Mendocino County Today: Sunday 12/15/2024

Point Cabrillo | Highway Closures | Brief Calm | Winter Sunset | Great Saves | AV Events | Blue Victorian | Failed System | Pet Noel | Point Arena LLC | Headlands Carvings | Sculptor Kenyon | Mendo Alibi | Ed Notes | Grand Hotel | Yesterday's Catch | Exciting Enough | Newsom Watch | The Hit | Navy Wins | Shore Leave | Marco Radio | Face Cut | Tribal Statement | Rain Tumbles Down | Symbolic Capitalists | Raven | Debate Limits | Lead Stories | Gimme | Media Lunacy | Good Night

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HIGHWAY CLOSURES YESTERDAY (via Caltrans)

[6:10am Saturday] Route 128 is FULLY CLOSED from the Route 1 junction to just west of Navarro (PM 0-12) in Mendocino County due to flooding. There is no expected time of reopening at this time.

[9:31am Saturday] Route 175 is CLOSED at Hopland (PM 0-1) in Mendocino County due to flooding. There is no expected time to be reopened.

[5:10pm Saturday] Route 1 at the Garcia River is CLOSED north of Point Arena in Mendocino County. The photo was taken at 9 a.m. Saturday.

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RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Laytonville 1.50" - Covelo 1.39" - Hopland 1.21" - Boonville 1.12" - Yorkville 1.04" - Ukiah 0.81"

CONDITIONS WILL BRIEFLY calm and dry this morning before another weak system tonight bring slight to moderate rain and gusty south winds into Monday. Drier and calmer weather will then build through midweek. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another 1.12" brings our rainfall total for the month to 4.43". A nippy 38F under clear skies this Sunday morning on the coast. Clear skies today, showers Monday, then clear into Friday. Long range forecast has more rain to start Christmas week. Uhg...

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LOCAL CHILD RESCUED BY LEGGETT VALLEY FIREFIGHTER AFTER VEHICLE ENDS UP IN RATTLESNAKE CREEK

On Friday, December 13, the Humboldt Communications Center received multiple 9-1-1 calls reporting a crash involving two vehicles that had overturned into Rattlesnake Creek near Spy Rock Road on US Highway 101 during heavy rain just before 5pm yesterday evening.

Todd McKay, 47, of Garberville, was driving a Toyota 4-Runner northbound on the highway when his vehicle reportedly hydroplaned. The 4-Runner veered off the roadway, overturned, and slid into the southbound lane, colliding with a Toyota Rav 4 driven by Anthony Fair, 56, of Philo. Both vehicles careened down an embankment and into Rattlesnake Creek, landing upside down and nearly submerged as the creek level rose rapidly due to the storm.

According to Tamera McCanless, Lieutenant Commander with the California Highway Patrol Garberville Substation: “Good Samaritans Barrett Thomas and Abram Hill (an off-duty volunteer firefighter with Leggett Valley Fire and Rescue and Piercy Volunteer Fire Department) were driving separately through the area when they noticed vehicle debris in the roadway. Both pulled over and checked down the embankment.”

McCanless explained, “Thomas pulled Fair and his son to safety out of the creek and noticed McKay’s vehicle downstream. Hill jumped from the creek bank onto the upside-down vehicle just as two of McKay’s children emerged from the vehicle. Hill helped the children to the creek bank as McKay emerged from the vehicle with his 4-year-old child. Hill helped McKay and his child up to the side of US 101.”

She went on to say, “Hill recognized the 4-year-old was not breathing and did not have a pulse. Hill and Thomas began CPR. Not long after starting CPR, the 4-year-old’s pulse returned, and shortly after, the 4-year-old was breathing without assistance.”

Thanks to their efforts, the child’s pulse returned, and they soon began breathing unassisted. The 4-year-old was transported to Howard Memorial Hospital and later to UC Davis Medical Center, where they are expected to make a full recovery. All other occupants of the vehicles sustained only minor injuries.

The Garberville CHP Office expressed deep gratitude to Hill and Thomas for their quick, heroic actions that saved the child’s life.

Leggett and Piercy Firefighters: A Legacy of Heroism

Volunteer firefighters from the Leggett and Piercy Fire Departments have a long history of lifesaving efforts in Northern Mendocino County. They were instrumental in the 2019 search for the missing Carrico sisters and the 2020 rescue of a 3- year-old child who was found alive after five days following a suspicious crash.

Once again, these local volunteer firefighters have proven their commitment to training long hard hours results in saving lives, even in the most challenging circumstances.

To donate to Leggett Valley Fire Department, you can reach out via email at: leggettfire@gmail.com

(Redheaded Blackbelt/KymKemp.com)

To donate to Piercy Fire Department, please send a check to: 80401 CA-271, Piercy, CA.

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AV EVENTS TODAY

The Anderson Valley Museum Open for this event!
Sun 12 / 15 / 2024 at 1:00 PM
Where: The Anderson Valley Museum , 12340 Highway 128, Boonville , CA 95415
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4292)

Holiday Party Potluck! Note: starts at 4:30pm!
Sun 12 / 15 / 2024 at 4:30 PM
Where: Anderson Valley Senior Center , 14470 Highway 128, Boonville, CA 95415
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4302)

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READER ROBERT SOMERTON of Westport sent in some pics of what we call the Ricard Building of Westport. The building has been abandoned, crumbling and dilapidated for years and now it has “lost its facade,” says Mr. Somerton. “During the recent 7.0 earthquake, the ‘Blue Victorian’ as it’s known locally, came undone. An attempt was made to shore it up and stitch it back together, shortly after that.” (See the “before” pic.) But Friday night’s storm and wind undid those efforts, and the upper righthand corner has now collapsed on to Highway 1.” (See the “after” pic.) Mr. Somerton added that he doesn’t know who owns the property, but hopes that somebody in Official Mendo will finally take notice and demand that the owner at least demolish what’s left of the decrepit old building because it is now not only an eyesore, but a traffic hazard.

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ANDY CAFFREY

Just got back from the dentist. I need a root canal for that broken tooth, but the nearest place that takes Medi-Cal for root canals is in SAN JOSE! No one north of the Golden Gate Bridge! That's a 6-hour drive for me EACH WAY! Talk about a failed system! So much for our Democratic state legislators. Worthless!

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UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Noel is such a sweetheart! She enjoys going on walks, hanging out with people, and best of all, we think our lovely Noel is house-trained. Noel was very mellow in the Meet & Greet room, lounging about and saying woof/hello to staff and volunteers as they passed through.

This gorgeous girl will be someone’s best friend, and we’ve got our paws crossed that Santa will find Noel her forever home this holiday season.

Noel is a one year old Shepherd who weighs 48 pounds. To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.

