mind, let’s take a quick look back at last year’s battles, and look ahead to the year that will be.
The first skirmishes broke out early in 2021, in the dead of winter.
Last February, a cyber-mob of unhinged radical cop-haters targeted the sheriff of Hancock County.
What was Sheriff Scott Kane’s unforgivable sin? He simply had the audacity to call out the violence committed by the Marxist hate group calling itself Black Lives Matter.
When a left-leaning nonprofit that provides inmate services for the Hancock County jail proclaimed its solidarity with BLM, Sheriff Kane took note of the radical group’s violent history and its call for defunding the police. Kane let the nonprofit’s Executive Director know that she had crossed a line, and that her employees were no longer welcome at the jail.
As you may recall, news of Sheriff Kane’s blasphemy triggered shrieks of outrage from all the usual suspects in Hancock County and beyond. After they recovered from their collective shock, they teamed up with their Fake News media allies and stoked up the cancel-culture mob, determined to drive Kane from office.
Maine First Project quickly fired off two email blasts that were widely shared across social media – encouraging support for Sheriff Kane prior to a February meeting of the county commissioners.
A motion calling on Kane to resign was on the agenda. Maine First patriots like you flooded commissioners with messages in support of the Sheriff.
Additionally, I wrote a hard-hitting op-ed that was published in the weekly Ellsworth American and reached many thousands of readers across Hancock County. Maine First Project vigorously defended Sheriff Kane and went on offense against the BLM thugs and their legions of cop-hating sympathizers in the Nanny State Nonprofit Industrial Complex.
In the end, your voice was heard, sanity prevailed over the woke mob, and the Commissioners voted 2-to-1 against the motion calling for Sheriff Kane to resign.
A good and honorable man was saved from being canceled by the mob – but a larger message was sent:
Mainers will no longer sit idly by and let good people suffer at the hands of radicals who want to turn Maine into a rural Northeastern version of decadent San Francisco.
Unfortunately, Sheriff Kane wasn’t Maine’s only protector of the peace targeted by virtue-signaling Leftists.
Black attorney Krystal Williams – with Portland’s Bernstein Shur law firm — alleged she was the victim of racial bias during two traffic stops in early 2019 when she lived in Cumberland.
Krystal Williams waited nearly TWO YEARS to file a complaint after this alleged police misconduct!
And exactly what did she allege?
She claimed that being stopped by a white police officer for having a license plate light out was racially motivated. Another time, when she was stopped on her way to the gym — again, by a white police officer — she was offended the officer asked her if she had a gun.
She referred to her encounters with the white cops in Cumberland as instances of “systemic racism,” and believes she’s lucky she wasn’t killed.
Maine First Project supporters shared our email blast holding Williams up to the public ridicule she so richly deserved.
In the end, an investigation into Williams’ claims by the Augusta police department found NO EVIDENCE of any racial harassment and NO EVIDENCE of any violation of state law or department policy.
The state Attorney General’s office even agreed with the findings. And to date, attorney Williams hasn’t sued anyone for violating her civil rights.
Our team at Maine First Project is proud of the work we did punching back against Williams’ grotesque defamation of law enforcement officers in Maine. Leftist liars and lunatics need to understand they won’t get a free pass the next time they decide to trash the cops.
The fight for a safe and secure Maine in 2021 didn’t stop there.
The diversity fascists struck again, this time on the pages of Mainebiz, the slick monthly magazine that claims to be “Maine’s business news source.”
The special March 8th issue was headlined, “Maine Moves Forward: Companies become more aggressive in DEI efforts.”
The magazine cover featured a photo of career criminal George Floyd next to a photo of a BLM “peaceful protest” in downtown Portland on June 1st of last year.
The demonstration began with a poetry reading at City Hall that erupted into mob violence and looting after darkness fell. Rioters threw rocks, bricks, and bottles of urine at police officers.
As you know, DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s shorthand for the racist ideology of cultural Marxism, the malignant theory of history and human nature that blames “whiteness” and white people for oppressing every so-called “marginalized community,” racial and otherwise, on the face of the earth.
Browsing through these 32 pages of racist propaganda in Mainebiz, I was struck by how thoroughly the Big Business lobby in Maine has morphed into the Foreigners First, cheap-labor lobby.
Believe me, <<First Name>>, when they say they are moving “aggressively,” they aren’t kidding!
In fact, one of the featured articles in the special George Floyd/BLM issue of Mainebiz encourages business owners to terminate employees who dare to question workplace wokeness.
Within days of the special issue’s publication, Maine First Project fired off an email blast scorching Mainebiz for their shameless celebration of Marxist ideology.
In fact, Maine First Project was the only organization in our once-great state to criticize the so-called “business magazine” for going woke.
And that’s why it’s so important we have you by our side in this fight. It is your voice that is making a difference. And we are your megaphone!
MFP is THE organization in Maine you can trust to alert you when the Foreigners First lobby welcomes another wave of unvetted border-crashers to settle here at your expense.
When we learned that Mainers were on the hook to pay the hotel bills for untold numbers of illegal immigrants who caught a bus from the Texas border to Portland last summer, we went to work.
