Shasta County, California has become a laboratory for far-right activists in search of power. The county has long been a Republican outpost in a blue state, but since the COVID-19 pandemic, local politics have taken a hard right turn. A recall election in 2022 swept a moderate Republican majority from the County Board of Supervisors in favor of a new class of extremists. Buoyed by popular discontent with mask mandates and school closures, Shasta’s newly elected rulers have turned their sights on eliminating voting machines, purging “Critical Race Theory” and LGBTQ-friendly content from schools, and trying to force all local officials to take an oath on the Second Amendment. Those who stand in their way, like former County Public Health Officer Karen Ramstrom, or local journalist Doni Chamberlain, have found themselves the targets of political retaliation and even public death threats. The Marc Steiner Show digs into the disturbing developments in Shasta County and what they might presage for the country’s future, turning to journalists Sasha Abramsky and Doni Chamberlain for their expertise.
Sasha Abramskyis a regular contributor toThe Nationand the author of several books. He recently wrotean article forThe Nationon the far-right takeover in Shasta.
Doni Chamberlainis an award-winning independent journalist and co-founder ofA News Cafe. She lives in Redding, California.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show and another edition of Rise of the Right, here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us. Now, what are the keys to the rising power of the right is its ability to organize, a tradition that once belonged to us, and to strategically build power from the bottom up to tactically take power locally, to build their power regionally and nationally. And we can also see a little bit of what’s in store for us if they do win power when you look at some local examples.
One prime example is the reality that’s in Northern California in Shasta County, a beautiful county that hides a dark secret. Sasha Abramsky is an author and activist, who frequently writes for The Nation. He wrote an important article for them entitled, The Takeover of Shasta County, asking the question, is this the blueprint for the right nationally? It’s eyeopening and I would say frightening, a frightening warning of what could be, and what do we do to stop it? Now, as I said, Shasta County is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I’ve been to it many times, but within that beauty of its landscape, lurks on authoritarian right-wing movement, masking itself as a true democratic movement and is a threat to its future and our future.
In this episode of Rise to the Right, we talk with Sasha Abramsky, who wrote the article, and we talk with one of the people he highlights in that article, Doni Chamberlain. She’s a progressive activist and journalist facing death threats, and has taken on the right in Shasta County. Sasha Abramsky is a regular contributor to The Nation magazine. He’s been covering the growing power of the right-wing in America’s local world, is an author of numerous books like Inside Obama’s Brain, the American Way of Poverty, the House of 20,000 Books, Jumping At Shadows, and most recently, Little Wonder, the fabulous story of Lottie Dodd, the world’s first female sports superstar.
Now, he outlines in this conversation, he details and explains how the right-wing took over Shasta County, how this is a very real possibility, emblematic of what our entire nation faces. Here’s that conversation. Sasha, welcome. It’s good to talk to you again.
Sasha Abramsky:
It’s good to be back, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
This article that you wrote, the one just introduce about Shasta County, I’m curious, just very quickly, how you came to this story in the first place.
Sasha Abramsky:
Well, I’ve been doing a lot of stories over the last couple years about counties and cities that, for various reasons, has swung far rightward, not just in the Trump era, but more especially after the Trump era. And I had been following what was happening in Shasta, because there’d been this recall election in the winter of 2022, I think it was February of 2022. I mentioned it to my editors at the time, and it got a lot of national attention back in February ’22. I said, “Look, I’m your California Western correspondent. Why don’t you let me do a story exploring what’s happening at Shasta?” I got a yes in the abstract and I put it on the back burner, because I had all these other features I was working on. Basically, my editors and I were brainstorming at the start of this year, and I said, “Look, let me do a one-year anniversary piece. Let me go up to Shasta and start exploring what does the county look like a year after the recall election and a year after it jagged to the far right.”
The editors knew it was a good story, and they said yes. It’s close enough to Sacramento that I could go back and forth quite often, so I spent a ton of time over several months just going back and forth to Shasta County and trying to get a handle on what was happening up there and what far right governance looked like and why it was so important, what it signified for where we were as a country. That’s basically the way I got into the story.
Marc Steiner:
It came through loud and clear, but let’s talk a bit about this for a moment. Shasta County, which was, in my youthful era, the home of where they grew some of the best marijuana in America, as I remember it, but it has shifted. It shifted very conservative, always had that base, but this is beyond conservative. What you’re covering here is a literal takeover by the far right.
Sasha Abramsky:
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Yeah. Shasta, if you go back 70 years or even 60 years, Shasta County was a reliably democratic county. It was conservative, but it had a timber industry. It had unionized workers. Its voters, a hundred years ago or 90 years ago, supported the New Deal. Its voters in the early 1960s supported Lyndon Johnson, but by the ’70s, like so much of rural America, it was veering rightward, and it’s been reliably Republican for half a century at this point. There’s no surprise that it voted for Trump. There’s no surprise that two out of every three voters in Shasta voted for Trump, but you’re right. What’s happened here is not just conservative or right-wing government. It’s uber right-wing government. It’s people who are out and out militia members or supporters. It’s people who literally want every county employee to have to swear an oath to the Second Amendment.
