Meeting Katrina Pierson
Many of my fellow DUers never had the chance to meet Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson, nor would they want to. But I did.
It was at a Tea Party grassroots activist meeting somewhere in the North Texas area back in 2011. As I was on assignment for some local Democratic leaders, I should probably remain mum about the specific time and place, but I can tell you about how strange it felt to blend in with around 60 local Tea Party activists, most of them male, all but one of them white, and every one of them cautiously optimistic about their prospects for 2012 given Tea Party victories in 2010. One guy offered me the link to a website on how to reduce or eliminate my income tax burden; the website was densely packed with all sorts of advice written in tiny fonts, very little structure. I've been told this is how some schizophrenics write down their ideas, too.
Then the only non-white in attendance took the podium. Katrina Pierson, a fellow native of Garland, TX, discussed techniques on "Taking Back Your Government by Fighting Sustainable Development." She discussed the UN "Agenda 21" conspiracy theory; either she or someone in the audience raised the fear that you could lose your house if you don't install a solar panel on your roof. Pierson cautioned that tax abatements, retail pruning, high-density housing, and even eminent domain were all being employed in the name of sustainable development.
Garland was a member of a pro-sustainability entity called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). All member cities, Pierson explained, paid dues to ICLEI in exchange for software, training, community planning, etc. The goal of ICLEI, according to Pierson, was to create strategies for "discreetly integrating preparedness into traditional planning efforts." In other words, more ICLEI involvement, more Agenda 21, more government-mandated sustainability. There were murmurs in the Tea Party crownd that "Green is the new red" and "One man's social justice is another man's social slavery."
While Pierson instructed the crowd on how to watch out for terms like "sustainable farming" and study their cities' own future-use maps for "catalyst areas," I decided to raise my hand and speak. I stayed in character - to a point.
I asked her about private corporations like Interface who were pursuing their own sustainability goals, querying whether or not Tea Party activists could accept or even encourage such behavior in order to enhance the bottom line of such companies and pursue sustainability independent of government involvement. Pierson responded by encouraging me to look into LEED certification for new construction projects and how they play into Agenda 21 and enforced sustainability. She also told me that as long as my home city is paying dues to ICLEI, my tax dollars were going towards tighter control by government over my life whether I was aware of it or not: "Any time there's money involved...there's a politician in somebody's pocket."
And if you're wondering how Katrina Pierson got tapped on the shoulder by Trump to join her campaign, this is how her political career got started. Pierson told the audience that she worked with the Garland Tea Party to get a new Race Trac built on a parcel of undeveloped land, but a pro-sustainability group called Envision Garland was blocking the gas station, hoping to use the site for one of their own projects instead. Long story short, Envision Garland was defeated at the City Council level by Tea Party activists, the Race Trac was green-lighted, Garland pulled out of ICLEI - and Katrina Pierson found herself occupying a seat on Garland's planning development committee.
She may be crazy as a loon and getting wackier by the day, but Katrina Pierson still knows how to get things done. Watch out.
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Good on ya, Jo. 