We were first on the scene with social media posts, e-mail blasts, and direct mail pieces informing our subscribers that for the second time in as many years, life-long Mainers were being shoved aside to make way for non-citizen lawbreakers who have NO right to be here and haven’t paid a dime in Maine taxes.
I know I can count on the hundreds of Maine First activists we trained this year to hold our elected officials accountable for betraying their constituents.
I’m excited to report this year alone our donors enabled us to nearly DOUBLE the number of activists we trained in all our previous years since the founding of Maine First Project.
These patriots have been making their voices heard and making a difference, fighting for our students at school board meetings, defeating bad legislation, and forcing all-important roll call votes.
In late May and early June, they phoned and emailed and wrote letters to lawmakers demanding a vote on our K-12 Indoctrination bill.
This bill would have outlawed the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) — defined as singling out one racial group of students as responsible for the suffering or inequities of another racial group of students.
The teachers’ union bosses and their allies in legislative leadership wanted to sweep this bill under the rug without a recorded vote. But thanks to the efforts of Maine First Project’s grassroots army, the bill received a roll-call vote and a floor debate in both the House and Senate!
Incumbent legislators running for re-election next year will have a lot of explaining to do if they voted against the ban on CRT indoctrination.
We expect this red-hot issue to take center stage in many Maine state legislative races next year — just as it did this year in Virginia’s gubernatorial and legislative contests.
In 2021, Maine’s K-12 public-school classrooms became a battleground in the culture war that pits America-hating intellectuals against patriotic parents and grandparents. Teachers’ union bosses have teamed up with administrators and school board members to transform OUR public schools into Leftist indoctrination centers.
Of course, these professional propagandists deny that they’re doing any such thing. “We don’t teach CRT! We don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The good news is that Maine’s FOAA (Freedom of Access Act) empowers Mainers to inspect public records in the custody of our public servants. So that’s exactly what we did.
My FOAA request to the Ellsworth school department earlier this year blew the lid off what’s going on in K-12 government-run schools across the state.
We shared the revelation that the swampy Augusta-based Cultural Competence Institute trained hundreds of Maine teachers across the state over the past year and a half. That training consisted of immersion in the sacred texts of the CRT cult, and instructions on how to incorporate cultural Marxism into the curriculum, no matter what the subject matter.
Now, with parental rights leader Shawn McBearity of Hampden on board as our Director of Special Projects, we are well-positioned to take this K-12 battle to the next level in 2022.
Momentum is on our side, <<First Name>> – and that means one thing – it’s time to double-down!
Our Activist Training courses were so in demand this past fall, we plan to hold monthly training sessions throughout the entire year of 2022, beginning in Rockland on January 29th, followed by Kennebunk on February 26th. Save those dates!
In fact, in 2022 we’ll be going beyond the basic training and offering more advanced classes for our activists to make even more of an impact on the political and cultural battlefields.
And stay tuned for technical upgrades and improvements made possible by our generous donors.
That includes a new MFP action website that will make our grassroots lobbying efforts easier than ever for Maine First patriots to access quickly during the second session of the Legislature that begins in just a couple of weeks.
Maine First Project is working on plans to bypass the lying, dying Fake News outlets that dominate the media landscape in Maine — and the national Big Tech oligarchy that muzzles the voices of common sense and reason. I will have more news on these efforts for you soon.
Maine First Project will be alerting our supporters to the legislative battles in Augusta — and mobilizing them to make their voices heard on the most important pieces of legislation.
Those patriots will force votes on bills advancing a Maine First agenda, and work to kill bills taking Maine further away from the Way Life Should Be.
And of course, Maine First Project will be holding candidates accountable.
As we have in each of the election cycles since our founding in 2015, we will disseminate the Maine First Agenda to every legislative candidate and ask them to sign a pledge saying they will stay true to that policy platform.
Then we will share the outcomes — which candidates support putting Mainers first, and which ones are ducking the issues that matter most to Mainers. Armed with that information, you can apply pressure to the politicians hoping to represent you.
It will be a busy year to be sure. But we won’t be the only ones active.
Maine’s corrupt and incompetent ruling class — the Leftist authoritarians who dominate state government, academia, and the Fake News media — will be working overtime and spending boatloads of campaign cash to maintain the status quo.
That’s why I’m so grateful to have Maine First supporters like you on the frontlines in this battle to restore Maine to the Way Life Should Be.
We cannot let the swamp critters drag us any further toward the precipice.
And we can’t rest on our laurels. Now that the momentum is on our side, we MUST double down.
Thank you for being in this fight to make Maine great again.
And I hope you enjoy your New Year’s Eve festivities.
Hon. Lawrence Lockman
Maine House of Representatives, 2012-2020
Co-founder & President
Maine First Project
P.S.
I’m happy to report that 2021 was a year of momentum for Maine First patriots — pushing back against the falsehoods, the fear-mongering, and the tyranny of one-party rule by cultural Marxists.
In the process, we roused many Mainers from their slumber.
But with legislators returning to Augusta next month, voters heading to the polls in November, and out-of-state special interest groups poised to spend millions of dollars to advance San Francisco values – it’s time to double down on the fight.
Please consider joining other Maine First Project supporters who are fighting back!