On Saturday, an extremist anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion group called Mayday USA took over the center of Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill. And this far-right invasion wasn’t a shock. It was a city-permitted prayer rally at the center of Seattle’s queerest neighborhood.

On the first day of Memorial Day weekend, when queer Seattleites would typically be sunbathing in the grass, Seattle’s parks department granted the group a 15-hour permit to dominate the park with stadium speakers. Across the field that once hosted the Black Lives Matter Memorial Garden, they set up tents for children’s haircuts, facepainting, a bike give away, and a raffle for grocery store gift cards. In front of the public bathrooms, there was a towering stage with a pink and blue banner that read #DontMessWithOurKids. From a distance, with your ears plugged, the saturated colors could have been mistaken for a Pride rally.

But the voices thundered over the Hill: California-based Minister Ross Johnston speaking in tongues, the choruses of “Our God Is an Awesome God,” and the crowd 500-people deep with their hands raised, crying out about the Godless destruction of the American family.

We knew they were coming. They’d been promoting the event for weeks, and Seattle’s Department of Parks and Recreation permitted the event from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. that day. Hundreds came from as far as Boise and Spokane, where On Fire Ministries is based. Hundreds more Seattleites staged counterprotests. The first was by the fountain, where punk bands tried to drown out the megachurch rock—and offered fascism-free haircuts. The second, called “Keep Your Bibles Off Our Bodies,” was organized by Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity, Puget Sound Mobilization for Reproductive Justice and Radical Women. LGBTQ advocates made a crescent around the event, booing and chanting with signs that read “Republican Lies Kill Trans People” and “The LGBTQ Agenda is a peaceful existence.”

That friction would have been hot enough on its own, but between them were dozens of cops, armed, packing “less than lethal” weapons, carrying batons, and announcing instructions on a massive cruiser-mounted speaker. They set up a barrier between the two groups and stood with batons in hand, always facing the counterprotesters. The protest lasted more than six hours, and in that time the police made 23 arrests. All of them counterprotesters, all of them thrown to the ground and cuffed. An elderly man was shoved violently back over the barrier after sitting in peaceful protest on the other side. Witnesses describe cops dragging protestors over the barrier for shouting in the officers’ faces. Other protesters, seemingly zip tied and incapacitated, were pepper sprayed.

By 7 p.m., SPD asked the far-right group to end the event, three hours ahead of schedule, exactly as Mayday USA wanted it. With the protection of the police, they went to a historically gay park in a historically gay neighborhood in a historically gay city for a “spiritual” battle. They showed their followers queer people weren’t untouchable and that power would side with them over their vulnerable targets. And still, they were able to cry victim—claiming that Seattle is their Goliath, and using it as a rallying cry.

Why did the City of Seattle willingly hand the far right a win this weekend?

It helps to understand Mayday USA. On Saturday, hours into the rally, a young woman in a Mayday shirt walked up to me and asked, “Does this shock you?”

That was, most likely, the plan: to bring loud, boisterous, joyous hate speech into progressive areas as a media stunt. Worst case, they can show good, Christian “principled struggle,” bringing the Word to the heathens. Best case, they get a reaction out of Seattle, and can claim that the Christian right is being attacked by “far left trangender radical leftists.”

This tactic is showing its roots. Mayday USA is new, but it has decades of far-right activism behind it. Most notably, it’s supported by former six-term Washington State Representative Matt Shea from Spokane. In 2019, the far-right politician was investigated by the Republican party for his involvement in domestic terrorism as a leader of the Patriot Movement. Shea was involved in training young people to fight a "holy war," created a pamphlet called Biblical Basis for War, and advocated for replacing the government with a theocracy and "the killing of all males who do not agree."  In 2022, he was caught by Polish authorities bringing Ukrainian orphans out of the country, and trying to place them with American Christian families.

Shea was at the rally on Saturday, representing his Spokane-based church, On Fire Ministries, and making Instagram reels about how beautiful it was that the men were on the front lines, protecting the worshiping women from the counterprotestors. (They were standing behind the cops, alongside their own private security.)

