NOTE FROM WINTER WATCH EDITOR: The following article (excerpt) is for informational purposes only. It’s is by no means an endorsement of the article or of ‘Slate’ magazine. It’s typical of the media’s coverage of the recall election in Shasta County.
The California County Where an Anti-Government Takeover Worked
By Lili Loofbourow | 14 February 2022
SLATE — On Feb. 1, a militia-backed anti-government group in Northern California won a recall vote that will effectively give it control over Shasta County’s local government. The official being recalled was Leonard Moty, a Republican who had once been police chief and has served as supervisor since 2008. If the early results hold, which have the recall winning with 56 percent of the vote, the sponsors will have scored a victory against the already conservative county’s insufficiently insurrectionist status quo. One of the groups in this saga, Recall Shasta, has received at least half a million dollars in funding from a disgruntled multimillionaire with a personal vendetta against Shasta County’s local government. But the most notable aspect of the effort is how self-conscious it was: Leaders of the recall effort went out of their way to bill their initiative as a model for what other far-right groups across the country can do. Their goal was not just to win, but to evangelize. Members have even been producing a docuseries about the effort aptly named The Red, White, and Blueprint. That bizarre events in an out-of-the-way place like Shasta County could constitute a template for national movement-building would at one point have seemed far-fetched. No longer — it worked. And it’s working in many other places, too, in school boards and town halls across the country. Observers think the Shasta County election might indeed become a template of sorts for what’s to come.
It’s hard to say how exactly this all started for the city of Redding and its environs. Back in October 2020, a far-right supervisor, Les Baugh, proposed that the county withdraw from California’s color-coded tier system designed to manage the pandemic. The proposal didn’t pass — one official pointed out that it was illegal, and other supervisors worried that the state might retaliate by withholding funds. To future members of the recall effort, this moment would be held up as a massive failing — a lack of courage by the board of supervisors.
Or maybe it started even further back, in 2014, when the aforementioned multimillionaire battled and settled with Shasta County because he bristled at the permits required to work on his land. He characterized local government as an assault on his liberty and has since — from his home in Connecticut — been financially supporting far-right extremist groups and the 2020 election of one of the current extremist supervisors, all leading up to the recall. […]
I wonder if anti-geoengineering activist Dane Wigington (geoengineeringwatch.org) might have played a role in this. He’s been incredibly vocal locally and on his weekly national broadcast and has a new documentary out called ‘The Dimming’ and is now suing several officials over it all. He shows videos of his land there that has been decimated from all the geoengineering chemicals and manufactured drought.
Being a long term resident of Redding, I will say we are just tired of the corruption and nefarious behavior of our representatives. Apparently so are many other hard working tax paying Americans. The thieves must go, and they will.
It’s wonderful to see people so civic minded and active at a local level. We cannot control what goes on in Washington, D.C., but we do have some control over what happens in our own communities. Change at a local level can translate over time into change across a nation. That’s how it’s supposed to work anyway. 🙂