How California’s rural Republican politicians deny real problems and create imaginary ones

From COVID to climate change, denial has become the defining trait of rural, Republican California.

From the beginning of the pandemic, the most conservative parts of California — particularly the more sparsely populated north and center — have minimized the threat and resisted commonsense, proven policies.

In June 2020, the sheriffs of Modoc and Sutter, two overwhelmingly Republican counties in Northern California, defied the governor’s mask mandate. In December of that year, central California’s uber-conservative Rep. Tom McClintock mocked masks as useless in an attention-seeking stunt.

In August, a parent in Trump-loving Amador County physically assaulted a teacher who was merely enforcing the local school district’s mask mandate. The following month, Butte County’s supervisors rejected calls for indoor mask mandates.

Beyond masks, California’s reddest counties have spurned the best tool we have against COVID: the vaccine.

In September, supervisors in bright-red Shasta and Tehama counties passed resolutions rejecting vaccine mandates. In October, right-wing Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who represents a large swath of northern California, condemned President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal employees.

But California conservatives aren’t just opposed to government mandates. They’re opposed to the vaccine itself.

As a September CNBC report documented, the more a county supported recalling Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, the less vaccinated it was. As of November, Lassen County, one of California’s most conservative, had the lowest vaccination rate.

So how’s that going for them? Well, the same right-wing regions that denied COVID’s seriousness and defied preventive policies — social distancing, masks and vaccines — are reaping the consequences. Their hospitals are overflowing — and so are their morgues.

Nearly a year after the vaccine first became available, conservative counties are the epicenter of an avoidable catastrophe. Bodies have piled up so high, so fast in rural, red northern and central California that the National Guard has had to step in.

From June through September, Californians in the least vaccinated region, the far north, were 490% more likely to die of COVID than Californians in the most vaccinated region, the Bay Area, according to a Los Angeles Times review of state health records.

But over-capacity hospitals and overflowing morgues aren’t enough to convince California Republicans to take COVID seriously.

In October, the congressman who represents the state’s most COVID-wracked region, LaMalfa, minimized the pandemic and introduced legislation that would prevent business owners from denying service to the unvaccinated. And in November, Oroville, a town in LaMalfa’s district, declared that it would defy any pandemic-related state or federal orders it doesn’t like.

Red California has been hit hard by another serious problem it denies: climate change. Wildfires have destroyed entire towns in the reddest parts of the state. Consider that seven of the 20 largest wildfires in California history have hit LaMalfa’s district.

Epic droughts have desiccated the land and livelihoods of farmers in California’s most rural, red regions, including McClintock’s district.

And yet as recently as July, the Public Policy Institute of California found a majority of California Republicans don’t believe climate change has even begun.

But you know what California conservatives do believe? Problems that aren’t.

LaMalfa is worried that President Joe Biden wants to teach critical race theory to 3- and 4-year-olds. McClintock is “very concerned” about voter fraud. Even before the September recall votes were counted, state GOP officials had begun casting doubt on the election’s integrity.

Arguably deluded by their shrinking and increasingly paranoid (dis)information bubble, California’s rural conservatives have become shadowboxers, punching at fleeting phantoms while their soil thirsts, their towns burn and their friends die.

This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "How California’s rural Republican politicians deny real problems and create imaginary ones."