California: "Extremists get a supervisor recalled. Let that be a warning."
Last edited Sat Feb 5, 2022, 05:59 PM - Edit history (1)
This from the Los Angeles Times (the long link below should take you to pg B-1) This is a national movement being fought at the very local level.
When conservatives fight one another over God and country, my general reaction is — have at it, and where’s the popcorn?
But the recent recall election in Shasta County that pitted a Republican ex-police chief against a far-right faction backed by a local militia is different. It’s a wakeup call ahead of the 2022 midterms that elections can go very wrong, even in liberal California.
(Snip)
The far right has made it clear that it hopes to target and drive out elected officials in places where their small numbers have outsize power with the right mix of discontent, propaganda and money. If those officials are replaced by ones willing to put ideology ahead of rules and democracy, we are going to end up with actual election fraud (not the conspiracy sort), school curricula straight out of the 1950s, and perhaps even sheriffs and district attorneys more interested in power than law.
That all may sound alarmist, but as Christopher Browning, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on Nazis and the Holocaust, told me, there’s a certain set of the far right that actually did learn something when they raided Congress a year ago. — Violent takeovers are hard. “Legal revolutions” are easier and more effective.
“They realize that you can’t go out and storm the Capitol, but you can take town hall after town hall,” Browning said. He pointed out that this tactic has been used by authoritarians before, including in Nazi Germany.
The recall attempt in Shasta has the veneer of a free and fair election, but there’s slime under the surface. Like much in politics these days, it was the pandemic that shook the fault lines open and exposed the ugly in Redding. It started with the shutdown and masks in 2020.
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?token=42e23962a5d74614be16bae3d62d13e7&utm_id=47983&sfmc_id=1778350&edid=92fa8a28-ea0e-46dd-9456-a63d80921f67
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