That sounds cartoonish, but it’s literally on the program of these guys, the board of supervisors, once you’d have to swear an oath to the Second Amendment. They fired their county public health officer, because he had the temerity to recommend things like mask mandates and to put in place ways to follow up on the state mandates around lockdowns and around school shutdowns and so on. It’s really irrationalist conspiracist governance. One of the big things is they got a lot of attention nationally a month or two back, when they became the first county in the country to end their contract with Dominion voting machines. They now have no viable way to vote because, by California law, you can’t just have hand ballots. You have to have machine ballots, at least as part of your account process, but they don’t anymore because they got rid of dominion voting without anything to take its place. You’re right. This is not anything recognizable as standard conservative governance. This is MAGA squared. It’s the ultimate absurd endpoint of MAGA governance.
Marc Steiner:
I’d like to explore for a moment how they took over, because you’d write in this article about people like Matt Nimmo and the rants on KCNR, which we’ll hear a little bit later when we talk to one of the folks who lives in Shasta County. You write about the militia, the Cottonwood M that was going to bring, as you quote, “Cottonwood justice of vagrants, criminals, and other undesirables,” said one of the leaders, Carlos Zapata. Lay out for us how that happened.
Sasha Abramsky:
First of all, I’ll lay out how it didn’t happen. It was not a literal takeover by armed men. It was not a coup. The Nation actually ran a headline saying, California Coup d’etat. I don’t have anything to do with the headlines. I write the story. It was an electoral takeover. It was a takeover by extremely right-wing people, who had been activated first by Trump and then by COVID. And everybody I spoke to, left-wing and right-wing, conservative, liberal, everyone I spoke to said that you can’t understand what happened to Shasta County in ’21, ’22, and ’23 without understanding the COVID crisis, because you had these lockdowns, you had these months and months, where kids couldn’t go to school. You had businesses being closed and you had growing public unease. In Michigan you saw it with armed men trying to take over the state capitol building or you saw it with the attempt to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. You saw it with Trump’s ludicrous tweets about liberating various Democratic controlled states.
Well, in Shasta, the way it played out, you had board of supervisors meetings. The board of supervisors run the county. You had border supervisors meetings, which were basically taken over in 2020 and 2021 by far right organizers. They were organizing, especially around the schools, but they were also organizing around mask mandates and then later against vaccine mandates. They came out to these meetings and they were unmasked and they were unsocially spaced. Anybody who was thinking sensibly about the pandemic stopped showing up at these meetings, so they basically seeded the ground to these very far right, very angry organizers, who would turn the board of supervisors’ meetings into an absolute spectacle, a mini January 6th every time they held a board of supervisors meeting.
They organized and they went viral with some of their actions and some of their speeches. They got a lot of attention from conservative talk radio, from television, conservative TV like Tucker Carlson, some of their leaders ended up on the Alex Jones InfoWars show and so on. The more they got attention, the more their echo chamber amplified on social media, and they eventually organized to recall three supervisors. They were all conservative, but they were moderate conservative, and so they held this recall election. One of the three got recalled. He was a man called Leonard Moty, and Leonard Moty had particularly aroused the ire of these conservatives for various reasons, and he got recalled. It was about 56% voting in favor.
In the year after the recall, the county just slid further and further to the right. One by one by one, the moderate Republicans were replaced by extremely conservative Republicans. You now have a four to one majority on the board, four extremists, one moderate. The moderate’s a woman called Mary Rickert, who features quite prominently in my article.
It wasn’t just the county board of supervisors. It was the school boards. One by one, these small towns began electing really, really right-wing school boards, who were first against the mass mandates, then against the vaccine mandates. Then it morphed in 2023 to being against critical race theory and being against having the presence of gay and transgendered issues in the classroom. All those culture wars that are playing out nationally that we see in Florida or we see in Virginia, all these issues that have mobilized conservative voters are playing out in microcosm and amplified in Shasta County. I find it horrifying, but if I’m honest, I also find it absolutely fascinating to tell the story, because it’s such a bizarre political saga and it’s such a cautionary tale of what could happen in one county after another after another, if progressives don’t learn to find a way to talk to rural America again.
Marc Steiner:
Let’s talk about that for a moment. This is one of the points I wanted to get to in our conversation, which you’ve just raised, which is, why is this so important? We’re talking about one county in Northern California not far from the border of Oregon, that’s been taken over by real right-wing fanatics. Why do you think it’s so important?
Sasha Abramsky:
It’s so important because it’s emblematic. If it was literally one anomalous county, well, then it would just be an interesting story, but it would be self-contained, but it’s the fact that these guys are using a language that’s spoken by national figures. It’s spoken by Donald Trump. It’s spoke spoken by Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s spoken by Matt Gaetz. It’s spoken by numerous political figures with a national platform, and these guys aren’t marginal figures anymore. You can’t just say, oh, well, there are a few eccentric people. They’re very powerful within the Republican party, and if you look at opinion polls, they’ve got a shot at taking control of the country come 2024. If you want to understand what’s happening in this country, if you want to understand the degradation of the political process and the degradation of the political discussion, looking at Shasta County is a really, really good place to start, because what you see in microcosm are all of these forces, all of these tensions around Trump, around COVID, around social media, around how to deal with public health mandates, around how to deal with schools. All of that is seen in microcosm in a place like Shasta.
