On rural resentment and pain, and its link to the trucker strike

I am a huge fan of Thomas Edsall, who writes regularly for the New York Times, but I missed this column earlier this month until today.  The headline is provocative, "There's a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers."  As is typical of Edsall, he marshals recent academic research on a topic.  You have to get pretty deep into this column to get to the rural part of this one, which otherwise focuses on class and regional inequality, but I'm just going to highlight below those rural bits.  The rural bits, by the way, could also be framed as regional inequality.  

I asked Rodríguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:

In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.

The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.

“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University; Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics; and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article “Progressive Cities: Urban-Rural Polarization of Social Values and Economic Development Around the World.”

* * * 

Luca and his colleagues emphasize the divisive role of what Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died last year, called the “silent revolution” and what Ron Lesthaeghe of the Free University of Brussels describes as the “second demographic transition.”

Citing Inglehart, Luca and his co-authors write:

when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”

The urban-rural conflict between postmaterialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”

I'm thinking "postmaterialistic values" sound like what Rob Henderson calls "luxury beliefs"--those that folks with other pressing problems (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs) in their lives solved then have the time to worry and think about. 

In an email, Luca elaborated:

There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in second demographic transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.

Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”

Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.

The Rodríguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.

Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In their October 2017 paper “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”

There's so much more to Edsall's column, which I'll try to get to in another post focusing more on class than geography.  

Meanwhile, here's another New York Times column on the Ottawa trucker's strike, this one by Ross Douthat and focused on class.   

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.  

"Rural America Lost Population Over the Past Decade for the First Time in History"

That's the title of a policy brief by Kenneth Johnson, from the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.  Here are the first few paragraphs:   

The economic turbulence beginning with the Great Recession of 2007 and continuing through the next decade had a significant demographic impact on rural America. Recent data from the 2020 Census reveal that the rural population declined between 2010 and 2020.1 The loss was minimal, just 289,000 (-0.6 percent) out of 46 million, but it is the first decade-long rural population loss in history. In contrast, the rural population grew by 1.5 million between 2000 and 2010, and by nearly 3.4 million in the 1990s. Just 33.1 percent of rural counties gained population between 2010 and 2020, compared to 53.2 percent in the prior decade. Population growth was impacted in metropolitan areas as well, but the urban population continued to grow between 2010 and 2020. Thus, both rural and urban America have been buffeted by the aftermath of the Great Recession, which continued to exert a significant impact on migration, fertility, and mortality throughout the decade.

Population growth or decline depends on the balance between natural change (births minus deaths) and net migration (in-migrants minus out-migrants). Between 2010 and 2020, the United States experienced the least population growth since the 1930s because of the economic turbulence of the Great Recession and its aftermath. During the decade, immigration to the United States slowed and internal migration diminished because residents were frozen in place by high unemployment, housing debt, and poor economic prospects. At the same time, natural increase declined because there were fewer births and more deaths. In 2020, fertility rates hit record lows and there were the fewest births since 1979. At the same time, deaths were at record highs because of population aging and growing deaths of despair (including from drug overdoses and suicide).

These changes in national demographic trends had significant implications for rural America. A key question is how did the components of demographic change combined to produce the population loss in nonmetropolitan areas after 2010? The rural population declined because more people moved out than moved in, and because diminishing rural births only minimally exceeded the rising number of deaths. Between 2010 and 2020, the rural population declined by 289,000 because the net migration loss of 510,000 reduced the rural population by -1.1 percent, a loss which exceeded the gain from natural increase of 221,000 (0.5 percent). In contrast, in the prior decade, the rural population grew by 1,516,000 (3.4 percent) because there was a net gain of 464,000 migrants (1.0 percent) plus 1,052,000 more births than deaths (2.4 percent) (Figure 1). The shift from net migration gain to loss was widespread. Just a third of rural counties had migration gains between 2010 and 2020, compared to 45 percent between 2000 and 2010. In contrast, the metropolitan migration gain remained stable over the two decades.

The sharp reduction in natural increase following the Great Recession had a significant impact because it traditionally produced most of the rural population gain, as it did between 2000 and 2010. However, between 2010 and 2020 natural increase contributed only 21 percent as many new residents to rural America as it had in the last decade. This small gain from natural increase was not sufficient to offset the net migration loss. Fewer births and more deaths also increased the number of rural counties experiencing natural decrease (when more people die than are born). Between 2010 and 2020, deaths exceeded births in 55 percent of nonmetropolitan counties, up from 37 percent in the previous decade. This is the highest incidence of rural natural decrease in history, and it predates the onset of COVID-19, which is likely to further accelerate the incidence of natural decrease.

Download the entire brief here.   

Postscript:  Here is an interview with Kenneth Johnson about this matter, published in The Hill.  

Morning Consult poll on rural attitudes toward the Democratic Party, and what one rural U.S. Senator is doing to reach his constituents

We've seen lots of stories about how Democrats should seek and can win the rural vote in the past few weeks (see earlier posts here and here, along with late 2021 post), and a big one appeared a few days ago.  It's from Morning Consult titled, "The Culture War Has Democrats Facing Electoral Demise in Rural America. Can They Stop the Bleeding?"  The piece by Eli Yokley leads with these data points, which are sobering for the Democrats: 

• 65% of rural voters view the Democratic Party unfavorably — including 48% who do so strongly.
• Among 21 issues tested, a rural voter’s desire for candidates to support securing the U.S.-Mexico border had the strongest correlation with negative views about the Democratic Party.
• Only 23% of rural voters say the Democratic Party “cares more about my community” than the GOP.

These are drawn from the results of Morning Consult's mid-January survey of 1,525 self-identified rural voters.  This bit of the story explains why rural voters remain so important:  

The Democratic Party’s attrition in America’s shrinking yet politically powerful rural communities was obscured during Donald Trump’s presidency, with the GOP’s suburban decline ultimately helping deliver Democrats a governing trifecta in Washington despite state-level losses.

But Democrats may no longer be able to rely on the suburbs given President Joe Biden’s mounting struggles that threaten to again highlight his party’s weaknesses in rural communities, where new Morning Consult research reveals culture-driven displeasure with the party in power. Some prominent Democrats believe an immediate course correction is required for the party to avoid perhaps decades in the political wilderness.

“The root issue is that rural voters are worth more in both the Senate and the Electoral College,” said Democratic data scientist David Shor, a 2012 campaign guru for President Barack Obama who has spent years warning his party that it faces extinction in the country’s more remote areas. “Either Democrats make these adjustments and do better with working-class voters, or they get locked out of the federal government for a very long time.”

This piece in The Hill by Hannah Trudo does not focus on rural voters only, but rather on Democrat messaging.  Same regarding this piece from Politico.  Jeff Greenfield offers his opinion under the headline, "Democrats are Losing the Culture War.  A Messaging Shift Won't Change Them."  This piece by Stanley Greenberg, the famed Democratic pollster, focuses on cross-racial coalition building among working-class voters.  

Meanwhile, back specifically on the rural front, I follow U.S. Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) on Twitter, and it strikes me that he does a brilliant job of reaching his rural constituents using social media.  I'm pasting screenshots of some of his recent tweets below, where he has been touring Montana cities and towns, from mid-sized ones like those in the Flathead/Kalispell region and small ones like Havre, on the so-called Hi-Line, which is the strip along the Canadian border.  I like the respectful way he listens to and communicates with his constituents--and the way in which he lets them know what he's doing for them.  The recent infrastructure bill has given him lots of opportunities to talk specifics with particular communities.  All of these screenshots were taken on February 23 and 24, which shows just how busy Tester stays when he goes home to Montana. 

Tester has also spearheaded an effort to rein in the power of meatpackers and thus protect ranchers:  

February 26, 2022

Tester also tweets regularly abut issues with the U.S. Post Office (reductions in service hit rural areas especially hard) and the need to expand broadband to all rural folks  

In short, it seems that Tester is out doing what Steve Bullock, former governor of Montana, said he could not do during his pandemic run for U.S. Senate against the state's junior senator, Steve Daines:  Tester is out talking to people, conveying his interest in them and their challenges.  He is also communicating his values and personally countering the negative stereotypes of Democrats in rural Montana--the stereotypes Bullock said he could not counter during the height of the pandemic.  

Here's Tester's Twitter bio, with his barn, near Big Sandy, MT, in the background.  His prior bio showed a photo of him in his tractor.  In this one, he's pictured in work clothes beside a big truck used to transport what he grows.  In sum, he is unabashedly and unashamedly rural and not in the least bit elitist or playing to coastal elites.  It's refreshing that he doesn't seem to care about what urban elites think.  He knows who his most important audience is. 

February 26, 2022

But Tester does "international" too.  Here's a Tweet stemming from his work on the defense appropriations subcommittee, related to the Ukraine crisis: 

February 26, 2022

And this tweet highlights his work on behalf of veterans.  He chairs the Veteran's Affairs Committee, which is a frequent subject of tweets, including when he visits veterans services facilities in Montana.    

February 26, 2022

Just goes to show that domestic and international service, action, and expertise are not at odds with each other. It strikes me that Tester is doing both--and he's doing them very well.  Indeed, he's not only doing a good job serving his constituents, he's communicating well to his constituents--and people like me who are not his direct constituents--what he is doing for them.   

Other posts about Tester are here, here, here, and here.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXVII): New Yorkers who decamped to rural places (mostly) return to the city

The New York Times reports today on New York City residents who fled to the country during the pandemic and are now mostly returning to the city.  The headline for Julie Lasky's feature is "They Fled for Greener Pastures, and There Were Weeds."  Here's the humorous lead anecdote:  

For Andrew Joseph, the unexpected challenge of rural living was summed up in a single word: beavers. Mr. Joseph was enchanted by baby beavers swimming in the brook on his four-acre property in the town of Saugerties, N.Y., [population 19,482, in the Hudson Valley] where he and his partner, Paul Pearson, have been sheltering since March 2020.

“I quickly learned that they’re horrible, nasty creatures that wreak havoc and destruction,” said Mr. Joseph, the head of a Manhattan public relations firm who still maintains a home in Harlem. The beavers dammed the brook in three places, creating a swamp behind the house, and built a den that is “the size of a small van.”

Mr. Joseph, 51, applied for a permit to remove the animals and awaited a visit from a beaver trapper. After a preliminary visit, he never showed up again, though a bear did.

Then one night the couple heard gunshots from a neighbor’s property, and, lo, the beavers were gone.

Here's another excerpt, this one focusing on what the data tell us about population movement:

According to a report published in November by the New York State comptroller based on United States Postal Service change-of-address forms, a trend in migration from New York City following the March 2020 lockdown had reversed itself as of July 2021, motivated by the reopening of schools, offices and arts and entertainment offerings.

There are more humorous anecdotes, this one about Tara Silberberg, who moved with her family from Brooklyn to Gallatin, population 1,668, also in the Hudson Valley, early in the pandemic:

Having been raised in rural western Massachusetts, where her parents retreated [from Brooklyn] after a horrific 1973 acid attack left a Park Slope child blind, Ms. Silberberg said she speaks two languages: country and city. “I’m very direct and the people on my board appreciate that about me. In the country, there’s a lot of couching and people trying to say something and not wanting to be aggressive about it.”

She is also schooled in the sometimes-operatic inconveniences of rural life. In the first year of her family’s Massachusetts sojourn, the 1930s gravity-fed water system broke “and nobody knew how to fix it and we didn’t have water for a year,” she recalled. “I understood that the country doesn’t mean it’s always picking daisies.”

Some transplants came to realize that urban density, the close contact with fellow citizens that seemed so threatening in a time of pestilence, was the first thing they missed.

And here's yet another, focusing on the "harsh demands" made by "big rural parcels":  

“I hurt my back over two years ago when I did weed whacking, one of the perils of country life,” said Annette Schaich, 58.

Ms. Schaich, a New York-based marketing consultant in the design industry, has spent the pandemic in a southern New Hampshire farmhouse she shares with her husband, Tony Conway, 71, an artist who grew up and was educated in the state. The couple are stewards of 20 acres, which has claimed a bit of their health. “Tony fell from a ladder when he was renovating the barn and broke his knee,” Ms. Schaich said. She added that there is an excellent hospital in the area.

And the presence of that excellent hospital sets it apart from other rural locales, where the transplants to rural places found themselves missing all sorts of services.   

Read the whole story.  Among other things, you'll find a mention of New Yorker--or urbanite--as identity. 

Here's a related post--now more than a decade old--by a student, "The uninformative rural mystique."  

Thoughtful comments on GOP's very rural candidate for Governor of California

I wrote a few weeks ago about Brian Dahle's campaign for governor of California.   Now, Laurel Rosenhall of the Los Angeles Times provides these thoughtful and respectful comments on the state's most rural state senator, from nonmetro Lassen County in the far northern part of the state.  

Dahle told me he was one of just two Republicans who routinely showed up to play cards at Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon’s Sacramento home. When Dahle became the Assembly Republican leader in 2017, he flew to Los Angeles to meet Rendon over beers. Rendon said they developed a warm and respectful relationship during seven years working together in the Assembly, including several visits at Dahle’s farm.

“I’d be at a taco truck in downtown L.A. and I’d call him up and he’d say, ‘I’m on my tractor right now, I’ve got to turn it off,’” Rendon recalled. “I think we’ve learned from one another’s perspectives, just from how different we see the world based on, to an extent, where we come from.”

Dahle’s background in agriculture is one of many ways he’s contrasting himself with Newsom. Big-city Democrat versus Republican farmer. Powerful politician versus scrappy underdog. To the extent there will be much of a campaign in this lopsided race, both men will spend much of it emphasizing their ideological differences — on guns, abortion, criminal justice and, of course, COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates.

Then, there is this comparison with Newsom:  

It’s worth noting, however, that Dahle and Newsom have some things in common — not only as white men in their mid-50s, but also in their origin stories. Both men come from families deeply rooted in their respective corners of California, Newsom as a fourth-generation San Franciscan and Dahle farming land near the Oregon border that once belonged to his grandfather. Both began their careers as entrepreneurs, Newsom opening a wine shop with the help of family friends and Dahle launching a seed business on the family farm. Both got into local politics on their county board of supervisors before setting sights on the state Capitol.

Pot-grower in far northern California pleads guilty to trying to bribe local sheriff

The Sacramento Bee reported yesterday from Siskiyou County, California, population 44,076,. on the Oregon state line: 

One of two marijuana growers charged with offering the Siskiyou County sheriff a $1 million bribe in 2017 pleaded guilty in federal court in Sacramento Tuesday in a plea deal that allows her to escape trial.

Gaosheng Laitinen, 41, of Cottage Grove, Minnesota, pleaded guilty in a Zoom hearing before U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez to conspiracy to commit bribery and conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, felony counts that could have netted her up to 20 years in prison.

Laitinen was charged along with her brother, Chi Meng Yang, 36, in an audacious scheme to bribe then-Sheriff Jon Lopey for to buy protection for marijuana grows in the county, prosecutors say.

The U.S. Attorneys Office in Sacramento said Yang offered Lopey $1 million during a meeting in the sheriff’s Yreka office on May 17, 2017, “in exchange for his assistance with an interstate marijuana distribution business that Yang and others were in the process of organizing in Siskiyou County.”

Immediately after the meeting, Lopey called the FBI and agents began recording subsequent meetings.

Other posts about pot growing in Siskiyou County and the Hmong community are here and here, and other links are embedded in those posts.  

Aging and disability services unequally distributed along rural-urban axis

Here's the policy brief from Syracuse University's Lerner Center for Public Health, authored by Claire Pendergrast (Syracuse) and Danielle Rhubart (Penn State):  

As the U.S. population ages, demand for aging and disability services will increase, but 15% of U.S. counties have no aging and disability services organizations. This brief shows that rural counties and counties with the highest rates of poverty, highest shares of older adults, and highest shares of non-Hispanic Blacks are most likely to be aging and disability services deserts. To support healthy aging across the country, policymakers should invest in aging services infrastructure and should prioritize resources for places that are aging and disability services deserts.

And here is a related paper, also about aging and rurality, just published in the Journal of Rural Social Sciences, "Support from Adult Children and Parental Health in Rural America," by Shelley Clark, Elizabeth M. Lawrence, and Shannon M. Monnat.  The abstract follows:  

Adult children are a primary source of care for their aging parents. Parents in rural areas, however, live further from their adult children than parents in urban areas, potentially limiting the support they receive and compromising their health and ability to age in place. We use two waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2013 and 2017) to investigate the relationships among geographic proximity, adult children’s instrumental and financial support, and parental health. Rural parents live further from their adult children and receive less financial support, but they are more likely to receive instrumental assistance. In addition, rural parents have worse health and more functional limitations than urban parents, and these differences persist after controlling for proximity to and support from adult children. Our findings indicate that factors beyond proximity influence the complex relationships between spatial and social boundaries and their consequences for older adults’ health and well-being.

Recalling local government officials: a rural-urban comparison (Part II: San Francisco Board of Education)

I started this rural-urban comparison of recent local government recalls in California last week, and this post is going to focus on the urban bit--what happened in San Francisco on February 15, when more than 70% of voters supported the recall of three members of the city's Board of Education (only three were eligible for recall based on how long they had served).  

I'll leave for a future post more details about what happened a few weeks earlier in Shasta County, California, popularly thought of as rural, though it's a metropolitan county.  San Francisco, however, is the Golden state's most densely populated county, and it is coterminous with San Francisco City.  

Public ire toward the San Francisco school board originated last year, in January, 2021, when the board voted 6-1 a year ago, in January, 2021, to rename 44 schools currently named for folks like Paul Revere, Diane Feinstein, George Washington, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Abraham Lincoln.  Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, wrote then:  

After the vote, I spent some time reading the Google spreadsheet helpfully compiled by the renaming effort, which listed the justification for each erasure: for Washington, slave-owning; for Revere, helping to command a doomed Revolutionary War military operation on the Maine coast that nonetheless supposedly contributed to the “colonization” of the Penobscot tribe; for Stevenson, writing a “cringeworthy poem” that includes words like “Eskimo” and “Japanee.” (It may not surprise you that some of these justifications, often pulled from Wikipedia, included significant errors of historical fact.)

As interesting as the spreadsheet, in its way, was the displeased statement from San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed. Though there was liberal opposition to the renaming project, the pressures of the mayor’s position apparently made it impossible for her to argue straightforwardly that Abraham Lincoln still deserves to have a school named after him. Instead, her ire focused on the fact that the school board is busy renaming schools when it hasn’t actually found a way to open them: “What I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.”

After that, the school board also decided to do away with "merit-based" admissions at the city's prestigious Lowell High School, a magnet school that Laurel Rosenhall of the Los Angeles Times described thusly: 

Lowell High School historically has admitted only students with strong grades and test scores, a policy that’s been controversial since before I was a student there in the 1990s. Though the campus has been an engine of upward mobility for generations of students from immigrant families, Black and Latino students have long been underrepresented. Overrepresented are the number of California politicians with ties to the school: Both parents of former Gov. Jerry Brown graduated from Lowell High, as did Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mother. State Controller Betty Yee graduated from Lowell in 1975, and Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis is married to a Lowell alum, according to my alumni newsletter, which writes about such things.

Soon after the election results rolled in, showing overwhelming voter support for the recall, columnist Mark Z. Barabak wrote in the Los Angeles Times: 

The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.

In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.

The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.

In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time that was wasted.

Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the district’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.)

Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.

This is the only account I have seen detail why the board would move to rename a school named for U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein.  Other coverage of how Abraham Lincoln, for example, could be one of the bad guys is here.

Laurel Rosenhall suggests on the Los Angeles Times editorial page that the overwhelming success of the recall was less due to a failure on the part of the board to "do its job."  Rosenhall closes her column thusly:  

In the end, all that misdirected effort accomplished little. A judge ruled that the board couldn’t change the Lowell admissions policy because it had violated open-meeting laws. The board rescinded its plan to rename dozens of campuses after being ridiculed at home and across the nation.

But the parents who spent hours on Zoom trying to get the board to listen to them and their children had been awakened. Their recall movement plowed ahead, gaining support from progressives and moderates in a city where Dem-on-Dem combat is usually fierce. This wasn’t about a conservative backlash. It was just about a school board that didn’t do its job.

On the wokeness front, I found of particular interest the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage of some comments by recalled school board member Allison Collins:  

Lowell [High School] wasn’t the main issue for [Laurence Lee, a 2011 alum of Lowell], but rather the “overt racism” of Collins’ 2016 tweet comparing Asians to a racial slur against Black people after she said they weren’t standing up against then-President-elect Donald Trump. She deleted the tweet after being reported, but reposted in a screenshot in December 2021.

“It’s completely performative, outrageous crap,” Lee said. “We used to have support and allies. Now we’re the easy scapegoat.”

Collins also said in 2016 that many Asian American students, teachers and parents “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate ‘get ahead.’”

A few days before the election, she doubled down.

“So when I have said in the past that SOME members of the AAPI community have aligned themselves with whiteness, it’s a historical fact, not an opinion. It’s surprising to me that some folks still find this idea so controversial,” she wrote in a tweet. “And let me add, this is true of ALL GROUPS including Black folks.”

This argument that Asians are trying to be white or acting white is also one made in Claudia Rankine's book, Just Us.  

So, the right-leaning and many mainstream media frame this successful recall as a backlash against wokeness, but there's room to interpret it the way Rosenhall does, too.   In fact, this quote from one of the recall organizer, Autumn Looijen, is perhaps most accurate in that it gets at the intersection of issues:  

It’s not about renaming, itself. It’s about renaming while the house is on fire.

Meanwhile, a recall effort is afoot to remove Chesa Boudin, the progressive prosecutor in San Francisco. 

Marketing wine as "rural"

Homepage for Rural Mendocino Wines

I've been traveling this weekend in nonmetropolitan Mendocino County, California, including both inland parts (the Anderson Valley wine region) and the coastal bits (the town of Mendocino and Fort Bragg). 

Tonight, dining at a restaurant south of Mendocino (the town), the red wine by the glass on offer was branded Zosia, a blend of Pinot Noir, Grenache, Carignan and Barbera.  I ordered it and found it slightly effervescent and quite distinctive, so I asked to see the label.  I was delighted to see that the wine is from farther inland Mendocino County than the Anderson Valley--and that is is marketed explicitly as "rural."  Here are the front and back labels:

And this led me to the website for the winery, Rural Mendocino, run by the sons of the Fetzer wine empire.  The text states: 

We grew up in Mendocino County. As kids our days were filled with hiking the beautiful countryside and working in vineyards. Our family started growing winegrapes here in 1958, and later founded Fetzer Vineyards. In the mid 90’s we began building the Masút properties throughout Mendocino County, where we farm vineyards and raise cattle and hay crops on nearly 5000 acres. Our ranches are rural, and we love working with our hands creating something from farming.

Rural Wine Company was founded because we wanted to showcase the incredible fruit across this beautiful county, a place we love and call home.

    Ben and Jake Fetzer, third generation

Kinda' cool to be marketing a product like wine as "rural," though we see many other products marketed that way.  Certainly, throughout California, tons of wine grapes are grown in rural regions, including parts of Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Placer, Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Monterey, Santa Clara, and Nevada counties, just to name a smattering.  A great deal of those grapes are also made into wine in the same places.   

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXVI): Nonmetro California county one of last to drop mask mandates

Between Boonville and Philo, 
Anderson Valley Grange, California 

I'm spending this weekend in Mendocino County, California, and, on the way here, I learned from my local NPR station that Mendocino is one of three California counties keeping its mask mandate in place.  That is, it's doing so even though the state wide mandate has finally been dropped.  I was surprised to hear this because Mendocino County, with a population of about 91,000 spread over a land area of about 3,800 square miles, is one of the Golden State's least densely populated counties.  It's not the type of place one expects to be one of the last to hold onto a mask mandate, especially given how controversial these mandates have been in this part of California, the full third of the state's land area lying between Sacramento and the Oregon state line.  The other two counties retaining mask mandates are decidedly, predictably urban. 

I've not been able to find a transcript of the radio segment on Capital Public radio, but the public health official noted that the reason Mendocino County is keeping its mask mandate is because of a relative shortage of hospital beds.  Then I found this related information in a county press release from February 10, 2022:

While Mendocino County appears to be recovering from the Omicron surge based on a decrease in reported cases from PCR testing, this data is believed to be an undercount because it does not include all positive antigen test results. The County also continues to be an area of highest risk, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), with “High Community Transmission.”

Furthermore, the County’s COVID-19 hospitalization and ICU rates are still higher than they were during the Delta surge. Since February 1, Mendocino County has had less than 10% ICU capacity. On some days, there are 0 or 1 ICU beds available, compared to California overall, which currently has 18-20% ICU capacity. This adds stress for local hospitals and their staff and delays other medical procedures.

“We will continue to assess the COVID-19 situation as it evolves and will reevaluate the need for continued universal masking orders on March 15, 2022, based on community transmission and burden to the local hospital system. For now, continued masking will protect our residents as we are still at the highest CDC risk level,” explained Dr. Coren.

The official interviewed for the Capital Public Radio story mentioned that people on the coast are supportive of the mask mandate--those are mostly tourists and those serving tourists.  Inland folks, however, don't support the mask mandate.  Their jobs are far less likely to be oriented to tourists; they tend to be more traditionally rural, and with that comes an antipathy to government regulation.

I have noticed here in Mendocino County that there is uniform signage (like photo above; saw same signs at wineries) every where I look, and I've been impressed at the extent to which folks are compliant with the mandate--whether inland or coastal.  

At Lichen Estate Winery, between
Boonville and Philo

At Lichen Estate Winery, between 
Boonville and Philo 

Northern California logging back in the news, this time regarding the rights of Native Americans

Lila Seidman reports for the Los Angeles Times today from near Fort Bragg, California, in Mendocino County.  The headline is, "A war to halt logging in Northern California reignites. Will it end differently this time?," and an excerpt follows: 

The Jan. 23 gathering was the latest rallying cry in a decades-long war over Jackson [Demonstration State Forest]’s trees, a battle that has pitted environmental activists against state and timber industry leaders. At the heart of the dispute are differing opinions about the best use of public land and who should steward the precious resource.

Those who oppose logging call it a greed-fueled operation that runs contrary to climate goals. Supporters see it as pragmatic management of a renewable resource.

Now, Native American tribes indigenous to the area [in particular the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians] have joined the fray, demanding a say in the fate of their ancestral homeland. And state officials are listening.

The renewed debate playing out behind the so-called redwood curtain could deliver the first agreement with Indigenous tribes to co-manage a state demonstration forest, according to officials at the California Natural Resources Agency.

It’s a historic path supported by stakeholders on both sides. But there’s a wrench in the works: State and tribal leaders don’t see eye to eye on important aspects of Jackson’s future. It’s not yet clear how the chasm between their visions will be reconciled.