Chapter Five

THE RED WHITE AND BLUEPRINT

Mary Rickert opened her iPad, clicked on her hate-mail folder, and started scrolling down some of the screeds she had received over the three years since the COVID pandemic first hit. One read, “I’d like to fuck Mary Rickert in the face with a brick.” Another had the subject line, “Going, going, gone, dead woman walking.” She closed the folder, shuddered, and said, “I have PTSD because of this, just from the insanity of it all. I have nightmares all the time. Watching the county just crumble is absolutely devastating for me, watching it being taken over by a far-right group.”

Rickert was seventy years old, with a long and storied local history in Redding. A prizewinning rancher with a degree in dairy science from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, she had served on the State Board of Forestry Fire Protection, spent ten years on the local mental health board, and was currently a member of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors. She and her husband owned several ranches with free-range cattle, along with hay and rice production, throughout the county, and they managed tens of thousands of additional acres for absentee landlords from the Bay Area. Rickert lived during the workweek at the ranch that was closest to the county seat of Redding: a comfortable, spacious white wooden bungalow four miles outside of the little town of Anderson and just under a half-hour’s drive from the county supervisors’ offices. The 2,200 acres of the ranch ran alongside the Sacramento River for two and a half miles, had thousands of squat white oak trees under which their cattle herds sought shade in the spring before they were trucked north for their summer pastures, and had meadows speckled with stunning displays of yellow wildflowers. In the spring, beekeepers came to those meadows with boxes of bees to pollinate the trees. Deer roamed the land, ducking under the barbed-wire fence line of the property—designed to stop the cows from escaping onto the roads on the edge of their land—which the Rickerts had elevated just enough to let smaller wildlife sneak under. She liked nothing more, she said, than to explore her acres, looking for downed tree limbs to stack or dead trees to mark for removal. She was at her calmest when she could take a sandwich out to the meadows, sit under a tree with some of her cows, and eat her lunch. It was, Mary confided, the “happy place” that she retreated to in her mind’s eye when the going got particularly rough during a board of supervisors meeting.

The Rickerts’ main ranch was eighty miles northeast of Anderson, in the tiny hamlet of McArthur—population 334, at the time of the 2020 census—in the Fall River Valley. It was in the northeasternmost corner of District Three, the vast expanse of sparsely populated land that Rickert represented as supervisor. There, practically under the shadow of the fourteen-thousand-foot-high slopes of Mount Shasta, the county supervisor retreated on weekends, to the 1960s-era ranch house she had lived in for decades, thirty miles from the nearest stoplight, to watch the waterfowl that visited her land and to marvel at the landscape she called home.

Mary and her husband knew many of the political leaders of the state. And her family, going back three generations, had been important figures in the crafting of agricultural policy in California; her maternal grandfather, she recalled with pride, had established the state’s chapter of the Future Farmers of America.

Rickert, whose office walls in the county building were filled with commendations and certificates, as well as family photos and ranching memorabilia, had until recently been considered by the public to be a rock-solid conservative, a woman who had cut her teeth in the Reagan years and voted for Trump twice, someone who could be trusted to come up with cogent arguments against government regulation and who was a proud gun owner, more than familiar with the ways of pistols and hunting rifles. She had long watched Fox News as her default cable network, growing disillusioned with the channel only after its commentators defended the January 6 rioters, among whom were many who had made their way from Shasta County, several of them personal friends of county supervisors.

Rickert was a feisty woman with a thick head of mouse-brown curls, a rouged face, and almost theatrically large spectacles. Everything about her was over the top, from her plaid jackets to her big chain bracelets—yet by the winter of 2023 she felt herself to be the sober personality in the room, a voice of reason in a moment in which her beloved county was going crazy. For three long years, because she, along with a majority of her colleagues on the five-person board, agreed to abide by Governor Newsom’s emergency pandemic mandates from the spring of 2020, including shuttering the board’s chambers and meetings to the public and moving interactions with constituents to Zoom, Rickert had been derided as a RINO. It was a label that offered no way back, a scarlet letter, and there was nothing she could do to convince those who had so labeled her that her conservative bona fides remained intact. The septuagenarian was routinely subjected to death threats and other intimidations and harassment. She was frequently denounced during overheated meetings as a “Communist”—even though it would be hard to imagine someone less likely to fit the profile of a revolutionary Marxist.

