We Heart Seattle and the Right-Wing Grift-o-Sphere
The Meteoric Rise of Mediocre Activist Andrea Suarez
If you have the misfortune of being someone who pays far too much attention to local politics, then you might have noticed a flap in early January over a long-form KUOW story on homelessness in Seattle. At the heart of the criticism was KUOW’s choice to put a local group, We Heart Seattle, front and center in their narrative about the homelessness crisis.
There was little unique about this blow-up on Seattle Twitter – for five years now, local media has elevated We Heart Seattle and its founder, Andrea Suarez, in the discourse on the region’s housing crisis. And for five years, people have criticized the group as a hate group that makes its living on tormenting the poorest people in our city (catalogued by the local group We Heart Seattle Exposed). This criticism is well founded. This “nonprofit” organization – “nonprofit” being the title we choose to give groups whose profits are simply located in a different division than their organization’s public facing front – is simply one of thousands of rotten mushrooms that has sprung from huge sums of conservative money sloshing around this country.
To understand We Heart Seattle and what its function is in a city like Seattle requires going back to the 1970s when the capitalist class in America began to panic that the US was, in the words of Nixon’s Treasury Secretary William Simon, “careening with frightening speed toward collectivism.” Terrified, corporate America declared that, “the time has come—indeed, it is long overdue—for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.”
Workers’ wages had been rising throughout the 1960s, peaking in 1973, thanks to a growing militancy in the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement. America’s capitalist class dubbed this a “crisis of democracy” and in 1971 the National Chamber of Commerce asked corporate lawyer and Phillip Morris board member, Lewis Powell, to write up a confidential document proposing a solution.
What Powell ultimately proposed was a wartime mobilization of America’s capitalist class to reshape the American mind. Money flooded in, with the National Chamber of Commerce increasing its membership from 60,000 to over 250,000 firms by the early 1980s. Veterans of the class war like the National Association of Manufacturers moved their headquarters to Washington DC and groups like the Heritage Foundation sprung from the earth fully formed, like little rotten mushrooms. And the money flowed. By 1978, the Business Roundtable alone was spending $900 million per year on public re-education.
This brings us back to We Heart Seattle. Andrea Suarez started the organization in 2020 under the name I Heart Downtown Seattle. Nominally formed as an organization for neighborhood groups to meet and do litter clean-up, there were plenty of early signs of the group’s future direction.
Suarez was given space on the Seattle Times opinion page in December of 2020 to give a coming-out announcement for her new organization. In the first paragraph, she states that she was “inspired” by the “downtown riots” – the George Floyd protests – to clean-up downtown. She goes on to blame the “hoarding mentality” of the homeless fueled by the “circular economy of donations and free drug needles” for the problems of the city.
Dubbing her a “gift to our region,” the Times was enchanted and wrote several fawning pieces about Andrea and her organization over the next year. Suarez, a former corporate salesman for DHL, relabeled herself a “public safety expert” and became the go-to expert for the Seattle Times, KOMO, King 5, and the rest of the city’s wretched media establishment.
Such a meteoric rise might strike a curious reporter as strange, possibly even suspicious. Luckily, Seattle news media is not burdened by such hang-ups. To this day, there has been exactly one reporter, Vivian McCall, among Seattle’s mainstream media that has thought to probe into Suarez and We Heart Seattle’s origins.
We Heart Seattle’s budget went from $5,000 in 2020 to $250,000 in 2021. The money was likely flowing in from the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Seattle Association who shared Suarez’s “get tough on the homeless” policy. Though, the line-up of possible funders doesn’t end there. We Heart Seattle’s rejection of housing-first policies and promotion of further criminalization of poverty is shared by all conservative organizations and think-tanks at every level … strange how that works out. We Heart Seattle’s revenue was $760,991 in 2023. Suarez paid herself $55,000 and they shelled out $19,032 in professional fundraising fees.
Still, We Heart Seattle would not come into full bloom until 2022, when Suarez met with Michael Shellenberger, a right-wing grifter in the Bay Area with a national audience. Shellenberger began his career working corporate public relations in the early 2000s. In 2006, he and associate Ted Nordhaus formed the consulting firm American Environics. Trying to get a contract with the national Democratic Party, they pitched them a strategy of ignoring “populist economics” and calls for universal healthcare in exchange for increasing focus on culture war messaging, while tacking to the right on all substantive policies.
Since this had been the core strategy of the Democratic Party since the Carter years, there was no more room at the inn for another Third Way consulting firm. So, Shellenberger and Nordhaus pivoted, creating the Breakthrough Institute in 2007. Nominally an environmentalist consulting firm, the Breakthrough Institute opposed all caps on carbon emissions and extraction as well as any funding of clean energy projects. Their core environmental policy is ‘don’t worry about climate change because some, yet to be determined, technology will save us in the future.’
The Breakthrough Institute can be opaque about their funding, but there have been some clues. When a series of exposé’s were released beginning in 2005 exposing some of the dozens and dozens of front groups Exxon-Mobil used to spread climate change denial, Shellenberger and Nordhaus penned an editorial defending the company. Or, there is the case of the Breakthrough Institute’s public advocacy for nuclear energy, and the Nuclear Energy Institute crediting Shellenberger as one of the “third parties” the NEI “engaged” to do public outreach for them.
