“Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America”

“This is a story,” says Sacramento-based social-justice writer Sasha Abramsky, “about the forces tearing at America’s twenty-first-century fabric. It is about a country that, pushed to the emotional and political limits by Trump, by COVID, and by the endless misinformation and echo chambers of social media, has found itself on the edge of a precipice, with political violence normalized and with wild conspiracy theories too often framing public discussions.”

Abramsky, a correspondent for The Nation, wonders whether the “corrosive forces” of “the nativism and the xenophobia, the distrust of sexual and cultural and racial minorities” will “burn out in the face of growing public unease—and even repugnance—at all that is lost when extremists seize the helm.” 

He's convinced that “it is in local communities throughout America, in ordinary places such as Sequim, Washington, and Shasta County, California, that this challenge will be met….” Both areas are explored in depth in “Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America” ($30 in hardcover from Bold Type Books; also for Amazon Kindle).

He begins with the COVID crisis in Sequim (“pronounced ‘Squim’”) “a town of 8,000 residents on the Olympic Peninsula,” which becomes a center of anti-vax sentiment--to the consternation of public health officer Dr. Allison Berry, “scared of white supremacists and misogynists who want me dead.”

In Shasta County, “public health officer Karen Ramstrom, along with her supporters in county government, were facing a similar set of terrors.” The stresses of the pandemic, Abramsky notes, forced people to the extremes. If health officials erred in inconsistent masking mandates, some of those who were infuriated found a home in a Republican Party “larded with violent rhetoric.”

Some Shasta County supervisors also pushed back on California’s open-carry gun ban and its mandated machine vote counts. “By 2023,” Abramsky writes, “there was an omnipresent background hum of extremism and a growing presence both of disinformation and of paranoia in everyday life.” Yet by the end of 2023 Abramsky finds hopeful signs both in Sequim and Shasta County. 

It’s a complex and nuanced story, a plea for a measured response when “chaos comes calling.”