On the day of the January 6 uprising in Washington, DC, newly emboldened far-right members of the board, led by Supervisors Les Baugh and the newly elected Patrick Jones, boisterously made their way into the county building and dramatically opened the board offices. At 9 a.m. California time, as Trump began speaking to his crowd of supporters in Washington—many of whom were armed and determined to prevent the certification of the Electoral College vote by any means necessary—urging them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to show their anger at the efforts to certify the presidential vote, telling them that only through strength would they retake their country, in Redding, California, their compatriots jostled their way into the county building. By the time Trump’s supporters began tearing down the security perimeter around the Capitol, pepper-spraying and otherwise assaulting Capitol Police officers, and then storming into the building on the hunt for Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and others, the anti-lockdown protesters in Redding had liberated the county offices. No matter that the building was largely empty and that the board had, months earlier, in the face of spiraling infection numbers and rowdy meeting attendees who refused to wear masks or to socially distance inside the chambers, voted to take their meetings online. What mattered, according to Jones, was that a point had been made. “I said if I was elected—which I was—on Day One, January 6th, 2021, I’d open the building. And I did. It was packed. Hundred and something people,” Jones said proudly, a little more than two years after that momentous day.

Did he think, with hindsight, that the events in Redding on January 6 bore some resemblance to the storming of the Capitol, three thousand miles to the east, that same day? Chairman Jones demurred. Redding, he asserted, wasn’t about people storming anything; it was just about reestablishing freedom and opening a public building that ought never to have been closed to the voting public in the first place: “I told the public I was going to open up the building and people were going to come in, and I did. There wasn’t no rush. It’s just lies.”

Then he paused and thought about the analogy to the Capitol, pondered how uncomfortable he was with the notion that the God-fearing conservatives in that Trump-inspired crowd could have acted violently. “It didn’t happen here, so I’m wondering if it happened there in DC. They opened the door and let people in; they wanted to create that environment. The door just didn’t magically open on its own. The national media says they were trying to overthrow the government. They opened the doors and let people in; let down the barriers. The national media says the Capitol was breached. It wasn’t.”

For Jones’s friend Woody Clendenen, the whole January 6 thing was a big brouhaha over nothing. He knew people, he claimed, who had been stationed overseas during genuine insurrections, who had experienced the full fire and fury of a roused populace determined to overthrow their government. January 6, he felt, didn’t come remotely close to meeting those terrifying standards. “It wasn’t an insurrection; that’s for damn sure,” he opined. “If the American people insurrected, there wouldn’t be a building left standing in Washington. That’s not what they [the people attending the January 6 protests] were there to do. They were there to peacefully protest.” The violence against the police? “Turns out none of those cops got killed. They lied about everything that happened there. It was inspired by the feds. Just like the Governor Whitmer kidnapping attempt turned out to be totally planned by the feds.”

In other words, a federal government still ostensibly controlled by the Trump administration planned a massive false-flag operation designed to make Trump and his supporters look bad in order to enable a roundup of conservative patriots and ease Biden into power.

Board of supervisors meetings in early 2021 were dispiriting, eerie affairs. Only one member of the public at a time was allowed into the chamber to give a three-minute speech, and all the board members were masked and partitioned off from each other by Plexiglas in front of them and to their sides, making them look something like freaks in a freak-show cage. Or like prisoners, talking to visitors through bulletproof windows, their voices piped to each other over intercoms or phones. There was in that room nothing but sterility, none of the vibrancy and human interplay, none of the spontaneity, that is normally associated with local government meetings. Outside the chamber, frustrated anti-lockdown advocates, almost all unmasked, gathered with bullhorns, shouting out their demands to the five board members.