Join us every first Saturday of the month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter. We're on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter/

For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

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SOMEONE IS BUYING UP A HISTORIC COASTAL CITY. IS IT THE NEXT CALIFORNIA FOREVER?

The quaint seaside city of Point Arena is being systemically gobbled up by a series of limited liability companies. Who or what is behind the purchases?

by Soleil Ho

For Olivia, the trouble with her former landlord started in 2020, when he cut down a plum tree in her rental home’s yard. She and her neighbors had spent the prior three years carefully pruning it, refocusing its energies on bearing fruit. And then, over the course of a day, it was gone.

When the landlord bought the cluster of small single-story homes that included Olivia’s building in the tiny Mendocino County coastal city of Point Arena in late 2019, the residents, mostly Mexican American families who had lived there for decades, grumbled but didn’t really push back against his tendency to start random construction projects on the property with no notice.

But the tree felt like a personal violation.

Point Arena is an intimate place — just 1.4 square miles if you don’t count the unincorporated part — where everyone knows each other. You can take in the entire main drag by standing at its crest on Highway 1. In the mornings, crab trappers and fishermen in search of lingcod and starry flounder launch boats and kayaks into the cove’s relatively calm waters; as the sun sets, nomadic groups and families living out of vans — on purpose, it seems — gather in drum circles on the beach.

Practicality, not charm, drew Olivia (whose last name we are withholding due to an unrelated matter in accordance with the Chronicle’s ethics policy) and her partner, both Bay Area natives, to Point Arena in 2016 after becoming disenchanted with life in New York City. They found work in nearby Gualala and Boonville and got a tip on the apartment from a family member. Yet they stayed for the same reasons a lot of people stay: the awe-inspiring waves that slap against the cove; the buildings from the late 1920s painted in striking reds, ocean blues and sandy taupes; and fiery sunsets that beckon onlookers to hold their breaths until darkness settles in.

Olivia grew to love the place so much that she ran for a four-year term on the City Council.

With a population of around 450, laid-back Point Arena, with its human-scale lifestyle and problems, had long appealed to wayward twentysomething transplants like Olivia. Many residents or their parents arrived in the early 1970s through Oz Farms, a nearby “ecotopian” commune that helped establish the area’s independent spirit.

Here, when something goes wrong, you talk it out. So that’s what Olivia did when she approached her landlord, a local motel owner and fellow transplant, about the tree.

It did not go well.

“This is not OK,” she recalled saying to him in the lobby of his motel. “You need to at least have conversations with the tenants and give us notice.”

He responded, she said, by ejecting her from the motel in a rage. Soon after, he increased her rent by 10%, the maximum allowed in California. The next year, even as the COVID outbreak and lockdowns threatened lives and livelihoods, he presented tenants with new leases and another 10% increase, while significantly changing the terms of their agreement. Olivia and her partner refused to sign.

On Dec. 3, 2020, the city announced on Facebook that she’d won her City Council seat. Five days later her landlord initiated eviction proceedings.

Olivia eventually beat her landlord in court after her lawyer cited the drastically different lease agreements and a lack of just cause.

It was a different story for her neighbors, working-class immigrants who largely didn’t speak English. This was when most tenants were unemployed due to the pandemic, and those who had jobs were essential workers. One by one, the building’s residents were forced out, with the landlord citing urgent renovation needs.

Olivia moved with her partner to a new apartment just outside of city limits. While they were lucky to find housing nearby, the location meant that she couldn’t be on the City Council anymore. In September 2021, she had no choice but to resign, relinquishing her seat to a former council member.

But she has continued to keep an eye on the dealings of her former landlord. She watched as he purchased another multi-unit residence in town and another commercial property. As she monitored the transactions, however, she discovered that her landlord wasn’t the only one interested in Point Arena. The seaside city she loved was being systemically gobbled up. By 2022, a series of limited liability companies had purchased at least a dozen properties in the city. And more businesses and residents were being displaced.

The speed and secrecy with which Point Arena was being snapped up sounded a lot like Solano County’s tech utopia project, California Forever, where billionaire investors anonymously bought up 50,000 acres of farmland intending to create a new city from the ground up — over local objections.

It seemed to Olivia that the displacement of her and her former neighbors could be part of a much larger and more labyrinthine picture.

Who was buying all these properties and for what purpose? And what would be left of Point Arena and its residents when they were through?

Though it has a smaller population than most internet forums, Point Arena is technically a city, having incorporated in 1908 to protect its liquor licenses if Mendocino prohibitionists forced the county government to go dry.

The city has gone through several dramatic booms and busts over the years. In the 1860s, it was a thriving port that shipped redwood lumber and agricultural products all along the West Coast before it was leveled in the 1906 earthquake. Residents rebuilt, but 20 years later, a fire engulfed downtown, forcing them to start over.

Another boom erupted in the 1960s with Northern California’s illicit cannabis industry, which earned Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties the nickname of America’s “Emerald Triangle.” Residents fondly remember the 1990s, when folks with literal stacks of cash freely spent it at Point Arena’s restaurants, festivals and shops.

But when California legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana in 2016, prices went into a freefall as smaller producers found themselves competing with corporate growers. As CalMatters’ Alexei Koseff found last year, “Cultivators who can barely make ends meet are laying off employees, slashing expenses or shutting down their farms. That means money isn’t flowing into local businesses … a sense of despair and heartbreak has taken hold in many communities.”

Juan Dominguez, a local advocate and member of the neighboring Pomo Community, told me, “Since legalization, things changed. That old weed money isn’t keeping things up anymore. … That economy is gone.”

Today, Point Arena scrapes by on tourism, with road trippers stopping to climb up the 154-year-old lighthouse, especially during whale watching season.

It isn’t enough.

“A city like Point Arena needs economic development,” City Manager Peggy Ducey, who started in 2024, told me. The goal should ultimately be to build the kind of sustainable tax base that would enable it to sail through booms and busts.

By all outward appearances, that isn’t happening. Each time I have driven up over the past year, the business district has grown emptier. Shuttered businesses line the main thoroughfare; Amber’s Diner, a burger spot, opened in July 2023 and closed after four months. The spaces that were once a marijuana dispensary and a general store are devoid of activity. In November, Center Street Market, a deli popular with local kids, announced it would close after its building was sold.

All of this is particularly confusing to residents because Point Arena isn’t suffering from disinvestment. Quite the opposite.

“The whole town’s being bought up and there’s no dialogue about it,” said a local business owner who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. The Chronicle is withholding the owner’s name in accordance with its anonymous sources policy. “A lot of us have no frigging clue what’s happening.”

