Keep the Bastards Out

"Seattle Post-Intelligencer" columnist Emmett Watson invented an organization called the KBO (i.e., Keep the Bastards Out): a tongue-in-cheek group which never actually existed, but which expressed his frustration (and the frustration of many Seattle residents) with the influx of newcomers to the Puget Sound area from out-of-state. Watson periodically wrote about the group in his column for more than a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. The name was chosen in ominous emulation of the Soviet Union's KGB.

The KBO's "raison d'être" was to protest the irritating and prolonged immigration of newcomers into the Puget Sound region, especially to Seattle. They clogged the roads, spent too much money bidding up prices, did not understand the "NorthWest way of life" and just generally made trouble, ... hence the KBO's mission statement. Watson periodically suggested actions that KBO members could take to make "immigrants" (perhaps especially Californians) uncomfortable, and, hopefully, encourage them to leave. Readers and others occasionally observed that it was all a sort of joke, and Watson sometimes responded that people could think what they liked, but that he would continue to promote the KBO as one way to deal with the decrease in the quality of life in the Pacific Northwest and especially in Western Washington.