Green Charter Township voters in rural Michigan just showed America how it’s done.
They had urged the township’s governing board not to go ahead with a big new Chinese-owned factory planned for the area in the northwest section of the state’s lower peninsula.
The township board wouldn’t give them the time of day.
So the people voted them out.
In a Tuesday special election, voters ousted five Republican officials in a recall, and there were also two resignations after the board had approved a $2.36 billion battery plant for electric vehicles planned by China’s Gotion High-tech Co., Fox News reported.
? BIG WIN IN MICHIGAN
The people have spoken!
The recall effort to oust the Green Charter township board that ok’ed the CCP linked Gotion battery plant in Mecosta county has been successful.
It was a clean sweep..
The entire board has been broomed. pic.twitter.com/1sYejtgo7j
— Justin Barclay (@MrJustinBarclay) November 8, 2023
The plant, which included a $715 million state subsidy, would have brought 2,300 jobs to the area. Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, called it the largest economic development project ever in Northern Michigan.
Of note, the population of rural Green Charter Township is a relatively paltry 3,219 — but that paltry number clearly holds some power.
“We don’t want to stop growth in our community,” said newly-elected township supervisor Jason Kruse. “But we want the right growth, and we want to make sure we’re not working with hostiles.”
Kruse, who won 70 percent of the vote in the election, said township residents continually pleaded with the board not to allow the Chinese factory, but their requests were ignored.
They were told there would be no public input on the planned project and approval for the new factory was, in effect, a done deal, Kruse described.
“Okay, so we have [Chinese] weather balloons flying over our country,” Kruse noted. “We have Chinese trying to start their own police forces around the country and it’s like: we want to do business with these people?”
Regarding local resistance to the proposed plant, Kruse continued that township residents “were asking – ‘Please, listen to us. Please.’ We’re begging them and then finally it was a moot point with them and then we knew exactly what we needed to do.”
Prior to the factory situation, the township board was acting in the best interests of the community, he said. But their blind support for the project caused pushback.
“It really is a sad thing to have to go through a recall,” Kruse lamented. “But that’s our democratic process and we chose to invoke that and we decided to recall the entire board.”
Ultimately the recall was about national security, he said.
“What we realized through all this is that whether it’s Democrat or Republican, it really is an issue matter – it’s a national security issue and whether or not these big plants need to be put in these areas,” Kruse said.
He added: “And it’s like a government pushdown…on our local governments. We want to keep it localized, not centralized, and we really need to be reminded about that every so often – that public officials work for the public.
“And so everybody out there across America needs to step back and understand that. You have the power. It’s still there. Government works and your vote matters, for sure at the local level.”
For its part, Gotion High Tech executives said they had no connections with the Chinese Communist Party.
However, in September Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and members of Congress from Michigan and from Illinois, where another Gotion plant is planned, noted that the company founder and his son belong to CCP organizations.
At least 900 of its employees are CCP members, according to those claims.
Bylaws of Gotion’s parent company require it to “carry out Party activities,” Fox News reported.
Like the growing awareness of the folly of the electric cars Gotion is designed to support, more Americans are realizing the dangers of ongoing entanglement with Communist China.
And what a great remedy shown by little Green Charter Township in Michigan.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
