Said Ashley Sova, quoted in "A rural Washington school board race shows how far-right extremists are shifting to local power/The establishment candidate thought she was a shoo-in, but she hadn’t contended with the home-schooling, anti-masking member of the far-right Three Percent movement" (WaPo).
Sova was reminded that she was, quite literally, toting a gun at that moment, with a pistol strapped to her hip.She laughed. “But I’m not waving it around, you know what I mean,” she said. “This is a tool. It is to be an equalizer in any bad situation. I’m not here to intimidate people.”...Two hours before she was to be sworn in at her first school board meeting, Sova was in mud-spattered boots feeding farm animals on her family’s 12-acre compound, which is nestled in the woods behind a tall metal gate with signs warning that trespassers would be shot. Sova said she would change her shoes and try not to cuss, but that otherwise, she intended to be 100 percent herself on the board....
Sova is an accidental politician, recruited as a last-minute replacement when another candidate, a local right-wing activist, realized that his address was just outside the district. She said she never previously sought any public role — “Oh sweet baby Jesus, no!” — and didn’t think she had much of a chance at winning.Sova saw running mainly as a way to register conservative discontent on the issues of the moment: mask mandates, diversity and inclusion efforts, sex education lessons. Before filing, Sova said, she had family check-ins with her husband, a Slovakian immigrant whose family’s escape from communist rule influenced her politics, and their three children, ages 16, 15 and 10. The kids have been home-schooled since 2014.
“It was a big decision for us,” Sova said of entering the race. “I knew right now, in this era, that I was going to get a lot of crap.” And she did, mostly related to her Three Percenter activity, which Sova brushes off as being “in the country doing country things.”
She said she doesn’t take part in protests at the state capitol. She joined because she shares the group’s “constitutionalist” stances and wanted to learn survival skills like canning and butchering. “We have bonfires over here where the music is loud and the neighbors don’t care. Where we’ve got a big fire going, kids jumping on the trampoline and everybody’s running around and having fun,” Sova said. “That, to us, is Three Percent.”
Sova’s critics reject that idealized image, especially after seeing Three Percenter flags among the rioters at the U.S. Capitol....
ADDED: I had to go over to Wikipedia to answer my question 3% of what?
The group's name derives from the erroneous claim that "the active forces in the field against the King's tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists" during the American Revolution.
Also of interest:
On February 21, 2021, their leadership dissolved the American national group in response to the 2021 United States Capitol attack, condemning the violence. Other Three Percenters remain as independent local groups.