So, with the help of Olivia and some other locals, I did some digging. It turned out that many of the recently closed businesses, including the salon, diner, dispensary and general store were not scooped up by an unaffiliated assortment of LLCs. Despite their confusing and opaque ownership structure, the properties all shared a common connection: Olivia’s former landlord, Jeff Hansen — who is no random investor, but a City Council member.

Hansen came to Point Arena in 2014 from Utah with his then-wife, Laura Cover, having fallen in love with the scenery, according to remarks he made at a Point Arena City Council meeting. They were looking for a project to work on together during their retirement, and as luck would have it, there was one at the entrance of town. At the time, the former Seashell Inn on Main Street was a blighted mess — “a flophouse,” according to the Ukiah Daily Journal. In late 2014, the couple purchased the property for about $1 million. In 2020, it finally opened, complete with solar panels, custom furnishings and beautiful floral accents.

The renovation earned Hansen a lot of goodwill in a city that was clearly in need of help. So, few in town blinked much when he began expanding his local portfolio.

Technically, the main LLC associated with Hansen’s real estate dealings, 610 Properties, has just a few holdings: One scan of recent assessor data shows that it owns three addresses in Point Arena. But that’s not the full story.

Just like the California Forever investors who quietly scooped up Solano County farmland over five years, Hansen is connected to a much wider network of LLCs. His name isn’t on some of their records, but follow recent transactions and, like a game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” familiar names keep popping up: his lawyer, Shirlene Bastar; a Utah estate attorney, Jay B. Bell; Brent Christiansen and Darla Newbold, two associates connected to a venture capital firm in Utah; and various Hansen family members.

I reached out to Bastar and Lauryn Hansen but received no response. The venture capital firm said it was not affiliated with Christiansen’s businesses, but then stopped responding after I asked about Newbold.

By design, it’s not easy to pinpoint who actually owns an LLC. The paperwork doesn’t require an owner to be identified — just “agents,” “managers” or “officers” who are usually lawyers specializing in corporate formation. Olivia’s eviction lawsuit, in which Hansen and his ex-wife were plaintiffs, describes Hansen as an “authorized agent” of 610 Properties LLC.

Public records show that 610 Properties owns three properties in Point Arena. Two other companies with Hansen listed as a manager, Wildflower Investment Properties LLC and Wildflower Investment Properties II LLC, own a multifamily residential building, a former Druids Hall, the former general store and a single-family home. Toussaint Properties LLC, of which Hansen is listed as a manager, owns the motel and a restaurant.

Meanwhile, Hansen’s daughter is the owner on record of a former dispensary, and the building that once housed a diner is the headquarters of another LLC connected to Hansen, H&C Partners. Point Arena Investors II LLC, owns one multifamily residential building in town and is the lender of record for the 2019 purchase of Olivia’s old building by Hansen’s LLC, 610 Properties.

In addition, former tenants of one residential property say that Hansen collected rent from them on behalf of their out-of-town landlord as a “master tenant,” exercising full on-boarding and eviction powers in that relationship.

Records show that in less than a decade, Hansen gained ownership, control or established an affiliation with around 20 properties in Point Arena. That would give him authority over more property in town than anyone besides the government, a land trust and a local timber company,

The opacity over who formally controls what isn’t just a curiosity. In 2022, Hansen was appointed to a vacant seat on the City Council. When he was confirmed on Dec. 13, 2022, his fellow council members and some community members specifically praised the motel and Hansen’s contributions to Point Arena’s overall beauty and economic growth.

But by then, some residents had become aware of and grown uneasy about Hansen’s land acquisitions.

At Hansen’s confirmation, local resident and landscaper Lani Bouwer spoke during public comment: “I have concerns about appointing Jeff because he owns half the town and it feels like a huge conflict of interest to me.”

Mayor Barbara Burkey assured worried residents that Hansen would recuse himself from votes that involved any of his properties.

That’s a difficult thing to enforce, however, without full transparency regarding what he owns and what he doesn’t.

During his confirmation, Hansen offered some assurances but few specifics on his plans for Point Arena’s transformation.

“I don’t know if I have a vision,” he said when someone asked him about his property acquisitions. He just wanted “to try to be a good neighbor.”

The first time Kyla Thompson dealt with Hansen was in May 2022, when the building that housed her 1-year-old salon and women’s apparel shop, the Bohemian Boutique, was sold to a new owner. Public records show that CD Partners CA LLC, a company registered to an accountant in Yorba Linda (Orange County), purchased the building and still owns it. While Hansen isn’t on any of the company’s public paperwork, Thompson cut her rent checks to him. She was midway through her two-year lease, which had an option to renew.

Hansen was respectful at first, she said, kind and friendly in her interactions with him. Thompson claimed that lasted until Hansen offered to cut her a deal on a more expensive retail space in exchange for a share of her profits. She declined and eventually closed the business in March 2023.

“All I wanted was to get out of the building and away from him at that point,” she said.

Recalling Hansen’s friendly demeanor, she remembers being startled when she found out who was going into her old space. According to a sign in the window, the new tenants are a “pop-up estate sale” with sporadic hours, owned by the family of one of Hansen’s associates.

Hansen did not respond when I asked him via email about his property acquisitions or plans for the city. He also failed to comment on any of the other sour relationships he’s made in town, of which there are several.

In 2023, Michael Schnekenburger, a local chef, made an abortive attempt to work with Hansen, who was the landlord and business partner of his restaurant, Amber’s Diner. It closed after four months. In a public Facebook post in February, Schnekenburger wrote, “We closed because of Jeff. Dictating hours, Forcing certain conditions on us, bad decisions, and business practices. That was the entire reason.”

Complicating matters, Schnekenburger and his girlfriend were also living in a rental that they said Hansen subleased to them as a master tenant. After their business collaboration ended, Schnekenburger said Hansen refused to accept rent payments on the home. Finally, Schnekenburger alleged, Hansen went to the chef’s other workplace, Greenwood Restaurant in Elk, to loudly announce to the busy dining room that he was being served an eviction notice.

Mark Tatum, who was working in the kitchen at Greenwood with Schnekenburger that day, said Hansen caused an uproar among the staff, who all were left thinking the same thing:

“The nerve that guy has to come here.”

What would New York City be without the noblesse oblige of the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, who built icons like Radio City Music Hall and dozens of libraries? What of San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House, a rifle company heiress’ mansion-turned-tourist attraction?

In the case of Point Arena, it’s not like anyone else is chomping at the bit to invest in the community — not at the scale that Hansen is, anyway.

“Point Arena was dead” even before the pandemic, longtime resident Jasmine Steckler told me.

Despite its struggles, there are still people who love this place and are trying to make it work.

