Welcome to election season, everybody! I’m going to start out with one of the easy ones, the race for US Senate. The tl;dr here is to vote for Peggy Flanagan! On the ballot:
Peggy Flanagan (DFL)
Michele Tafoya (Republican)
Rebecca Whiting (Libertarian)
Marisa Simonetti (Independent)
Marisa Simonetti (Independent)
Let’s kick things off with the weirdo. Marisa Simonetti is the woman who illegally rented out her basement as an Airbnb, then got mad at the tenant for asking if she could bring in pest control to deal with a spider infestation, and proceeded to try to harass/intimidate her into leaving. It was the part where she tossed a tarantula at the tenant that got all the news coverage, but she also contacted this woman’s abusive ex through social media and told him to “come get her,” stole the groceries she’d had delivered, and broke down the door in order to enter the basement apartment (so that she could toss the tarantula, along with tacks and nails. She also sprayed fart spray.)
After a bunch of delays this actually went to trial this summer. Marisa fired her lawyer (I bet because her lawyer had negotiated a guilty plea and a $300 fine, which is what Marisa’s co-defendant got) and defended herself. The jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to 90 days in the workhouse (which sounds incredibly Victorian but is just the Minnesota term for the county facility where people serve short sentences, possibly because it’s set up to allow for work release.)
Every time I’ve posted to Bluesky about this, someone has asked if the tarantula is OK. She actually shook it out of the terrarium onto the stairs, she didn’t fling it, but I have no updates on the tarantula and have no idea what happened to it.
Anyway, if reading this didn’t convince you not to vote for Marisa, you can watch a 25-minute video providing an edited-together set of police bodycam videos (with some additional footage filmed by the tenant) here. Note: the voiceover (which I think is a synthesized voice) mispronounces Edina, which annoyed me immensely. If you want to skip to the funniest (to me) bit of the video, that’s here, with the following exchange:
Marisa (yelling to be heard over the deafeningly loud praise-and-worship music she’s blasting): She’s an attorney, she’s playing the little games, whatever. I don’t know why she’s here. I would like to find out why she’s here.
Cop: So you didn’t rent to her or anything like that?
Marisa: You keep asking me that question and I think that’s something that everybody is trying to stick it to Marisa and what we need to not do right here is stick it to Marisa, what we need to do is pray to Jesus.
(The video then cuts to the tenant showing the cops the rental agreement. Marisa did, in fact, rent out the basement to this woman, that’s why she was there! Also, just reading the news articles makes Marisa sound unhinged but the video really takes it to a whole new level.)
In order to get on the ballot, Marisa had to get 2,000 people to sign a petition. If you were one of those people, consider doing at least five minutes of due diligence the next time someone asks for your signature.
Rebecca Whiting (Libertarian)
Rebecca is kind of a classic Libertarian candidate in a couple of ways, in that she manages to combine “vaguely tempting” with “oh my god, what?” She’s anti-corporation and anti-war (vaguely tempting!) but she takes her anti-foreign-intervention beliefs all the way into isolationism. She’s also anti-tax and anti-regulation without any particular discussion of how society would function if we stopped taxing anything and whether her emphatic pro-deregulation stance includes the belief that it should be legal to sell chicken salad that’s been sitting out at room temperature for 8 hours, we can just run our own tests if we’d like to avoid food poisoning. (Having watched her video from the 2024 Farmfest I think, yeah, she thinks food safety regulations are tyranny.)
Do I think there are regulations that are annoying: absolutely. Do I want the government regulating the companies that produce the food, cosmetics, and drugs that I put in my body: also absolutely.
Her commitment to deregulation does not include women’s health; she thinks abortion should be illegal. (“Murder already is illegal, and we should quit trying to redefine what a human is based on their stage of development.”) She further elaborates on her position here: “I want to see a pro-life movement that doesn’t just care about unborn babies, but our mothers as well, that supports pregnancy centers and makes help more accessible through churches, non profits, and charities.” Worth noting, she wants pregnant women supported through churches, non profits, and charities — not through WIC, food stamps, Medicaid, or literally any of the other supports provided by the government. (I haven’t seen her specifically address EMTALA anywhere but it would go thoroughly against her other philosophies not to oppose it. So I just want to note that removing all government supports for health care would result in a huge number of dead women and babies due to them being unable to afford emergency care. Private charity has historically never provided sufficient support to those in need.)
She posts quite a lot to Facebook so if you want to read a mix of memes, complaints about how Libertarians aren’t taken seriously (no automatic ballot access! she’s not being included in debates!) and occasional long posts about her views/personal history, you can find her Facebook here.
Michele Tafoya (Republican)
Michele Tafoya is a former sportscaster who got into politics in 2022; she chaired Kendall Quall’s gubernatorial campaign that year only to have him explicitly rule her out as a potential running mate on the grounds that she was pro-choice. (She thinks abortion should be legal up to 12 weeks.) She’s also been in favor of red flag laws in the past. I’m nonetheless confident that if elected she will not let her views stand in the way of doing whatever Trump tells her to do.
Her website has a big section on fraud and how bad it is. During the primary, I sent her an email to ask if she would support the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act or any of the various proposed laws that would stop House and Senate members from insider trading on the knowledge they get through things like closed-door hearings. Her opponent wrote back immediately (“I would support both of those acts. I hate fraud, and corrupt politicians even more”) but Michele Tafoya did not.
She wants you to know that she loves cops (and presumably Flock cameras, though I couldn’t find any information specifically on her stance) and hates trans people. Also, in 2024 she posted to Twitter that she was going to be “fleeing (Minnesota) soon.” Her views are a mix of anodyne and reprehensible and the absolutely last thing Minnesota or the US needs is another Senator who will be a rubber stamp for Trump, which Michele absolutely will.
Peggy Flanagan (DFL)
There’s a lot I really like about Peggy, from the fact that she started in politics by serving on the Minneapolis School Board (which is, hands down, the most thankless, miserable elected office anyone could ever ask for), to her genuine warmth in person, to her long list of excellent policy proposals. But possibly the thing I like the most about Peggy is that she’s one of a very small number of politicians who truly seems to understand how grave the moment is in the fight to keep our Republic.
I am ABSOLUTELY going to vote for Peggy, and you should, too.
This seems like a good year to fundraise for a trans nonprofit, so I’m fundraising this year for TIGERRS. I don’t have a Patreon, and a fundraiser lets me see in a tangible way that people value my work, which is really helpful as a motivator. (This project is a lot of work.) I raised $7,230 during primary season so I’ve raised the goal.
I also have a new book out! Obstetrix is about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on hand to deliver their babies; it’s a story about enduring, surviving, and not giving up. You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold, and I’ve been doing my best to keep Uncle Hugo’s, Moon Palace, and Dreamhaven Books in signed copies.