I’ve written about other areas, too. A year ago I did a story on a town called Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. It was a very similar story that had this slow slide rightward, that was doing all kinds of dangerous things to the body politic locally, and that had national implications. I’ve been a political journalist for 30 years at this point, and I love finding stories where you can tell a massive national or even an international story through zooming in on one community, and I think in Shasta, you really can do that. It’s got all the ingredients to tell a bigger story.
Marc Steiner:
It does. One of the things that to focus on for a moment here is the ascent of Patrick Jones. Talk a bit about him and the takeover of this county, not just the takeover of the county, but what it is emblematic of what could happen in this country, because the way you describe it in the article, when the right-wing took over the county, they fired people and left, people were threatened, their lives were threatened. Even though they loved to say they were against fascism, again, hate Nazis, it was a very fascistic policies that they put in place.
Sasha Abramsky:
You’re absolutely right. Patrick Jones used to be a counselor in the town of Redding, and he’s a gun store owner. His family’s owned a gun gun store in Redding for about 50 years. Patrick Jones is as conservative as you can get. He’s firmly convinced that anyone to the left of Mitt Romney is a communist and probably Mitt Romney is a communist. He’s really, really right-wing.
And when you talk with him, he says he doesn’t believe in gay rights. He doesn’t believe in the NAACP. You hear these things, you think, “Well, what does he believe in?” Well, what he believes in is guns and he’ll tell you that upfront. He’s a Second Amendment absolutist. He’s an extremely religious conservative. He believes in the black and white morality, and this man is on the board of supervisors. Now, he got elected, I think, at the end of 2020. For a while, he was the lone far right member. He was the one against four moderates. Then over the last year and a half, he’s basically come to dominate. He’s now the chair of the board and he’s the one who’s pushing to get rid of Dominion voting machines. He’s the one who’s pushing for the Second Amendment oath. He’s the one who’s pushed to fire the public health officer and various other civil servants in Shasta, and his mark is pretty profound.
If you want to see a county being remade at speed, looking to the actions of someone like Patrick Jones gives you a pretty good indication of what can happen when ideas of good governance are replaced by a really stridently ideological conservative or radical right vision of what governance should be. He’s an interesting guy to talk to. I spent a lot of time talking to him in his gun store. He’s very personable in person. I sat with him for several hours. I talked with him. He was very generous with his time. I just didn’t agree with anything he was saying, and the longer he talked, the more what he was saying scared me. It scared me because I think it’s fundamentally irrationalist. When you have governance that puts aside all expertise and basically shuns the idea of expertise, and when you have governance that fetishizes guns and weapons, and when you have governance that mocks public health officers, that to me, is a recipe for chaos. Again, if you want to understand what’s happening nationally, look at figures like Patrick Jones or on the national stage, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and see what kind of vision they’re promoting.
Marc Steiner:
The way you describe this with this right-wing majority, first of all, you describe the people in the council as moderate. Most people in the council, from what I’ve read, were conservative in a traditional American sense, and these folks who’ve taken over are further to the right than that.
Sasha Abramsky:
Yeah, I think that’s true, and I think that’s the story more of apathy than anything else. County board of supervisors are very important at a local level, but very few people actually pay attention to those elections. You can get elected with a few thousand votes, even in a county with a … Shasta’s sparsely populated by California standards, but it still has 185,000 people. You can get elected with just a few thousand votes if you’re running to be one of the five county supervisors, because a lot of people don’t vote. That’s particularly true in off-year elections when there’s no presidential election or Senate race to bring people out to vote. I think what happened in Shasta was you had a very, very well-organized right-wing and they’d organized around the issues of COVID and they’d organized around trying to make the board meetings in person again when the board meetings went remote at the height of the COVID pandemic.
You had this core group of people and they organized very effectively. Frankly, they used grassroots techniques very effectively. They did the old-fashioned thing of knocking on doors. They had petition gathering parties, they had fundraising parties at local restaurants and diners and gun stores and everywhere else. They were very effective at organizing, but I don’t think that that means that the entire bulk of Shasta County’s electorate suddenly swung to the far right. I think if you talk to most people in Shasta County, they’re where they’ve always been. They’re moderately conservative. They’re probably culturally more conservative than most parts of the country because they’re a small, rural state, but they’re not fanatically right-wing, and yet, they are now being governed by fanatically right-wing people. To me, that’s a real cautionary tale of what happens when people don’t get involved at local politics.