Steckler said Hansen offered to buy her house back in 2019 when she was so desperate for work that she was commuting three hours each way to a spa in San Francisco. But she said no, and ended up getting a roommate to tough it out.

Plenty of others haven’t been so lucky.

When one person controls most of the town’s commercial properties — with many sitting vacant and notably not collecting sales taxes — it becomes that much more difficult for existing residents to secure a financial future for themselves and their city.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, city sales tax revenue dropped 37% in 2023 from the previous fiscal year, from $79,000 to $50,000. To keep the city solvent, in November, voters were forced to pass a sales tax increase, Measure X, projected to raise $85,000 annually. In its support statement, the City Council wrote: “Point Arena can barely afford to maintain basic services like local street repaving or pothole repair, trash and litter pick-up, park maintenance and pier operations.”

So, is there a vision behind the changes in Point Arena?

Hansen didn’t respond to my inquiries, and Point Arena locals say he generally refuses to answer their questions, too.

“Everyone’s kind of waiting to see what this rollout of Point Arena is supposed to look like,” said Steckler. “It’s a big crispy question mark.”

“I know that Jeff Hansen is a controversial figure,” said Ducey, the city manager. “But his purchasing of properties, there’s nothing the city can do about that. I’ve had some very frank conversations with Jeff, and we’re gonna continue to have those — but I cannot infringe on his legal rights.”

Fair enough. But what does it mean to be a “good neighbor,” as Hansen promised to Point Arena residents on the day of his City Hall confirmation? And how can residents hold him accountable to that promise if he doesn’t come clean about the extent of his dealings?

In the November election, Hansen retained his seat on the City Council after running unopposed for one of three open seats. He earned only 58 total votes, just half of what his two colleagues earned.

So far, he has still not been vocal or forthcoming about his outsized roles in Point Arena’s real estate, despite it being an oft-discussed issue in town.

In a city that has repeatedly rebuilt itself with a proud do-it-yourself spirit, being a good neighbor means something deeper than just waving when you see somebody. This is the kind of place where essential services, like the town recycling program, are run by dedicated volunteers. The ethos of working for the greater good has animated its citizens for more than a century.

You can’t stop someone from buying a town. But you at least deserve to know who’s doing the buying and why. Residents shouldn’t have to beg an influential property owner, especially one that is in a position of public authority, to be clear about how his actions will impact an entire city.

As Isabel Kuniholm, a local teacher, told me: “If you’re gonna buy up a town, then you should be actively supporting it. You can’t own a town and then not support it.”

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KELLY KRAICH

I began renting from Mr. Hansen back in July. Same story. Verbal attacks, threats, intimidation. Even told an employee that he was going to have “a couple of his guys” cause me some kind of physical harm. Thank you, Olivia and the San Francisco Chronicle for bringing this to the public's attention.

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MORMONS IN POINT ARENA

Debra Keipp and I weren't wrong about the Mormons buying up Point Arena! The only thing Soleil Ho did not put in the Chronicle article is that the people doing the buying up are Mormons. I know you have written about this in past editions of of the AVA on-line. The documents, I was collecting date back to 2019. It's about time that a larger audience took notice.

— Deb Silva

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KELLEY HOUSE HISTORY MYSTERY!

Does anyone know the history of these carvings on the Mendocino Headlands? The Kelley House would love to document them. Any clues to when they were carved or by whom would be much appreciated. (Photographer: Robert Dominy)

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RABBANI KENYON'S LANDMARK ART

by Bruce Anderson

In December of 2008 the late Johnny Winter, famous blues musician, appeared in Navarro to perform at the Navarro Store. That appearance was improbable bordering on the impossible. A man who played to thousands was in Navarro playing to one thousand? But there he was, the man himself, belting out Highway 61 under the redwoods at the Navarro Store, the unlikely made real by Dave Evans, local merchant and music impresario.

Just before Winter's appearance and, in its way, even more startling in its pure improbability, a larger-than-life wood sculpture of the rockabilly blues star, a sculpture so eerily resembling Winter it's as if the guitar man had somehow become a giant wood sprite, also appeared at the gate to the Navarro Store's neat little amphitheater.

Winter, when he saw it, was moved to tears.

When most of us see the Winter sculpture we marvel at the skill of the artist, Rabbani Kenyon, and come away reminded of equivalently striking sculptures of Kenyon's that we've seen at other Mendocino County venues, specifically at Noyo Harbor and, now, Elk. We've seen the meticulous wood reproductions of salmon and mountain lions when Kenyon worked at Noyo, and now we see his work at the Artist's Collective in Elk right beside Highway One.

Rabbani Kenyon's work has put more than a few crinks in the necks of passing motorists who strain to see it as they pass by, many of them returning for closer looks. His art is big and startling. At Noyo, where Kenyon began work on large pieces, he says he “carved just about anything — wildlife, sea captains, Johnny Appleseeds. At first I wasn't used to working in public so I kind of hid in the back of the place at Noyo. But then after about five years, I got used to people stopping by, and now I barely notice.”

The first bigger-than-life rock and roll pieces Kenyon did were of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Jerry Garcia. The origins of the Winter piece, Kenyon recalls, was a PBS documentary where Winter belted out his inimitable version of Highway 61. “Then, when I heard Winter was going to play at Navarro, I got in touch with Dave and…..”

And Dave and the Navarro Store have a memorable piece of art right out front, a work of art that will last a long, long time, a landmark.

Rabbani Kenyon's artistic pedigree is unusual for a graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts with a master's degree in painting with a minor in lithography. Kenyon, whose first name he adopted from Sufi friends, translates from the Arabic as “light of the heart,” worked at the Branscomb mill for the Harwoods, then pulled green chain at the G-P mill in Fort Bragg. His art now supports him and Mrs. Kenyon, and includes paintings as striking in their way as his sculptures. Kenyon describes his paintings as “more personal, dreamscapes” than the precise wood sculptures he's famous for.

Born in New Hampshire, raised in Southern California in 1948, Kenyon, now 74, arrived in Branscomb in the early 1970s, relocated to Fort Bragg in 1976, and now lives in Albion from where he commutes to the Artist's Collective in Elk where, among other of his stunning pieces, he has on display two spectacular hand-carved chairs.

“Recessions,” Kenyon says, “always have a negative effect on art sales, but for the more personal art there's less negative effect because people are taken by it and they buy it. They'll drive past, turn around and come back because they have to have it.”

The artist is almost reverential when he speaks of what he calls the “Albion-Elk-Navarro triangle,” the captivating natural aesthetic of redwoods and sea that has captured so many of us. He looks forward to doing more art at the Navarro point of the triangle, the tiny settlement already renowned for Dave Evans presence and becoming almost as well known for its arresting sculptures.