Had a time traveler somehow made the leap from early 2020 to mid-2021, they would have been utterly flummoxed at the change. Multi-hundred-million-dollar county budgets that used to be perused for hours at a time in painstaking detail by board members before votes were taken on them were now hurriedly approved with only a minimum of debate, the supervisors desperate to retreat once more into the safety of their homes, each additional minute in a group setting an added risk to their well-being.

Behind the Plexiglas dividers, a smaller, less ambitious version of public governance, and of the interplay between those doing the governing and those being governed, was taking shape. The dividers may have been only an improvised and temporary response to a raging pandemic, but in the eyes of Carlos Zapata and the other leaders of the local anti-lockdown movement, they were symbols of a yawning gap, of a cavalier disregard for democratic processes.

Later on, in June 2021, Patrick Jones would pull a savvy publicity stunt to capitalize on this growing resentment, showing up with a power screwdriver and theatrically unscrewing the Plexiglas surrounding his desk from its moorings, and then, to raucous cheers from the audience, picking up and removing the dividers that separated him both from his colleagues and from the public. Jones sat down again behind his computer screen, raised his eyebrows, and said, simply, “Much better.” His audience ate it up; if this wasn’t owning the libs, it was hard to know what was.

At the time, the majority of the supervisors were just trying to keep themselves and the public as safe as possible, and to do so they were abiding by state health mandates. To the unmasked attendees, however, who gathered inside the rooms when they were permitted, and outside the meeting room with bullhorns and anger when restrictions meant they had to filter in one at a time to make their comments, it was a grotesque assault on their right to participate in the democratic institutions of local governance. The thing is, they weren’t entirely wrong about this—the emergency powers that democratic governments assumed all over the world and the breakdown of participatory processes during this time showed how fragile were the democratic bonds. Liberties that had long been seen as sacrosanct were, during the emergency, suddenly put on the chopping block. Parliamentary methods of decision making that had evolved over centuries were cast to one side in an instant in order to respond swiftly to the unprecedented public health dangers of the moment. There were, both at the time and certainly with hindsight, legitimate objections to the way these democratic processes were allowed to buckle, but the protesters in Shasta didn’t stop at that. They turned a legitimate objection to some public health emergency measures into an across-the-board critique of public health, of the CDC, of local government, and of state government, tying everything together into a meta-conspiracy intended to deprive Americans of their God-given liberties.

The long tail of that resentment would impact the county for years to come.

A little more than twelve months after those strange, Plexiglas-fronted meetings, in February 2022 Rickert would survive the recall effort against her, as did a colleague, Joe Chimenti. But then–board chair Leonard Moty, like Rickert a Reagan Republican, blamed by many residents for not going to war with the state against its COVID public health mandates, wouldn’t be so lucky. Even though, compared to most other counties, Shasta went light on its lockdown enforcement, tending to turn a blind eye when small businesses reopened or when mask mandates were ignored, and even though many of its schools either never shut or, if they did, reopened for in-person classes months before schools in any of the state’s big cities did so, for the anti-mandate faction Moty was doing too little too late.

“COVID, when it came out, was a very distant thing,” Moty said, as he thought through the two years leading up to his recall. “We were like six months behind [in terms of local infection rates]. So a lot of people ’round here saw it as Sacramento and the Democratic governor trying to tell us what to do, big government trying to take over, the New World Order. We’re a hotbed for the State of Jefferson thing. It became an easy rallying point.”

Moty had favored a form of “voluntary compliance” with the mandates, a go-soft approach that meant when local businesses refused to shut down, the county generally didn’t issue citations. He had no problems with restaurants keeping up outdoor dining; he recognized that rural counties had different pandemic needs than did the densely populated big cities to the south.

