Thread by @opinion

Welcome to Shasta County, Northern California.

Until last week, Shasta had fewer cases of Covid-19 and fewer restrictions on daily life than all but a couple of California counties. But residents were still mad trib.al/fq1kniG

Matt Pontes, county executive officer of Shasta, knows how to handle a crisis. He’s:

🔥Fought wildfires
🚒Run responses to fires, floods and mudslides

Yet even he describes the local response to Covid-19 strictures as “full-on anarchy” trib.al/fq1kniG

Here’s a couple of things that have happened recently:

➡️The sheriff announced he wouldn’t enforce pandemic restrictions on social gatherings and businesses
➡️People who had never before attended board meetings were accusing local officials of treason trib.al/fq1kniG

The county’s health officer was receiving so many threats that Pontes had to:

✅Bring in a threat-assessment team
🌳Cut away bushes from her home
📸Install a security system and floodlights
🚓Order police patrols

“She still doesn’t feel safe out there” trib.al/fq1kniG

Every Tuesday, Shasta’s Board of Supervisors meets and allows citizens to voice their concerns.

Each speaker gets three minutes, before two well-armed bailiffs escort them back out to an outdoor plaza, and a roar of approval from a crowd of protesters trib.al/fq1kniG

Most speakers turn up with outrage at the constraints on their liberties, along with some other specific complaint, such as the:

- County’s failure to secede from the state
- Order requiring nurses to get a flu shot
- Supervisors’ inattention to the Bible trib.al/fq1kniG

It ends with a memorable speaker wearing a Grim Reaper mask.

He sat down, reached into a silver ice bucket that said CORONA down the side with a pair of tongs and grabbed a surgical mask. He then tried, without success, to light the mask on fire trib.al/fq1kniG

The inconveniences caused by California's restrictions had attracted a new sort of person to politics. Take Elissa McEuen:

Six months ago, she couldn’t have told you where the Board met, much less what they did. Now she shows up to every meeting trib.al/fq1kniG

Almost single-handedly, McEuen had organized a bunch of vaguely lunatic groups — the anti-vaxxers, the Second Amendment people, the chemtrail crowd — into a unified fighting force.

She also persuaded Carlos Zapata to come to a meeting trib.al/fq1kniG

On Aug. 11, Zapata, an ex-Marine officer and restaurant owner, marched into the chamber and threatened to start a war.

“Right now we’re being peaceful but it’s not going to be peaceful much longer.” He called Covid-19 “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated”

Within a fortnight, Zapata’s speech had 20 million views on YouTube and he’d become a right-wing icon.

Well-armed men now drive from Idaho and Nevada to eat at Zapata’s jam-packed restaurant. He’s had nights when 1,000 people have showed up trib.al/fq1kniG

There is only the loosest connection between the constraints on people’s freedom and their level of outrage about them –– Zapata’s restaurant is running as if the virus never existed.

But that is about to change: Shasta’s Covid numbers are now spiking trib.al/fq1kniG

Just how many people will need to die before minds change?

Only weeks ago, one of the loudest protestors in Shasta had watched his mother die of Covid. In that moment, a political opinion was challenged by a fact; one of them needed to be altered trib.al/fq1kniG

200,000 American deaths has been insufficient to create a shared American reality –– even on a personal level.

The protester called the coroner and demanded that the county change the cause of death trib.al/fq1kniG