Now the County's Delusionists Want to Recall Supervisor Lawson-Remer

It’s bad enough that the ragtag band of vaxxers, internet ‘researchers,’ and wannabe tea baggers showing up for County Board of Supervisors meetings think they’re some flavor of patriots fighting an oppressive government. 

Bless them for caring enough to show up, but it’s time for reality to bite them on the ass. San Diego’s now been embarrassed nationally twice in recent weeks with hours of testimony only vaguely connected to the universe most of us live in. 

Now these folks are claiming their not-so-merry band of noisemakers represent a majority of local residents, as a campaign to recall Supervisor Terra-Lawson Remer is launched. 

It seems she “voted in FAVOR, against the overwhelming opposition of the people, on Fletcher’s Resolution to combat free speech in San Diego County.” 

Somebody from the “Recall Nathan Fletcher” campaign did some “research” and discovered that the earliest date for a recall election for him would be roughly two months after his June 7, 2022 primary.

They may have also noticed Fletcher’s political party has a 125,000+ advantage in registered Democratic voters in District 4. Perhaps his 2 to 1 drubbing of Bonnie Dumanis in 2018 made them think twice. 

A recall petition (once certified) would require 40,000 signatures. It’s highly unlikely a volunteer effort will succeed in getting a special election scheduled in the 160 days allowed by law. Just ask the Recall Jen Campbell crew how hard that was.

Lawson-Remer’s Third District has a roughly 50,000 advantage in Democratic voter registration over Republicans, and she “only” won by 17%. Her term ends in 2025, so these political geniuses think they have a better chance of success.

National polling says Republicans are roughly six times more likely than Democrats to say they have no interest in being vaccinated. Which means any recall campaign --as has been true with the Recall Newsom effort--will be dependent on Republican voter enthusiasm. 

Recall elections stemming from coronavirus controversies are happening all over the country; 93 have been attempted nationally in 2021, according to Ballotpedia. More than half of those have already failed to trigger an election. School boards around the country in particular are also facing recalls based on rumors and misinformation about Critical Race Theory. You don't have to squint to see the overlap in people involved in both causes.

It’s one thing to have enthusiasm for your cause. It’s another to understand basic math.

Now let’s deal with the Free Speech issue. The Board of Supervisors resolution calls for seven steps in response to what they see as misinformation surrounding the pandemic as a public health crisis.

I suspect, based on the testimony before the Board of Supervisors, that the folks raising the free speech issue don’t agree with the basic premise. 

Some of them went so far as to infer they didn’t “believe” in COVID-19. That’s fine by me; I don’t believe in a lot of things. But when it comes to protecting the common good, I’m gonna want a high bar of proof. And these folks can’t even agree on what their evidence is.

https://twitter.com/TheActivatedPod/status/1432912873085276160?s=20

The bottom line of what the County resolution proposes to do is to mount a public relations/education campaign. Nobody’s being threatened with arrest. Nobody’s being threatened with having their right to assemble being sanctioned. Nobody’s going to have anything done by any agency of the government about their beliefs, whether they’re factual or not.

We DO have a public health problem. Over Memorial Day weekend total reported infections of COVID-19 averaged 25,000 a day nationally. Now it’s Labor Day weekend and we’re up to 160,000 a day. Most days more than 1500 people are dying. 

https://twitter.com/katalin_pota/status/1434248583793029130?s=20

The American Academy of Pediatrics says child cases of COVID-19 have increased exponentially, with over a five-fold increase the past month, rising from about 38,000 cases the week ending July 22nd to nearly 204,000 the past week. I’ll grant that most pediatric cases aren’t as serious as those affecting older adults with underlying health issues. 

But if it was my child that bit the dust, I wouldn’t care what somebody else believed. 

I honestly don’t think the county’s public relations program will persuade any of the people with their hackles up about free speech and Pfizer conspiracies. I’ve seen those “debates” (which consist of a firehose of misinformation followed by name calling and threats) and firmly believe if Jesus came down from the heavens, the deniers would call him a liar.

https://twitter.com/progressivepush/status/1433903056924643331?s=20

What will take the wind out of their sails will be repudiation of the empty threats commonly employed by denialists. Nobody needs to deny them their free speech. The world just needs to see how misguided they are.