But when the infection rates spiked late in 2020 and the local hospitals were overwhelmed, Moty and his colleagues leaned into further restrictions and tighter lockdowns. By then, however, their enemies were circling. Because most of those who supported the mask mandates and other health measures had long stopped going to these public meetings, where they knew they would bump up against unmasked and nonsocially spaced attendees, by default Zapata and his crowd were able to take center stage. In the months after Zapata’s barn-raising speech went viral, they would pack the meetings, maskless, crammed next to each other, jeering the Palo Cedro resident’s opponents and cheering on their homespun hero.

When Zapata, wearing a white T-shirt and a blue-and-white baseball cap, stepped to the podium in one particularly tense meeting in the summer of 2021 and went after a progressive local journalist, Doni Chamberlain, the enthused crowd members could barely contain themselves.

As Zapata raised his voice to denounce masking and to lambaste anyone who favored public health restrictions as unpatriotic and willing to inflict deliberate violence on children, he homed in on Chamberlain, who had been writing increasingly personal ad hominem attacks on him in her online publication A News Café over the course of the year since he had demanded the county immediately reopen. Chamberlain, a one-time print newspaper journalist who had run her online publication since 2007, first under the name Food for Thought and then as A News Café, didn’t write concisely. In long screeds, often pages long, the diminutive grandmother mocked her perceived enemies, people whose rhetoric she held responsible for the escalating threats that she and her news colleagues faced. She wrote that Zapata was “unhinged,” that he was “abusive,” that he “embraces fighting and violence.” He was, she told readers, an “unstable, out-of-control bully with an inflated ego in dire need of anger-management help.”

Now the ex-marine responded in kind. He denounced the journalist as “the only person in this room covering her coward face”; mocked her for having had an unpleasant divorce, in which her and her husband’s personal dirty laundry was aired in public; and, addressing her directly, hollered that “this is our county, Doni. We’re fighting to take it back from people like you.” And then he continued: “We are up against people who will say anything and do anything to hurt our children. We have to stand up.” To the audience, both in the room and in the vast, amorphous expanses of the internet, he exhorted them to “take a side. Hot or cold.” The unmasked crowd lapped it up. As Zapata’s voice crescendoed and as he built to a climax of performative rage against Chamberlain and her ilk, a chorus of heckling, men’s and women’s voices mixed in about equal measure, began against the publisher of A News Café. There was something almost cartoonish about it: “Coward!” “Go to hell!” “Slander!” “Pussy!” “Her people are smearing people online!” “Communist!” “Fake news!”

Zapata triumphantly walked away from the dais. Chamberlain took a deep breath and returned home to write yet another article on what she viewed as the climate of rage that had taken over her county.

“We do have a pretty big population of extremists; their rhetoric is violent, very antigovernment,” said Jennifer Arnold, a self-employed copywriter who had joined an online group that was called Things You Should Know—Shasta County and that had been established to track the region’s slide toward extremism. But, she continued, their message was amplified less by their raw numbers than by their volume: “They seem like a bigger group because they’re a loud minority. The politics went from right to far-right, but there’s only a little section of extreme far-right people.” Once that loud minority had established its dominance at the board meetings, the attacks against Rickert, Chimenti, and Moty, as well as any other person who was seen as being on the side of Big Government, came fast and furious. At every meeting, they were heckled and insulted. At every meeting, they were accused of having abandoned county residents, many of whom journeyed in from small out-of-the-way rural communities with names like Happy Valley, Igo, and French Gulch, to the predations of a liberal, out-of-control Sacramento administration and its public health foot soldiers.

Boosted by a huge infusion of cash from an eccentric Greenwich, Connecticut-based right-wing heir to a billionaire’s fortune named Reverge Anselmo, the recall effort picked up steam through 2021.