Marc Steiner:
Well, in the time that we have, let’s talk a bit about this cautionary tale, because what you described in the article, the right-wing won a majority of the votes in all these elections. You described people actually go door to door in a very intimidating way, demanding to know how people voted, and firing the county attorney, firing the public health officer. It’s a cautionary tale about fascism and how it can grow, but you say most of the county is not right-wing, yet they voted majority for this far right-wing.
Sasha Abramsky:
Oh, no, I didn’t say they’re not right-wing. I said they’re not as right-wing as the people who are now representing them. The people who voted are probably that right-wing. As I said, one of the issues in understanding stories like this is understanding apathy, who votes, who doesn’t vote, who’s more mobilized, who’s not mobilized, who’s organized, who’s not organized, and these right-wing groups did a very, very good job of mobilizing their base. In the same way as when you look at these book banning movements that are taking off around the country at the moment, frankly, I don’t think the majority of Americans are really up in arms about the fact that there are gay themed books or transgender themed books in schools and libraries, but there are these really well-organized evangelical voices who are up in arms about it. Oftentimes in politics, the people who shout loudest get the most attention.
Well, the right-wing, the far right-wing in Shasta County spent three years shouting louder than anybody else and they drove a lot of other people away from the political process. People who weren’t right-wings stopped attending board meetings. They stopped engaging. I think they felt intimidated. There was a lot of violent rhetoric floating around on social media, and so the people who were left on the political stage were the right-wing and the irrationalist. When you look at how authoritarian movements arise, oftentimes that’s how they arise. They arise because there’s an organized minority of voters, but they’re well enough organized that they can start to dominate the electoral process. Once that happens and once those groups get footholds in power, they’re very, very hard to dislodge because then they have all the propaganda tools at their disposal. They have patronage tools at their disposal. They have all the powers of governance at their disposal.
You saw this in Turkey last week with President Erdogan. Well, if anybody deserves not to have been reelected, it was somebody who presided over hyperinflation and shoddy construction that led to tens of thousands of people dying in an earthquake. Well, Erdogan was reelected because he controlled the state media and he controlled the propaganda apparatus. [inaudible 00:20:26] thing in Hungary with Viktor Orban. Same thing in Russia with Vladimir Putin. It’s very, very dangerous to let authoritarians get power because once they have it, it’s very hard to reclaim power from them.
Marc Steiner:
And what you’re saying here is that Shasta County and the right-wing takeover of Shasta County is an object lesson for America.
Sasha Abramsky:
Absolutely. If good people don’t get engaged enough, bad actors can end up with too much power, and that is a cautionary tale. We saw it in 2015 with the rise of Donald Trump, 2015, 2016. We’re certainly not past that authoritarian moment. If anything, we’re right in the middle of it still. All of the movements spawned by Trumpism are now playing out locally. It may be a bit more fragmented than it was when Trump was president, but that movement toward using power in a really nefarious way, that’s alive and well, and we’re certainly seeing it in Shasta County and in the hiring and firing decisions that are being made by Shasta County’s supervisors right now.
Marc Steiner:
Well, Sasha Abramsky, this article is an eyeopener. It’s important for people to understand and read, but of course, people can read it in the attach it. We’re about to talk to one of the folks that you interviewed there right after this, to Doni Chamberlain. As we part today, talk a bit about her, why you interviewed her, and what she represents.
Sasha Abramsky:
Well, I’ll let her speak for herself.
Marc Steiner:
No, she will. Don’t worry. I don’t put words …
Sasha Abramsky:
In brief, Doni Chamberlain’s, a local journalist. She runs an online news site called A News Cafe. She has been following local politics for many, many, many years and has been chronicling, with growing horror, what’s been happening at the county board supervisors’ level. She was very important when I was doing the story because she had a lot of information, so I would go and I’d interview her many times. She’ll tell you exactly who she is and why she’s there and everything else, but she’s an interesting person to talk to.
Marc Steiner:
Well, Sasha, I really appreciate this piece of work you’ve done and the work you’re doing, and I look forward to many more conversations. Thanks for bringing this to all of our attention.
Sasha Abramsky:
Well, again, Marc, thank you, and I always enjoy being on your show. It’s a pleasure.
Marc Steiner:
And now we’re going to hear from Doni Chamberlain, who grew up in Shasta County. She’s the founder and editor of anewscafe.com. When she’s not writing about food, she takes on the right-wing, the racism and the danger of the right-wing in her community. As you hear in these clips, she puts her life on the line to stand up to the bully boys of the right.
Matt Nimmo:
You live in a country of 300 million people, 300 million armed people. Do you really think the veterans that are being driven out of the military and watching their families destroyed over this COVID crap … People like Doni Chamberlain should be tried under the Nuremberg trial and then publicly executed because of what they’re doing.