The so-called movement to Recall Gov. Gavin Newsom needs to be soundly defeated. The bravado of those people who got their 15 minutes of fame on Stephen Colbert will run headlong into the reality that most people don’t think either Nathan Fletcher or Terra Lawson-Remer are doing a poor job. (Hot tip: They aren't. We're lucky to have them.)

There are, as I’ve pointed out in the past, larger concerns connected to the rabble rousing of people who don’t know and don’t care about the foundational documents of the US. 

It’s no coincidence that the Proud Boys (aka the Brown Shirts for our century) are showing up at anti-masker/vaxxer actions around the country.

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1433960282418827268?s=20

The folks at Left Coast Right Wing Watch did some amazing research on Let Them Breathe, a dark money funded group working in conjunction with ReOpen California Schools.

• In August 2021, the group organized or promoted at least 92 different school-mask protests at school board meetings in California, according to LCRW’s analysis of posts on its Instagram page. The protests spanned almost the entire state, ranging from Redding in the north to Coronado in the south, and east into Joshua Tree and the Central Valley. Each protest was promoted with the same flyer design, featuring an exuberant smiley face and the words LET THEM BREATHE UNMASK OUR KIDS.

• The individual protests have earned local media coverage many times, but reporters routinely fail to make the connection that the various school-board demonstrations are centrally coordinated by a single group. Even statewide papers like the LA Times have mostly missed the story, identifying the group’s participation in the anti-mask lawsuit but neglecting to note their role in the statewide protest campaign and referring to the group simply as “a San Diego-based parent group.” The San Diego Reader, an alt-weekly, nominated the group as a finalist for “Best Local Activist Group” in their 2021 Best Of poll.

• One San Diego news station, KUSI, has positioned itself as a champion of Let Them Breathe’s cause, featuring dozens of interviews with Let Them Breathe members who often spout anti-mask pseudoscience with no pushback from KUSI’s reporters. Typical KUSI stories on the group include “‘Let Them Breathe’ group says masking children does more harm than good” and “Let Them Breathe’s goal is to unmask our kids and recall our governor.” A search of KUSI’s website turns up more than 30 stories about Let Them Breathe in the past month, all of them positive. Fox News host Laura Ingraham, famous for parroting white-nationalist talking points and promoting neo-Nazis on national television, featured a friendly interview with McKeeman at the end of July.

Time Magazine’s expose on America’s Frontline Doctors, the group being used to supply speakers with white coats to vaxxer protests, shows it’s just another grifter/front group. Their message has changed as needed, from downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic to upselling hydroxychloroquine to anti-vaccine content to promoting Ivermectin, the anti-parasitic medicine mostly used for deworming livestock.

• The emergence of AFLD was a coordinated political effort months in the making. The group was the brainchild of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive network of conservative activists. During a May 11 call of CNP members that was leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group, members complained that Trump was being slammed for his handling of the pandemic, including failing to follow scientific guidelines. The group needed their own medical professionals to promote their message, they said, in the face of data showing two-thirds of Americans were wary of restarting the economy.

• “There is a coalition of doctors who are extremely pro-Trump, that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care,” Nancy Schulze, a Republican activist married to a former Pennsylvania congressman, said on the call. “And these doctors could be activated for this conversation now.”

• Eight days later, conservative groups publicized a letter signed by more than 500 doctors calling the lockdowns a “mass casualty event.” The lead signatory was Dr. Simone Gold, a licensed emergency-room physician and Stanford-educated lawyer who was working as a part-time, independent contractor in a hospital in Bakersfield, Calif. Ten weeks after the letter’s release, Gold was standing on the steps of the Supreme Court as the founder of AFLD as Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican, thanked the white-coated physicians for coming to “tell us the truth.” The event was hosted and funded by the Tea Party Patriots, a pro-Trump right-wing group.

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