Anselmo, whose father had made his fortune setting up the Spanish-language television station that is now known as Univision, and whose mother, Mary, had previously made it onto the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, was tall and lean. His sartorial taste tended toward black suits, formal shirts, and expensive black ties. His face was creased, his gray hair cropped short. He was, as he told the producers of The Red White and Blueprint, infuriated by the board’s actions against his business holdings. He had, he remembered, chosen Shasta County for the site of his 1,200-acre vineyard precisely because it was known to be conservative. It was, he said, 67 percent Republican, “so at least I’m not going to catch any craziness there.” And then, to his disgust, he had indeed caught the craziness. Instead of greeting with favor his plans to build a winery, a restaurant, and a ranch house on his land, the county had had the temerity to demand that he go through a time-consuming permitting process. When he sued the county rather than abide by its permitting request, claiming that his property rights were being violated, the county leaned into the court proceedings instead of backing down. When the wealthy landowner then decided to add a chapel onto his property, also without a permit, the county again ordered him to stop construction. As the legal fight picked up steam, Anselmo became something of a minor celebrity on the right-wing political circuit. Fox News picked up his story, commentators such as Ann Coulter excoriated the board of supervisors, and local Tea Party activists made Anselmo a poster boy for their “Don’t Tread on Me” antigovernment campaigns. Ultimately, however, none of this support mattered. In 2013 a federal judge sided with the county, and Anselmo was ordered to pay more than a million dollars in legal fees and fines.

Now, eight years on, Anselmo was determined to flex his financial muscle from his splashy estate on the other side of the continent to influence the recall election. Over the course of the campaign, Anselmo reputedly ponied up hundreds of thousands of dollars—close to half a million dollars, Bloomberg’s “Citylab” podcaster Laura Bliss calculated—donated to local activists and political action committees, turning what could have been a sleepy local race into a spectacle that assumed global implications for the alt-right. If Moty were recalled, and if the permitting process in the county were reformed, Anselmo might, he said, consider bringing his businesses back to Shasta.

Through the spring and summer of 2021, events were held to gather the required number of signatures to qualify the recalls for the ballot. They took place in local churches such as Grace Presbyterian, where congregants were encouraged to pray and fast for the success of the recall; in gun stores; and in local restaurants such as Dill’s Deli, a barbecue joint three miles north of Redding, with a sign conspicuously placed in the window: “Freedom of Choice, Not Mandates.” There were drive-throughs for signature gathering. There were auctions to raise money for the campaign in local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) halls. And through it all—through the hellish months of smoke from local forest fires and through the months of growing numbers of pandemic illnesses and deaths—there were increasingly acrimonious, loud confrontations at board meetings and increasingly ugly internet campaigns against the targeted supervisors.

Zapata posted frequently on Facebook and other social media sites. He argued that killing one’s opponents was, in theory, justified in the fight against tyranny. And articles published by Doni Chamberlain in August and November 2021 in A News Café referenced Zapata posts declaring that he had “never relinquished my kill option” and stating that given the exigencies of the moment it was necessary to teach one’s children to be “wildly ruthless.” When celebrity conspiracy buff Alex Jones invited Zapata to be on his InfoWars show, the ex-marine leaped at the chance to explain his ideas to a broader audience. “You don’t vote your way out of socialism,” he opined. “Once it’s taken root, the only way to eradicate it is to fight it with arms, to have a violent, violent confrontation, have blood in the streets. And I hate to say it, but that’s the reality of where we are at, Alex. And if the mechanism for fixing it is broken, then we need to fix that. You don’t fix that by talking, by rallying, by even voting. You fix that mechanism by violent overthrow. You fix it by storming the chambers and forcibly removing those people that are oppressing you. You change things by rallying the troops to take up arms.”

Yet even though Zapata didn’t have much confidence in the electoral system, once the petition drive against the moderate supervisors took off, he was all too happy to lend his support to the campaign via memes and pithy comments directed against Moty, Chimenti, and Rickert. Nor did he object when his fellow Palo Cedro residents voted in conservative members of the local school board. This was, after all, the sort of political change, nudged from below by outraged citizens, that Zapata had dreamed of in The Red White and Blueprint.

