By Carleen Johnson
The Center Square

A little more than a month after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah, new Braver Angels CEO Maury Giles came to Seattle. Braver Angels describes itself as “a citizens’ organization uniting red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America.”

Giles’ Wednesday appearance in the Emerald City comes at a time when Washington, a deep-blue state in terms of political ideology, is experiencing its own share of political conflict in the form of numerous reports of harassment and physical attacks against signature gatherers for the conservative Let’s Go Washington political action committee.

LGW is gathering signatures for initiatives related to transgender athletes in school sports and parental rights.

Individuals have stolen signature sheets, which contain the personal information of signers. In one incident at a Fred Meyer in Tacoma, a young woman stole signature sheets from the gatherer, fled the scene, and hit an innocent bystander’s car in the parking lot. No serious injuries were reported.

Signature gatherers have faced threats, yelling and physical confrontations. In Covington, a man reportedly stole and destroyed petitions from a gatherer outside a Walmart.

Non-emergency 911 lines have been used to report signature gatherers for non-criminal reasons, such as “hate speech.”

“It starts with, from our perspective, being able to inspire people and awaken them to understand that you have the personal agency to choose to act instead of react,” Giles told The Center Square on Wednesday at the Swedish Club in Seattle, where about 100 people gathered to hear him speak. “When you’re engaging with someone else and you hear something that’s wrong or it’s getting your blood boiling, instead of playing into the dominant narrative of the two tribes, you look at the person you’re talking to as a person, not as a Democrat, not as a Republican, not as a red or blue, but as a person.”

Giles acknowledged that can be challenging in a state like Washington, where Democrats dominate both chambers of the Legislature and the state leans heavily progressive.

“Even when you’re in a state where the party that is the dominant party is not your tribe, you do have the power to affect change by actually engaging with each other,” he said. “And when stuff gets way out of balance, what we find is even people of that same tribe or party, they can see the imbalance as well, but they don’t they don’t engage, and if you don’t get enough people talking to each other and then looking at where the challenges are, then you’re missing a chance to actually affect change in your local community.”

Getting people to see each other as human beings and reach across the ideological aisle is even more important in sharply divided states like Washington, according to Giles.

“I believe in the American people at their core want light over darkness, want love over hate,” he said. “And you can’t defeat darkness with darkness. You can’t. You can’t defeat hate with hate. It just doesn’t work. And that’s what we’re trying to promote to go beyond that.”