”We've already have Skip Bloyd working here,” Kenyon says enthusiastically, and it's a perfect spot for outdoor art.”

(Rabbani Kenyon's work can be seen on-line at redwoodsculptures.com)

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A READER WRITES: Just wanted to give a quick shout out to our friend Luigi who on December 4th around 6 AM helped us load our trailer and drive with us to play a secret set all the way to Point Arena, which is about 2800 miles from Manhattan and after staying at the show with us all night he bought merch from every band except for the hoodies and when we asked he just replied “2 things I hate most in this world are hoodies and 3D printed 9mm.” Thank you Luigi the world needs more people like you!

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ED NOTES

HILARIOUS HITS on San Francisco just keep on coming from Fox News. “Nowhere is the radical left more on display than in the city of San Francisco,” one of their commenters declared — I don't watch Fox often enough to learn their names — as he described the greatest city in the world as teeming with “undesirables” and “your 60s hippie retreads,” the latter perhaps a reference to the Mendocino County Superior Court.

IN REALITY, San Francisco in no way resembles a town governed or created by “the radical left,” whatever that much abused tag might mean to the millions of Fox's Orange cultists.

A RADICAL LEFTIST is simply a person not sold on capitalism as the basis for social-economic organization. Which happens to be millions of contemporary Americans who never heard of the “radical left.” The people Fox describes as radical leftists — mainstream Democrats — are not hostile to capitalism. They think the beast can be reformed. San Francisco's management is kinda liberal on its best days but is mostly, like all city governments these days, simply overwhelmed.

AS FOR “UNDESIRABLES,” I remember a nonplussed City police chief exclaiming, “Hell, we can't just go around arresting people because they're undesirable!” Correct chief, besides which one person's undesirable is another person's president. And double besides, undesirables seem evenly distributed throughout our population, many of them celebrated, even elected to office. Political San Francisco is really a very tame place. Its so-called progressives are conservative Democrat liberals, not radicals, certainly not leftists.

MILE AFTER MILE of San Francisco is as sedate as Boonville on a rainy week night. There is, of course, a small army of drunks, dope heads, bums, and unconfined lunatics roaming the downtown, which is also where the hotels are located, so it's no surprise that many visitors come away shocked at the apparent “anarchy” outside their hotel lobbies. You could call it “local color” if it wasn't so large and prevalent. But beyond the city center? Boonville.

THE MANY OUTPATIENTS loose in America are more the result of the exemption of the owning classes from paying their fair share of the social load — no affordable housing, no state hospital system, not enough rehab programs, and so on, while the capitalist countries of Europe, Canada and much of Asia assume a basic network of social guarantees as basic to any civilized social order, a fact the Fox network and the semi-liberal mainstream media seldom mention. (“Progressive” San Francisco's idea of cutting edge politics is gay marriage and legalized prostitution.)

OF COURSE the tough talkers of the Trumpian right push political agendas much crazier than anything the “radical left” might come up with, and never mention that San Francisco remains the number one tourist destination for the whole wide world, which kinda of begs the question, doesn't it? If Frisco is so nuts and dangerous why does everyone want to visit?

A NEW LOW was recently achieved by NPR's consistently nauseating minutes given over to listener comment, the infuriating uplift essays inflicted on listeners too slow to hit the off button. Usually we hear a couple of minutes of very, very Nice People telling us how swell they are. But the other day, just as I reached for the off button when I heard the segment announced, my extended hand froze in mid-air as, so help me, a six-year-old boy recited his alleged beliefs, beliefs that included saving more trees, respect for parents, and thirty or so more saccharine sentiments straight out of the Leo Buscaglia-John Bradshaw-Music By Yanni playbook. It was clearly a fraud and probably child abuse. Six-year-olds don't have anything resembling belief systems. The kid's demented parents, and NPR's equivalently demented producers, obviously put him up to it. The poor little dupe had been dragged from his sandbox and compelled to recite this revolting litany of feeble-minded platitudes because his parents wanted a bigger audience for their faux prodigy than they could find at the neighborhood playground. I'd call CPS but I don't know where the kid lives. Yanni, incidentally, was arrested for domestic abuse in 2006. Anybody surprised?

A LETTER writer opined that so and so shouldn't be a department head because she doesn't have a college degree. Except for math, the sciences, engineering and other specialties, anyone who can drag himself to classes can get a college degree in the liberal arts. All you have to do is show up. I happen to know that because I got one myself simply by showing up. I wouldn't have gone to college at all if I hadn't been a mediocre athlete good enough to more or less hold my own at the college level, which got me big breaks on fees, a meal ticket, a job I didn't necessarily have to show up for. Take away the wonderful world of sports and I either would have stayed in the Marines or hooked up with the Longshoremen’s Union, the dream job of my youth because I liked the waterfront aesthetic.

I DIDN'T LEARN anything in college that I couldn't have discovered at the library, did discover in the library. If I hadn't taken the path less traveled, hadn't fallen in with beatniks and bolsheviks at an impressionable age, and with my BA diploma in whatever the hell it's in — Long Novels, I think — I might have become Paul Tichinin, Superintendent of Mendocino Schools! $140,000 a year plus perks for doing absolutely nothing! Instead, I stumbled on into the newspaper business at $10,000 a year and an occasional free drink at the old Boonville Lodge.

OF COURSE it’s the liberal arts people, people like me, and the liberal arts grads called lawyers, who run most public bureaucracies, hence the social-political dysfunction from sea-to-shining sea. The people who really know how to run big organizations run private ones, so we get people who can’t do anything except correctly pronounce “paradigm” overseeing 1,200 Mendo workers and a $300 million budget!

SAD SIGHT on Highway 128 last week. A bearded crazy man, probably at the end of prolonged crank run, maybe 30, wrapped in an overcoat, trailing a blanket, resembling Rasputin, talking to himself, walking rapidly towards Boonville from the area of the gravel pits south of town. He'd walk into the middle of the road, back to margins at the sound of approaching traffic. The County Jail is full of these guys, and if it weren't for the Sheriff's Department most of them would be dead.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY wasn't woke. This passage from ‘The Sun Also Rises’ certainly would have been edited out if Hemingway was writing today: “Two taxis were coming down the steep street. They both stopped in front of the Bal. A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking… I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure…”

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GRAND HOTEL, FORT BRAGG (Ron Parker, Mendocino Way Back When)

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, December 14, 2024

JOSE ANICETO-GONZALEZ, 27, Eureka/Laytonville. DUI, controlled substance.

JESUS DELGADO JR., 29, Fort Bragg. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

KENNEITH DEWITT JR., 43, Ukiah. Parole violation.

SEAN FLINTON, 44, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation violation. (Frequent flyer.)

