The burden of the "American Dream" on rural communities

Photo Credit - Chelsea Peng 2025 "The end of the American Dream and why it’s OK"

On March 14, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing called “Empowering Rural America Through Investment in Innovation.” Subcommittee Chairman Jake Ellzey, a Republican representing Texas's 6th Congressional District (a mix of Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and rural counties like Navarro and Cherokee), told the room that “as the demand for AI accelerates, America’s digital infrastructure is rapidly expanding into rural communities.” He promised that for every data center job created, seven more would follow in the surrounding community.

I have spent this semester writing about technology arriving in rural America. The promise is always the same: innovation, jobs, progress. The pattern is also the same: the benefits flow out, and the costs remain.

Three posts, one pattern

In my first post, I wrote about a $25 billion AI data center planned for Tonopah, Arizona, population a few hundred. Backed by a billionaire venture capitalist and a Trump mega-donor, the project would consume as much electricity as a million homes and drain aquifers that residents depend on for drinking water. The tech consumers served by the facility live in cities. The residents of Tonopah got noise, light pollution, and a fight they lacked the political power to win.

In my second post, I stepped back from tech to look at the framing. I had caught myself thinking that rural investment came at urban expense. That zero-sum instinct turned out to be the wrong lens. The federal government spends $850 billion a year on defense and asked $1.8 billion for the Legal Services Corporation. The scarcity pitting rural against urban is a policy choice, not a fact of nature. Rural and urban working people have lost ground to the same forces and share the same interest in functional public services.

In my third post, I wrote about robotic strawberry harvesters arriving in Salinas Valley. Immigration enforcement had squeezed the farm labor supply. The federal government’s response was to lower guest worker wages, and then automation filled the gap. The robots cost $300,000 each, priced for corporate farms. Small growers and the farmworker communities who built Salinas for generations got nothing.

Each story has different characters and geography. But the structure is identical: federal policy creates or worsens a rural problem, and capital arrives promising solutions. The benefits accrue to investors/urban consumers and the people who already live there absorb the costs.

Photo Credit - Will Robinson 2020 "Is the American dream dead?"

The packaging

This pattern persists because it is wrapped in a story that Americans have been told their whole lives: that progress rewards hard work, that innovation lifts all boats, that the people who struggle simply need to adapt. This is the "American Dream," and I have come to believe it is one of the deepest sources of political paralysis in this country.

I said something like this in class a few weeks ago. I told Professor Pruitt and my fellow students that the American Dream is this country’s “original sin.” She pushed back, fairly, and pointed out that there are things about this country that are more original and more sinful. She’s right. Slavery, land theft, and genocide are the material foundations. But the American Dream is the legitimating story that makes those foundations look earned. It converts structural advantage into personal merit and structural disadvantage into personal failure.

I know this because I lived it. I grew up male, Mormon, white, healthy, and financially comfortable. My family believed fiercely in individual agency. I followed the rules and concluded that people whose lives were less "successful" than mine were in that position because of their own bad choices. It took college and a lot of unlearning to see that my “good choices” were only available because the structure was built for me.

The same logic operates at the community level. When a rural hospital closes after Medicaid cuts, residents blame the hospital, not the lawmakers who voted for the bill. When a farmer in Colorado threatens to mechanize rather than pay overtime, the framing is that labor protections killed the farm, not that the farm’s business model depended on paying workers less than the legal standard in every other industry. The American Dream teaches people to punch down and look away from the hand above them.

What would it look like to say no?

There are signs of resistance. At least 25 data center projects were cancelled across the United States in 2025 after community opposition, four times the number in 2024. Rural school voucher programs have been blocked by rural Republicans who understand that their public schools are the backbone of their communities. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew 10,000 people to Greeley, Colorado, a conservative town in Weld County, on a message of class solidarity across the rural-urban divide.

None of these are sufficient. But they share a feature that the American Dream framework lacks: they start from the premise that rural communities have the right to decide what happens to their land, their labor, and their resources. That premise is incompatible with a system that treats rural space as a site of extraction and rural people as obstacles to progress.

Congressman Ellzey’s hearing (referenced at the beginning of this post) promised rural America seven jobs for every data center. Nobody on the panel asked how many jobs, aquifers, and night skies those same communities would lose. Until that question gets equal time, the American Dream will keep doing what it has always done: blaming the most vulnerable among us for their poverty and lack of resources, while lionizing the most powerful people in this country as they get increasingly wealthy. 

A sustainable transition (Part V): How and why?

If you’ve read the preceding blog posts in this series, thank you for sifting through my life as I try to sift through these issues. Here is the crux of it all: 

I offer three main reasons by which localized renewable infrastructure situated on brownfield sites is a legitimate—and possibly necessary—component of the green transition.

First, giving local control of renewable sites to rural communities would allow these communities the financial wiggle room to transition. There is no payment plan directed only directed at the individuals affected, which may prove problematic if it incentivizes individuals to merely stockpile that money as they search for other employment. The primary benefit of this program, if properly enacted by the local government, would serve as a form of Universal Basic Income to the entire community. This mirrors the Alaska Oil surplus payment program, which has been well-received by the community and has been compared to a “Universal Basic Dividend.” Such a scheme would also not require an application process and a congressionally allocated stockpile of dollars, which has doomed the other federal transition policies. 

Furthermore, now that this community has a bit of a financial windfall, it could stock its own coffers and be more protected from fiscal spin. It could also use that excess energy to improve the quality of life of the area by subsidizing air conditioning and heating or alternatively diversify its economy into more energy-dependent fields like coding, telecommunication, and business. Finally, the community could even sell the excess energy as a source of local revenue. 

Second, by benefiting cities, any city initiatives in funding nearby rural areas will be seen as investments in a collective future, not a bailout of “the other.” Not only would a decentralized grid lower costs for cities, but it would also reduce the strain on the grid for times of emergency. While an isolated power grid can be disastrous, one that is independent but still connected could provide necessary power in times of strife but cut back on the possibility of overextension. This is further bolstered by the fact that many fossil fuel communities are located where things have died, not where there live. While humans tend to settle along water, arable land, and protection, fossil fuel communities spring up around and because of a resource, including Death Valley. 

Third, by harmonizing rural-urban relations, communication is fostered between rural and urban areas, instead of a game of telephone between corporations who have every interest in disrupting this transparency for their benefit. By eliminating the corporate middleman, we can start to have an honest conversation of what we both need, and what we can both provide. Yes, rural areas provide the majority of food, energy, and natural resources, to urban areas. But they do so through corporations. In this proposed solution, cities and rural areas would be able to negotiate with each other and see each other. And yes, the conversation may not always be fully amicable, but I believe that to be necessary to establishing a more proper relationship between these social units. 

What I advocate is not necessarily a just transition. I do not have a plan to introduce similarly lucrative jobs into a community. What I advocate is not necessarily environmental justice, as pure environmental justice would balk at neutering brownfields that might otherwise be more fully remediated, and argues for some degree of infrastructure in places that have been heavily damaged by industry. But what I advocate is some consideration that as we transition, we need a safety net, and as we pursue environmental justice, we cannot paternalistically deny a community’s decision to take on the costs of such a project. What I advocate is a fully transparent, remedial, and voluntary middle ground between just transitions and environmental justice, and a way to harmonize the Economy and Environment components of the sustainable development triangle. A transition can’t happen overnight, and justice forced on an unwilling participant is rarely just. So, there it is, and there I’ll let it lie.

Rising evictions in rural America during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

This past summer, while doing eviction defense work for a legal aid in Los Angeles, I often heard the statistic—90% of landlords have legal representation, while only 10% of tenants do. This statistic, however, only accounts for metropolitan areas where the data is collected. In rural areas, where there is a lack of legal access, representation for both tenants and landlords is likely to be much lower. 

The lack of legal access in rural areas stems from a shortage of lawyers and the underfunding of legal aid organizations. These factors coupled with the lack of affordable housing have fueled the rise of rural evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. 

Rural areas face some of the highest eviction rates in the country. According to research by Cornell University, evictions in many rural counties now exceed pre-pandemic rates. During the pandemic, there was an influx of people moving from cities to rural areas as work increasingly became remote and rural living became more appealing. The added pressure on rural housing markets caused the supply of low-income rentals to decrease and the number of evictions to skyrocket. 

Rural tenants have increasingly been unable to keep up with their rent, and as the affordable housing supply decreases, the need for legal representation is becoming more important. Tenants oftentimes are not informed of their rights and the protections in place. Without legal representation, most tenants lose their cases and are evicted. This drives locals to leave for more affordable towns, or often to become housing insecure as evidenced by the increase in rural homelessness in recent years. 

On the other hand, many rural tenants have been reluctant to use eviction protections or fight their evictions. Brett Thompson, executive director for East River Legal Services in South Dakota, said, "We've developed a culture where people don't tend to avail themselves of protections afforded to them. This isn't a new problem. It's a problem that's been magnified by the pandemic and reaching a crisis point because of the pandemic." In South Dakota when there was a national eviction moratorium in place, people tended to move elsewhere when they received an eviction notice rather than fight for their right to stay. 

One key hurdle in providing support for rural tenants is the lack of data collected in rural areas. Most statistics on evictions in states come from data collected from cities and metropolitan areas. State governments therefore overlook the scope of the problem in rural areas and are unable to make fully informed decisions. For instance, California passed eviction protections during the pandemic, however, the only way to use these protections was to assert them as defenses in court in response to an unlawful detainer action. Considering the lack of legal access and low level of legal representation in rural areas, many tenants were not equipped to fight their evictions and use these protections.  

While moving forward, it is necessary to be mindful of rural areas when discussing the lack of affordable housing and the rise in evictions. States need to begin with making more inclusive decisions where data from rural areas is collected and considered. We further need to advocate for greater tenant protections which include rent caps, just-cause eviction protections, and a right to counsel. Lastly, there needs to be a push for increased funding for legal aids operating in rural areas—rural places need lawyers. Maybe then will rural attitudes toward seeking legal assistance begin to shift. 

Read more about the lack of legal access in rural America here and here. 

Ammon Bundy accused of hiding assets

Boise State Public Radio reported recently under the headline, "Documents allege Ammon Bundy hiding his assets amid civil lawsuit." James Dawson and Ashley Dutton write:

New court documents accuse anti-government activist Ammon Bundy of hiding his assets in a new sequence of shell companies as a civil lawsuit against him continues.

In a video recording from April 19, Bundy said he sold his home and doesn’t have much for St. Luke’s Health System to recover in the case.

“I have a few cars that I own,” Bundy said, in addition to some tools and about $50,000 in cash.

St. Luke’s sued him, a close friend, Diego Rodriguez, and organizations tied to both men nearly a year ago after Bundy encouraged his followers to protest at the hospital. The grandson of Rodriguez was being evaluated at St. Luke’s over health concerns.

The protests last March sparked a lockdown at the hospital’s downtown Boise campus and forced ambulances to be rerouted.

The five-acre property in Emmett is now owned by White Barn Enterprises, an LLC registered by a company in Post Falls, and is estimated to be worth $1.2 million, according to court documents. The Gem County Assessor’s office said the property was worth $998,452 in its 2022 tax evaluation.

White Barn Enterprises is subsequently owned by a Wyoming corporation, Farmhouse Holdings LLC.

Just a handful of states, including Wyoming, allow owners of LLCs to remain anonymous.

Documents from the IRS filed by lawyers on behalf of St. Luke’s show both companies are owned by Aaron K. Welling, Bundy’s one-time treasurer for his unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign.

The filings also include an email exchange between Welling and Donovan LaCour, an advisor with Wyoming-based incorporation company Prime Corporate Services from Dec. 13, 2022.

Prior posts about Bundy are here (2017), here (2021), here (2016), here (2018), here (2022), here (2020) and here (2016).   

Rural Policing (Part 2): Community solutions

In my previous post, I discussed police shortages in rural areas, some adverse effects of these shortages, and the rise in sheriffs making individual determinations as to what laws they will enforce. 

I am extending the discussion from that post by exploring how communities, particularly those of color, have found their own solutions for the lack of adequate policing and general lack of resources. I also explore the "punishments" these communities receive while police officers are kept mostly unaccountable. 

I was inspired to continue this discussion after watching Check-It, a documentary in which a queer community forms a self-defense group after multiple people experience brutal attacks for their sexuality. While the self-defense group was initially characterized as a "gang" because of their brutal attacks on homophobic assailants, the group has now created a clothing label and funded a community center where they provide members with resources, help people develop practical skills, and organize fashion shows. Check-Its change was triggered when some of its members ended up in jail, causing others to realize that their violence inevitably kept some members in the cycle of poverty they all wished to escape. 

Key to the development of the Check-It community was the lack of adequate police response and even violence by the police against victims who sought help from them. Similarly, rural people take up arms to defend themselves because of a similar lack of adequate police responses to violent crimes, as I discussed in part I. Like those in Urban, D.C., many rural people believe their individual gun ownership will reduce crime rates.  It seems that police everywhere are failing people everywhere.

However, a crucial problem arises when abandoned groups of people take their defense and protection into their own hands: the court system fails them after every other part of the criminal justice system has done so. For instance, when queer people, and more predominantly people of color, engage in self-defense, they disproportionately end up in jail.

That was the case in Out at Night, a documentary discussing the lives of four lesbian women who each were sentenced to over eight years of prison for stabbing a man that charged at them after yelling homophobic epithets. Despite meeting all the elements of self-defense and having video and witness evidence, the women's self-defense claims were rejected, and all four women were charged with gang assault. 

This was also the case for Luke O Donovan, who ended up serving 2 years for pulling a knife on a group of men that attacked him and yelled derogatory remarks at him. Surely, these are not the only instances in which self-defense claims have resulted in the imprisonment of innocent people. 

Furthermore, it is often the case that women will end up in jail for fighting back against men who abuse them. This hole in the legal system can be particularly damaging to rural women who often face heightened instances of domestic violence. Exemplified by Brenda Golden, an attorney, and Muscogee Nation citizen, who had the police called on her for hitting her ex-husband with an ashtray after he would not stop abusing her. 

The horror of these instances is that, after being failed by the police, who cannot or will not help them, people take matters into their own hands and end up in jail anyway. This punishment happens at the hands of those who would not help victims in the first place. What's worse is that the root of this problem is not particularly clear or simple. Cynthia Lee's, Minnesota law review article suggests that self-defense's "reasonable person" standard is to blame for the horrors. While Phyllis Chesler suggests that the problem arises out of our gendered expectations, " Women are held to higher and different standards than men, who are expected to be violent; people do not expect and will not tolerate women to be violent, even in self-defense." 

The silver lining that comes from this issue is that communities find ways to help their members, even when the state and police fail to step in. This brings me back to Check-It, who seemingly came to the realization that self-defense measures can have varying results, instead, they turned their efforts to providing resources that help people change their lives. 

While rural members who take up arms and stay at home might not experience such devastating outcomes, similar resource centers are created in rural communities. This often occurs through churches, as exemplified in The Overnighters, (another documentary), where homeless rural people, including homeless LGBT+ people, seek refuge in their local churches.

It seems that community work is crucial to solving policing issues; something that marginalized communities have always known and provided for each other. How many problems could be fixed or reduced if we offered more funding for communities to provide better resources for themselves? And should we leave communities to resolve these issues alone? Or is a complete revamping of our criminal justice system? 

The rural vote and interest convergence

In Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma Derrick A. Bell, Jr. analyzes Black people's ability to achieve civil rights victories only when satisfying an "interest convergence." The interest convergence he describes happens when the political and social aspirations of Black Americans, or any marginalized group, aligns with an interest of upper class, decision-making, white Americans. Only when this happens, he states, will there be any changes made for marginalized groups. This is an interesting way to analyze the rural vote. 

One of the first questions we discussed in our class about the rural vote was basically: Why do we even care about the "rural vote?" Obviously, we are taking a class about Law and Rural Livelihoods so that is one reason. The researchers, statisticians, journalist, etc. that write about the rural vote, however, are not in our class but they still spend a lot of time and effort analyzing this topic. Moreover, many politicians seem to care, at least as of lately. This is because rural Americans refusal to blindly support the Democratic party has allowed for an interest convergence. 

We also discussed the commonly held idea that these people are voting against their own self-interest. After all, as Sara Smarsh's Aunt Pud says in Heartland, "The Democrats are for poor people, and the Republicans are for the rich." Although I agree with Aunt Pud, if rural Americans continuously showed up for Democrat candidates, would these candidates still have the same motivation to win them over as they do now? Probably not. In other words, by refusing to give loyalty to the Democratic party, rural Americans made their interests converge with the ruling class in a way that actually better fulfills their self-interests in the long run.

After Trump's 2016 election, political discourse began acknowledging the "forgotten Americans." Isabel Sawhill's What the Forgotten Americans Really Want--and How to Give it to Them describes this group as people without a college degree and lower income. She also notes that they represent thirty-eight percent of the working age population. She describes their issues with feeling like the government is out of touch and like current policies are not reflective of the values held by forgotten Americans. 

Bill Hogseth discusses the rural vote in Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties Like Mine. He states that while roughly two-thirds of rural voters voted for Donald Trump, in his opinion it wasn't because there was a lack of Democratic organization in these areas but because the Democratic Party "has not offered rural voters a clear vision that speaks to their lived experience. The pain and struggle in my community is real, yet rural people do not feel it is taken seriously by the Democratic Party."

By not just refusing to vote but voting overwhelmingly Republican, rural voters have created an interest convergence between their wants and the wants of both parties--to win elections. Now, politicians on both sides have no choice but to take their demands seriously and show tangible ways they will improve rural lives.

This blog, by Professor Pruitt, discusses how Democrat candidate John Fetterman's "every county, every vote" strategy secured him enough votes to win the senate race in Pennsylvania. 

Most people in my life outside of school, who are working class, don't vote. The ones who do vote mostly do so because I have lectured them of its importance, and they just ask me who/what I'm casting my vote for and go along with my choice. It is safe to say that nobody on either side cares very much about politics. 

Most of their ambivalence comes from similar feelings as the forgotten Americans Sawhill interviewed: that the government is "ineffective, untrustworthy, and out-of-touch." Although I would never advise anyone in my life to vote Republican (and honestly probably not forgive them for doing so, depending on how much I dislike the candidate), I can't help but admire the way rural voters fortitude has forced their issues into the hearts of legislators. I hope politicians remember the power that the working class has in every election.

Addressing nihilism in rural America: What we can learn from the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and why it should not be written off as “dangerous right-wing radicalism”

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled across an interesting find in the used book section of a thrift store in a rural town in southwest Kern County, California. It was a copy of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I purchased the book, and on my drive home up highway 99, I contemplated the impact of Jordan Peterson, a prominent public intellectual who, at times is casted as a conservative, is more accurately described as a classical liberal and traditionalist, on rural communities.

While I recognize that Jordan Peterson is a polarizing figure, I believe that understanding the “Jordan Peterson phenomenon” is important for anyone seeking to understand and uplift rural peoples in America. 

The aspect of Jordan Peterson’s message that I am interested in exploring in this post is his emphasis on personal responsibility, to which Peterson attributes much of his popularity, especially amongst young men (though women are an increasingly growing part of his audience as well). For Peterson, responsibility is the neglected half of any discussion pertaining to rights. And this is especially important because, Peterson argues, responsibility gives meaning to life–it’s what makes the suffering one experiences in the world worth enduring.

Peterson’s book is subtitled “An Antidote to Chaos,” signaling the clear purpose of his rules for life. Peterson notes that though not all chaos is bad, it must be balanced adequately with order, lest extreme forms of chaos—like anarchy or tyranny—result. 

Many parts of rural America seem to suffer from what I would call an inner chaos, if I may, in the form of ennui. It is a chaos of the soul due to feelings of loss of dignity, status, purpose, and importance, which ultimately results in nihilism—the notion that there is no meaning or purpose to life. Nihilism entails the rejection of objective truths, morals, philosophical codes, meanings, or values. This inner chaos is exacerbated by the pitiful economic conditions of many rural communities.

The plight of despair within rural communities has been chronicled by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020). Since the turn of the century, premature death rates have sharply increased among rural Americans due to increases in suicide, drug overdoses, and liver disease related to alcohol abuse. To be fair, there are countering narratives as to the cause of these tragedies. Case and Deaton argue that the main reason is the lack of economic opportunities whereas others point to the proliferation and accessibility of illegal drugs. Either way, the net effects are undeniable, and they result in what we logically expect from broken communities: pervasive poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, and the likes.

To add insult to injury, rural communities also face “rural bashing” often at the hands of progressive elites, who, in recent election cycles, have resorted to blaming rural folks for their own problems because they ostensibly vote against their own interests.

The zeitgeist of our time would entail rural folks adopting a mentality of victimhood and internalizing it as an identity. Perhaps many rural Americans have done just this in embracing Donald Trump. President Trump capitalized on America’s victimhood culture by encouraging his supporters to embrace victimhood as an identity throughout his presidential campaigns and presidency. 

This should not be too surprising because furthering victimhood culture is (tragically) an excellent political strategy. Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of perpetuating it. This is because it allows an “in-group” to rally its members to act in an intensely revengeful manner against an otherized “out-group”. Think Democrats vs. Republicans, rural vs. urban, white vs. non-white, educated vs. uneducated, etc. What results is dangerous and destructive.

When a group places extraordinarily great emphasis on their own suffering, they can develop “egoism of victimhood.” Psychologists use this phrase (egoism of victimhood) to refer to situations “whereby members [of an in-group] are unable to see things from the perspective of the rival group’s perspective, are unable or unwilling to empathize with the suffering of the rival group, and are unwilling to accept any responsibility for harm inflicted by their own group.” (See here and here for research supporting this.) Further, researchers have found that people who embrace victimhood culture are less willing to forgive others, have an increased desire for revenge (as opposed to mere avoidance,) and are more likely to engage in revengeful behavior. 

Another pitfall of victimhood culture is that it relieves one of responsibility by shifting it to someone else, maybe even “the world,” broadly, or to some structural aspect of society. Dr. Peterson argues that once a person is relieved of responsibility, they are also stripped of power and agency. Thus, without responsibility, one has no power to change one’s circumstances (though it seems that without personal agency to change one’s immediate situation, some folks shift their energy towards deconstructing and destroying societal structures at large, given their ostensible structural inequities). 

Given this backdrop of the rise of victimhood culture, the plight of rural America, and the increasing struggles of young men (see Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It), Jordan Peterson offers an attractive alternative. I argue that rural Americans may be attracted to this message—and benefiting from it—because it is radically different.

Jordan Peterson fans and followers seem to share a common perspective and experience. Many are disenchanted by the shaping of contemporary society (the prominence of ideologies based on the centralization of race, gender, and sexuality,) and many are even more troubled by the apparent lack of purpose in their own lives. Many share stories of despair, addiction, and depression in their lives. Still, his followers are often written off as right-wing extremists. I believe, however, that there’s more to Jordan Peterson fans than the popular media presents.

If we look past the rhetoric and analyze Dr. Peterson’s message, we can see that his message is one that seeks to uplift individuals by speaking to the basic nature of humans as conceived within a Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethos. In short, Peterson proffers a solution to chaos that has been neglected and maligned by the Left in recent years and only superficially discussed by the Right.

The power of his message is that it seeks to restore dignity and agency to each human being, reminding them that they have control over their circumstances so long as they take responsibility. This is so even if much of their predicament is technically at the hands of forces outside of their own individual power. Put another way, this is a return to personal responsibility, and it seems to resonate with rural people, who tend to value individual striving, hard work, and responsibility. 

Dr. Peterson proffers 24 “Rules for Life”  in his books. Fifteen out of the 24 are related to personal responsibility:

• Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping.
• Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
• Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
• Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie.
• Be precise in your speech.
• Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
• Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.
• Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
• Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
• Abandon ideology.
• Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
• Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.
• Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.
• Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.
• Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

I believe that a message that puts power back into people's hands resonates with folks in despair because it means they have agency to change their lives. This does not necessarily mean that it puts blame on the individual for their circumstances or that it rejects the notion of structural issues that may play a role in causing underlying crises. I’ve always wondered why a message that emphasizes personal responsibility ought to be viewed as one that denies the existence of structural inequalities? The two aren’t mutually exclusive. 

People in despair genuinely seem to be benefiting from Jordan Peterson’s message. He has amassed a massive following on YouTube (over six million subscribers and over half a billion total views on his videos). Glossing through the comments on his videos and posts on the Jordan Peterson Reddit page (which has over 300,000 members) there seems to be a significant number of people profusely thanking Dr. Peterson for his role in transforming their lives for the better. Sure this is anecdotal, but it is certainly worth something.

Earlier I stated that Jordan Peterson’s approach is a “return to” personal responsibility. I say this because the importance of personal responsibility in uplifting the downtrodden has ancient roots. It can be traced least as far back as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Arguably one of the most successful programs for pulling people out of addiction and despair, the 12-step program created by Alcoholics Anonymous, puts the power in the hands of the sufferer, but interestingly, via a recognition of a higher power that can give aid, i.e., God. Ultimately, though, it is the individual who has the conscious ability and free will to make decisions and perform actions that will better their life.

This reminds me of multiple verses in the Quran in which God says that no soul is taxed with a burden except that it is one which they are able to bear. (Quran 2:233, 2:286, 6:152, 7:42, and 23:62). Furthermore, God states that “no bearer of burdens shall bear that of another.” (Quran 6:164, 17:15, 53:38. Translation by Nuh Ha Mim Keller, The Quran Beheld, (2022)). The implication is that some level of personal responsibility is required to recognize and strive toward a path out of one’s difficult circumstances. For the 12-step program, as well as the Muslim and broader Abrahamic traditions, the path begins with recognition of the Higher Power.

Tying this back to the discussion about victimhood culture, psychologist Dr. Scott Kaufman explains in an article published in a Scientific American article that the opposite of a victimhood mindset is a “personal growth mindset.” He argues that a personal growth mindset can help flip the narrative of trauma and despair if individuals choose to view their trauma not as a something essential to their identity, but as something that may actually be a source of personal growth and development, rather than a demarcation of oppression. He ponders of the personal growth mindset:

What if we all learned at a young age that our traumas don’t have to define us? That it’s possible to have experienced a trauma and for victimhood to not form the core of our identity? That it’s even possible to grow from trauma, to become a better person, to use the experiences we’ve had in our lives toward working to instill hope and possibility to others who were in a similar situation? What if we all learned that it’s possible to have healthy pride for an in-group without having out-group hate? That if you expect kindness from others, it pays to be kind yourself? That no one is entitled to anything, but we all are worthy of being treated as human?

This would be quite the paradigm shift, but it would be in line with the latest social science that makes clear that a perpetual victimhood mindset leads us to see the world with rose-tinted glasses. With a clear lens, we’d be able to see that not everyone in our out-group is evil, and not everyone in our in-group is a saint. We’re all human with the same underlying needs to belong, to be seen, to be heard and to matter.

Seeing reality as clearly as possible is an essential step to making long-lasting change, and I believe one important step along that path is to shed the perpetual victimhood mindset for something more productive, constructive, hopeful and amenable to building positive relationships with others.

Dr. Kaufman’s proposal seems to be an explanation of how people in despair are benefiting from the message of Jordan Peterson. I would further argue that a good part of why Dr. Peterson has been so successful with his employment of this messaging is because it is rooted (however imperfectly) in ancient, transcendent truths steeped in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.

I share this post in large part to compel us to reckon with the possibility that there is great good in a message that emphasizes personal responsibility in lieu of one that places greater emphasis on structural inequities and victimhood culture. For one, the former seems to bring about real benefit more readily for real individuals in a relatively short period of time, whereas the latter leaves one stuck in a rut, hoping for the government to deliver a utopia.

Another story of law enforcement struggles to serve (and protect) rural communities

Dani Anguiano wrote in The Guardian a few days ago under the headline, "‘We’re on our own’: the rural US town where police refuse calls."  The story is about Rancho Tehama, an unincorporated community in Tehama County, California, population 65,829, about 120 miles north of Sacramento.

Failures of law enforcement in Tehama County burst into the news in 2017 after a mentally ill gunman killed five in remote Rancho Tehama, including at an elementary school.  The Los Angeles Times covered the events thoughtfully, drawing state wide attention to happenings that might otherwise have gone largely unnoticed because of the remote location.  I wrote a few blog posts in the aftermath of the killings, here and here. 

More recently, Tehama County has been in the news in relation to its inability to recruit and retain enough deputies to serve the county.  CalMatters report on the issue was the topic of a December, 2022 blog post here. 

Here's a lede from Anguiano's Guardian story last week: 

In Rancho Tehama Reserve, residents are used to getting by without everything they need. The price, or the perk, of living among the oak trees and rolling hills where cattle graze in this rural northern California community is its isolation.

People typically come to the Ranch, as residents call it, looking for space and quiet – they only got proper cellphone and internet service three years ago. The settlement is at the end of a two-lane road that meanders through the hillsides of California’s Sacramento Valley and offers glimpses of the snow-capped peaks of Mounts Lassen and Shasta. The gas station has snacks, propane and phone chargers, and the hardware store carries alfalfa pellets, kerosene and bolts, but most anything else requires at least a 30-minute drive.

Sherri Burns, the owner of the hardware store, said people here knew one another, and were often united by their love for a place viewed by outsiders as the “armpit of Tehama county”.

Burns, who is also the assistant volunteer fire chief, is quotes:  

I love it. I wouldn’t go anywhere else.  If you respect people, you get respect back. I’ve never had fear out here – and I’ve gone on calls in the middle of the night by myself.

Recently, however, the remoteness has presented a dilemma:  

[R]esidents say when they call 911, they are frequently unable to get any help.

In places like Rancho Tehama, residents say, the issue is not a lack of police, but neglect. The staffing challenges only exacerbated a longtime problem – residents say that for years, even when the sheriff’s office had more deputies, the county’s remote settlements received little attention. Though the absence of patrol deputies affected the entire 3,000 sq mile county, it hit those living in rural areas particularly hard due to their distance from major population centers and the lack of other law enforcement agencies.

One Rancho Tehama resident, Cheyenne Thornton, called the situation a "ticking timebomb," adding:

 Unless you’re bleeding or dying, you’re probably not going to get a sheriff or anyone to respond.

You feel like you don’t matter out here – you’re on your own.

Others, like Chris Foster, said they were less troubled by the lack of law enforcement protection:  

I can protect myself and my family, whether I shoot you in the ass or beat you with a stick. This is the country. People packing guns is normal to me and my nine-year-old son. Because, you know, you have to protect your wellbeing and your property. It’s like anywhere else.

Don't miss the rest of Anguiano's story, where you'll also echoes of this post about rural law enforcement's struggles to effectively oversee vast physical territory with few resources.  The story also notes that some Rancho residents sued the county over the 2017 shootings, in particular the failure to seize the killer's guns pursuant to a restraining order that compelled them to do so.  

Finally, if you want to learn more about this community, the 2017 killings at Rancho Tehama are the subject of a just-released set of episodes on the podcast This is Actually Happening.  

Reconciling rural aversion to environmental policy with reverence for the environment

American political polarization on the issue of climate change, specifically the predominant notion that environmental protection is a left-wing cause, has never felt intuitive to me. The people in my life who were most integrated with, knowledgable about, and invested in caring for the natural world – hunters, fishers, and farmers – were all also life-long conservatives. Knowing first-hand the extent to which these individuals revered the natural landscape that surrounded us in rural Virginia, I reconciled this perceived disconnect by presuming their commitment to the environment, which I witnessed as implicit in their rural ways of life, took a back seat to other political preferences and agendas. I had never considered, however, that rural existence and identity could, in-and-of-itself, be constructive of an ideology opposed to climate change policy.

A December 2022 Associated Press news report, "Rural voters 'in the trenches on climate, leery of Biden," complicated my understanding of rural Americans' relationship to climate policy. The story focuses on Raquel Krach, a rice farmer in a rural area of the Sacramento Valley, who has been unable to grow full crop yields due to ongoing drought. Despite confidently attributing the increasing prevalence of such adverse natural phenomena to the effects of climate change, Krach feels she cannot even discuss the issue of climate change policy with her rural neighbors given its deeply divisive nature within her community. The report contextualizes Krach's rural neighbors' antagonistic relationship to climate policy within a broader trend by which rural communities are less supportive of federal climate change mitigation action relative to their urban counterparts, even when analyzed internally within political parties. 

The existence of an urban-rural divide with regards to attitudes towards climate policy is particularly surprising given the ways in which rural communities are on the forefront of many climate issues. As the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Third National Climate Assessment highlights: 

Warming, climate volatility, extreme weather events, and environmental change are already affecting the economies and cultures of rural areas.

More specifically, because rural socioeconomic ways of life are heavily dependent on natural resources that are being impacted by climate change and less diversified in terms of sources of socioeconomic stability, the livelihoods, infrastructure, and quality of life of many rural communities across the country are being jeopardized by climate shifts we are already seeing.  

Drought and lack of available water, such as that posing challenges to Krach's farm, provide just one illustration of climate change's many iterations and corresponding implications for rural communities. Other ways in which climate change-influenced disasters continue to have an outsized impact on Rural America include increasingly frequent wildfires (previously discussed on this blog here, here, here, and here), flooding (here and here), and coastal erosion. 

A 2020 study, "Understanding Rural Attitudes Towards the Environment and Conservation in America," produced by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, confirmed both the existence of an urban-rural divide with regards to attitudes towards climate policy, as well as what I knew from personal interactions: this divide was not the product of rural Americans caring less for the environment. To the contrary, the study found that rural Americans definitively do value environmental protection and have strong place-oriented values embodied by environmental stewardship and an ongoing connection to nature. 

Instead, the Nicholas Institute study posits the divide is largely the result of rural Americans' negative attitudes towards the government and, particularly, their distrust of federal environmental policy and regulation they feel has not taken into account the needs of rural constituencies and, consequently, led to bad outcomes for their communities. Similarly, the study identifies rural Americans' anti-climate policy disposition as emerging from skepticism of large environmental advocacy groups they see as pushing top-down regulation that serves the agenda of global climate activists, but not necessarily their small towns. Thus, the study demonstrates the ways in which for rural Americans being pro-environment, but anti-environmental policy is not inherently contradictory.  

Understanding rural Americans' aversion to climate change mitigation policy, despite in many ways bearing the brunt of climate change's most tangible impacts, has import beyond just being of theoretical interest. Rural Americans are essential to the success or failure of much environmental policy implementation. More specifically, as spotlighted in a 2021 paper, "Understanding Rural Identities and Environmental Policy Attitudes in America," by Emily Diamond: 

Conservation of ecosystems, water, and wildlife, the production of energy – renewable and non-renewable – and many other environmental issues depend on the actions taken by rural residents; gaining rural buy-in for environmental regulations can lead to greater success in their implementation.

Given the critical importance of rural communities to climate policy implementation, policy-makers and activists should take seriously the recommendations of the Nicholas Institute study to: (1) collaborate with local constituents, particularly trusted community leaders, such that rural stakeholders are positioned to have an active voice in local resource management and the broader solution, (2) build state and local government partnerships into policy to mitigate federal distrust and bolster overall efficacy, and (3) leverage rural Americans' existing environmental values both by honing in on the importance of environmental stewardship for the purposes of acting on behalf of future generations, and by focusing on specific local issues, such as protecting clean water sources, rather than on climate change and global emission reduction more universally.

Might the State of California subsidize flagging rural law enforcement? and a deep dive on other issues implicated by the rural law enforcement staffing shortage

Tehama County Jail
September 2021
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2021

I wrote about this topic last month based on this Los Angeles Times story out of Tehama County, California.  Now, CalMatters is expanding on the reasons for the shortage.  Nigel Duara's deeply reported story also discusses the possibility--which I assume is a very slim one--that the State of California might subsidize counties like Tehama that are unable to hire sufficient deputies to afford daytime patrols.  Here's an excerpt on the big picture, with a nod to rural self-sufficiency: 

This is a county where people are expected to take care of themselves, and in the last month, Tehama County itself has been operating without its own guardrail: Outgoing Sheriff Dave Hencratt said last month that deputies would no longer patrol during the day.

Next, here's a terrific excerpt on how the shortage--which has attracted attention from tabloids as far away as London and New York--has landed locally:  

On a recent December morning, lots of people’s faces hung low and heavy as the clouds.

The sheriff frowned when he met a reporter at midday on the edge of his property, dressed in barn clothes, declining to comment. The county administrator frowned because the sheriff’s abrupt decision threw his office into chaos. The tavern owner frowned because he works 23 miles outside of town and hasn’t seen a patrol car in weeks. The elected leaders, the motel owners, the rural residents left to their own devices — everyone, it seems, in this stretch of land between national forests, is unhappy with the circumstances, and they each have a different idea for how to solve it.

There's lots of colorful language from the retiring sheriff about how his department loses officers to neighboring agencies, like the Redding Police Department in neighboring Shasta County:  

The state, meanwhile, isn’t making it any easier to hire police officers — particularly those who leave larger departments with shoddy disciplinary or criminal records and find employment at smaller organizations. New laws have raised the minimum hiring age of law enforcement officers to 21 and require the community college system to create a “modern policing” degree program by 2025, laying the groundwork for a statewide officer education minimum.

In Tehama County, tensions had been building for months, if not years. Hencratt told the Red Bluff Daily News in February that other law enforcement departments were treating his office like a “supermarket of employees.”

“When (the) Redding Police Department says, ‘You know what chief, we’re down officers,’ ‘Well go down to Tehama County, go down the officer aisle and pick some,’ and that’s what they do. They’re cherry picking our people,” Hencratt told the newspaper.

Tehama County usually makes its hires from newly graduated applicants, said Tehama County Administrator Gabriel Hydrick. Since the county pays so poorly — about 22% below market rate, according to a county-commissioned compensation study from August — the new recruits don’t stay long. The police department in the county seat of Red Bluff pays better, and law enforcement in the nearby city of Redding and surrounding Shasta County both offer higher salaries and hiring bonuses of several thousand dollars.

Since 2012, the Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training, or POST, has certified on average about 3,200 officers each year. A basic certificate means that the applicant passed both the POST academy and a field training program, then completed a probationary period at the agency that employs them. The entire process takes about two years.

In 2022, however, the agency issued just 2,424 basic certificates as of Dec. 13, the lowest number of basic certificates issued since 2013, and well below the 10-year high of 4,530 issued in 2020.

“I would agree that it’s harder to be a police officer now than (in years past),” said Hydrick, the county administrator. “There’s a lot of disincentives to being an officer. The culture isn’t behind you anymore. We have more laws about policing and being a police officer than other states.”

But Hydrick also blames the working attitudes of the new generation making up the youngest ranks of law enforcement — or, in this case, not making up that new generation.

“We can keep throwing money at it, but if there’s a generation that’s not willing to work or apply for jobs, the money’s not going to fix that,” Hydrick said. “The younger generation wants to be gamers and YouTubers; maybe they cobble an income together from being an Uber driver.

“We’re not seeing people want to become professionals anymore.”

And here's more on the question whether too much state regulation is the problem--or at least part of it.  

One of the architects of California’s push for tougher regulations on police and policing is Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat and chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee. He said he doesn’t see a conflict between police hiring problems and the state’s stronger hand in hiring officers and the practice of policing.

“It’s almost like, if you’re saying the regulations are too stringent, you’re saying we can’t get people who are not racist, who do not want to brutalize people of color,” Jones-Sawyer said. “We’re not the ones making police officers look bad. It’s the bad police officers who are discouraging the good ones from applying.”

But Sawyer-Jones said it may be time to consider having the state send money to the smallest departments, like the one in Tehama County, to make sure they can afford to pay competitive rates.

“We probably do need to look at subsidizing smaller police departments so they can level the playing field,” he said.

* * * 

Police departments nationwide are calling for more officers, but in the smallest offices covering the largest geographic areas, the situation is more dire. In Shasta County, north of Tehama County, the sheriff’s office closed one level of the jail and blamed a lack of deputies. Sacramento has had a police officer shortage since the Great Recession 15 years ago, and in Los Angeles, the police department has no staffing problem, and is instead requesting more helicopters.

It’s not like policing pays badly in California — sometimes the opposite. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a Beverly Hills assistant police chief earned $716,284 in total compensation in 2021, making him the highest-paid municipal employee in the state. But Tehama County is no Beverly Hills: The entire county drew less than one-half the revenue that Beverly Hills did in the 2020-21 fiscal year, the latest year for which numbers were available

One recruiter who works with police departments said that law enforcement has been slow to change its recruiting practices, and that’s reflected in the smaller number of people joining the profession.

“This isn’t 1997,” said Epic Recruiting CEO Sam Blonder. “You’re not going to get 1,000 people signing up for the (policing exam).”

The issue isn’t just pay, Blonder said, citing research showing that the newest generation of recruits looks for work-life balance ahead of pure compensation. But policing’s issues also extend to intransigence among the old guard. His work to recruit new officers, Blonder said, is as much about convincing police brass to do the recruiting.

“Among command staff there’s this attitude that I shouldn’t have to do this,” Blonder said. “Ask 150 high school kids who wants to be a police officer — you won’t get one that will raise their hand. It’s not for me to say why that’s happened, but sometimes an industry needs a shakeup like that.”

That shakeup is happening in real time in Tehama County.

“People have expressed to me fear and concern based on the lack of the daytime sheriff’s office patrol,” said Tehama County District Attorney Matt Rogers. “Simply put, if they pick up the phone and dial 911, is someone going to come?”

Any Tehama County officials wishing for tax hikes to generate more county revenue watched those hopes fizzle in March 2020, when voters rejected the county’s 1-cent sales tax increase. And it didn’t just fail, it was crushed, 84% to 16%.

Tehama County is also setting aside money for about 30 vacant sheriff’s office jobs, eight of them for deputies and 13 for deputies in the county jail. Hydrick, the county administrator, said the sheriff’s hope was to eventually fill those positions and restore the sheriff’s office to its 2017 size of approximately 84 deputies.

But in the meantime, all of those vacant positions “encumber,” or put a hold on, the salaries those positions would be paid. That, Hydrick said, amounts to about $3 million each year in unused money by the sheriff’s office, which then reverts to the county’s general fund.

In place of the absent deputies will be the California Highway Patrol, which has 14 officers for the 15-county region that encompasses Tehama County.

“Since Nov. 20, the CHP has received numerous requests for assistance (from residents) to calls in Tehama County that don’t include their usual duties,” California Highway Patrol spokesperson John Crouch said in an email.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea, whose county borders Tehama and whose office pays more, said background checks are as much an obstacle to making new hires as the recruiting process is.

“It’s a challenge to find people you would want to entrust with the authority to carry firearms,” said Honea, who is also president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association.

Honea said his office tries to focus on retaining the people they already have by offering free gym memberships and yoga classes.

For some longtime residents like Tehama County Supervisor Bill Moule, the end of daytime patrols is a return to the county’s past.

“I moved to this county in 1978, and the first question I asked was, ‘What kind of service do you have in the rural areas?’” Moule said. “The sheriff was kinda this big guy, been sheriff a long time. He looked at me and said, ‘Son, get yourself a shotgun and a dog.’

“It’s no different today than it was in 1978.”

Grateful to be able to quote liberally from this CalMatters story, since this is a non-profit news website offering Creative Commons licensing.  

Is an orientation to work and self-sufficiency making Democrats' domestic policies unpopular?

National Public Radio reported a few days ago on new poll that shows Democrats not getting credit for their assistance to low-income families.  Kelsey Snell and Domenico Montanaro report, with some excerpts following, including this part I want to highlight the most, but which doesn't show up in the transcript.  It's a quote from a Republican voter in Oklahoma who got the child tax credit for his kids but says it didn't help it all.  In that regard, he represents one in five voters who responded to the survey.  Curious, because it's hard to imagine how a cash infusion couldn't help "at all." 

Perhaps more importantly, that respondent--whose race is not specified--doesn't think it's good for government to give money to people.  Here's his quote (transcribed by me):  

Long term, it's a problem because you need a better choice.  What you're doing when you actually give these people that Band Aid is you're making them dependent on that Band Aid.

This reflects a long-standing attitude of Americans who value work--the idea of work.  These folks expect all people to work because they work--even if the fruits of their labor don't truly meet their economic need.  This is reflected most prominently in Jennifer Sherman's book, Those who Work, Those who Don't:  Poverty, Morality and Family in Rural America, and I've written about it here and here.  

What follows is an excerpt from the story's transcript with more context on the poll on which Snell and Montanaro were reporting:   

Democrats say the child tax credit has a particularly large impact on low-income families for whom the additional funds have been crucial. A recent study from Columbia University found that those monthly payments kept 3.6 million children out of poverty in October.

In the NPR/Marist survey, almost 6 in 10 eligible households said they received the child tax credit. But the 59% of eligible respondents is far below the number of families that the government expects should be getting funds. The IRS estimated earlier this year that the families of 88% of children in the U.S. would be eligible for the payments and said in September that 35 million families received them.

The disconnect between the government figures and respondents' answers is a perception and credit problem for Biden and Democrats.

Even among those who did recall receiving the tax credit, two-thirds said it only helped a little and 1 in 5 said it didn't help at all.
Biden's perception problem

For the president, there were further signs that voters don't give him credit for the policies of his own administration.

When it came to those direct payments, respondents gave Democrats in Congress a plurality of the credit for getting them to people (40%), while 17%, credited Republicans — even though zero congressional Republicans voted for the March relief bill.

The same percentage — just 17% — felt Biden was most responsible for sending the cash.

* * *

While the numbers are a sign of a deeply polarized society, there's also evidence of lackluster feelings for the president among even people in his own party.

For example, in the survey, while 76% of Republicans strongly disapproved of the job Biden is doing, only 38% of Democrats strongly approved.

* * *

Democrats have spent months repeating the message that their legislation will not add to the deficit or worsen inflation. In an address from the White House in October, Biden called the plans fiscally responsible policies to help the country grow.

"They don't add a single penny to the deficit," he said. "And they don't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. In fact, they reduce the deficit."

Overall, 61% of respondents said things in the country are going in the wrong direction. That's a significant drop from back in July, when .Biden was saying the U.S. was on the cusp of independence from the pandemic. Americans then were split but more optimistic than they are now on the direction of the country.

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.  

More on private fire-fighting in the rural West

The New York Times ran a big story a few days ago on various private fire-fighting efforts in California, Oregon and Washington.  I've recently written about this issue here and here, but Ilie Mitaru's piece (he photographed and reported) is really extraordinary, featuring the views and practices of pot farmers, ranchers and a retired fire-fighter who adapts vehicles to be fire-fighting, water-toting machines.  In fact, fire-fighting vehicles play a really important role in this story.  Guess you got to have the equipment if you're going to have any hope of succeeding against these fires.  

A related story of self-reliance in the face of wildfires is here. 

Gold Country Republicans expect Newsom to cheat in California recall election

Republicans in Sierra-Nevada foothills--sometimes called the Motherlode or the Gold Country--are articulating  skepticism about whether the Gubernatorial Recall election a week from today will be on the up-and-up.  Hailey Branson-Potts brings us the story for the Los Angeles Times, dateline Sutter Creek, in Amador County.  Here's a quote from Ed Brown, 67, whose trailer of pro-Recall and pro-Trump merchandise sits off "Gold Chain Road," apparently a reference to famed Highway 49, named for the 49'ers.

“They’ll probably do something to cheat,” Brown said of Newsom’s supporters, adding that he will vote for Larry Elder because “he’s more like Trump; he’s for the people.”

Tomi Lahren has been on Fox News similarly alleging election shenanigans in the upcoming recall.  

“Yes, Gavin Newsom has raised a whole lot of money from teachers unions and special interests and tech, but that money is not going to save him,” said Lahren. “The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud, so as they say: Stay woke. Pay attention to the voter fraud going on in California because it’s going to have big consequences not only for that state but for upcoming elections.”

Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple linked Lahren's claim to Trump and the 2016 election;   

The idiocy of this claim dates back almost five years, at least. Though Donald Trump in the 2016 election won the electoral college vote, he lost the popular vote, a shortcoming that quite clearly anguished him. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump wrote on Twitter, also alleging that there was “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”

Also responding to Lahren's claim, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter noted on Twitter that it'll just be simple math if Newsom survives the recall.  After all, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2 to 1 in the Golden State. 

Branson-Potts' story out of Sutter Creek also features the Amador County Republican Party chair, Vince Destigter, who say 

the recall has channeled rural voters’ deep-seated anger at the state’s liberal politicians and at institutions such as public schools and the news media, which they claim give them the short shrift.

“We have to be real sure that you understand: We don’t like your newspaper,” Destigter told a Los Angeles Times reporter at a diner in Jackson last week. He said he screams at the news: “Come on, you guys have no concept of what we do up here!”

I must say I think there's some truth to that--that urban folks, including politicians in Sacramento, don't much understand what rural folks do, in California or elsewhere.  

Destigter, 79, of Pioneer said people here are an independent lot who “don’t like the government running our lives.”

Elsewhere in the story, Destigter reports that he's vaccinated.  He also opines on other issues driving the California recall:  

Recall supporters, Destigter said, blame Democrats for forest management policies that they believe have made wildfires more destructive.

“There are many — I’m sorry, but they’re liberals — they don’t believe in cutting trees,” he said.

Destigter voted for Elder and dropped his ballot off at a drop box instead of mailing it.

“We’re very fussy about that,” he said. “We believe that there were a lot of shenanigans done with the voting” in the presidential election.

Finally, the story features details of how folks in neighboring El Dorado County, also Republican leaning, are voting amidst the Caldor Fire.  

Postscript:  Within a few days of this Los Angeles Times story, allegations of (anticipated) voter fraud were showing up in other national news fora, with the allegations being made by Larry Elder and Donald Trump.  And they allegations weren't just coming from rural California.  Read stories here, here, here, and here.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part LXII): The great (mandatory) mask war

Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my pet peeves is a national newspaper referring to state like Arkansas as "a rural state," suggesting that it is rural in its entirety when a majority of people live in urban areas (at least as defined by the Census Bureau).  Nevertheless, I"m going to commit that sin in this post by loosely labeling Arkansas, where I grew up, a "rural state" to contrast it with another state that is primarily urban, my current home, California.  Both states have reported their highest rates of coronavirus infections this past week, but when it comes to mandatory masks, the two states' responses are at nearly opposite ends of the spectrum. 

Yesterday, the governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson (R), said that municipalities could not require residents to wear masks when in public.  He did this in response to decisions by the cities of Fayetteville and, shortly thereafter, Little Rock, to order the wearing of masks in public places.  Here's what the Arkansas Democrat Gazette reported in relation to an an extension of the governor's

emergency declaration that would keep in place measures such as the executive orders he signed this week granting businesses and health care workers greater immunity from coronavirus-related lawsuits and extending workers' compensation benefits to Arkansans who contract the virus on the job.

[The governor] also noted language in the order giving him and Health Department Secretary Nate Smith "sole authority over all instances of quarantine, isolation, and restrictions on commerce and travel." 

"Cities and counties shall not impose any restriction of commerce or travel that is more restrictive than a directive or guidelines issued by the Secretary of Health, in consultation with the Governor," Hutchinson said in the order.

These paragraphs were buried pretty deep in the day's big story about the coronavirus in Arkansas and were not part of any headline, and I am disappointed that the statewide newspaper shied away from foregrounding this important conflict.  I would not have known of the governor's decision to "overrule" the cities had I not seen it highlighted in my Twitter feed by some progressive Arkansans.

Meanwhile, Governor Newsom (D) today in California ordered the wearing of masks in public places.  Of course, California has been on the vanguard of more aggressive public health orders since the beginning of the pandemic, with a shelter-in-place order since mid-March.  Here's coverage by CalMatters and the Los Angeles Times.  

Do these different decisions (and the fact one state has a Democratic supermajority and other a Republican supermajority) reflect different mindsets by rural folks compared to urban ones?  Does Arkansas (population 3 million, with 42% living in rural counties) have more of a frontier, "live free or die" mentality than California?  The Golden State, after all, is more urban, more densely populated generally (40 million people, 98% of whom live in urban areas as defined by the Census), and more accustomed to regulation?   

Meanwhile, Governor Doug Ducey (R) of Arizona has finally given local governments the authority to require face masks in public, as reported here by AZCentral, and many are choosing to do so as coronavirus cases in the state spike.  Perhaps most bizarre is the decision of the Nebraska Governor, Dave Ricketts (R), to announce he will withhold federal funding to any local government entity that imposes a mask requirement.  Although, now that I think about it, that's no stronger a move than the Arkansas governor doing the same thing by fiat, without bringing money into it.