Hilltop Patriots: An Interview with Founder Marie McFarland

By Brian Bahouth

In the two and a half years since the Hilltop Patriots formed, they have made their presence and principles known to the communities of Lincoln County, Oregon and beyond. The group initially met at the Hilltop Inn in Lincoln City but outgrew that space and now gather at an old fire station in the Taft District of Lincoln City. Marie McFarland, the Hilltop Patriots founder, recently met me at the Hilltop Inn to discuss the group and its aims.

“My friends were calling, and we were talking about current events, and their frustration was that they felt no one else felt as they did,” McFarland explained when asked about how the group formed. “And so I invited seven friends down here to the Hilltop restaurant to meet one day for an hour for lunch, and we closed the restaurant at three o’clock and we decided that we all had something in common. 

“We took time to learn about each other, what our backgrounds were and something about each other. And the next meeting, we agreed we’d meet in three weeks. A month was too long, two weeks was too short, and so three weeks later, we met, and each of us brought more friends, and it’s been growing like that.

“And after not quite a year, we had to find another place to meet because we’d outgrown Hilltop [Inn], and we are now well over 100 in Lincoln County. We have people come from as far as Waldport, Tidewater, Toledo, Otis, Newport, all of the places in between. 

“And we meet down at the old fire station down in Taft, and we have a Zoom call in addition because we have several people who own businesses and can’t get out for our meetings, and we meet at noon, every three weeks.”

The group is currently involved with four recall petitions: the recall of Lincoln County Commissioner Claire Hall, the recall of Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, the effort to end universal mail-in balloting in Lincoln County, and an effort to stop a suite of recently enacted state levies to fund the Oregon Department of Transportation.

“We’re very concerned about taxation without representation, which is what’s happening in the state,” McFarland said. “Most of us here on the coast live on fixed incomes. We are very much a senior group, and we don’t have the ability to go out and make more money in order just to pay the taxes. Our cost of living has gone up. Taxes have gone up. Everything has gone up. And we don’t have that ability to walk out and say, ‘Give me more money, because everything else has gone up.’”

The group takes a practical approach to activism. They identify what they perceive as a problem and then take direct, on-the-ground steps to solve it.

“We go to city councils. We go to the county council. We’ve gone to the BOC [Lincoln County Board of Commissioners]. 

“We stood up for Casey Miller. Casey, I think he’s had a really bum rap, shall we say, in what’s been going on with him. He should have a voice. He’s been elected into a position, and Claire Hall is not allowing that, and so we have been standing up for that. 

“We are very much mobilized against the initiative that’s going on in Lincoln City for Lincoln City to become a Dark Skies city, and for many reasons. Amongst them is that that group, which is by the way, from Australia, takes control. So they’ll tell the city, they’ll dictate the lighting we can have here.”

KYAQ news recently published a report about the Dark Skies Initiative in Lincoln City, and a representative from the city confirmed that Dark Skies International, the group sanctioning the Dark Skies Initiative, is based in Tucson, Arizona.

For McFarland, another problem with the Initiative is that the Chinook Winds Casino is on sovereign territory, so they do not have to abide by Dark Skies exterior lighting guidelines if they choose.

Because of the casino’s prominence as a business in Lincoln City, McFarland said she thinks the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians should hold a permanent seat on the Lincoln City city council.

Since April of this year, the effort to recall Lincoln County Commissioner and Board of Commissioners chair Claire Hall is central to the group’s activities. I asked McFarland what’s at issue.

“The essence of that comes down to one of the meetings I was at, Commissioner [Hall] said that a budget was nothing more than a road map to be chosen to follow or not to follow. And I have been in business for a number of years, and I lived and died by budgets. I could not pick and choose what I wanted to follow on a budget, and I couldn’t move money around, et cetera. So money is the huge thing, because the county budget, I think, is something like $100 million, so there’s a major concern about that. 

“There’s also a major concern over the fact that the commissioner [Claire Hall] has [been], I’ll use the phrase, stilting public speech. I am very much for First Amendment rights. I believe in freedom of speech, and our group is very much on that. We start with a pledge and end with a prayer. We believe in free speech, and we want to see free speech.

“So from Commissioner Hall, it’s a problem of free speech, [and] it’s a financial one. Those are our issues with Claire Hall, and that’s it.”

The Board of Commissioners did not end public comment, but board chair Claire Hall has sought to limit public comment by arguing that restricting comments to agenda items, and ending meetings when discussion becomes unruly or involves personnel matters, helps to maintain order and focus on county business.

Some supporters of Commissioner Hall maintain that the recall effort is really about her being a trans woman. I asked McFarland if the recall effort was about Hall’s gender identity.

“No, not at all,” McFarland said emphatically. “If Claire Hall wants to be trans, gay, straight, whatever, that’s fine. That’s a person’s choice, and again, free choice. I don’t care about that. That’s not what this is about. And it is not about bigotry. It’s about free speech. It’s about financial, fiscal awareness and responsibility.”

 

On August 18, President Trump said he intends to sign an executive order that would ban the use of mail-in ballots ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, calling the practice “corrupt.” 

Oregon voters approved universal vote-by-mail in 1998, making it the first state to adopt the method, and Lincoln County was among the first counties in the state to adopt the system. Lincoln County Clerk Amy Southwell told me she has absolute confidence in the system and the integrity of the voter rolls. The Hilltop Patriots want universal mail-in voting to end.

“We had an individual come to our one of our signings, and this gentleman and his wife were both Postal Service people, and they said, ‘We want to sign that because,’ they said, ‘as an example, we have one woman on our route that receives six ballots, all with different names, and she signs them because she’s still receiving ballots in other names.’ So this one woman votes six times, and when they took it back to the Postal Service, they said, ‘Forget it. It’s their worry, not ours.’ That’s one problem. 

