MSNBC's Chris Hayes details how a Washington town was liberated from QAnon extremists

Members of the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement were among the extremists who, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. QAnon members have been active all over the United States as well as in other countries, and in the Pacific Northwest, one of the places where they took over the local government was the small town of Sequim, Washington.

Liberal MSNBC host Chris Hayes, during a recent report, discussed the Sequim residents who weren’t afraid to fight back and were victorious in the end.

QAnon extremist William Armacost, described by Hayes as a “right-wing demagogue,” was elected to the Sequim City Council in 2018 and became mayor in 2020 — when, according to Hayes, he “publicly endorsed the far-right cult conspiracy theory QAnon.”

When Dr. Allison Berry, a Sequim-based health official who called for social distancing restrictions and later vaccine requirements in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, she became the target of death threats from QAnon extremists — some of whom called for her to be publicly lynched. And Armacost’s allies, Hayes told viewers, “sided with the people sending the death threats.” The Sequim City Council passed a resolution condemning Berry, not the QAnon supporters who wanted to lynch her.

But Sequim residents, Hayes added, decided to “take their city back” from Armacost and his allies and formed the Sequim Good Governance League.

“Together, an alliance of progressives and conservatives took over the (Sequim) City Council and ousted the mayor,” Hayes explained before bringing on The Nation’s Sasha Abramsky as a guest. Abramsky reported on events in Sequim in an article published by The Nation on February 7.

Abramsky, whose article was headlined “The Town That QAnon Nearly Swallowed,” told Hayes, “Armacost was announcing his support for QAnon, he was coming out against public health mandates, and the city was spiraling into chaos. And a group of people basically got together and said, ‘This has to stop’…. And they formed this Good Governance League.”

That group, running candidates for a variety of positions in Sequim in 2021, “drove Armacost and his colleagues completely out of power,” Abramsky told Hayes.

The QAnon movement believes that the U.S. government has been hijacked by an international cabal of pedophiles, child sex traffickers, Satanists and cannibals and that former President Donald Trump was elected in 2016 to fight the cabal. Well-known MAGA Republicans who have endorsed QAnon include Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, among others.