FENANDO HEREDIA-CASTRO, 42, Ukiah. Shoplifting, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

JORGE MARTINEZ, 29, Ukiah. Vehicle tampering, disorderly conduct-loitering, county parole violation.

ANAMARIA MEIJA, 51, Ukiah. Harboring wanted felon, false information to law enforcement, failure to obey lawful order.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ, 35, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.

ITURI SHIVALILA, 48, Willits. Ammo possession by prohibited person, offenses while on bail, probation revocation.

ARSENIO SINGLETON, 37, Alameda/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

CHRISTOPHER SKAGGS, 42, Ukiah. Controlled substance, registration tampering, ammo possession by prohibited person, false personation of another, offenses while on bail, county parole violation.

DOUGLAS WHIPPLE III, 38, Ukiah. Parole violation, resisting.

MICHAEL WILLSON, 61, Hopland. Battery, vandalism.

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WHAT'S THE MOST BADASS THING A CELEBRITY HAS EVER SAID?

There was once a director by the name of Michael Curtiz who had a reputation for great cruelty. He was cruel to his assistants, his actors, to animals… during the making of The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1936 alone, Curtiz killed dozens of horses through tripwires, all in the name of realism…

There was one particular actor who hated Curtiz more than any other… Errol Flynn. Because Flynn absolutely loved horses, and had a reputation for being considerate to his stuntmen. During the shooting of one swashbuckling film, Curtiz had the actors fencing with Flynn remove the protective covers from the tips of their swords, so they would actually jab the actor — this would make the action scenes “more exciting”…

Errol Flynn had enough — he climbed into the director’s rented villa, dragged him out of his bedroom and dangled him over the balcony by his neck. Flynn then asked the director: “Is this exciting enough for you?”

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NEWSOM’S CAMPAIGN BEGINS

Editor:

These are the types of shenanigans our state government pulls that drive voters crazy:

The California Air Resources Board drafted a policy to modify the state’s low-carbon emissions standards. This policy would have the effect of raising gasoline prices another 50 to 75 cents per gallon. Realizing how unpopular such a move would be, Gov. Gavin Newsom withheld the publishing of the policy until three days after the November election. The tactic seems to be to raise the price of gasoline to compel more people to buy electric vehicles. This despite the fact that EV manufacturers are pulling back from the market with high losses on every vehicle and dealer lots full of unsold cars.

Newsom is also touting a $25 million bill to “Trump-proof” California, in expectation that the California attorney general will have to file numerous lawsuits to prevent Donald Trump from destroying the nirvana we currently live in. Don’t be fooled — this is the start of Newsom’s 2028 presidential race. In this case, though, rather than being funded by Democrat donors, it is being paid for by us, the taxpayers.

Joe Gaffney

Rohnert Park

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CHUCK BEDNARIK & FRANK GIFFORD

“The Hit” is one of the most iconic plays in NFL history.

On November 20, 1960, in a game between the Eagles and New York Giants at the original Yankee Stadium, Bednarik knocked Giants running back Frank Gifford out of football for over 18 months in one of the most famed tackles in NFL history, often referred to simply as The Hit. Bednarik's clothesline tackle of Gifford dropped Gifford immediately to the ground, and Gifford immediately went unconscious. Gifford was transported from the field on a stretcher and then to a local hospital, where he was diagnosed with a deep concussion.

Bednarik was criticized after the game by Giants players and fans for apparently celebrating Gifford's injury. A Sports Illustrated photo of Bednarik standing over an unconscious Gifford became iconic, showing Bednarik in mid-celebration, right above Gifford as he lay unconscious on the field. Bednarik defended himself by saying that he was celebrating the fumble caused by the hit, which the Eagles recovered, clinching the victory for the Eagles, sending the team to 1960 NFL Championship Game. Years later, Gifford called the hit "a clean shot," and said, "Chuck hit me exactly the way I would have hit him." Gifford said, "I didn't bear him any resentment and never have….” The play has been called "one of the most iconic plays in NFL history.

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BRUCE MCEWEN:

Army v. Navy — As a Marine veteran I tend to favor Navy and my older brother was a machinist’s mate on the USS Prairie during the Tonkin Gulf Incident, so I cheer for Annapolis! And yet my father was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, a tank commander with the 111th Division “Lightningbolts” in Patton's Third Army. And too my other brother served in the field artillery out of Ft. Sill and was deployed to Germany every winter for war drill against the Ruskis back during the Cold War. Then you could add in and weigh out all my sundry uncle’s aunts cousins and friends who served one or the other but still it’s hard to tell who to cheer for but rest assured there will be fewer penalties called than in other games. Discipline.

Army seemed to be playing a boots on the ground game whereas Navy used their air superiority and sent that slippery old seal of a quarterback rushing in through the tanks and artillery barrage to win the day! Anchors away!

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PAUL CADMUS (American, 1904-1999)

“Shore Leave” by Paul Cadmus is a vibrant painting depicting sailors enjoying themselves in a city park. The scene is full of life, with sailors interacting playfully and flirtatiously with women. On the right, a sailor embraces a woman in a red dress, while a woman in a blue dress playfully places a sailor’s hat on her head. The atmosphere is dynamic and chaotic, capturing the excitement and freedom of shore leave.

In “Shore Leave,” the background includes various interactions, with one figure engaging a sailor in conversation. Paul Cadmus was known for subtly incorporating diverse representations of identity and relationships in his work, reflecting the social dynamics of his time.

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MEMO OF THE AIR: Built for comfort.

Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2024-12-13) almost-8-hour Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first three hours of the show, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0622

Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement or whatever. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Vivaldi. The Goede Hoop Marimba Band. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-Pn4usTSi8

Skate-dancing on perfect natural ice. https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/12/12/elladj-balde/

Rerun: Table For Few. https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2024/12/dinner-for-few.html

And puzzles for the crow. https://laughingsquid.com/crow-puzzle-maze/

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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DELTA TRIBAL ENVIRONMENTAL COALITION ISSUES PRE-HEARING CONFERENCE STATEMENT FOR DELTA TUNNEL PROJECT

by Dan Bacher

Stockton, Calif. — On February 18, 2025 the State Water Resources Control Board will be holding a public hearing to determine action on the Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) petitions to change water rights permits related to the Delta Conveyance Project, AKA Delta Tunnel.

According to the Delta Tribal Environmental Coalition (DTEC), “There are significant procedural and legal concerns regarding DWR’s petitions to change water rights. This includes the fact that DWR’s permits expired over 15 years ago and the Board should not proceed without resolving these expired permits or confirming that these rights even exist.”

