SLO County school board candidate shared QAnon video, fake news. Is that ‘part of the past’?
A candidate for a San Luis Obispo County school board position drew concern after she posted a video associated with a QAnon conspiracy theory and shared misinformation about COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter protests on social media.
Eve Dobler-Drew, 73, also promoted the ex-gay Christianity movement and called philanthropist Melinda Gates “satanic” in Facebook posts.
Dobler-Drew is running for a position on the San Luis Coastal Unified School District board of trustees. A former teacher in Lucia Mar Unified School District, Dobler-Drew is running against two incumbents — Walt Millar and Kathryn Eisendrath Rogers.
Though Dobler-Drew’s Facebook and Twitter pages have been purged of the posts she had previously shared, screenshots were obtained by The Tribune.
Her social media posts drew concern from some San Luis Coastal board members and were mentioned by Tribune columnist Tom Fulks in a recent column about so-called “Trojan Horses running for office.”
Chris Ungar, a current board member, said he was disturbed that the posts were deleted.
“I do appreciate voices from different viewpoints to come up to give our students the best possible choices,” Ungar said. “But what concerns me is when a candidate is trying to hide important information about themselves that voters should be able to see.”
Dobler-Drew told The Tribune she deleted the posts because she is “beginning a new phase” in her life.
“All those tweets are part of the past. Those things are past history, and don’t have any bearing on what I’m doing now,” she said. “I am pursuing a non-partisan, non-political school board position.”
Those who took screenshots of the now-deleted social media posts were “looking for ammunition” against her, Dobler-Drew said.
School board candidate’s posts share QAnon conspiracy, fake news
In May, Dobler-Drew retweeted a post by Twitter user dawnmarie1971 stating, “BREAKING: ANTIFA manual that was accidentally dropped at a riot in Oregon. 8 pages. These riots are PLANNED.”
The supposed anti-fascist manual was said to be dropped in Oregon in 2020, but was actually created in April 2015 in reference to protests in Baltimore, Maryland, over Freddie Gray’s death in police custody, according to The Poynter Institute’s fact check of the social media posts.
Those 2015 protests were not violent, according to The Poynter Institute.
Another post shared by Dobler-Drew on Twitter in June said “While I have many black friends, I do not see the logic of the excesses of one rogue cop requiring the backlash of a multitude. Who is delivering pallets of bricks in a systemically organized fashion? There is some systemic violence really worth considering.”
A Snopes.com fact check concluded that claims that government officials, law enforcement, billionaires or anti-fascist groups placed pallets of bricks near protests in the United States to stoke violence were completely false.
Dobler-Drew also tweeted in June that although George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis police custody, “should never have died at the hands of the cop,” he “lived his life as a violent criminal” and “should not be martyred today.”
In now-deleted Facebook posts, Dobler-Drew shared articles that advocated against abortion, urged people to “vote against Democrats because they support (Black Lives Matter)“ and claimed that COVID-19 was designed in a Wuhan, China, laboratory. Scientific evidence contradicts the latter claim, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In June, Dobler-Drew posted on Facebook that Gates, the wife of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, is “satanic” due to a pendant she wore in a broadcast interview that many claim is an upside-down cross.
However, the Church of Satan says that an upside-down or inverted cross is not a Satanic symbol and is instead seen by Christians as symbolic of St. Peter, according to the church’s website.
In January, Dobler-Drew shared a YouTube video on Facebook promoting the Changed Movement, which encourages people to “overcome” their LGBTQ+ sexual orientation or gender identity through therapy and religious support.
Some experts equate overcoming one’s sexual orientation or gender identity with conversion therapy, which is a “dangerous and discredited” practice, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Dobler-Drew said she does not support conversion therapy, and does not “support anything that tries to strong-arm a person or influence them to go a certain way in what their self identity is.” That includes, she said, those “trying to persuade people to be in the LGBTQ group.”
Dobler Drew’s post was particularly troubling, Ungar said, because of a 2017 scandal involving the school district in which a San Luis Obispo High School teacher wrote a letter to the student newspaper, Expressions, saying people committing homosexual acts “deserve to die.”
The letter was in response to the student newspaper’s print edition that featured LGBTQ issues and had a picture of two women kissing on the cover.
In May, Dobler-Drew shared on Facebook a video titled “Follow the White Rabbit” that has since been taken down. The video shows an edited version of a 2016 campaign speech by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, with images of Hillary Clinton and other subjects of the speech shown.
At the end of the video, the words “now comes the pain,” and “WWG1WGA,” a QAnon slogan meaning “where we go one, we go all” appear along with “QAnon Follow the White Rabbit.”
QAnon is a “far right-wing, loosely organized network and community of believers who embrace a range of unsubstantiated beliefs,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Dobler-Drew said that her previous social media posts are not relevant to her campaign for a position on the San Luis Coastal board, and that this year is “a year of new beginnings.”
“My new beginning was to step up and try to give back to the community,” she said. “That’s why I say that anything from the past before I ran for office has no bearing on where I am now.”
This story was originally published October 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