“The Blueprint is citizens taking responsibility for our government,” Elissa McEuen, one of the stay-at-home mothers who had gotten most involved in the county fights over the COVID lockdowns and school closings, told the documentary’s interviewers. As far back as May 2020, barely two months into the pandemic, she had excoriated the board of supervisors for abiding by state mandates that, she argued, would result in her children growing up enslaved. Standing outside the board chambers, because the supervisors had voted to hold their meetings in closed session, the young mother grabbed a bullhorn and screamed into the chamber demands that the board members stand up to Gavin Newsom’s administration and fully reopen the county. She had since gotten increasingly involved in local efforts to bring down the existing majority on the board, helping to coordinate a sprawling coalition of various libertarian and far-right groupings, all of whom were being further radicalized by the restrictions on everyday life put in place to slow down the spread of the new and deadly virus.

McEuen had been the one, at an absolutely packed board of supervisors meeting in early April 2021, a year into the pandemic, to present the three supervisors with the notices of intent to recall them. In doing so, she had spoken fluently, with passion and with conviction, about broken government, mismanagement, and even corruption. And with her long curly hair and her black pantsuit, she looked every bit the professional—not, by any stretch, an extremist, just a concerned mom. In a metered tone, she told the supervisors that the campaign was designed to “secure our rights to operate our schools, businesses, and churches as we see fit.” And she also told them that “this is not personal; this is responsible citizenship.” Like Zapata, McEuen had a natural gift for speaking, knew how to build to a crescendo, knew when to taper off and go for the soft, slow timbre.

Later, on episode 2 of The Red White and Blueprint, McEuen would elaborate on her ideas, telling the audience that she and her allies were engaged in a grand project intended to protect the Republic down through the generations. That episode also featured footage of the March 2021 Cottonwood Rodeo, complete with martial mood music and a voice-over from a speaker addressing the rodeo attendees about the American flag: “If somebody stomps on it, you put ’em in their place, and if somebody tries to take it away from us, well, you build The Red White and Blueprint. Don’t let ’em tell us what to do. Don’t let ’em take it away. I hope you will stand with us when the time comes to be true Americans.” Rounding out that episode was a bizarre illustrated graphic-novel–style segment showing soldiers/avatars continuously firing off their guns. It depicted the county government and its various departments as a series of armies, the heads of the departments as generals, all of whom had maliciously decided to turn their guns on the people of Shasta County, “thereby making us slaves of the state.”

By the summer of 2021, with the recall in full swing, the moderate supervisors knew that they would now face months of relentless attacks, their records impugned, and the full force of a well-funded and savvy social media campaign turned against them.

A few years earlier, Moty had gone behind the Carr Fire evacuation lines to check up on families that hadn’t left and on homes that had been left behind. He brought with him gas for home generators. While behind the lines, he stopped by the large house, in a rural, hilly subdivision west of Redding, that he and his wife, Tracy, had lived in for more than a quarter of a century and added gas to his own generator. That act, that appearance of using his official position to illegitimately access his evacuated home, would eventually land him a grand jury investigation. Although he wasn’t prosecuted for or found guilty of any crimes, the grand jury report did state that he had committed an act of “mis-feasance,” essentially suggesting that he had shown poor judgment. He wasn’t convicted of a crime, wasn’t fined, but in early June 2021 did face a vote of censure from his colleagues on the board. Sitting in their Plexiglas cubicles, one after the other they announced their support for censure. The most conservative of them, Les Baugh, declared it “purely 100 percent malfeasance of office” and called on Moty to resign. Mary Rickert got so angry at Baugh’s onslaught against her friend that she eventually screamed at him that she was “sick and tired of listening to your bullshit. I don’t lose my temper very often, but you flipped that switch.” Yet Rickert also voted in favor of the censure motion. Even Moty endorsed the vote, hoping that in acknowledging he had been wrong to refuel his home generator he could put the episode behind him. It didn’t work. Over the coming months, his opponents would wield the censure motion like a sledgehammer to beat into the heads of the undecideds the notion that Moty was unfit to hold public office. Not surprisingly, Moty’s numbers among the voting public in Shasta County took a hit.