“In addition, there is a clear lack of due process and a number of significant uncertainties that further warrants a pause in these proceedings, including a completed Bay-Delta Plan,” the DTEC stated.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/12/2291621/-Delta-Tribal-Environmental-Coalition-Issues-Pre-Hearing-Conf-Statement-for-Delta-Tunnel-Project

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WHEN THE RAIN TUMBLES DOWN IN JULY

Let me wander north to the homestead
Way out further on there to roam,
By a gully in flood, let me linger
When the summery sunshine has flown.

Where the logs tangle up on the creek beds
And clouds fill the old northern sky
And the cattle move back from the lowlands.
When the rain tumbles down in July.

The settlers with sad hearts are watching
The rise of the stream from the dawn,
Their best crops are always in flood reach
If it rises much more they'll be gone.

The cattle string out along the fences,
The wind from the south races by,
And the limbs from the old gums have fallen,
When the rain tumbles down in July.

The sleeping gums on the hillside
Awaken to herds strayin' by,
Here on the flats where the fences have vanished,
As the storm clouds gather on high.

The wheels of the wagons stop turning,
The stock horse is turned out to stray,
The old station dogs are a-dozin'
On the husks in the barn through the day.

The drover draws rein by the river
And it's years since he's seen it so high,
Yes, and that's just a story of homeward,
When the rain tumbles down in July.

— Slim Dusty (1945)

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FINE WOKE CANNIBALS

"We Have Never Been Woke" by Musa al-Gharbi may be academia's first serious effort at self-analysis, and its surprising, enraging diagnosis rings all too true.

by Matt Taibbi

If a book gets you thinking about tri-state killing sprees by the middle pages, it’s probably worth reading. Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke achieves the feat in the introduction, when the author unveils a character called a symbolic capitalist. I’d have gone with a term needing no explanation, like “laptop-class douchebag,” but al-Gharbi works in academia, so:

Symbolic capitalists are professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services)… People who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media, law, consulting, administration, and public policy… If you’re reading this book, there’s a strong chance you’re a symbolic capitalist. I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.

Musa al-Gharbi grew up in a “smallish southern Arizona military town,” is black, and before embarking on a PhD program at Columbia supported a family of four “selling shoes at Dillard’s.” Apart from those details, and a few suspiciously merciless descriptions, you’d never think the book was written by an outsider. With its Ivy-credentialed author and Princeton imprint, We Have Never Been Woke is academia’s first real attempt to self-diagnose its recent bout with madness. Its many surprises helped reframe my understanding of the last decade-plus of American history, when I wasted huge amounts of time puzzling, puzzling, puzzling.

I understood why some Democrats considered Bernie Sanders a nuisance needing squashing, but smearing him as a racist misogynist Putin acolyte meant losing many of his voters, in election years no less. What possible end could that serve? Why during the “summer of Floyd” were there so few concrete structural demands on police procedure, but so many purges of alleged racists? Why did a historically speech-protecting party suddenly endorse huge digital censorship programs, even after they became political liabilities?

Why cancel Barbara Ehrenreich, for God’s sake?

These turn out to be the wrong questions. Republicans often made a similar mistake in thinking woke intellectuals were extreme ideologues driven by hatred for the ordinary, family-oriented conservative. In fact few “symbolic capitalists” know any conservatives, and the only thing most know about conservatives is they can be utterly denounced with zero social cost. As for ideology, unless “believing everything all my friends think” counts, “symbolic capitalists” really don’t have one.

Hence the title of We Have Never Been Woke, which shows that a generation of McCarthyist lunacies was neither a neo-Marxist movement, nor an anti-populist partisan gambit, but a vulgar scrum for resources disguised as political struggle, conducted wholly within the top of the wealth distribution. Rural conservatives, independents, and institutions like schools and the press were collateral damage to history’s dumbest upper-class food fight. And I was complicit! This book forced me to realize that through one of the biggest errors of my career, I helped launch the woke Hindenburg…

https://www.racket.news/p/fine-woke-cannibals

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THE SMART WAY to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

— Noam Chomsky

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LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

How Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues.

Civilian Life Returns to a Town in Northern Syria

Israel Strikes Military Sites in Syria, Monitor Says

Automakers Thrived in the Pandemic. Many Are Now Struggling.

ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump

Devin Nunes, Pugnacious Trump Loyalist, to Lead Espionage Advisory Board

Trump Names Richard Grenell for ‘Special Missions’ Role

An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones

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TAIBBI & KIRN

Walter Kirn: And let’s just say, Matt, that a president who has vowed to disclose the story of past plots and who’s going to be president in a month needs, in some way, maybe just by God or karma to be countered in advance. And rather than the plots he’s going to expose and has already found having to do with the Kennedy assassination and all these others, we’re going to get one that’s more gripping, a bigger deal. We’re going to be absorbed in something that will make those disclosures look dull and trivial by comparison.

And you know what we’re also going to do? When RFK comes in, the real healthcare reformer, we actually have a guy who the pharma industry, the food additive industry, and the healthcare industry as it conventionally understood fears like no other person in American history. And the conversation he wants to have about healthcare, and he wants to have about drugs, and he wants to have about pharma, is all going to be shouldered aside by the conversation they want to have, which is evil insurers aren’t paying people enough.

And guess what? The other thing that they are about to change perhaps, is pharma’s ability to advertise on all these media. In other words, they’re going to be implicated, MSNBC, CNN, and so on, because those are their major advertisers now. And those are the people who may have influenced their COVID coverage in ways that are about to be exposed because the other things set to be exposed is COVID, another healthcare issue.

But the Mangione murder, the surgical Robin Hood killing by the attractive young man that shows vigilantism can sometimes work is going to claim all the freaking space from all these other healthcare issues that you knew were coming, they knew were coming, and which are much less flattering to the powers that be. And that’s me closing my case.

Matt Taibbi: All right. All right. Fair enough. We can come back to that. Just to wrap up, to finish with a flourish in terms of the media lunacy on this, it’s actually one segment that I think we should split it into two parts. This is Joy Reid on MSNBC about this, and this is one of the most amazing segments I’ve seen, and she’s capable of some amazing ones, but this is incredible.

Joy Reed: Today, the 26-year-old suspect in the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO was back in a Pennsylvania courtroom for an extradition hearing to determine when he’ll be brought back to New York to face charges including secondary murder. The case has brought out a clear division in the reaction among those on the right. You see, when popular conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro and anti-woman zealot Matt Walsh tried to attack evil liberals for celebrating the murder of a CEO, they were met with backlash from some of their own supporters who defended the violence. Because the truth is, those on the right don’t necessarily abhor violence if it’s against someone they don’t like Black Lives Matter activists or pro-Palestinian protesters, undocumented immigrants or the homeless. That’s why they get behind people like Kyle Rittenhouse who shot and killed two BLM protesters or George Zimmerman who shot and killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin and turn them into cause celebs. Just look at how, in nearly the same breath, Fox’s Laura Ingraham speaks about the 26-year-old United Healthcare suspect and Daniel Penny, who was just acquitted yesterday in the subway chokehold death of 30-year-old homeless man, Jordan Neely.