“The other thing is we have underage kids voting. We have people voting that shouldn’t be voting. Our voter rolls are a mess, and they have not gotten cleaned up. If they were clean, if you could count on that, it would be different. What our initiative is, is to get it on the ballot, to vote for it and let people decide if they want mail-in or if they want the combination of vote in person.

“And for those that need a mail-in ballot, they could still get theirs, but it would allow us to have same-day [results]. When I started voting, it was same-day, and we had the results that night. It wasn’t a situation where you waited a month or six weeks or however many months it would take for the ballots to be tallied. 

“In addition, you don’t know if your vote is counted or not, because it isn’t at the city or the county level, it goes to the state, to the Secretary of State, and I just met one of our people the other day, checked on her voter status, and she found out she’s not on the voter rolls. Explain that. How do you explain that? How do you explain it when people tell us that they’ve had a deceased family member that’s been voting for years, but they’re deceased, so that says there’s problems and we need to clean it up.”

 

I asked where the group fits in the political spectrum. McFarland said the Hilltop Patriots are nonpartisan. 

“I always say we’re patriots, because I believe we look at causes. For instance, the concern about the kids in school. We have gone into schools and we have taught civics, back to the basics, our Constitution, what our Constitution is about, freedom of speech. And as I said, we start with the Pledge of Allegiance. We believe in the Constitution of the United States and we support the Constitution. 

“So I find it hard to pigeonhole us, because we are taking up things that are of interest and where we feel that there’s injustice, we will go and work on that.

I asked McFarland whether the group is aligned with the MAGA movement.

“As I said, we are not anything. We have MAGA people in there [at the meetings]. We have Democrat people in there. We have Independents, and I dare say there’s some others. But as I said, we are patriots. Let me back up.

“I like a lot of what President Trump has done and his programs. There’s not everything I like, but the other thing is, is that his policies that he’s put forth have been beneficial to the country, and that’s where I’m at. I want to see things move in a beneficial way, not in a harmful way. 

“And where we open up talks, where we open up peace, where we open up the ability to get things taken care of that we haven’t. Those are important things. 

“And if that’s MAGA, then it’s MAGA. If it is the Democrat Party, then it’s the Democrat Party. It is not an allegiance to a specific group.”

 

The Lincoln City Cultural Center recently underwent a yearlong construction project, and during that time, no U.S. flag flew in front of the building.

“So we went in and talked to them and said we’d like to see the flag up there,” McFarland explained. “And they said, ‘We can’t get it up.’ 

“So I had gone several times and I ended up over at City Hall and said, ‘How do we get a flag [in front of the Cultural Center]? That’s a city building. It’s a former school, and the Cultural Center is there. Why don’t we have a flag there?’ 

“So then suddenly it was, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a flag up soon.’ So then we went in and I said, ‘Okay, what size of flag will that [flagpole] support?’ It took me three trips back to City Hall to say, how do I get help to get that flag? And so I finally got it, got the dimensions, and they’re flying the flag that we bought. 

“We have bought several flags. We’ve taken them over to [the Cultural Center] and had a flag-raising ceremony. It’s been a year now that we’ve had our flags flying, and we feel that that’s important. Our United States flag should be flying. It is our flag.”

 

Marie McFarland is an avowed supporter of the First Amendment to the Constitution. In late September, a Taft 7–12 middle and high school teacher in Lincoln City was placed on administrative leave over a social media post he made regarding the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The teacher and his family have reportedly received death threats and have a restraining order in effect against a former student. The event has been a flashpoint in Lincoln City and beyond.

A Charlie Kirk memorial wall is featured on the Hilltop Patriots website. McFarland said a contingent of Hilltop Patriots will attend the next Lincoln County school board meeting.

“We are going to be going to the school board meeting. Our group is going and speaking on behalf of the kids, because it’s the children and their free speech and their ability to have their thoughts and feelings, and I’m very concerned about what’s going on.”

I asked if the Taft High teacher’s First Amendment rights had been violated.

“I think it’s fine for him to have his own free speech, but not when he’s affecting children. I used to teach. I taught for ten and a half years, and it’s still a situation. Kids are very malleable and moldable, and they should not have … We shouldn’t be indoctrinating them, and I’m afraid that that’s what we’ve gotten into. 

“Rather than, when I went to school, it was challenging. My thoughts think outside the box. Okay, you’ve taken this position, the debate. ‘Why do you think that? Why don’t you think this?’ And that ability to think, we don’t teach thinking. We don’t teach listening. It’s like we are teaching things like ‘You’re going to think this way,’ ‘you believe this way,’ and it’s going that path rather than opening up the world.”

For McFarland, an overarching objective of the group is to expand the political dialogue, to welcome respectful disagreement at face-to-face meetings. McFarland said she is troubled by the rancor of today’s political climate and hopes for better, in-person dialogue than occurs on social media platforms.

“It’s a situation where things are a lot less open, a lot less discussion, and people … It’s very divisive right now, and that’s not good. And it’s not good for kids to think that one side’s only right and one side’s only wrong, and there’s never any compromise, or there’s no ability to talk things out.

“It’s like we’ve got bullies, and bullies are going after bullies, and we don’t need the bullying. What we need is people to calm down, take a deep breath, and recognize that you’re a human, I’m a human, that we have our thoughts individually, and it’s okay to have those thoughts.”

I asked McFarland whether there is a religious aspect to the group.

“We do end with a prayer. We feel we are spiritual. And yes, I have Matthew 17:20 on my chest, and that is the little mustard seed. And in fact, that is what got us going. I said we are like the little mustard seed. We are planting a seed, and we are going to grow that orchard, and we have.”