Racist Gracey Van Der Mark Running For Huntington Beach City Council
Van Der Mark is an affiliate of extremist Proud Boys and much more.
As a Huntington Beach local and a dad raising two kids in the Huntington Beach School District, I have seen quite my share of weird people. Gracey Van Der Mark takes the cake.
I will put it simply, I have never been worried for the safety of my children -except for the time that I met racist Gracey Van Der Mark. That fateful evening, Ms. Van Der Mark had to be escorted by police officers off the premises…screaming. That’s right.
You see a few years ago, while my children were attending XXXXX View Elementary, the school had applied for funding for additional play structures and fencing for the school. The PTA had asked any able parents to attend a monthly school board meeting to voice our support for the budget measure. Being a dad who loves to see his kids play outdoors, I attended to voice my support in what was supposed to be a routine board meeting. I’ve been to these meetings before. They are normally boring affairs. I even brought my 4 and 6 year-olds to the meeting. Well, I had no idea that I was about to experience what one parent described as “the local crazies”.
A conservative internet columnist in a cheap suit and Gracey Van Der Mark proceeded to read off a list of complaints at the school board about some kind of incident that had happened on an internet message board. That’s right, the tired parents in the audience had to wait while two grown adults ranted about liberals commenting on internet message boards. It was like a scene in The Onion.
This would normally be hilarious to my wife and I. Believe me, we have seen our fair share of strange, screaming people in Huntington Beach. However, tonight we had rushed to this meeting after a long day’s work with our children and honestly just wanted to eat dinner and go on with our lives. Gracey Van Der Mark and her bald friend in a cheap suit (who mentioned that he was armed) continued to grow louder and louder until they were fully screaming at the council board members while filming themselves for Facebook Live (that’s the type of people they were).
I honestly would’ve written the whole event off had it not gotten so ugly and devolved into outright threats, including the man yelling at a female school board member half his size, “You’re a fucking liar!” in front of my children. All while Gracey Van Der Mark posed for selfies.
Luckily Huntington Beach Police Department were on hand to gently nudge the two to leave once their time had been exceeded. They left yelling about the travesty of democracy and oppression they were experiencing.
The entire incident was so bizarre that I laughed at it. Until I saw the very same screaming woman appear on a ballot for my children’s school board election. That woman’s name was “Gracey Van Der Mark”.
I was horrified to learn that Gracey Van Der Mark has a history of extremism and bigotry. She marched with racist extremists like the Proud Boys, Baked Alaska, and even curated a youtube list once questioning the authenticity of the Holocaust. Her online exploits have since been scrubbed as clean as possible to appeal to a more broad “mainstream” Republican Party. But this is not the same Republican Party that Ronald Reagan ran years ago. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the local Huntington Beach Republican Party has fully endorsed candidates like Van Der Mark (not her given name), Holocaust deniers, and Proud Boy apologists. These people are not conservative. They have devolved into extremists with a flair for violence and clearly racist underpinnings. They no longer try to hide their bigotry and that is why they now support the old guard of weirdos who screamed at school board meetings, like Van Der Mark.
Please don’t vote for Gracey Van Der Mark. I would not trust her with the safety of my children and you shouldn’t either.
For more info on Ms. Van Der Mark, you can read this terrifying account here https://orangecounty.adl.org/news/anti-defamation-league-joins-call-for-hb-finance-commissioners-removal/
