America's yard sign discourse, vol. 3

Plus: trusting strangers, a Nordic-tiki sour, and more

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

America’s yard sign discourse, vol. 3

I have a longstanding fascination with non-campaign political yard signs.

I first wrote about them for The Week in the summer of 2020 while living in the Twin Cities, then the epicenter of America’s race debates. This was also high COVID season, well before the vaccines dropped, and Minnesota is a deep blue state. Not, like, Joe Biden blue—not in the cities, anyway. More like Bernie Sanders blue. Like, I made it all the way to 2021 without ever seeing a MAGA hat in real life blue.

So we’d had lockdowns and protests, riots and curfews, and little in the way of opportunity for in-person political conversations. There’d always been a lot of political signage around the area, but it was in this context that yard sign discourse really proliferated and came to my attention. As I wrote then:

The Twin Cities are bursting with political yard signs.

They’re not campaign signs—those are tellingly few. I’ve seen more faded blue holdovers from 2016 than support for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden or President Trump. No, the signs dotting my neighborhood and absolutely swarming the next neighborhood over aren’t about voting, per se. They’re about policy, principles, identity, and they’re almost entirely left-wing. While I’ve never been fond of the phrase “virtue signaling”—its contempt is often unfair—used literally, it’s an apt description of what’s happening in our metro’s front yards.

That summer was peak “In this house” time. You know those signs, I’m sure: the little creeds that interviewees told me (over Facebook, of course, because COVID) were deliberate signals about themselves:

“I’m lucky,” said Chelsea, who lives in Saint Paul. “I don’t have a large family I feel the need to mollify, [and] I work in a progressive company.” She doesn’t invite anyone to her house who doesn’t affirm her signs’ doctrines, Chelsea told me, describing this as a matter of “fundamental morality,” not mere politics. “We live in a bubble,” said another Saint Paulite, Laurie. “It is unlikely that visitors to our house will disagree with our signs.”

Why display them? The universal reason was virtue signaling in that literal sense. Laurie’s next-door neighbors are refugees, she said, and “we wanted to signal to them that we were welcoming.” Chelsea’s family, too, wanted to “identify ourselves as friendly and safe” while sending a message to “people who may not be sympathetic that this neighborhood will stand up for people who need it.” She recounted overhearing passersby cite her sign as evidence that “this neighborhood is nice people.”

When I moved to Pennsylvania a year later, I wrote about yard signs again. Here the signage is far more varied. It’s also evolving. “In this house” was prominent in the summer of 2021—not as prominent as it had been in Minnesota, but well-represented. Now I can only think of one straggler in the neighborhood, and it feels like they’ve started letting the garden obscure it on purpose.

My sense is that “In this house” is old hat. There are newer, hotter options for literally staking out your identity. So consider this the third installment of my informal series, featuring three of the most notable political messages in my purple neighborhood.

“Leftism is a mental illness. Turn off the TV and get help.”

I’m cheating a tiny bit with this one, as it’s not actually in someone’s front yard. But it is, so far as I can tell from a little spelunking through Google Street View history, on their business property, and it’s a small business and a DIY sign, so I figure: close enough. Here’s a pic from Google Maps dated to November 2023:

I’d get an updated photo if I could, but it’s a fast road with no shoulder and, at this spot, no sidewalk. There was a special election version this past fall—I can’t remember details, but I think it endorsed Donald Trump on one side and denounced Kamala Harris on the other. Both before and after that, though, the current default is as quoted above: “Leftism is a mental illness. Turn off the TV and get help.”

There are two things I find intriguing here. One is that the business in question appears to be a going concern, and the sign used to advertise it. That would seem like a sound business decision, as this is a busy road and the shop is down a steep hill on a side street, totally invisible to most drivers. Give up this signage and you lose probably 99 percent of roadside advertising, so it feels notable that the owner has decided the politics (and politics easily connected to his business) should take priority.

The other thing is that this man—and it is a man, which I knew from the phrasing even before checking out the business—is apparently working off a 20-year-old model of media. What left-of-center TV shows does he imagine are really doing numbers these days?

Fox News absolutely trounces MSNBC and CNN in viewership, and even Fox has piddling ratings compared to television in the pre-internet era. Seinfeld used to be able to pull in north of 30 million people for a single episode. In the first quarter of this year, “Fox News averaged 3.012 million total primetime viewers.” For MSNBC, that number was 1.024 million. For CNN, just 558,000. And yes, obviously there are clips that go around online and other secondary means of influence, but these are strikingly small numbers in the grand scheme of things.

The kind of political transmission I take this guy to be worried about isn’t really happening on TV these days. It’s on TikTok, chiefly, but also Bluesky, X, Instagram, podcasts, and YouTube. I kinda want to tell him … but I also want to see if he gets there on his own.

“The future is trans,” in tiny graffiti on a fire hydrant

As “In this house” has declined, trans-centric messaging seems to have filled the vacuum. There are lots of trans flags about, and “Protect trans kids” is a popular sign.

But while I promise my third example will focus on yard signs proper, here I want to once again stretch the category and attend to something else on this subject. On a rusty fire hydrant, in small white letters against dark green paint, the declaration: “The future is trans.”