When, in early January 2022, Moty won a 3–2 vote to become chairman of the board of supervisors, his opponents, laced throughout the audience, audibly snickered. In his first act as chair, Moty moved to limit the public comment period to forty-five minutes total at the start of each meeting, with further comments being pushed back to the end of the meeting in order to allow board members to have time to vote on the issues before them; in response, the crowd erupted in a righteous fury. From then on, the chairman seemed to be in a state of nearly permanent confrontation with his constituents. When they refused to abide by the three-minute limit on individual comments, he would repeatedly request that they stop talking; if they didn’t, he ordered them removed from the room. There was, at times, something of the martinet in his persona. When the activists heckled him, he gave as good as he got, repeatedly telling them to be quiet, to abide by the time limits, to sit down, to shut up. The longer the confrontations went on, the more a barely concealed fury could be heard in the chairman’s voice. It was as if he could see the writing on the wall, knew that his days as supervisor were numbered, and wanted to vent while he still had a public platform.

Sure enough, on February 1, 2022, in a low-turnout election participated in by fewer than half the total who had voted in the presidential election fifteen months earlier, Moty was booted off the board of supervisors, with 56 percent of the nearly 9,000 people who voted casting their ballots in favor of recalling him. His replacement, the basso-voiced, gray-haired Happy Valley school board chairman Tim Garman—elected with 1,600 fewer votes than Moty himself had received in the recall vote—was a MAGA loyalist, an anti-vaxxer, and a sympathizer with the local militia. His chief selling point, as he regularly reminded supporters during stump speeches, was that in his capacity as school board chair, he had taken actions to ignore the state’s COVID vaccine mandates for schoolkids.

The election confirmed to Shasta observers what had been apparent for more than a year: riven by battles over the correct response to the COVID crisis, in thrall to Trumpism and the MAGA rhetoric of the nation’s forty-fifth president, the county was spiraling rightward, its moderate Republicans sidelined by a radicalized, infuriated, take-no-prisoners populist Right. In such an atmosphere, Jones and his allies thrived, taking symbolic actions against state public health mandates that they didn’t actually have the legal authority to reject. The point wasn’t necessarily to actually get the board to do something; rather, it was to score political points. It was, in the words of the “Citylab” podcaster Laura Bliss, “government theater,” or “basically symbolic actions” intended simply to rally the political troops. If that was Jones’s goal, he more than succeeded. Pointless, threatening letters to Governor Newsom would be entered into the record while the unmasked, unsocially distanced crowd stood and whooped aloud, as if they were the audience in an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. After one such letter had been read out to the crowd, Jones and his colleague Les Baugh screamed at Rickert and Moty (Chimenti, sitting in the middle, looked like there was nowhere he would rather less be). Rickert, her voice breaking with frustration, talked of the numbers of memorial services she had recently attended for COVID victims; with the crowd haranguing and mocking her, she seemed, at times, on the verge of tears.

Nine months after the recall, the shift rightward accelerated: following Joe Chimenti’s decision that running for reelection in such a toxic environment was more trouble than it was worth, in the November 2022 elections two more supervisors aligned with Jones and Garman were elected.

What had been a four–one moderate-right majority on the county board of supervisors in 2020 was, by early 2023, a four–one hard-right majority. Patrick Jones, Kevin Crye, Chris Kelstrom, and Tim Garman were now arrayed against the lone surviving moderate, Mary Rickert. Even when, a few months later, Garman began to tone down his positions and more frequently ally with Rickert, that hard-right majority remained. At a minimum, on most issues Jones could drum up another two colleagues to support his policy stances.