Carlos Zapata:
Our children do not deserve what they’ve gotten over the last two years. They have done nothing to deserve the restrictions and mandates and stress. The horrifying trauma that they’re having to endure by having to cover their faces, by having to go to school, by having to watch their parents stress out, this is the nexus that we’re facing right now of stressors in our life, and they do not deserve any bit of it. And when you have people like Doni Chamberlain, who is the only person in this room right now wearing a mask, covering her coward face, telling lies about me, about my family, about my friends, contacting my ex-wife, the mother of my children, trying to get her to say things about me, how’d that work out for you, Doni? Tell me. You want to speak here? Microphone’s yours. The very man that you have been writing about … I don’t know what you would do with your life if it wasn’t for me, Doni Chamberlain. The one man that you write about the most, and you never have the stones, the courage, the moral fortitude to interview me one time. Have you ever reached out to me and sat down for an interview? I have offered that to you many times, Doni, ut you and your coward photographer, your coward little staff that you have, your 25 followers that read your bullshit little articles.
Speaker 5:
Yeah, coward.
Carlos Zapata:
You are the coward, Doni Chamberlain. It’s people like you that are making this life difficult for our children, for people that actually want to live in this county and make it better.
Speaker 5:
Go to hell.
Carlos Zapata:
Look at my eyes, Doni, because I’m speaking to you.
Marc Steiner:
And Doni Chamberlain, welcome to the show. Good to have you with us. What we just heard here was Matt Nimmo on a local radio station and Carlos Zapata at a supervisor’s meeting, attacking you. I wanted to play that upfront because I want to get a sense of the people who are listening to get a sense of the tension and the forces are right against you that are really quite threatening in a very personal way.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah. I’ve been a journalist for 30 years and I always was under the mistaken impression that somehow if I waded into a meeting or a protest or anything, somehow my little notebook and pen and recording device would protect me, but in the last three years, when I go out in public to these places, protests or whatever, I’ve had people turn their attention on to me and verbally attack me, call me names, names that I couldn’t say or the FCC would come down on you. It’s been pretty scary. My son has put security devices all around my house and I’m very careful when I go out in public. I’m not paranoid, but I’m very careful and watchful.
Matt Nimmo eventually did, actually, just recently, he’s suing me and A News Cafe and R. V. Scheide for defamation, which I laugh because he’s accusing us of saying something to defame his character, when all we did was write about the death threats that he’s recommending, I am tried in the Nuremberg trial like situation, and I’m publicly hanged, and the way communists and socialists, put that in air quotes, like me understand is to be dragged behind a car and have my neck stretched, things like that. He is attempting to sue us, and I’ve never been sued. I’m always very careful. I tell the reporters who work for us, “Let’s make this a week when we don’t get sued.” So far so good, knock on wood, and as you know, the defense for libel or slander or defamation is truth, so as long as you speak the truth.
Anyway, we are counter suing, which I have never done, so we’ll see. Our hearing is on the 26th. I never thought, as a journalist, I would have to be afraid to report. It’s not just I’m afraid, but I keep on doing what I’m doing because I’m driven and I’m terrier-like, but what I’m finding is it’s almost impossible to find people to speak with me, even as a confidential source, who I promise I would never disclose their identity. People are afraid to speak even off the record. We hear these things whispered to us, we get tips, and we can’t go any further with it because we cannot substantiate it with the very people who are in a position of knowing, so it’s pretty awful. Well,
Marc Steiner:
I might take a step back for a moment. Talk a bit about the county itself. You grew up in Northern California.
Doni Chamberlain:
I did.
Marc Steiner:
It’s always been, in the state of California, in some ways, a more conservative space than other parts of the state, but something is afoot here. It’s gotten to a point, with places like Shasta, where you live, that has a lesson for the entire country to listen to.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Right?
Doni Chamberlain:
Yes, absolutely. Well, that’s what Carlos Zapata said from day one is, this is a blueprint. They have a blueprint for the extremists and this is way beyond Republican Democrat party politics. This is way beyond. This is rational versus irrational, sane versus insane. The other side, when they don’t get their way, when they don’t like what’s happening, they will threaten people, threaten to hang them, or, “We know where you live. We know where your dog lives. We know everything about you.” I’ve had death threats. Mary Rickert, who’s one of the sanest people on the board right now, she’s had death threats. We’ve reported it, of course, and nothing ever happens.
That’s the blueprint and these guys, I think, genuinely want to go scorched earth on Shasta County. They don’t care if the county devolves into a cesspool of nothingness. That’s the way it appears now. You have a majority on the board, who are just slashing and burning. Kevin Crye is bringing in Mike Lindell and all these outside insane people, who have been denounced, and it doesn’t matter. I think some people think, and I’m not sure if I would go this far, but a lot of people say they think there’s some outside source, outside something that is using Shasta County as an example for the rest of the country. We’re the little Petri dish. We’re a hard, right, extremely conservative group of people already. We’re in a sea of blue in here in California and I think we’re being made an example of, and the other side, the militia, all those guys say, “Hey, people are watching us.” And they say that smiling, like, “Way to go,” because that means that the people who want to come here are people who think like them, who threaten and want open carry. Basically those people want this place, Shasta County, to be even more populated with even more extreme conservatives.
Marc Steiner:
You mentioned Mary Rickert.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Mary Rickert was on the board of supervisors.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yes. She still is.
