GLENDALE – Glendale mayoral candidate Michelle Robertson has scrubbed “Black Lives Matter” from her social media profiles. The racial cleansing is raising questions about her struggles with her internet identity.
Robertson, who ran as the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2016 for Maricopa County Superintendent of Public Instruction, has been scrubbing her social media accounts in what appears to be an effort to portray herself as a moderate. Someone who would appeal to the traditional Glendale voting base.
Robertson’s cleansing first caught the attention of Glendale’s Yucca District Councilwoman Joyce Clark. Clark shared some “scrubbed” images of Robertson’s social media posts on her popular blog.
Clark writes:
We use social media to update the world on our status. In other words, our use of social media reflects our personalities, what we value, and what we believe in. It is a reflection of ourselves.
Recently, an intrepid user of all social media sent me a series of screen shots captured from Mayoral candidate Michelle Robertson’s Facebook pages. Out of curiosity, I went to her Facebook pages to see these postings for myself. Amazingly, they were all gone. Not some of them, but all of them. Ms. Robertson, or perhaps her campaign team, seems to have carefully scrubbed (erased) any posting that did not reflect her current, carefully cultivated image as a moderate candidate for mayor of Glendale.
Now when you look at her Facebook postings from the past two years there are very few, perhaps as a few as a half dozen postings in each year. Those postings that kept are filled with unicorns and rainbows, puppies and babies…all very benign and extremely non-controversial…unless you hate unicorns or babies!
None of the Facebook screen shots sent to me was anywhere to be seen. So, I thought I’d peel back the onion a bit and share with you a sampling of the items Ms. Robertson deleted.
The scrubbing isn’t the first time the campaign has faced questions about Robertson’s new internet image. Just this week, her campaign contacted the Arizona Daily Independent claiming that a page on her website offering walking tours in downtown Glendale for a $20 donation to her campaign amid the pandemic was “inadvertently posted to the “front end” of the website.
Ben Scheel, a campaign operative, demanded the reference to her website be retracted. “The “pitch,” wrote Scheel, “was inadvertently posted to the “front end” of the website during the construction of the website. This was only meant for the “back end” of the website to test functionality of the site.”
Scheel did not respond however to questions about Robertson’s whitewashing.
“I can’t imagine running for an office while hiding the real me while pretending to be something that I’m not,” writes Clark. “I’m clearly the opposite. I write my blog so that my constituents can really know what I’m thinking on a variety of issues.”
The primary election is Tuesday, Aug. 4. The deadline to register to vote for the Aug. 4 primary is Monday, July 6.