So how was this far-right group granted a 15-hour permit in Capitol Hill?

In a public statement on Saturday night, Mayor Bruce Harrell acknowledged that the “far-right rally was held here…to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city’s values, in the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood.” But neither the Mayor’s office nor the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation have responded to The Stranger’s questions about their decision to grant the permit.

On Saturday, one of the Mayday USA organizers told the Seattle Times that Cal Anderson wasn’t the group’s first choice. They said they’d originally asked to go to Victor Steinbrueck Park by Pike Place Market, but, they claimed, the city said no. (When reached for comment, the Seattle Parks and Recreation said that Mayday USA had first applied for a permit for a street location through the Office of Economic Development. Their first request to Seattle Parks and Recreation, the mayor’s office said, was for Cal Anderson. “We are required to enable the expression of free speech throughout the parks system,” they wrote. “As the park was available and met the size and logistical needs for the event requested, the permit was granted.”)

Whether or not the park was their first choice, the organizers took advantage of their position in Cal Anderson.

In an Instagram reel at the event, Shea and Wenatchee minister Folake Kellogg celebrated being in Capitol Hill. “In 2020, we know what happened on this ground,” Kellogg said, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests. “We are in a spiritual battle. We are holding the ground.”

In the evening, the event pivoted from Jesus jams to religious testimony. One raspy-voiced woman told her life story from the stage: how she was raped and molested, how she turned to drugs and landed in federal prison. She spoke directly to the counterprotesters, parroting an age-old piece of anti-gay propaganda: She understood their pain, that she too had been molested like they all had, that they could find Jesus if they chose him.

While the speakers inflamed the crowd, SPD maintained a physical wall between the alt-right event and the counterprotesters. They put up metal barriers, and for most of the event, maintained a wall of cops as well—with their backs to the stage, trained on the counterprotest.

The barricade created a line that the police could enforce, and the cops appeared to take every opportunity to do so. All 23 arrests were physical and violent. Charlette LeFevre, the director of Capitol Hill Pride, had set up a booth near the fountain to show support for the counterprotesters. The small, greying woman in a high-vis vest paced the barrier, scolding the cops.

“They're using whatever excuse—just even somebody yelling in their face—to pull them over [the barricade] and arrest,” LaFevre told The Stranger on Saturday. “It's not illegal to yell in somebody's face. But I actually saw it happen firsthand.”

The only elected official at the park that day was Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who was working with SPD and city leaders, asking them to shut down the event before it escalated further. (Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who represents Capitol Hill, did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment before publication, and has not made a statement about the event.)

After SPD finally asked the far right group to shut down around 6:30 p.m., Mayday USA couldn’t help but take a last swipe at the counter protesters. “We got you to come to church,” one of them shouted. “You see how happy we are!”

The cops maintained a stiff physical barrier between the protesters and the Mayday attendees filtering out of the park. 

Throughout the weekend, elected officials and campaign hopefuls reprimanded the City and the parks department for permitting the event. The Seattle LGBTQ Commission “condemned” the event. “Eyewitnesses and press reports suggest that SPD escalated tensions instead of protecting community members from the far-right group’s targeted anti-LGBTQ rhetoric,” they wrote, and called for an investigation into SPD’s actions, a review of the permitting process, and “meaningful community engagement.”

Mayday USA used the mayor’s statement correctly identifying them as a far-right extremist group as proof they’d been oppressed by the City of Seattle.

They called for a “Rattle in Seattle”: a protest at City Hall on Tuesday against “the religious bigotry of Mayor Bruce Harrell,” calling for him to “apologize or resign.” “We’ve done 3 Mayday events with perfect peace,” they wrote on Instagram. “But in Seattle, we hit Goliath.”

Vivian McCall contributed additional reporting to this story.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Matt Shea as a US representative. He was a Washington State representative.