Portside

Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America
Sasha Abramsky
Bold Type Books
ISBN-13: 9781645030430

WHEN I WAS growing up in a small California town over 200 miles north of any major metropolis, my friends and I often claimed we lived in the “real Northern California.” The implication was that our mountainous part of the state kept a rugged distance from the more cosmopolitan Bay Area to the south.

Over the years, this feeling has fueled a population that prides itself on self-sufficiency and living without government intervention, even spawning a secessionist movement to break from the rest of California and create the State of Jefferson. My home county of Siskiyou is also a magnet for cult-like religious movements and spiritual gatherings, inspired by the region’s beauty and the freedom to express oneself in the remote terrain. Yet both these groups can be particularly susceptible to snake oil salesmen and magical thinking, a dynamic that became abundantly clear during the first election of Donald J. Trump.

Far-right extremism, anti-vax campaigns, and secession efforts were once obscure movements, but Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic poured fuel over them and set them ablaze. In his new book Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America, journalist Sasha Abramsky documents the rise of extremism in communities such as Shasta County, near my hometown, and Clallam County in Washington State. “Loud and often ugly dramas have been playing out on local stages with increasing frequency in recent years,” he writes. “There is, in modern America, a soundtrack of extremism and often irrationalism, transforming even the most obscure corners of the body politic into potential battlegrounds.”

Abramsky starts the book with the COVID-19 pandemic and how public health officials struggled to implement public safety measures amid intense backlash, including death threats and intimidation tactics. In what follows, extremists take over county supervisor boards and city councils, and chaos ensues.

While the book covers the national forces impacting these rural communities, the most fascinating sections are the ones where Abramsky digs into the details of the local political battles raging in these areas. In Shasta County, right-wing groups organize a recall against three supervisors, one of whom is a solidly conservative ex–police chief yet still gets voted out of office for not fighting hard enough against COVID-19 restrictions. In Clallam County, an extremist who peddles QAnon conspiracy theories becomes the mayor of the small town of Sequim.

Much attention is paid to national politics, but we often don’t realize how much the political drama playing out on the national stage impacts small towns and communities across the United States. Yet it’s typically within these communities that movements take hold or gain traction. Abramsky makes it clear that when we ignore city councils and small-town elections, the consequences are grave. “All these conservative people snuck onto the [Sequim] city council when nobody opposed them,” says Ron Richards, a former Clallam County commissioner, “and then they appointed their friends to government. It resulted in the most right-wing people you could imagine running the city of Sequim.”

One of the most harrowing episodes in the book is when a journalist is attacked in Shasta County after she shows up to a public meeting with a recording device. She is quickly surrounded by dozens of hostile attendees and blocked from the exit. When she is finally allowed to leave, someone approaches her from behind and yanks a strap around her neck, violently pulling her as if she were being strangled. She suffers damage to her neck vertebrae and is so traumatized by the incident that she struggles to function for months. Despite filing a police report, her attackers face no consequences. Shasta County “was beset by increasingly acrimonious and often irrational and even violent turmoil,” writes Abramsky.

What’s interesting is that extremist, far-right candidates, once in power, seem far more interested in their social media followings than in the tedious day-to-day work of governing the communities that elected them. The locals notice. Sometimes before they can even finish a term, they’re recalled. It’s an encouraging end to the book.

We learn that persistent organizing, door knocking, and voter engagement in local elections is the only way to keep these candidates from power. And even then, it’s sometimes not enough, as was the case in Redding, California, where one far-right candidate prevailed by a mere 50 votes in a recall election. While the election was exceedingly close, it showed that not all communities succeed in rejecting these politicians.

According to Brandon Janisse, a moderate conservative who was elected as Sequim’s mayor in January 2024, middle-of-the-road candidates are successful when they “put ideology to one side and knuckle down to tackle the hard work of local government.” They must focus on “grassroots, baseline, everyday ‘what do our constituents need to live their fullest lives?’” It’s an astute lesson, and throughout the book, we hear from several rational voices on the right like Janisse’s. The balance of perspectives takes readers out of the liberal-versus-conservative trenches.

Chaos Comes Calling is a tightly written and well-reported account of the rise of extremism in small-town America. But more analysis of what this means for the United States’ future would have strengthened the book. How widespread is the retaliation against these types of candidates, and can recall efforts succeed in other parts of the country? After facing the challenge of actually governing, do far-right candidates tend to fizzle out or, as the recent election seems to suggest, will we be fighting these local government battles for years to come?

Regardless of national trends, Abramsky provides hope in these two distant West Coast communities. In rural Northern California communities like the one where I grew up, residents feel that little can be done about the slide to extremism. But Abramsky’s reporting shows that moderate, reasonable voters and candidates exist in even the most conservative regions. What it takes is hard work and dedication from local residents to keep these far-right forces at bay.

Extremist voices are certainly the loudest—and most intimidating—in the room. Chaos Comes Calling provides a road map to bring back reason and levelheadedness to our communities—and hopefully in time, our country as well.