Shellenberger has been a life-long grifter, lying to the public for private cash from the wealthiest people in the country. In 2016, he decided to become a solo-act, declaring himself an expert on topics as varied as coal/nuclear power, climate change, drug addiction, homelessness, trans-issues, free speech, internet censorship, and the existence of flying saucers – Shellenberger’s opinion lining up neatly with baseline conservative politics in each case.
Given Shellenberger’s trajectory, it was inevitable that he and Andrea Suarez would meet – two self-declared experts playing the classic shill in the great con-game that is American politics under neoliberalism. After meeting in 2022, Shellenberger cut Suarez a check for fifteen-thousand-dollars and helped her organize yet another “non-profit” in Seattle, North America Recovers. More rotten mushrooms.
The presence of a national figure like Shellenberger drew even more grifters to We Heart Seattle. Kevin Dahlgren, a conservative YouTube personality, was brought in as president of the organization in 2022. One year later he was facing charges in Oregon for stealing the identities of homeless people for the purpose of committing fraud. On January 27 Dahlgren pleaded guilty to felony first degree theft and felony aggravated identity theft in Multnomah County court. Robert Marbut, a former Trump Administration official who got his start running an infamously punitive homeless shelter in San Antonio, and masterminded the city’s racist resettlement of Hurricane Katrina refugees, began hanging around Suarez and We Heart Seattle in 2023. Brandi Kruse – local news anchor turned aspiring Rush Limbaugh – and Jonathan Choe – local conservative grifter and pervert – became We Heart Seattle’s biggest boosters on social media.
The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think-tank initially created to push new-earth creationism turned generic Heritage Foundation copycat, joined in with We Heart Seattle as a cofounder of North America Recovers. In March of 2024, the Discovery Institute and We Heart Seattle collaborated with lesser-son William “Billy” Baldwin on the “documentary” Americans With No Address. Similar to previous pieces like 2019’s Seattle is Dying, the film is a cynical bit of poverty porn that hits with all the subtlety of Triumph of the Will. Naturally, it was directed by Jonathan Choe, funded by the Discovery Institute and stars Andrea Suarez and Robert Marbut – the grift goes around and around.
So, what has five-years of centering Andrea Suarez and We Heart Seattle in the discourse around the housing crisis done for Seattle? Seattle now has a record number of homeless residents – part of a national trend – beating the previous high from 2023, which beat the previous high from 2022. This is not surprising as We Heart Seattle’s embrace of a punishment-first model for dealing with homeless people is nothing new, it is the status-quo response that every single city, town, and county in the country has pursued for a quarter century.
And thus, the debate around homelessness enters the same realm as the drug war and climate change, a hermetically-sealed conservative echo chamber meant to produce endless reams of discourse that only serve to bolster an increasingly cruel status quo. As inequality grows in the United States and worldwide an increasingly bloated capitalist class has cast about looking for places to invest, launder, and hide its filthy lucre. Real estate has been the chief asset for achieving this goal, with everything from homes to apartments to commercial real estate being converted from places that humans inhabit into investment properties to be milked for rents and then ultimately abandoned.
In King County, 2024 also marked a record setting year for median home prices and rental evictions – again reflecting national trends. With all this valuable real estate floating around, the last thing investors want is a bunch of recently de-housed people screwing up their investment. It is a modern-day enclosure movement, except this time there is no place for evicted peasants to go to. There are no cities thirsting for labor, there is no “new world,” and there is no western frontier to provide a safety valve for the disruption. All that is left, are endless sweeps.
In a world like this it could be easy for people to get angry at the wealthy who throw them out on the streets. And that is where We Heart Seattle and the thousands of other little rotten mushrooms that are just like it come in. Why does a city as wealthy as Seattle have so much visible poverty? It must be the “homeless syndicate,” “baby momma debt,” “addiction enablement,” and on and on. It must be the poorest people in the city who secretly pull all the strings and not those that treat the city’s real estate market as their personal piggy bank. After all, they are the backers of We Heart Seattle, and they are a “gift to our region.”
—Brian Platt
Editor’s note: Andrea Suarez ran for Legislative District 43, Position 2 during the last cycle and was trounced by Shaun Scott - former field director for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Community organizer Alycia Ramirez pointed out on Twitter/X that some urls on Andrea’s campaign website (https://electandrea.com/author/krist/) suggest that very tall and very smooth-headed Libertarian former rock star Krist Novoselic authored some of her posts, including this gem: “I will not bandy around the terms bolshevik or communist. Red baiting is a right wing cliché … the terms bolshevik and communist actually describe Shaun Scott’s agenda. There is no avoiding this.”
Also: As we went to press Kevin Dahlgren pleaded guilty to multiple felonies, and DivestSPD pointed out that Andrea Suarez supported Dahlgren up until he was charged and claimed that he “virtually eliminated homelessness in Gresham,” where “he abused his position as an outreach specialist to exploit the homeless for personal gain.” DivestSPD also noted that “Andrea is thanking Seattle-based property management firm Pillar Properties for donating to We Heart Seattle. Pillar has been named in anti-trust lawsuits alleging the company used algorithms to inflate rents.” Andrea also thanked Kroger (owners of local supermarkets QFC and Fred Meyer), who donated a truck to WHS. We have a special report on Kroger coming next month.
A condensed version of this article appeared in the February print edition of the Nirvana WOK newsletter:
