I’ve learned that wisdom, the rightful use of knowledge, brings life, more to be treasured than gold. Photo by Stacey Warde
Let a man meet a bear robbed of her cubs, rather than a fool in his folly. — Proverbs 17:12
by Stacey Warde
The classic definition of a fool is someone who believes in a lie, who lives their life according to fables and unfounded claims, who refuses to acknowledge truth, all of which eventually result in their own or someone else’s ruin.
Fools are not to be trifled with; they are supremely dangerous — better to come across a bear robbed of her cubs than to meet a fool in his folly, says the author of Proverbs. They pose a real threat to the health and well-being of the community with their loud, false, and vociferous claims.
They bear false witness and malign others to further their own ends, and refuse to bend their hearts or minds to truth despite all the evidence, and willfully submit themselves (and those within their circle of influence) to eventual disgrace and humiliation. A wise person seeks to heal and mend, to build and create rather than malign and destroy.
There’s no peace or rest with fools; only calamity. They set their sights on the destruction of all that is good. Their goal is to demolish and tear down. They haven’t any plan or clue on how to make things better, only on how to destroy, disrupt, and divide. Their words — often rhetoric that has no basis in reality — are full of poison and misrepresentations of the facts, which don’t matter to them at all.
I’ve been no less a fool myself on many occasion, believing lies, getting angry at imagined slights, lashing out unintelligently, living in the fantastical world of magical thinking, holding fast to half-truths and trinkets of reality, concocting stories out of whole cloth, indulging in speculation, rumor, and hearsay, supporting lost causes. Over the years, however, and in spite of my own follies, I’ve gained more respect for wisdom and understanding because these, at least, are much less likely to end in disaster — for individuals as well as the larger community.
I’ve learned to think critically, parse truth from fiction, because I believe that these are the mature and responsible ways to behave as a citizen, because, let’s be honest, as even the Bible says, wisdom is more to be desired than folly. What is the nature of wisdom?
I’ve learned that wisdom, the rightful use of knowledge, brings life, more to be treasured than gold; wisdom and the actions derived from it are in accord with nature and are more likely to result in the good that promotes healthy community and constructive dialogue. Folly, living and believing in a lie, leads to shame, villainy, and death, as we’ve already witnessed and continue to witness among those who claim falsehoods as their guiding light.
So, here we are, a nation apparently half full of fools, on the heels of a global pandemic, still believing a lie, still clinging to villainy and the threat of armed resistance, still stupidly thinking against all the evidence and sound reason that Democrats stole Election 2020, still spuriously claiming that covid-19 is “just a flu,” despite the million victims in the US who have died from the disease, still holding up a false god (any politician, not just Trump) as their Savior, ad nauseam…. How sad, how really truly sad, that folly, maliciousness, and shameful, willful ignorance have become the hallmark of a “patriot” in the U.S. These so-called patriots now call good evil and evil good, promoting acts of violence such as we saw during 2020’s January 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol with blessings from the Biggest Fool of all.
I’ve had conversations with well-meaning friends and individuals who believe that we ought not to judge or criticize the wayward fool, that we ought ourselves to remain neutral in the false hope that we might turn their hearts towards what is true and lovely. Rather, these friends have argued, we ought to remain open to conversation or intelligent dialogue with people who have succumbed to the lies and ignorance of, say, shadowy figures or movements like the Pillow Guy or QAnon. I say that’s bunk. Holding out hope for a fool is wasting your time. Better to tie an 800-pound rock around your neck and jump into a lake. Leave the presence of a fool and let them wallow in the sewage of their own delusions. You’re better off without them. Save your gifts and talents for those who will listen.
And, at the risk of ignoring my own admonition to move on from the presence of fools and being maligned by false witnesses and sundry other misinformed individuals, if you are one of those people parading their folly in the streets, carrying “stop the steal” signs, claiming in ignorance and against all evidence or reason that Trump won the election, thumbing your nose at covid-19, defying science and public health guidelines, all I can say is, Just stop! Don’t be a fool. Don’t go down in history as someone who based their life on a lie. Stop trying to subvert our democracy. Stop minimizing the pain and suffering of those who have died from covid-19. Call yourself tragically misinformed, or claim the moniker of fool, but don’t flatter yourself by calling yourself a “patriot.” There’s no virtue or wisdom in such a specious claim. You, who ignorantly believe and willfully spread these lies, are no patriot.
A patriot doesn’t resort to arms in defiance of just laws, or try to destroy what is good; a patriot fights for liberty from real, not imagined, oppression. A patriot isn’t blind or foolish, or a subscriber to QAnon, or a follower of imbecilic claims by people like Mike Lindell (and the list goes on…) who says he has evidence of liberal malfeasance but has only offered evidence of his own delusions. A patriot defends the right to vote, demands that all votes be counted (once, twice, three times, it doesn’t matter), not the right to add or subtract votes at whim.
Let wisdom and reason, not folly, be your guiding light. Our republic, and the blood of those who sacrificed their lives to preserve it, demands nothing less. ∆
Stacey Warde writes from his home in Mendocino County where he studies and trusts in the words of the wise. This essay originally appeared on Medium.
I’m still learning how to swim years after the terror of drowning, after getting thrown into the deep end without knowing how to swim.
by Stacey Warde
Toxic masculinity (circa 1975)
At 15, I took a round slap to the face from a young woman about my age. Not for making a lame joke but for something much worse, for an assault.
I was in the midst of drying off after taking a short ocean swim break from my duties as a store clerk at Clark’s Surf Shop on 15th Street in Newport Beach, Calif., then a popular summer hangout for teens. We rented rafts and umbrellas, and sold mens and womens swimwear, towels and lotions, whatever anyone needed to stay comfortable on the beach.
My work mate, an accomplished popular surfer named Jack, who was a few years older than I, laughed uproariously as the smack of the woman’s hand against my face reverberated throughout the shop.
“What did you do?” he asked, still laughing as the girl strode proudly back out onto the crowded, sun-drenched boardwalk that ran up and down the Newport Beach Peninsula, busy with cyclists on beach cruisers, skaters on skateboards and roller skates, and sunbathers strolling, looking for a hookup or a hamburger.
“I smacked her on the butt,” I said. He laughed even more loudly.
“You did what? Do you even know her?”
No, I told Jack, who was teaching me how to bodysurf the monster south swells that pummeled Orange County’s south-facing beaches during the late summer, swells kicked up by Baja’s hurricane season. I respected him and felt the rightness of the humiliation I suffered in that moment as he sought to understand what had just happened.
I thought I was hot stuff, running out to the ocean’s edge with my swim fins, fearless in the face of some really big waves that Jack taught me how to bodysurf, eager to show off what I’d learned from him. He was the real water ballet dancer, spinning down the face of some of the biggest waves I’d ever seen, holding himself steady halfway down and hydroplaning on his hands inside the wave, the wave’s lip threatening to bury him beneath a ton of water, then spinning himself several times more before torpedoing himself out the back side to meet the next big wave. He was fearless and artful and at-ease in the water, and I really admired those qualities.
***
It had taken me a long time to get comfortable with swimming because, as a young boy, I was terrified of the water after someone, a male in the family, decided to teach me how to swim by throwing me into the deep end for a “sink or swim” swimming lesson, which I failed. I struggled and began sinking until someone fished me out. I refused from that point on never to go near the water.
Until then, as a 5-year-old, I had been perfectly content to hang out in the shallow end of the pool, clinging for dear life to the pool’s edge. But for some reason, not from malice so much as from the notion that a boy shouldn’t be a pansy hanging onto the edge of the pool, never venturing beyond his limits, one of the menfolk in my family decided to test my mettle by lifting me out of the shallow water and hurling me into the deep end. I remember it being one of my uncles; mom says it was my biological father who had abandoned us one year earlier. In either case, someone had decided it was time for me to stop being a “pussy.”
Mom had to hire someone, a young woman, to lure me back into the pool after nearly one year of my refusal to get wet, she says. It wasn’t easy; it took some work, patience on the part of my instructor. I don’t remember exactly when I began to really love the water but eventually I overcame my fear of swimming and became a proficient swimmer–and learned to be wary around the menfolk in my family.
***
I trusted Jack, and the girls on the beach seemed to like him as well. He was not a macho kind of guy, even with his hairy chest. He had a slight build, high-pitched voice, and was not “manly” in the typical sense but more like the dolphins we’d see swimming in the warmer south-swell waters, gleaming, playful, and proficient. He was graceful, good-natured, and good-humored.
Whenever possible, friends and I would watch him swim each time he ventured out into the ocean and we would marvel over his mastery of these enormous waves and over his ease of movement in the rush of water pounding the beaches. He usually was the only swimmer to brave those waves, and the lifeguards knew him well enough to leave him alone while they chased everyone else safely away from the water’s edge.
I explained to him how I’d noticed this girl on the beach; she was a regular, and I found her attractive. As I was running up the boardwalk, out to the water for my midmorning swim, I saw her coming toward me, and so took the liberty of slapping her bikini butt as I trotted past her.
“What?” Jack gasped.
She’d waited, apparently, watching me as I took my swim, and followed me back into the shop to correct the situation. She walked to where I was drying off in the store, stood herself directly in front of me, took a deep breath, looked me square in the eye, and with a heave of her arm, slapped me hard. Really hard on the face, not just with fingers but palm and the heavy swing of her outstretched arm. It hurt and it stung. Then, to the music of Jack’s laughter, she marched out.
“You better go find her and apologize,” he said.
I gave him a look, as if to ask if he could manage the shop without me because it was getting close to lunch time, the busiest part of our day, and also because I didn’t really want to apologize. I was afraid to apologize, to admit that I’d done something wrong. Yet I knew that I’d made a poor choice, and hurt someone, and Jack knew it too. I could feel the pain, not just on my reddened, hard-slapped face, but more deeply. Jack shooed me away. Go! Take care of business, he seemed to be saying. I put on my shirt and took off for the beach.
I was half-hoping that I wouldn’t find her. Yet, one way or another, I would need to make things right, admit that I was wrong for slapping that girl’s butt, that I had taken liberty where none was offered. I would, as was so common during summers at the beach, inevitably run into her again. What would I say? How would I face her? I could feel the shame building up inside of me.
Plus, if Mrs. Clark, the nicest lady in the whole world and owner of the shop, caught wind of what had happened, I’d feel more awful than I already did. If word got out that one of her boys working the surf shop was assaulting potential customers, she would have been hurt too. She trusted us enough to leave the shop in our hands and let us run the place. Knowing also our love for the ocean, she was ok with us taking turns on big south swell days to test ourselves in the water. I knew I had a good thing, this summer job on the beach.
I found the girl, sitting among friends on towels in the sand, lounging, enjoying the sun and breeze, not far from the public restrooms where so many of the usual crowd would hang out at “The Wall,” a brick and mortar construction, to watch the surf and gaze at beachcombers as they trudged through the sand to find their places. It was a glorious summer day, the waves roaring up the wet sand, electricity in the air as the south swells pounded the beach.
I braced myself, wary of alarming her and her friends, eager to make things right, to make peace. One of her friends turned to see me coming and warned the others. They all turned to look as I approached, making sure, I guessed, that I would not commit another assault.
“I came to apologize,” I said nervously, hoping to set their minds at ease, dropping to my knees in the sand to avoid towering over them where they sat on their towels. “I’m really sorry,” I said to the girl.
“You had no right to do that!” she said. “You don’t even know me!”
“Yes, I know. I’m really sorry. I won’t ever do it again.”
Her demeanor softened and we chatted briefly about how much we enjoyed the ocean and how that was the most important thing, our only real common interest. Beyond that, we would not be friends, merely acquaintances. Periodically, we would see each other and wave, or say hello.
My struggles with women did not end there.
I’ve offered apologies for worse behavior than slapping a girl on the butt. As a man, I’ve succumbed to the same toxic maleness that possessed whoever threw me into the pool to teach me a lesson about swimming when I didn’t know how to swim. And once, when I called someone “a pussy,” a woman, a friend and lover, laughed at me and said: “Pussy? Try pushing a baby through your penis and see what happens!”
***
The men in my family, mostly uncles, wanted what was best for me, and they taught me what they thought I needed to know to thrive in the world as it was then (and perhaps still is) configured: Men had to be tough, not whiners or “little pussies,” but ready to fight for what was right, and grab what’s theirs before someone took it away. There was no time to cry, or “be like a girl.”
I ventured out into the deep end, however, not because I “manned up” when thrown into it, but because a woman was kind and patient enough to coax me back, not to go deep right away, but simply to get into the water again–after experiencing the terror of drowning–and actually becoming unafraid of and passionate about swimming.
I’m still learning how to swim. The deep end is indeed a scary place.
Stacey Warde is a writer living in Mendocino County, not far from the ocean.
I burned a book once. Actually, I burned two books with the same title at the same time: The New World Translation of the Bible.
Yes, I burned, not just one, but two “bibles.”
I’m not proud; it’s just something I felt had to be done and, at 15, imagined that I had a good reason for doing it, and so I found an excuse to put a match to the pages of a book, and not just any book but a religious one: Anger being the primary motive.
“Fuck this book,” I said to myself after my absentee biological father, who showed little interest in me or my brother, tried to shower us with his “love” by sending us each our own copies of the preferred religious tract of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I knew from base instinct that I would never read it, knew that I was angry about receiving the book as a gift, and felt in my gut the cheapness of the gesture, of thrusting religion in my face without any sign of the love that religion presumably demands.
Despite my anger–coupled with the ongoing childhood fear of abandonment, the guilt and shame of neglect from a parental figure who ghosted his family more than a decade prior–I knew these books were bullshit. There was no love or truth to be found in them, at least not as demonstrated by the one, a devotee, who sent them, my absentee father.
Lucky for me, my mother remarried, and I found a real father, who wasn’t religious at all, who left the Catholic Church when it informed him that he couldn’t marry a divorced woman whom he loved until the day he died nearly 45 years later. The man who actually spawned me had mostly disappeared, with the exception of two brief encounters before his final attempt to win me over with Jehovah.
Once, as a boy of 6, I was playing with my cousins at the ocean’s edge at our favorite spot in Laguna Beach when my aunt, then in her mid-20s, came running down to the water, where we played in the wet sand. “Stacey!” she said breathlessly, pointing toward Main Beach, “Is that your father, walking this way?”
I looked, as any child would, with great eagerness to spy out the only man I could then imagine as my father, the one who left me two years earlier when I was 4. He wore a Speedo swimsuit, the kind of swimwear muscle men wore to the gym, and had a certain look about him.
I started running and stopped him to ask, “Are you still my father?”
He seemed startled, grasping for words, “Well, legally…” I heard him say, and felt my heart drop. I hated him at that moment. I knew his words were slippery, not to be trusted, escape mechanisms, attempts to shuffle the truth, create illusion and distance, and had no real substance to them. I knew then he would never ever, nor would he want to, be my father.
He tried once more to contact us when I was 10. I had already given my heart and loyalty to mom’s second husband, my stepfather who, by all accounts, was the only real father I ever had. Nonetheless, “Jim,” as mom used to call her ex, said he was interested in visitation rights with me and my brother.
He arranged to meet with mom and Mr. Radice (as most of my friends called my new stepdad) and work out the details. My brother and I were told to wait upstairs. When all was said and done, we were asked to come downstairs and say hi to Jim. We said hi, and that was the last we ever saw or heard from him–until he sent us those ugly puke green bibles.
I told my brother, “Watch this! I’ll show you what to do with these.” I took the bibles out to the curb in front of our home and placed them in the gutter. I poured gasoline over the green hardcovers with the gold lettering and the flimsy thin white pages of the two bibles. Then, I struck a match and tossed it onto the gasoline-doused bibles.
They burst into flame and crackled. I glowered in my contempt for my father’s hypocrisy, for his false and limited idea about what love was.
I felt a certain delight and shame, each emotion cohering with my anger and hurt until I wished the fire would burn itself out already, leaving nothing but the charred remains of the hideous, green books with gold lettering. I felt like I was doing my brother and myself a favor by finally cutting ties with a man who would always be a ghost to us, never real, never within reach, not a human face we would recognize.
I didn’t think for a moment that I was doing anything wrong, felt that my anger toward the man who fathered me without taking any of the responsibility of a father was fully justified; and what better way to show it than to put to flame this lame attempt of his to reach out to me and my brother after more than 10 years of virtual silence?
I wasn’t concerned about the books so much as I was about the statement I wanted to make: “Fuck you, ‘dad!’ Fuck you and your religious bullshit!”
By the time we’d received these “gifts,” he’d already fathered a half-dozen more children with nary a word about where he was or what he was doing. As a boy, whenever I’d ask mom why he didn’t seem interested in us, she’d say, “You’re better off without him.”
I never understood that, never believed it entirely despite his absence and disinterest, until many years later when I learned from a couple of half-siblings that living with a Jehovah’s Witness as a father was a living hell.
They left home as soon as they came of age, if not sooner; one of them committed suicide.
As the flames turned the white pages of the books into char, my late grandmother, Virginia, who lived to be 100, pulled up to the curb. I saw a look of horror cross her face as she raised her head to peer over the steering wheel and through the windshield of her car to take in the scene. She pushed her door open and bounced out of the car.
“WHAT are you doing?” she demanded.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry, grandma,” I said, “we’re just burning these fake bibles that Jim sent us.”
I didn’t think much of her disapproval, didn’t imagine that her horror had more to do with the idea of burning books than it did with me making a statement, or even simply starting a fire in the gutter in front of the house. She loved books and could often be found in her room, reading. Books were her treasures.
She came from a family of educators. Her mother, Marie Harding Thurston, pioneered the first schoolhouse in Laguna Beach. We were encouraged to read and educate and better ourselves. We visited the library often and became familiar with the ways of accessing information, sorting truth from fiction, learning to love both truth and fiction, and knowing the difference between the two.
The library eventually became one of my favorite places to hang out as I got older. There, I met fierce advocates of the right to access all kinds of data, if one was interested in really educating himself. There, in the library, I found people who really cared, who encouraged me to learn more, who seemed to suggest an endless flow of data was available if I wanted to have it. The sky’s the limit for anyone who wants to learn something, these librarians seemed to be saying.
I also found through many solo hours in the library that it wasn’t so bad to be alone. I’m grateful for my many hours of study and research in the library, finding treasures galore in books on the library shelves and elsewhere in the system.
I’ve never looked but I imagine you could find in the library a copy of the green-bound bible that Jehovah’s Witnesses have loved and cherished over the years.
Now, nearly 50 years after I set those bibles aflame, I still would not choose to read them, nor do I have any interest in doing so, but I would not burn them either.
Stacey Warde is a writer living in Mendocino County.
As often happens in small communities, especially where news is hard to come by, stories get blown out of proportion yet, on a dime, they can also twist themselves into even stranger truths, or fictions. This one, however, looks to be true.
In my lighthouse post, I reported that a small army of armed men wearing black hoodies had descended upon a home not far from Gualala, the southern tip of Mendocino County where pot grows more quickly, and perhaps draws, or used to anyway, more dollars to the area than the surrounding redwoods.
The number of attackers, as reported by the local media, is still unclear but, reading between the lines, I would guess it was probably in the neighborhood of two banditos, not 20 as originally reported, one of whom was allegedly identified and is now a person of interest in the raid: Yuri Andrade, also known as the man who streaked through a Superbowl game wearing a pink leotard.
The only person who seems to be active on the story is a fella who goes by the name of Matt LaFever, an educator not a full time journalist. I like that he’s out there, since no one else seems to be actively monitoring the police but him. Still, we had to wait TWO days for an update on 20 armed thugs running around in the woods.
LaFever found some good material, documenting the police getting a warrant to search the besieged home. Of course, the cops found nearly 2,000 pounds of pot there. Perhaps there was also a ton of cash, as there usually is because banks refuse huge deposits of cash earned off a Schedule 1 drug, but we don’t know because the details are not yet forthcoming, either because no one is telling us, or because no one is asking.
Where 19th century genius meets 21st century thuggery
I had no idea that a militia of armed rebels was conducting a raid just minutes away as I stood in awe of the genius of 19th century lighthouses.
by Stacey Warde
On the day of my first-ever visit to the Pt. Arena Lighthouse in Mendocino County, I returned home to discover that local law enforcement, five agencies in all, had issued a “shelter-in-place” order because 20 armed bandits wearing black hoodies had descended upon someone’s home in the woods near Gualala, a few miles down the road.
I had no idea that a militia of armed rebels was conducting a raid just minutes away as I stood in awe of the genius of 19th century lighthouses casting a beacon of warning and welcomed light from some 20+ miles away to ships at sea, saving perhaps hundreds of mariners from certain shipwreck, and possibly death. I was still trying to wrap my head around the genius of the French innovator and physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, (1788–1827), whose light technology from 200 years ago, as the saying goes, “saved millions from shipwreck,” and is still used today in car headlamps and traffic signals. All the while, mesmerized by the beauty of the Mendocino coastline and the historic collective effort of pioneers in this area to build a rescue center and beacon of hope for mariners, a small army of bandits was trying to overwhelm nearby homeowners, presumably pot growers or drug dealers with a lot of cash on hand, which is a common hazard in these parts.
Recently relocated to this county from Morro Bay/Cayucos, I decided to go for a drive and enjoy the sun and clear skies along the the coast, try some sightseeing, get to know the place, and landed at the lighthouse, not far from my new home in the small coastal community of Elk, less than 400 residents, slightly smaller than the 2,500 population of Cayucos, where I have lived for most of the past 35 years.
The weather, so far, has been mostly cold and wet, with lots of welcome rain, some frost, and a few cold weather advisories. I’ve been homebound, on account of the weather and covid-19, eager to get out and meet people despite the rain and fog and the global pandemic, but on Tuesday the clouds cleared and the sun came out; it seemed like a good day to venture out into the southernmost part of the Emerald Triangle, where some of the world’s best pot is grown.
Also, nearby Anderson Valley is emerging as one of those quaint hard-to-reach wine destinations popular among folk who love good cuisine paired with equally delicious wines, and appeals to visitors from The City who like to get away and spend lots of money. Like Cayucos, this is a tourist destination but, unlike Cayucos, it appears to me that many who live here also do not wish to be bothered by urbanites whose only goal is to fuck things up by turning the countryside into a rich man’s playground. Still, the push toward the high-end dollar is very much in evidence here, where wine, money, and pot commingle in an odd amalgam of earthy wealth and criminality.
Originally, I had planned only to make a quick run to the Elk Post Office, pick up a package, hit the small family-run general store next door and return home. But the store was closed and I needed some avocados, which were always plentiful on the ranch in Cayucos. We were having tacos for dinner and guacamole sounded like a great side dish.
I had recently visited a small grocery/coffee shop on the main drag through the town of Pt. Arena, about half an hour’s drive south from Elk on Highway 1, the Shoreline Highway. I knew they had what I was looking for. So I headed south on the winding, breathtaking road past Irish Beach with its cluster of eyesore prefab-like homes, down through Manchester, and finally into the little town of Pt. Arena.
Hippies have left their mark on the place, I’ve decided, where it’s easy to find organic produce, posters and handbills advertising liberal ideas such as diversity and the right to vote, and yet there’s an odd mix here of surfers, foresters, environmentalists, and drifters who lounge in the public restroom/park area across the street, next to the Arena Theater, an old movie house still in operation and run locally by an association of art lovers. It’s not unlike the little coastal town of Cayucos, from which I came a few months ago, but less chic and apparently less affected by big money. This is a town, like Cayucos, that has a storied seafaring history but, unlike Cayucos, feels like it’s on the verge of a civil war.
Before I got to the tiny local market, however, I detoured onto the road leading out to the point, where many shipwrecks have occurred throughout the years and where, in 1870, a lighthouse was built to steer ships to safety. Mariners must adjust to a 40-degree slant, heading either north or south, when they get there to avoid hitting rocks or running aground. Navigating these waters requires a skillset that keeps me in awe and I wonder how men and women even find the nerve to approach such a task.
While exploring the area around the the point, I marveled at its rugged beauty, which reminds me of Big Sur, the spectacular rise of coastal mountains on California’s Central Coast, where I’ve spent many a wonderful evening, conversing with Benedictine monks overlooking the Pacific, grousing over the shape of things to come with the curator of the Henry Miller Library, and sitting naked with my lover in the coed baths at the Esalen Institute. Big Sur, however, as I’m quickly learning, is not Mendocino.
While I stood in rapt wonder over the effort required to build the lighthouse and signal a warning to shipmasters the world over who dared to navigate these waters, two armed residents held off the small thug army until authorities arrived and the invaders scattered. Into the woods, I guessed, which would mean several days of slogging through rugged hill country before they arrived where I’m now living. No need to worry. Yet.
We’re loaded down ok, with a couple of shotguns, a handgun or two, but hardly equipped to fend off 20 invaders. I’ve had some training in guerrilla warfare tactics as an Army Ranger, and my host’s two brothers–all lifelong friends, like family–served as Special Forces operatives in Afghanistan and Iraq. I suppose we could stage ourselves for combat. Conduct raids. Drive out the enemy. But this is supposed to be our home. And besides, I’m 63, and I don’t want to set up for combat. I want to live! Life is difficult enough. Like anyone, I want to feel safe in my home, eat good food, sit by the fire and read, not throw up parapets and dig fox holes.
In the end, I want to study the genius of men like Fresnel, who apparently thought more of the wonder of light than how to terrorize and steal from his neighbors. In the end, I wish to pursue the enlightenment to be had in the study of physics instead of bullying someone into giving me something that doesn’t belong to me.
Two days after the “shelter-in-place” order, I have still not found any updates in the local media, no word on whether anyone was caught, or what became of the residents who apparently bravely stood their ground. I’m surprised at the queer silence that has filled the pages of the local news. There’s no appraisal or reassurance about much of anything here, simply the hope for connection with minds like Fresnel’s whose focus truly was to enlighten rather than dominate and terrorize.
Stacey Warde is a writer living in Mendocino County.
Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections
After Steve Bannon urged his followers to take over local-level GOP positions, the plan went viral across far-right media.
by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
“This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.
In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties’ nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers.
“We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state’s formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal” rally during Wisconsin’s November recount, said Bannon’s podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm.
ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”
Bannon, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
While party officials largely credited Bannon’s podcast with driving the surge of new precinct officers, it’s impossible to know the motivations of each new recruit. Precinct officers are not centrally tracked anywhere, and it was not possible to examine all 3,000 counties nationwide. ProPublica focused on politically competitive places that were discussed as targets in far-right media.
The tea party backlash to former President Barack Obama’s election foreshadowed Republican gains in the 2010 midterm. Presidential losses often energize party activists, and it would not be the first time that a candidate’s faction tried to consolidate control over the party apparatus with the aim of winning the next election.
What’s different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can’t let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him,” said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again.”
It has only been a few months — too soon to say whether the wave of newcomers will ultimately succeed in reshaping the GOP or how they will affect Republican prospects in upcoming elections. But what’s already clear is that these up-and-coming party officers have notched early wins.
In Michigan, one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned. In Las Vegas, a handful of Proud Boys, part of the extremist group whose members have been charged in attacking the Capitol, supported a bid to topple moderates controlling the county party — a dispute that’s now in court.
In Phoenix, new precinct officers petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of 2020 ballots. Similar audits are now being pursued by new precinct officers in Michigan and the Carolinas. Outside Atlanta, new local party leaders helped elect a state lawmaker who championed Georgia’s sweeping new voting restrictions.
And precinct organizers are hoping to advance candidates such as Matthew DePerno, a Michigan attorney general hopeful who Republican state senators said in a report had spread “misleading and irresponsible” misinformation about the election, and Mark Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers militia who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is now running to be Arizona’s top elections official. DePerno did not respond to requests for comment, and Finchem asked for questions to be sent by email and then did not respond. Finchem has said he did not enter the Capitol or have anything to do with the violence. He has also said the Oath Keepers are not anti-government.
When Bannon interviewed Finchem on an April podcast, he wrapped up a segment about Arizona Republicans’ efforts to reexamine the 2020 results by asking Finchem how listeners could help. Finchem answered by promoting the precinct strategy. “The only way you’re going to see to it this doesn’t happen again is if you get involved,” Finchem said. “Become a precinct committeeman.”
Some of the new precinct officers were in the crowd that marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to interviews and social media posts; one Texas precinct chair was arrested for assaulting police in Washington. He pleaded not guilty. Many of the new activists have said publicly that they support QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that believes Trump was working to root out a global child sex trafficking ring. Organizers of the movement have encouraged supporters to bring weapons to demonstrations. In Las Vegas and Savannah, Georgia, newcomers were so disruptive that they shut down leadership elections.
“They’re not going to be welcomed with open arms,” Bannon said, addressing the altercations on an April podcast. “But hey, was it nasty at Lexington?” he said, citing the opening battle of the American Revolution. “Was it nasty at Concord? Was it nasty at Bunker Hill?”
Bannon plucked the precinct strategy out of obscurity. For more than a decade, a little-known Arizona tea party activist named Daniel J. Schultz has been preaching the plan. Schultz failed to gain traction, despite winning a $5,000 prize from conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie in 2013 and making a 2015 pitch on Bannon’s far-right website, Breitbart. Schultz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon’s podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered, beginning to explain his plan. Bannon cut him off, offering to return to the idea another time.
That time came in February. Schultz returned to Bannon’s podcast, immediately preceding Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who spouts baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
“We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz said. “I can’t guarantee you that we’ll save the republic, but I can guarantee you this: We’ll lose it if we conservatives don’t take over the Republican Party.”
Bannon endorsed Schultz’s plan, telling “all the unwashed masses in the MAGA movement, the deplorables” to take up this cause. Bannon said he had more than 400,000 listeners, a count that could not be independently verified.
Bannon brought Schultz back on the show at least eight more times, alongside guests such as embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a leading defender of people jailed on Capitol riot charges.
The exposure launched Schultz into a full-blown far-right media tour. In February, Schultz spoke on a podcast with Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, a leading popularizer of QAnon. In an episode titled “THIS Is How We Win,” Diaz said of Schultz, “I was waiting, I was wishing and hoping for the universe to deliver someone like him.”
Schultz himself calls QAnon “a joke.” Nevertheless, he promoted his precinct strategy on at least three more QAnon programs in recent months, according to Media Matters, a Democratic-aligned group tracking right-wing content. “I want to see many of you going and doing this,” host Zak Paine said on one of the shows in May.
Schultz’s strategy also got a boost from another prominent QAnon promoter: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law and “rerun” the election. On a May online talk show, Flynn told listeners to fill “thousands of positions that are vacant at the local level.”
Precinct recruitment is now “the forefront of our mission” for Turning Point Action, according to the right-wing organization’s website. The group’s parent organization bussed Trump supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, including at least one person who was later charged with assaulting police. He pleaded not guilty. In July, Turning Point brought Trump to speak in Phoenix, where he called the 2020 election “the greatest crime in history.” Outside, red-capped volunteers signed people up to become precinct chairs.
Organizers from around the country started huddling with Schultz for weekly Zoom meetings. The meetings’ host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It’s the only idea,” Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do.”
By the next week, though, Schultz suggested the new precinct officials might not stay peaceful. Schultz belonged to a mailing list for a group of military, law enforcement and intelligence veterans called the “1st Amendment Praetorian” that organizes security for Flynn and other pro-Trump figures. Back in the 1990s, Schultz wrote an article defending armed anti-government militias like those involved in that decade’s deadly clashes with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.
“Make sure everybody’s got a baseball bat,” Schultz said on the July strategy conference call, which was posted on YouTube. “I’m serious about this. Make sure you’ve got people who are armed.”
The sudden demand for low-profile precinct positions baffled some party leaders. In Fort Worth, county chair Rick Barnes said numerous callers asked about becoming a “precinct committeeman,” quoting the term used on Bannon’s podcast. That suggested that out-of-state encouragement played a role in prompting the calls, since Texas’s term for the position is “precinct chair.” Tarrant County has added 61 precinct chairs this year, about a 24% increase since February. “Those podcasts actually paid off,” Barnes said.
For weeks, about five people a day called to become precinct chairs in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, southwest of Green Bay. Albert, the county party chair, said he would explain that Wisconsin has no precinct chairs, but newcomers could join the county party — and then become poll workers. “We’re trying to make sure that our voice is now being reinserted into the process,” Albert said.
Similarly, the GOP in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, is fielding a surge of volunteers for precinct committee members, but also for election judges or inspectors, which are party-affiliated elected positions in that state. “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real,” county chair Lou Capozzi said in an interview. The county GOP sent two busloads of people to Washington for Jan. 6 and Capozzi said they stayed peaceful. “People want to make sure elections remain honest.”
Elsewhere, activists inspired by the precinct strategy have targeted local election boards. In DeKalb County, east of Atlanta, the GOP censured a long-serving Republican board member who rejected claims of widespread fraud in 2020. To replace him, new party chair Marci McCarthy tapped a far-right activist known for false, offensive statements. The party nominees to the election board have to be approved by a judge, and the judge in this case rejected McCarthy’s pick, citing an “extraordinary” public outcry. McCarthy defended her choice but ultimately settled for someone less controversial.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 1,000 people attended the county GOP convention in March, up from the typical 300 to 400. The chair they elected, Alan Swain, swiftly formed an “election integrity committee” that’s lobbying lawmakers to restrict voting and audit the 2020 results. “We’re all about voter and election integrity,” Swain said in an interview.
In the rural western part of the state, too, a wave of people who heard Bannon’s podcast or were furious about perceived election fraud swept into county parties, according to the new district chair, Michele Woodhouse. The district’s member of Congress, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, addressed a crowd at one county headquarters on Aug. 29, at an event that included a raffle for a shotgun.
“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed,” Cawthorn said, in remarks livestreamed on Facebook, shortly after holding the prize shotgun, which he autographed. “That’s right,” the audience cheered. Cawthorn went on, “As much as I’m willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American, and the way we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”
After Cawthorn referred to people arrested on Jan. 6 charges as “political hostages,” someone asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?” The crowd laughed and clapped as Cawthorn answered, “We are actively working on that one.”
Schultz has offered his own state of Arizona as a proof of concept for how precinct officers can reshape the party. The result, Schultz has said, is actions like the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots. The “audit,” conducted by a private firm with no experience in elections and whose CEO has spread conspiracy theories, has included efforts to identify fraudulent ballots from Asia by searching for traces of bamboo. Schultz has urged activists demanding similar audits in other states to start by becoming precinct officers.
“Because we’ve got the audit, there’s very heightened and intense public interest in the last campaign, and of course making sure election laws are tightened,” said Sandra Dowling, a district chair in northwest Maricopa and northern Yuma County whose precinct roster grew by 63% in less than six months. Though Dowling says some other district chairs screen their applicants, she doesn’t. “I don’t care,” she said.
One chair who does screen applicants is Kathy Petsas, a lifelong Republican whose district spans Phoenix and Paradise Valley. She also saw applications explode earlier this year. Many told her that Schultz had recruited them, and some said they believed in QAnon. “Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party,” Petsas said. “That attitude can’t prevail.”
As waves of new precinct officers flooded into the county party, Petsas was dismayed to see some petitioning to recall their own Republican county supervisors for refusing to cooperate with the Senate GOP’s audit.
“It is not helpful to our democracy when you have people who stand up and do the right thing and are honest communicators about what’s going on, and they get lambasted by our own party,” Petsas said. “That’s a problem.”
This spring, a team of disaffected Republican operatives put Schultz’s precinct strategy into action in South Carolina, a state that plays an outsize role in choosing presidents because of its early primaries. The operatives’ goal was to secure enough delegates to the party’s state convention to elect a new chair: far-right celebrity lawyer Lin Wood.
Wood was involved with some of the lawsuits to overturn the presidential election that courts repeatedly ruled meritless, or even sanctionable. After the election, Wood said on Bannon’s podcast, “I think the audience has to do what the people that were our Founding Fathers did in 1776.” On Twitter, Wood called for executing Vice President Mike Pence by firing squad. Wood later said it was “rhetorical hyperbole,” but that and other incendiary language got him banned from mainstream social media. He switched to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by deplatformed right-wing influencers, amassing roughly 830,000 followers while repeatedly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Asked for comment about his political efforts, Wood responded, “Most of your ‘facts’ are either false or misrepresent the truth.” He declined to cite specifics.
Typically, precinct meetings were “a yawner,” according to Mike Connett, a longtime party member in Horry County, best known for its popular beach towns. But in April, Connett and other establishment Republicans were caught off guard when 369 people, many of them newcomers, showed up for the county convention in North Myrtle Beach. Connett lost a race for a leadership role to Diaz, the prominent QAnon supporter, and Wood’s faction captured the county’s other executive positions plus 35 of 48 delegate slots, enabling them to cast most of the county’s votes for Wood at the state convention. “It seemed like a pretty clean takeover,” Connett told ProPublica.
In Greenville, the state’s most populous county, Wood campaign organizers Jeff Davis and Pressley Stutts mobilized a surge of supporters at the county convention — about 1,400 delegates, up from roughly 550 in 2019 — and swept almost all of the 79 delegate positions. That gave Wood’s faction the vast majority of the votes in two of South Carolina’s biggest delegations.
Across the state, the precinct strategy was contributing to an unprecedented surge in local party participation, according to data provided by a state GOP spokeswoman. In 2019, 4,296 people participated. This year, 8,524 did.
“It’s a prairie fire down there in Greenville, South Carolina, brought on by the MAGA posse,” Bannon said on his podcast.
Establishment party leaders realized they had to take Wood’s challenge seriously. The incumbent chair, Drew McKissick, had Trump’s endorsement three times over — including twice after Wood entered the race. But Wood fought back by repeatedly implying that McKissick and other prominent state Republicans were corrupt and involved in various conspiracies that seemed related to QAnon. The race became heated enough that after one event, Wood and McKissick exchanged angry words face-to-face.
Wood’s rallies were raucous affairs packed with hundreds of people, energized by right-wing celebrities like Flynn and Lindell. In interviews, many attendees described the events as their first foray into politics, sometimes referencing Schultz and always citing Trump’s stolen election myth. Some said they’d resort to violence if they felt an election was stolen again.
Wood’s campaign wobbled in counties that the precinct strategy had not yet reached. At the state convention in May, Wood won about 30% of the delegates, commanding Horry, Greenville and some surrounding counties, but faltering elsewhere. A triumphant McKissick called Wood’s supporters “a fringe, rogue group” and vowed to turn them into a “leper colony” by building parallel Republican organizations in their territory.
But Wood and his partisans did not act defeated. The chairmanship election, they argued, was as rigged as the 2020 presidential race. Wood threw a lavish party at his roughly 2,000-acre low-country estate, secured by armed guards and surveillance cameras. From a stage fit for a rock concert on the lawn of one of his three mansions, Wood promised the fight would continue.
Diaz and her allies in Horry County voted to censure McKissick. The county’s longtime Republicans tried, but failed, to oust Diaz and her cohort after one of the people involved in drafting Wood tackled a protester at a Flynn speech in Greenville. (This incident, the details of which are disputed, prompted Schultz to encourage precinct strategy activists to arm themselves.) Wood continued promoting the precinct strategy to his Telegram followers, and scores replied that they were signing up.
In late July, Stutts and Davis forced out Greenville County GOP’s few remaining establishment leaders, claiming that they had cheated in the first election. Then Stutts, Davis and an ally won a new election to fill those vacant seats. “They sound like Democrats, right?” Bannon asked Stutts in a podcast interview. Stutts replied, “They taught the Democrats how to cheat, Steve.”
Stutts’ group quickly pushed for an investigation of the 2020 presidential election, planning a rally featuring Davis and Wood at the end of August, and began campaigning against vaccine and school mask mandates. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” Stutts had previously posted on Facebook, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Stutts continued posting messages skeptical of vaccine and mask mandates even after he entered the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19. He died on Aug. 19.
The hubbub got so loud inside the Cobb County, Georgia, Republican headquarters that it took several shouts and whistles to get everyone’s attention. It was a full house for Salleigh Grubbs’ first meeting as the county’s party chair. Grubbs ran on a vow to “clean house” in the election system, highlighting her December testimony to state lawmakers in which she raised unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Supporters praised Grubbs’ courage for following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence. She attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally as a VIP. She won the chairmanship decisively at an April county convention packed with an estimated 50% first-time participants.
In May, Grubbs opened her first meeting by asking everyone munching on bacon and eggs to listen to her recite the Gettysburg Address. “Think of the battle for freedom that Americans have before them today,” Grubbs said. “Those people fought and died so that you could be the precinct chair.” After the reading, first-time precinct officers stood for applause and cheers.
Their work would start right away: putting up signs, making calls and knocking on doors for a special election for the state House. The district had long leaned Republican, but after the GOP’s devastating losses up and down the ballot in 2020, they didn’t know what to expect.
“There’s so many people out there that are scared, they feel like their vote doesn’t count,” Cooper Guyon, a 17-year-old right-wing podcaster from the Atlanta area who speaks to county parties around the state, told the Cobb Republicans in July. The activists, he said, need to “get out in these communities and tell them that we are fighting to make your vote count by passing the Senate bill, the election-reform bills that are saving our elections in Georgia.”
Of the field’s two Republicans, Devan Seabaugh took the strongest stance in favor of Georgia’s new law restricting ways to vote and giving the Republican-controlled Legislature more power over running elections. “The only people who may be inconvenienced by Senate Bill 202 are those intent on committing fraud,” he wrote in response to a local newspaper’s candidate questionnaire.
Seabaugh led the June special election and won a July runoff. Grubbs cheered the win as a turning point. “We are awake. We are preparing,” she wrote on Facebook. “The conservative citizens of Cobb County are ready to defend our ballots and our county.”
Newcomers did not meet such quick success everywhere. In Savannah, a faction crashed the Chatham County convention with their own microphone, inspired by Bannon’s podcast to try to depose the incumbent party leaders who they accused of betraying Trump. Party officers blocked the newcomers’ candidacies, saying they weren’t officially nominated. Shouting erupted, and the meeting adjourned without a vote. Then the party canceled its districtwide convention.
The state party ultimately sided with the incumbent leaders. District chair Carl Smith said the uprising is bound to fail because the insurgents are mistaken in believing that he and other local leaders didn’t fight hard enough for Trump.
“You can’t build a movement on a lie,” Smith said.
In Michigan, activists who identify with a larger movement working against Republicans willing to accept Trump’s loss have captured the party leadership in about a dozen counties. They’re directly challenging state party leaders, who are trying to harness the grassroots energy without indulging demands to keep fighting over the last election.
Some of the takeovers happened before the rise of the precinct strategy. But the activists are now organizing under the banner “Precinct First” and holding regular events, complete with notaries, to sign people up to run for precinct delegate positions.
“We are reclaiming our party,” Debra Ell, one of the organizers, told ProPublica. “We’re building an ‘America First’ army.”
Under normal rules, the wave of new precinct delegates could force the party to nominate far-right candidates for key state offices. That’s because in Michigan, party nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor are chosen directly by party delegates rather than in public primaries. But the state party recently voted to hold a special convention earlier next year, which should effectively lock in candidates before the new, more radical delegates are seated.
Activist-led county parties including rural Hillsdale and Detroit-area Macomb are also censuring Republican state legislators for issuing a June report on the 2020 election that found no evidence of systemic fraud and no need for a reexamination of the results like the one in Arizona. (The censures have no enforceable impact beyond being a public rebuke of the politicians.) At the same time, county party leaders in Hillsdale and elsewhere are working on a ballot initiative to force an Arizona-style election review.
Establishment Republicans have their own idea for a ballot initiative — one that could tighten rules for voter ID and provisional ballots while sidestepping the Democratic governor’s veto. If the initiative collects hundreds of thousands of valid signatures, it would be put to a vote by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Under a provision of the state constitution, the state Legislature can adopt the measure and it can’t be vetoed.
State party leaders recently reached out to the activists rallying around the rejection of the presidential election results, including Hillsdale Republican Party Secretary Jon Smith, for help. Smith, Ell and others agreed to join the effort, the two activists said.
“This empowers them,” Jason Roe, the state party executive director whose ouster the activists demanded because he said Trump was responsible for his own loss, told ProPublica. Roe resigned in July, citing unrelated reasons. “It’s important to get them focused on change that can actually impact” future elections, he said, “instead of keeping their feet mired in the conspiracy theories of 2020.”
Jesse Law, who ran the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations in Nevada, sued the Democratic electors, seeking to declare Trump the winner or annul the results. The judge threw out the case, saying Law’s evidence did not meet “any standard of proof,” and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. When the Electoral College met in December, Law stood outside the state capitol to publicly cast mock votes for Trump.
This year, Law set his sights on taking over the Republican Party in the state’s largest county, Clark, which encompasses Las Vegas. He campaigned on the precinct strategy, promising 1,000 new recruits. His path to winning the county chairmanship — just like Stutts’ team in South Carolina, and Grubbs in Cobb County, Georgia — relied on turning out droves of newcomers to flood the county party and vote for him.
In Law’s case, many of those newcomers came through the Proud Boys, the all-male gang affiliated with more than two dozen people charged in the Capitol riot. The Las Vegas chapter boasted about signing up 500 new party members (not all of them belonging to the Proud Boys) to ensure their takeover of the county party. After briefly advancing their own slate of candidates to lead the Clark GOP, the Proud Boys threw their support to Law. They also helped lead a state party censure of Nevada’s Republican secretary of state, who rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraudulent ballots.
Law, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has declined to distance himself from the Las Vegas Proud Boys, citing Trump’s “stand back and stand by” remark at the September 2020 presidential debate. “When the president was asked if he would disavow, he said no,” Law told an independent Nevada journalist in July. “If the president is OK with that, I’m going to take the presidential stance.”
The outgoing county chair, David Sajdak, canceled the first planned vote for his successor. He said he was worried the Proud Boys would resort to violence if their newly recruited members, who Sajdak considered illegitimate, weren’t allowed to vote.
Sajdak tried again to hold a leadership vote in July, with a meeting in a Las Vegas high school theater, secured by police. But the crowd inside descended into shouting, while more people tried to storm past the cops guarding the back entrance, leading to scuffles. “Let us in! Let us in!” some chanted. Riling them up was at least one Proud Boy, according to multiple videos of the meeting.
At the microphone, Sajdak was running out of patience. “I’m done covering for you awful people,” he bellowed. Unable to restore order, Sajdak ended the meeting without a vote and resigned a few hours later. He’d had enough.
“They want to create mayhem,” Sajdak said.
Soon after, Law’s faction held their own meeting at a hotel-casino and overwhelmingly voted for Law as county chairman. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, a longtime ally of Law who helped lead Trump’s futile effort to overturn the Nevada results, recognized Law as the new county chair and promoted a fundraiser to celebrate. The existing county leaders sued, seeking a court order to block Law’s “fraudulent, rogue election.” The judge preliminarily sided with the moderates, but told them to hold off on their own election until a court hearing in September.
To Sajdak, agonizing over 2020 is pointless because “there’s no mechanism for overturning an election.” Asked if Law’s allies are determined to create one, Sajdak said: “It’s a scary thought, isn’t it.”
As I changed my wet outer garments into something dry, the conductor announced that the train isn’t exactly weather proof, there may be some seats that are wet, due to leaks.
Searching for a home during a global pandemic
By Stacey Warde
I woke up at 4:45 a.m. to catch a six o’clock train, Amtrak’s Surfliner, in San Luis Obispo to Santa Ana. I slept fitfully in a Motel 6 not far from the station.
Had I stayed here the previous night, it would have cost me nearly $300, which I don’t have; but Sunday, after prime time, it’s only $80, which is still more than I want to pay on a fixed budget. Fortunately, good friends put me up for a night and it was great to socialize and visit them and to find love in an era where love seems lacking, when so many are holding their breath, isolating themselves as I have these past two years, waiting for the covid pandemic to end, starved for affection and a friendly, warm human embrace.
