Fight where it makes the most sense

We can't control much of what comes out of Washington. We can have an impact where we live.

May 09, 2025

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Tony Thaw took off his jacket and got ready to sit down in his chair as someone mentioned the newspaper article. Thaw mumbled something I couldn’t hear before one of his fellow board members said, “I guess you and newspapers just don’t get along.”

Thaw dismissed the brewing controversy on the front page of Darien News, which on Wednesday ran an article about an RV that Thaw had installed behind a new bar and grill on Sapelo Island under the headline “RV in Hog Hammock Creates Concern.”

Thaw said he didn’t subscribe to the newspaper, then took his seat as chair of the McIntosh County Board of Tax Assessors at a meeting Wednesday in Darien, where I was the only person in the audience in the town’’s old City Hall. The board went through some typically boring agenda items as it carried out its meeting — approving and denying homestead exemptions, discussing conservation easements, the budget, a trip they’ll take to some government conference. But that wasn’t why I was there.

I was there because in addition to the RV that Thaw has put behind the bar, apparently for his bartender to live in, the chair of the McIntosh County Board of Tax Assessors also has personal property on the island where the bar is located, Sapelo. There, a community of 30 to 50 slave descendants has been trying to hold on to their ancestral land as outside forces make it more and more difficult to do so. Thaw is one of those outside forces. Like many of his fellow white landowners on Sapelo, Thaw has acquired a beautiful marshfront lot where he has constructed a home that is larger than county law allows. At least 10 of his fellow white land-grabbers have also built homes that are in direct violation of county ordinance — and yet they have faced no consequences, I’ve found.

For the last two weeks I have been immersed in the relatively isolated world of Sapelo, a 10,000-acre island off Georgia’s coast that can only be reached by ferry. I’ve spent this time wrapping up a story that is six years in the making, since my first trip to Sapelo in 2019, shortly after I moved to Savannah. That story will be published by the Guardian and will detail how Thaw and other whites have taken much of Sapelo’s habitable land over the last 40 years, utilizing political connections and often murky legal and real estate handiwork to acquire and swindle land from the island’s natives, descendants of slaves who purchased the land on which they were enslaved — the Gullah-Geechee.

Being immersed in Sapelo has been instructive. Here is a small community fighting more powerful forces. Thaw was appointed to the board of tax assessors by the McIntosh County Board of Commissioners. That board has one Black commissioner and four white ones in a county that is 30 percent Black. When the board proposed an ordinance change that would allow for larger homes on Sapelo — even larger than the homes like Thaw’s that are already on Sapelo and in violation of the law — the descendant community pushed back, gathering enough signatures to hold a voter referendum on the proposed changes.

McIntosh County then sued its own judge to stop the referendum from undoing the proposed ordinance change. The matter is now the subject of three lawsuits being decided by the Georgia Supreme Court. All of this has given me a revelation of sorts — while the sheer volume of authoritarian maneuvers in the first 100 days of the second Trump administration has been at times exhausting, seeing the machinations of local government at work in McIntosh County has reminded me that we still have some control over what this country looks like.

After covering so many major developments in Trump’s first 100 days, I had begun to wonder whether it was worth my time and energy to stay on top of every authoritarian measure coming out of the White House. I still think that’s worth some of my time and energy, just not all of it. Immersing myself, once again, in the saga of Sapelo, I think I’ve found something of a code that has unlocked a way for not just myself, but for all Americans to do something about the authoritarianism being pushed on all of us.

In my lifetime, the American right has been tremendously successful in deploying the levers of government in their favor. The right has taken over school boards, library boards, city councils, and county governments. There, they’ve implemented policies that are often tyrannical in nature, seeking to stifle dissent and make the rest of us feel like we’ve lost. But the story of Sapelo shows that these losses are, at times, a choice.

In our cities, towns and state capitols, progressive Americans can do the same.

Tony Thaw and his fellow white landowners have gotten away with violating the law and building homes on Sapelo that are larger than allowed by county ordinance because they are the government in McIntosh County. If they’re not, if people with respect for the Gullah heritage of Sapelo and things like county zoning laws were in positions of power, people like Thaw wouldn’t be able to so easily get away with their apparent wrongdoing.

After the meeting ended, the members of the board left the conference room and headed toward the exit. Thaw went down a hallway toward an elevator, and I hopped in with him. He didn’t answer any of my questions about his acquisition of land on Sapelo or how he was able to build a home larger that’s in obvious violation of county law, but as he continued to walk away from me toward his truck he did respond to something I said. I told Thaw that my story detailing his and others’ sometimes questionable acquisition of descendant land on Sapelo — and their illegal homes — would come out whether he spoke to me or not.

“It doesn’t matter,” Thaw responded as he walked away.

I wondered, does it not matter because Thaw doesn’t care what people think of him? That’s possible. It’s also possible that Thaw doesn’t believe my story matters because he and his fellow white Sapelo landowners hold the power in McIntosh County, and my story won’t change that. If that’s the case, Thaw’s “it doesn’t matter” is perhaps the most instructive development of these last few weeks of reporting on Sapelo.

Trump supporters like Thaw often don’t believe they’re accountable to anyone — not the press, not the nation or the world, not Sapelo’s descendants, not their fellow citizens of McIntosh County. Nothing that anyone says or does matters because they have the power. Until they don’t.

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P.S. My good friend Steven Monacelli will be writing for American Doom over the next month while I tend to some other matters, including wrapping up my book. Just a reminder that if you sign up to be a founding member of American Doom you’ll get a signed copy. It’s a memoir titled If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened: the Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. You can support my and Steven’s work through a paid subscription to Doom if you’d like, which will get you access to this newsletter’s archives as well as audio version of each post.

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