My elderly mother was sent one of the threatening Proud Boys emails. So why wasn’t I?

The FBI has now said that the threatening messages came from Iran. I still wonder how and why they targeted my mother — a woman in a comfortably red state who lives in the same place, votes the same way and donates to the same causes as me — in a small town in Alaska

The emails purported to be from the far-right Proud Boys group though it is now thought they were a part of foreign election interference (Getty Images)

My parents moved in with me several years ago to help raise my two young daughters and make the best of my long work hours as a single parent. My dad was a lifelong Republican and my mom a lifelong Democrat. They liked to joke about cancelling out each other’s votes.

Two years ago, my dad passed away and my mom, my daughters and I moved to Juneau, Alaska for the next leg in our adventure. It was a little scary being so far away from our support network after losing my dad and my mother’s husband of nearly 50 years, but we did it — and we found a new support system.  

Then the pandemic hit. We felt stranded, panicked and extremely isolated. You can’t pack up your car and drive out of Juneau. The only way in and out is air or sea. For months, our airport and sea ports were closed to travelers with few exceptions, but restrictions loosened and finally my mom was talking about visiting family in the lower 48. We ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth the risk of exposure to the coronavirus, but it was nice enough that it had become a realistic option!  

A few days ago, we were enjoying our morning coffee and a reading about a few emails that local Alaskans had been getting from a group claiming to be the Proud Boys. As I was talking about how ridiculous the rhetoric had gotten my mom gasped, “I got one of those emails!” Neither of us could believe it. She sent it over to me and we were both shocked by the threatening and intimidating language. 

I checked to see if I received an email myself, but I hadn’t. We both registered to vote on the same day when we moved to Alaska with the same party affiliation. We’ve both donated to Democratic causes in this election cycle at levels a single mom and a retiree on social security can afford. We both voted by mail.  

Why would an email like this even target Alaska, we wondered? It’s been comfortably red for a while now with only three electoral votes. It doesn’t make much sense. Alaskans are independent, small-government types, not Trumpian. Some local elections have seen record high voter turnout this year and we’ve had a few recent scandals among the Alaskan GOP so voters are motivated to be heard. So perhaps it was considered that that red lead wasn’t the comfortable after all. Then again, maybe our state was a test run for the bigger fish in Florida and Arizona, we thought.

My mom is savvy enough to know that the so-called Proud Boys weren’t coming for her, but she felt targeted because she thought other elderly people might feel very threatened by this. Threatened enough that they may stay away from the voting. Threatened enough that if they came to a voting location and saw President Trump’s supporters standing by, maybe they would think about this email they received and sit this election out.  

That’s really what it boils down to. This election cycle has gotten acrid enough that targeted emails can go out to an already frayed population from an unknown source and take advantage of the existing situation to reduce voter turnout.

The FBI — whose tip line we did report the email to when we received it — has said that Iran was behind these messages, and that both Russia and Iran received voter information and have already interfered in the 2020 election. It’s a scary thought. It’s also scary how believable the emails were when they hit Americans’ inboxes. They could have just as easily come from a real source within our country as they could from outside.

I hear the president say, “Stand back and stand by” at a debate while the Proud Boys make this their slogan. He says, "I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully” as they gather outside polling locations, waving flags and chanting. Then my mom gets an email from the so-called Proud Boys that tells her they have her address and they’ll come after her if she doesn’t vote for Trump.

Somebody feeling a little more vulnerable, with a little less of a support system may decide to sit the 2020 election out or, worse, change their vote. Not me and certainly not my mom. She’s been through too much in her lifetime to not speak her mind and make her vote count, no matter who is sowing discord in the United States right now — and no matter who purports to be working for the president.