Throughout the night I could hear rainfall but it turned heavy and started dumping around 3 a.m. I got up several times to look out the window of my motel room and saw it coming down in sheets the way it does in the tropics. God, I thought, I hope there aren’t any delays or problems on the railroad tracks.
I had been worried about this supposed “bomb cyclone” forecasters had been warning about for days, a system out of Alaska that was drawing moisture up from the south, packing potential devastating rain.
I’ve been looking for a new home, essentially homeless, these past four weeks after quitting a 7-year relationship. I’ve been up to Mendocino and back to San Luis Obispo and Orange Counties several times, staying with family, friends, and in motels, hoping to find a place to land.
Meanwhile, during my travels up and down the state, I had been worried about this supposed “bomb cyclone” forecasters had been warning about for days, a system out of Alaska that was drawing moisture up from the south and packing potential devastating rain, with flash flood warnings in California’s burn areas, one of which, the Alisal Fire near Gaviota, we would be passing through on our way south. Peak rainfall, the forecast warned, would occur as we passed through the area, and debris could quite possibly muck things up.
I found a space as close to the station as possible in the long-term parking lot, and tried to wait a few minutes for the rain to lighten up before traipsing up to the train depot but the rain kept coming down hard. Finally, losing precious time, I grabbed my bags and hustled off, still a good walking distance from the station, to find cover inside the depot, when I realized that I hadn’t placed my parking pass on the dashboard of my truck. I hurried back (“goddammit!”), by this time nearly soaked, to place the pass in the window as heavy rain blasted at my back. I could feel it soaking through, my bags already glistening wet as I set them down to unlock my truck and put the parking pass where it belonged.
Inside the depot, still not quite 6 a.m., I had a moment of panic, my travel bags dripping, clothes soaked, waiting passengers milling about, shaking off the rain, some wearing masks as required to protect against Covid-19, others not, some, believe it or not, wearing flip-flops over bare feet. I hadn’t had my coffee, and I was feeling cranky, and the air itself seemed icky wet.
A young male adult, probably a Cal Poly student, stood tossing a yo-yo through the air not far from where I sat, barely missing his girlfriend’s face who was seated in front of him, watching and blinking as the yo-yo flew past her nose, and I wondered what her parents must think of the fella, whose only talent appeared to be wrapping yo-yo string around his fingers, and making the yo-yo itself twirl in loops around their daughter’s face. What a useless dick, I thought, feeling like a crotchety old man. Still, she seemed to like him.
I noticed one woman who had gone into the restroom with wet clothes and came out moments later in dry clothes. She appeared to be the only person in the room who felt comfortable and at ease. Smart woman, I thought. I’ll be doing the same thing on the train, putting on dry clothes, staying comfortable, not getting chilled.
The station master, who had been carefully monitoring the scene, came out, and from the door of his office announced, “the password to get into the restroom is 2-0-0-1.” In minutes, the train pulled up to the boarding platform and passengers gathered their damp belongings to go outside, where it was still dark, and board the train. Underneath a small covering, in the glimmering light of the station, we waited for the doors of the train to open and watched as the rain poured, splattering the ground all around us.
The biggest concern I had at that moment wasn’t the flash flood warnings given for the recent Alisal Fire near Gaviota, but my damp clothes, staying warm, and keeping my covid protection mask dry. “Ugh, a petri dish of…” I had to put it out of my mind. “What good does it do to worry? I’m going, so let’s go!” I boarded the train, feeling like a wet rat in clothes and a mask covering my face.
On board the train, as I changed my wet outer garments into something dry, the conductor announced that the train isn’t exactly weather proof, there may be some seats that are wet, due to leaks, and to “feel free to move around until you find something dry.” I found my place, the same as always, a seat with no one behind me. I could essentially relax unmolested, if I could relax.
We passed the Alisal Fire area without any problems, the blackened ground reeling against the season’s first downpour but not slipping into nearby ravines and clogging waterways or blocking the road and railroad tracks. I could barely see out of my window as the rain pelted the train. I could hear it on the roof of the car, and when I went down to the cafe car to get coffee, I spotted empty seats that were taking on water from the leaky roof.
At the Santa Barbara station, where mostly college students get on or off, the conductor announced again, “this train is not weather proof! Please find yourselves a seat that’s dry, and be careful walking around the lower deck; it’s very wet!”
Occasionally, I could hear the throaty hacking cough of a woman several seats in front of me. WTF? I hoped she’s ok and that it was only the usual morning clearing of the lungs and not something more menacing. Yet, I know there are those who will travel no matter how they feel, even during a global pandemic.
Upon our arrival in Ventura, the rain had lightened considerably but the wind blew stiff against flags that flapped furiously in dark horizontal squares against the sky, and along the tracks trees had fallen. The hacking cough continued unabated, at least until the woman got off the train. I wasn’t feeling especially charitable or friendly, and neither did other passengers appear ready to show friendly faces. I kept to myself, and did not wish to appear friendly so no one would sit next to me. I was perfectly happy to sit alone for this ride.
My mask, as always with long-time wear, was beginning to hurt my ears after several hours, but at least my clothes were dry.
This trip would not have been necessary had I stayed in the unhappy situation I’d lived in for years. Things had gotten so toxic. I try not to focus on it too much and remind myself that I need to get on with my life, and I’m still learning what that even means. “Getting on” means a willingness to risk, to be vulnerable, to find a home, to end things when so much effort goes into making an unworkable relationship work.
As we rolled into the LA station, the conductor announced that more than 100 passengers would be boarding, and that all seats must be made available. “It’s a crowded train.” Who’s gonna get the wet seats on this train that “isn’t weatherproof”? And why are so many people traveling when the risk of covid is still so great?
As more passengers boarded, complaining of how crowded the train was, I could smell the dank odor of marijuana. Someone is packing or carrying a load, I thought, someone always is. Fortunately for me, I love that smell.
As the conductor made announcements about federal regulations for wearing masks–“yesterday I removed five passengers for not wearing masks”–a young woman, probably in her 20s, on her cell phone raised her voice to be heard above the din: “I had the bruschetta…” I was having trouble hearing the conductor. What is wrong with people, I thought as I tried to listen to the conductor’s instructions, that their personal stuff, which isn’t really personal because everyone can hear them, is so much more important than the conductor giving instructions for riding the train during a global pandemic? A friend soon joined her. Neither one wore a mask.
I’ve been hearing so much about the tensions between Boomers like me–“OK, Boomer”–and younger folk like this woman, who was so rude and selfish in her tiny little world of sharing her dinner experience with everyone on the train. I didn’t understand those tensions; now I do. Basically, I realized, we’re all sojourners of a sort, looking for a place to call home. Yet, I also know that home is a state of mind, where friends and family welcome you into their arms, no matter how wet you are, or how difficult your life has been.
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Stacey Warde is editor of The Rogue Voice. Please leave comments.