Marc Steiner:
She still is.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah. They’d love to have her out, but she’s still there.
Marc Steiner:
She describes herself as a Reagan Republican.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yes, absolutely.
Marc Steiner:
Right?
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah.
Marc Steiner:
From what Sasha wrote, she said that she suffers from PTSD and watching her home being take over by this very far right group, so it sounds as if everything I’ve read and people I’ve talked to, that what you’re facing is living under the beginnings of, for want of a better term, I don’t like using these words loosely, but a neo-fascist dictatorship.
Doni Chamberlain:
Hey, I was thinking that term before you spoke. That’s exactly what it feels like. Don’t forget, a lot of the problems that are happening are happening directly from our elected leaders on the board with Mary Rickert. I look at it like a pirate ship. Shasta County was this ship just going along, mainly conservative, and it’s been taken over by these crazy pirates, who are just take no prisoners. They are so rude to Mary during meetings. It’s appalling. People just gasp. These guys gaslight her, they mock her, right during meetings, Patrick Jones and Kevin Crye in particular, very disrespectful, and she just hangs in there. She’s stubborn and she is one of these people.
Now, Kevin Crye talks about how God has led him to do great things. Mary Rickert, I believe, is the real McCoy. I’m not a religious person. I’m a Democrat. Mary Rickert is a conservative Catholic and she and I, it amazes me that we can have the kind of conversations we do because we are so different in many ways, but I look at her like Joan of Ark or something. She is standing strong there and she says that what keeps her going is her faith, and she’s staying in there as long as possible.
Cathy Darling Allen, our Registrar of voters is in the same boat. She’s a Democrat, and it’s a nonpartisan party position, so it shouldn’t matter, so are the supervisors for that matter. These two women in particular, they’re not extremist people. In fact, Cathy Darling Allen will sometimes knit furiously during some of the most raucous board meetings for a stress buster. They’re just strong women pushing back and saying, it sounds corny, but they do love this county.
Marc Steiner:
Talk a bit about where you think the roots of this, before we talk about where you think it may go, what the roots of this are. As we said earlier, that part of California you’re in has always been more conservative region. There’s always been mixed, but it’s never had that kind of sense of fear that people have to live under, of threat of being killed, of bodily harm.
Doni Chamberlain:
No.
Marc Steiner:
What do you think changed?
Doni Chamberlain:
Well, President Trump influenced things greatly here. Many, many people voted for President Trump, including Mary Rickert, at least the first time. And then I think when I was a kid growing up in the ’60s, Shasta County was actually Democrat. We had lumber mills and union jobs, and so it was more Democrat. And then it eventually-
Marc Steiner:
You grew up in Shasta County?
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah, I did. I’ve been here since I was five years old.
Marc Steiner:
Okay, got you.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah. My mom was a New Yorker and always hated Shasta County, and so that leaked over. She used to say only mad dogs and Englishmen would be in this place in the summer, and I have to agree with her. Anyway, I think it was the perfect storm. You had Trump and a lot of people here who believe in him and follow him no matter what he does. And then COVID came, and in the beginning, like Carlos’s first speech, where he gave his speech that went viral and made him a minor celebrity, was about, “Hey, we’re not taking this anymore. You’re not going to mask our kids.” Well, guess what? In Shasta County, there was not one citation written by the health department, not one. Our health officer, who they eventually ran out on a rail, Karen Ramstrom, she’s gone, she tried the best she could to basically keep people safe during a pandemic, but not one citation. She didn’t force anyone to wear a mask.
I think this group, they were waiting in the wings for the trigger to be pulled to basically open the floodgates for their moment to scream about the one thing I think they all have in common, because it’s a disparate group. Some are religious, some are malicious, they’re all over the place, state of Jefferson. What they all have in common is the desire for, they call it freedom to do whatever they want, whatever it is, to open carry, to not have a building permit. And they speak about this time that I don’t know ever existed in history. Take back America. Make America great. They talk about this old-timey American values.
And by the way, a lot of them talk like I just talked a lot of people who speak with this faux country accent like that, they’ve never left Shasta County. I don’t know where this accent comes from, but some of them are from Turlock and Merced and the Bay Area, but they get here and they start talking and walking like that and they dress like that and they have chew in their back pocket and you can see the outline of their gun. I’m not kidding. It’s like a costume.
I think COVID gave the excuse why they were upset, but I don’t think it was about COVID, because nothing was happening here. Restaurants blatantly stayed open, bars. In fact, you’ll hear some people, like the Chamber of Commerce say, “You know what? Shasta County has the distinction of being the most economically stable county in California during the pandemic.” You know why? Because nobody closed. They kept doing business. The people who complied, by and large, were ethnic restaurants, Thai restaurants, Mexican restaurants, because they were doing what the state said.
Marc Steiner:
Not to get too deep into this part, but what you described here though, from what I’ve read and what Sasha wrote about, you have this county of 185,000 residents. There were almost 700 people died from COVID, because there were no restrictions at all. There was a higher percentage than the whole state of California in terms of deaths per capita.
