Anti-maskers suffer embarrassing failure in Fargo
MINOT, N.D. — A thing we often forget in politics is that the loudest voices are not always the most numerous.
We have a tendency to inflate the importance of prolific Facebook gadflies and shouty public meeting mobs. We assume they are always representative of larger political movements, and often they’re not.
Case in point, consider the plight of the Recall Fargo School Board group. This bunch, motivated by pique over local masking requirements, set out to recall four members of Fargo’s school district leadership.
Everyone assumed they’d at least be successful at putting the candidates on the ballot, mostly because the masking kerfuffle has dominated local and national headlines for pretty much the entirety of the pandemic. Surely there were enough anti-masking cranks out there to recall some school board members to the ballot.
Not so, it seems. Even in North Dakota’s largest community, this host of incompetents couldn’t get the 4,144 signatures required for each candidate.
