Unfamiliar with the Santa Methica sign saga? I’m jealous. But I’m also not going to write up an explainer again. You can catchup here. Above photo by Joni Yung.
In the summer of 2024, the Santa Monica Coalition seemed to be riding high. Holding a rally at Reed Park to protest the county’s needle exchange program in April of that year, it was able to attract a majority of the City Council and a small army of news cameras.
Sixteen months later, the group is now seen as so far outside the Santa Monica mainstream that a MAGA inspired banner worshipping Santa Monica Native and Senior White House staff member Stephen Miller is greeted with a shrug.
The Reed Park rally marked the high-point of the Coalition’s relevance. Behavior of some of the rally attendees and speakers shocked Santa Monica residents, and THE Coalition’s front man, John Alle attempted to calm the situation by lying about it. A lot.
Two months later, the City Council voted unanimously to condemn the Coalition’s mis-information campaign and the coalition ended up not endorsing any candidate in the fall election…in part because the Coalition had become the local version of the “Leopards Eating Faces Party.” Then-Mayor Phil Brock and now-Mayor Lana Negrete had tried to appease the group, but just weren’t conservative enough so the Coalition tried to eat their faces.
Negrete, name intentionally misspelled on the sign as “Regrete,” is the only Santa Monica politician named on the most recent banner to grace the Alle’s vacant storefront at the 3rd Street Promenade. The “Santa Monica Is Unsafe” banner series used to draw national attention, but after nearly two weeks being displayed a news search for “Stephen Miller” and “Santa Monica” shows zero hits on the banner (and one story about Miller’s grade school friends being aghast at his adult behavior.)
Sure, there are some people that have always drawn a line connecting the MAGA movement and the Coalition. Alle was a regular on KFI-Radio talk shows, the most conservative political talk shows in L.A. County, and on the Epoch Times’ California video series “California Insider.” In his review of the Reed Park rally, Jason Mastbaum argued the behavior of the crowd and speakers was MAGA-like.
Those connections are one thing. A banner praising Stephen Miller as the city’s saint is something else. You can’t make a straighter line between yourself and MAGA then that, absent a red hat of course.
The Coalition still has its supporters for sure. It can still get a couple hundred views of videos on their Instagram and YouTube pages. But it’s a bad look in Santa Monica to go full-MAGA, which the coalition has done. Absent a political earthquake that would make the shocking 2020 election look like bingo night at Saint Monica’s.
