A2Politico: In a Major Blow to Chronic Virtue Signalers on Council, The Attempted Recall of Council Member Hayner Flopped

by P.D. Lesko

Two trans women, Ariah Schugat and Michelle Ryan Hughes, launched a recall of Hayner, a Ward 1 Democrat, after Ward 3 Council member Travis Radina took to his fainting coach with a cool washcloth on his forehead over Hayner’s use of a quote from the Hunter S. Thomson 1970 book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Hughes (as a man) ran for City Council as an independent candidate in 2018 against Democrat Jeff Hayner and lost.

The two trans women claimed in their recall petition that Hayner’s use of the literary quote made Ann Arbor “unsafe” for LGBTQ people. Radina, and the other sufferers of Chronic Virtue Signaling Syndrome on Council, confronted Hayner at a public meeting about his use of the Hunter S. Thompson quote. Radina teared up because there was a lengthy discussion about whether Council had the authority to sanction an elected official for using the words of a fictional character, apropos no one in particular. Ultimately, ignoring the advice of the City Attorney, eight members of Council agreed that they had to act quickly and that they had the legal authority to police the speech of a colleague whose taste in literary quotes, questions, politics and votes they don’t like.

It’s no coincidence that Travis Radina became distraught and outraged in March 2021, and did his best to link Hayner’s use of a literary quotation to the harassment Radina said he has suffered throughout his life. Radina’s Desperation Politics came a short time after his pal Council member Jennifer Eyer was publicly accused by around a dozen women of having known about, and having facilitated the sexual predation of young women at the company Eyer told voters she owned when she ran for office in 2020.

Posting the Thompson quote to social media, a quote that rips into incompetent journalists, Ward 1 Democrat Hayner reportedly meant to show his frustration with a local MLive reporter who has repeatedly harassed and threatened Hayner via text message. The harassment included forwarding to former MLive employee Jennifer Eyer, an anonymous voicemail that had been sent to the reporter about Hayner during Hayner’s 2018 campaign. Eyer forwarded the voicemail to Hayner’s wife. The reporter also sent Hayner an unsolicited text out of the blue which said the Council member needed psychiatric help. Harassing, unsolicited texts are a violation of Michigan’s 2019 cyber-bullying law.

The reporter wasn’t named in Hayner’s Facebook post, only the Thompson quote, above, spoken by Raoul Duke, a character in the book.

It’s no secret that the Ann Arbor News employs some serious “fuckoffs and misfits” who dip for details with teaspoons, who won’t fact-check the obvious lies fed to them, and who serve up “biased,” shoddy, “click-bait reporting” that “rarely holds local government and powerful elected officials accountable.” And those criticisms are according to the company’s own newspaper readers and its employees.

Schugat’s recall effort flopped, despite paying up to $16 per hour (plus bonuses) to paid signature collectors, and raking in over $11,000 for the recall effort.

I think it’s important to point out that several thousand dollars of the $11,000 was solicited from anonymous donors, a violation of Michigan Campaign Finance law. Schugat had a Twitter account dedicated to the recall without a “paid for” disclaimer, another campaign finance violation. Schugat also put an ad up on social media offering to pay for signature collections (below), likewise missing the required “paid for” disclaimer, yet another violation of Michigan Campaign Finance law. Schugat and Lady dissolved the Committee prior to the campaign finance filing deadline, perhaps to avoid disclosing donors, a move which violates Michigan Campaign Finance law. Finally, campaign finance records show that Schugat and her Committee Treasurer, Kyle Lady, missed the July 25 deadline to file the required finance disclosures for the Committee to Recall Jeff Hayner. Failure to file includes daily fines, as well as both misdemeanor and felony charges. Failure to file campaign finance disclosures can result in jail time. Kyle Lady works for Dug Song, husband of Ward 2 Council member Linh Song.

The belly flop of the recall effort is an outcome that is, perhaps, an omen of what voters will do to Taylor and his Council allies and candidates who run in 2022 and 2024. Really, can our severely impaired watershed, neglected infrastructure, shrinking minority population, and lack of affordable housing options stand another batch of Corporate Dem, Neo-Lib leaders who’ll say anything to get elected by gullible voters?

If the last 10 months have been any indication of Taylor and his allies’ sheer ineptitude, hypocrisy and utter inability to get the business of the people done without threats, fighting, crying, lying, bullying staff, creating a hostile work environment for city staff and each other, micromanaging, having tantrums in public, and policing everyone’s behavior/speech but their own, any one of his political allies who tries to run for mayor, will lose. It’s quite possible all of Taylor’s allies who ran for election/re-election in 2024 would be defeated.

In fact, there are grumblings in Ward 4 that, to mark Council member Jen Eyer’s first year in office, her constituents will launch a recall of the woman who admitted she lied to voters to get elected, and who stands publicly accused by up to a dozen women of abetting sexual predation at her company.

Schugat has complained bitterly and publicly that in defending Hayner’s taste in literary quotations, Ann Arbor and Ward 1 are full of racists and homophobes who don’t care that Hayner used a literary quote containing the word faggot. The results of the recall effort drive home the clear answer that Ward 1 residents are tired of the hypocritical virtue signaling, fauxgressive leadership and social media histrionics served up by Taylor and his Council cronies.

To be fair to Schugat and Hughes, they are spot on that Arbor City Council is most certainly populated by racist, sexist, homophobes. For starters, we have a Mayor who, during his 15 years in elected office, has nominated, voted for and appointed over 600 locals to boards and commissions. Over 95 percent of those people have been white. His current white Council rubber stampers, not surprisingly, have sat back without comment as the Mayor has done so. Even the one Asian on Council has been mute in the face of this systemic racism. While his City Hall flies a Black Lives Matter flag, Taylor is a partner in a local law firm that employs no Black attorneys. While Taylor bemoaned the violence done to George Floyd by police officers in another city and state, he found the simultaneous tasering and shooting of Black mother of three Aura Rosser by two AAPD officers, “not a tragedy of racism.”

Can anyone imagine a white mother of three who answered her door in Burns Park or Ives Woods shirtless being both tasered and shot to death?

Yes, faggot is a slur. However, the rampant lack of leadership and, frankly, endless hypocrisy, thought and speech policing by Taylor and his allies on Council are dangerous and, frankly, destroying city government, as evidenced by the recent firing of Tom Crawford, City Administrator.