Doni Chamberlain:
That’s right, but COVID’s fake. That’s what they’ll say. It’s just the flu. The ignorance is astounding, absolutely astounding. And now in Shasta County, we have no health officer. We have an old guy, an ancient guy in there just trying to put his finger in the dike keep things from falling apart. We now have one of the highest sexually transmitted disease rates in the state. We now have seepage from a canal. It’s called the ACID Canal, Anderson Cottonwood Irrigation District, and it’s because of the drought and being empty. Now water is seeping into sewer lines. It’s a huge health risk, bacteria, people … And all those true health concerns, homelessness, overdoses, none of those are being addressed because we don’t have a health officer, and this other group says, “We don’t need no stinking health officer.”
Marc Steiner:
What is what you’re going through in Shasta County every day and people who are around you? I’ve seen the photos of people in meetings who oppose what’s going on, but they’re a large minority, but they’re a minority of the people in Shasta, at least it appears that way. What does that portend, do you think, for the rest of the country? What does it say about where we could be headed?
Doni Chamberlain:
Well, if Shasta County is air quote successful, if this group, they’re taking over school boards, it’s that pirate thing, climbing onto ships, any elected position, getting on the board of supervisors. Now we’ve dumped our Dominion voting machine, which has disenfranchised 111,000 registered voters in Shasta County. It’s unprecedented that any place in the country has ever done a hand count of this magnitude. I interviewed a woman who’s a elections expert and she said most of the time across the country, you’ll have hand counts in little places in New England or Alaska or someplace or tiny places, little municipalities that have a couple of hundred people or a couple of thousand at most. The very top one, I think, was 16,000 somewhere. Shasta County has 111,000. How can you hand count a ballot that has multiple races on it? I think it’s going to crash and burn, which means that even if people want to vote and they rush and they say, “I want to vote,” if you can’t count the votes, it breaks the system, and these guys have done no planning.
Mike Lindell spoke directly with Kevin Crye, who’s under threat of being recalled now, and frankly, as a journalist, that whole thing where the both sidism of journalism, this person says this, what does this person say, for me, the stakes are so high here that that objectivity has gone out the window. I am openly saying, when I write, “Kevin Crye lies, Kevin cry cheats,” those are pretty strong words, but I’m calling it as it is. It is imperative that this man is recalled because he has brought nothing but chaos and destruction to Shasta County. That sounds like such hyperbole, but I’m not exaggerating.
Marc Steiner:
When you hear those threats that take place against you and some others, how seriously do you take them and how dangerous do you think it really is?
Doni Chamberlain:
I take it seriously enough that I’m considering, for the first time in my life, getting a concealed weapon permit. I hate guns. I just called today to get a bid on a security gate on my front driveway. I’m very guarded without letting people know where I live, but this lawsuit, this Matt Nimmo guy, he had no trouble finding out where I lived, and he now knows where I live because I received the court papers. I take it seriously, not so much for somebody like Matt Nimmo or even Carlos Zapata, but the people who listen to them, the guy, the disenfranchised, unemployed guy in a single wide trailer with a bare light bulb in his dirty underwear, who feel inspired to do something about someone like me, who they classify as a communist socialist, who needs to be shown a lesson.
I do take it seriously. I try not to talk about it. I have a twin sister. If I get a death threat, I don’t even tell her what it is because she literally will cover her ears and say, “I can’t listen to this. I can’t stand it.” There are just few of us who can speak among ourselves who are under that kind of pressure. It’s a small club and it’s a scary place to be. For example, I live in an old house. I’m sitting here, I can see out my window, and I moved my bedroom. I had a lovely bedroom right at the front of the house, but at some point, I would lie in bed at night and think if somebody drove by with an AK-47 and shot the windows out, I wonder if they would hit me while I’m sleeping, so I’ve moved my room and now my office is in the front and during the day, I can watch everything for my little catbird seat.
I’m not going to turn into an agoraphobic person who never goes out, but I take it seriously enough that I know that things can happen. We have the highest percentage per capita of concealed weapons in the state. That’s not counting the people like one of our board supervisors, Chris Kelstrom, who says it’s his God-given right to carry a weapon and he doesn’t need a permit. We already have the concealed weapon permit, largest number, and those are the legally carrying people. I have no clue how many other people are carrying weapons without a permit, and that’s frightening. They’re loaded weapons. Woody Clendenen, the militia head of militia here, said in some interview, I think it was the LA Times, said the only time he’s not carrying a loaded weapon is when he’s in the shower, and I think that’s the way a lot of these guys feel.
Marc Steiner:
This is the gun store owner?
Doni Chamberlain:
No, that’s Patrick Jones, who’s our supervisor.
Marc Steiner:
Supervisor, that’s right.
Doni Chamberlain:
All these characters
Marc Steiner:
Having read what’s going on in Shasta County, because it’s always been a place where there are a lot of conservatives, but others as well, they lived in relative harmony over the decades. This shows where we’re going from January 6th to what’s happening to you in Shasta County, and I think it’s an important lesson for everybody to listen to, just in terms of what could be coming, because it is not necessarily limited to Shasta County.
Doni Chamberlain:
No. I think we are an example and we are that blueprint. I’d like to think there’s another blueprint, the other side of where people are standing up, finally. They’re the people who were hanging out on the beach with their picnic baskets, just regular citizens, and they said, “I’m not into politics and I don’t want to get involved.” Now they’re standing up and they’re trying to recall Kevin Crye. Leonard Moty, who was recalled in a dirty, nasty, lie-based recall, he has often said that the only way the average citizen will actually stand up and pay attention is when their garbage is no longer picked up. It has to be personal on that level, seriously.
I think other places in the country are watching, and if these guys, if the pirates can take over the ship and turn it around and head us for an iceberg, or whatever metaphors you want to use, sink us, whatever, I think they will emulate us. And also, in the example with the Dominion machines, Kevin Crye is speaking in different counties in California, encouraging other counties to do the same thing, even though it’s untested here. It’s like the Pied Piper saying, “Hey, you guys, follow us without knowing where the cliff is.” It’s untested for its … I know I’m totally mixing my metaphors, unchartered waters, cliffs, whatever, garbage disposals, sinkholes.
Marc Steiner:
Gotcha.
Doni Chamberlain:
It’s all bad.
Marc Steiner:
I think that we’ll just conclude here with … We talked a little bit about this with Sasha, but this also is built around this whole political ideology of creating a separate state. Oregon and in Northern California, they want to call it the state of Jefferson.
Doni Chamberlain:
Not only that, it’s like putting two Japanese fighting fish in the same little bowl. We have the state of Jefferson folks, that’s one group, and then we have the New California State group. These are two different organizations. They don’t even like each other, and they want to split up the state in different pieces in a different way. I feel like we should just stand back and let those guys duke it out, but that’s another thing. You hear this refrain, “The time has come for 51, 51st state.” I cannot believe what’s happening here. I don’t know if you heard about this latest board meeting, where we had the speaker who used-
Marc Steiner:
The N word-
Doni Chamberlain:
… the N word.
Marc Steiner:
… against the Black man who was trying to speak up.
Doni Chamberlain:
He was staring right at the only Black person, we’re a sea of white here in Shasta County, the only African-American person in the audience. This guy turned and looked right at him, and then Patrick Jones, the chair, threw out the African-American gentleman, Nathan “Blaze” Pinkney, threw him out for yelling in the audience, saying, “Hey.” He told the guy to get out, called him a racist, so the wrong person was thrown out of the room. Now our supervisors are considering whether to do a code of conduct that says that the N-word should not be spoken in a board meeting.
Marc Steiner:
Whoa.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah. Whoa. That’s how far we’ve devolved here, open racism.
Marc Steiner:
They even try to hide it better in places like Mississippi.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah. It’s just mind-boggling. A lot of people are leaving this area, and I’m just stubborn enough that I’m hanging in here because I feel like I have a huge job. I’ll just keep going until I can return to one day writing about recipes and stuff and feature stories about cool people.
Marc Steiner:
Well, I will say this jokingly, but then seriously. I looked all through your site. Your recipes look great, so I’m going to try some.
Doni Chamberlain:
Well, that’s what I do for my therapy, should see my freezer.
Marc Steiner:
I do want to say that we’ll be connecting to all your work here on our site. People can see what you’re talking about.
Doni Chamberlain:
Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
Look at where you are.
Doni Chamberlain:
I will stay in touch.
Marc Steiner:
Thank you.
Doni Chamberlain:
And I know you’re in a very dangerous situation, and it says a lot about the power of the extreme in this country that have taken over several states and what they’re doing where you live in Shasta County. Doni Chamberlain, please stay safe. We’ll stay in touch.
I will do my best.
Marc Steiner:
Please do, and we’ll stay in touch. Well, thank you so much for taking your time with us.
Doni Chamberlain:
Yeah, and visit Shasta County anytime. I’ll show you around. Okay?
Marc Steiner:
It’s been a while. I’m ready to come back. It’s a beautiful county.
Doni Chamberlain:
It is. That’s what they say. Thank you so much.
Marc Steiner:
Thank you.
Doni Chamberlain:
Have a great day. Bye-bye.
Marc Steiner:
Take care. I want to thank our guests today, Sasha Abramsky and Doni Chamberlain, for joining us. I want to thank you all for listening. We face a grave danger in this country. What’s happening in Shasta County, California is emblematic what’s happening in counties and municipalities and states around the country. We’re in a battle for our future and for the future generations to come. Now, we’re going to keep doing this and stay on this, because this is one of the most important topics, I think, facing our future.
Please write to me at mss@therealnews.com. I want to hear your thoughts, your ideas, stories you might want us to cover. Now, we’re in this together. I’m here to highlight what your communities face and how we organize the stand together, so remember, mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll write you right back. For David Hebden and Kayla Rivara and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Take care, stay involved, keep listening, and stay in touch.