Matt Taibbi: All right. So before she moves on, there’s a couple of things there. We can take it down for now. Equating this with Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny and not … I mean the George Zimmerman case, I think some of these cases are different than others, but in each of them there was a self-defense element at least. And to not bring that up in the comparison, just sort of lumping them all together as violence is, I mean, that’s just extraordinary. And then the additional little flourish of saying that Rittenhouse shot two BLM protesters, not so subtly implying that they were Black when they weren’t, but this whole idea that, okay, well, vigilantism is something that’s been embraced by conservative America. Why not this?

Walter Kirn: Well, when we do it better and we do it more surgically and we do it with a more attractive assassin, how can they complain?

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: They started it. We’re just improving on it. We’re just doing it at an Ivy League level, what they do at a vocational school level,

Matt Taibbi: Right? Right. I mean, is that not an amazing segment by Joey Reed who, again, who’s done some crazy stuff, but this idea that, okay, well, our version of violence is somehow the same as Kyle Rittenhouse. I just …

Walter Kirn: Well, so, okay. I want to apologize to our audience for a second. Walter the Buddhist, and I am partly, realizes that his ego has gotten involved with his hypothesis about this crime, and I’m pushing it and I’m interrupting, and I’m being insistent, and I’m going to move back on it because I’m going to let everybody discover it for themselves. With this Joy Reed thing we’ve moved into, really, what you were describing earlier, true opportunism. Now, if the other things were set up directly, this is just a tribute to their ability to bend everything. Know what I mean?

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Walter Kirn: It’s a way to remind you of the right wing crimes that we never want you to forget that we call right wing crimes. What does freaking Kyle Rittenhouse have to do with any of this? Nothing.

Matt Taibbi: Well, no. I mean, they’re saying it does have something to do with it because look, the Kyle Rittenhouse story, Kyle Rittenhouse, the reason that story resonated is because there was a real controversy there. You weren’t really sure. Did he go out? Was he guilty? And it took some resolution and took some education, and then there was an element of the press mis covering it, which made it a cause celeb on the right, where there were just assumptions that this was a right wing hate crime when it really wasn’t that. And when the guy finally gave an interview, he turned out to be something completely different than what he had been presented as. But he was a celebrity, I think in large part as a reaction to the explosion of coverage about the BLM protests that people felt a certain way about. And here comes somebody who gets swept up in it, and he’s not exactly a guilty victim or a guilty player.

Walter Kirn: You know what the real subtext of this comparison is?

Matt Taibbi: What?

Walter Kirn: Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty.

Matt Taibbi: Well, that’s the, okay, well, there’s that too. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: What do Penny and Rittenhouse have in common? Not guilty. And they’re doing a very sophisticated thing here. When we get the secondary characters and we find out the depth of his back pain and how screwed up the medical system made him, and how that mental and emotional pain was aggravated by the insurance industry, it will be practically a self-defense defense in his trial. They attacked him first. They hurt him first. They screwed him up for life. He fought back to defend himself before they could do more damage, not just to him, but to the crowd that he was protecting, like Penny was protecting. The reason that they’re building this set of comparisons is because they are already talking to the jury and they know it.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And they’re already pre-bunking some of the problems with his story. For instance, one of the things that’s going to make him potentially unsympathetic to people is that he’s rich. And so the second part of this interview addresses that, and this is almost, I think, more remarkable in the first part in how it goes into the issue and expands upon this idea of the injustice that was being fought against

Speaker 2: Bagged people, which I was sent in the commercial break earlier. Crazy. He’s cute. And people celebrating this. This is a sickness. Honestly, it’s so disappointing. But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Gentlemen, thank you so much. And up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny. A lot of people think he’s a hero, and tonight he’s not guilty. My take next.

Matt Taibbi: So they’re laughing about that. Then they’re going to analyze.

Joy Reed: University and host of the podcast A Word with Jason, Johnson.

Matt Taibbi: Here’s Jason Johnson.

Jason Johnson: Witnessed a murder of irony.

Joy Reed: Yes.

Jason Johnson: That was a murder right there. Irony is officially dead under any and all circumstances. We should not be surprised in this country that just re-elected Donald Trump.

Joy Reed: I mean, the reality is, if you go back to the Trayvon Martin case, even before that. You can go back to the justification for lynching among conservatives, whether the conservatives wearing the D uniform or the R uniform. Conservatism itself has justified violence. January 6th, burning down Tulsa and Wilmington overthrowing the government there. If it’s violence for the purposes they want, they’re cool with it.

Jason Johnson: If the victim is somebody that I don’t like, or the victim is someone who they feel deserves it, then a lot of times people are willing to justify violence. It’s an unfortunate thing. It’s a very American thing. I mean, we worship vigilante violence. We worship action heroes. We worship Charles Bronson and all these people who take it into their own hands.

Joy Reed: Al Capone.

Jason Johnson: Al Capone. Criminals and everything else like that. I think the sad part about this, frankly, is that I am not going to pretend that in a country that’s been started and operated off of violence, that violence doesn’t sometimes solve things.

Matt Taibbi: Here we go.

Jason Johnson: But the man who was killed is a cog in a machine. It’s not going to change anything about how healthcare operates in this country at all.

Joy Reed: No.

Jason Johnson: And so you have killed a man, harmed his family, and the machine’s going to keep going. And so it didn’t really accomplish anything.

Joy Reed: And the thing that’s so kind of wild about, it’s this Luigi Mangione, he’s sort of now everywhere. There’s people celebrating him all along saying, “Don’t catch him,” all that sort of thing. He did have his arraignment today and he stood up and yelled something about, “It’s unfair, it’s not right,” yada, yada, yada. He was walking, there he goes, walking in today, he yelled something about … There he goes. He’s turning himself into sort of a folk hero and leaning into that. He’s probably richer than the guy that he killed.

Matt Taibbi: There we go.

Joy Reed: His family, he has generational wealth.

Jason Johnson: Yes.

Joy Reed: So he probably was wealthier than the CEO that he killed.

Jason Johnson: Yes, yes. This is Lex Luthor killing a Stormtrooper, right?

Joy Reed: Correct.

Jason Johnson: And here’s the thing. The humanity of this is that no matter how much money you have, you can still be taken advantage of by our unfair healthcare system.

Matt Taibbi: All right. Okay.

Walter Kirn: Wow. I, dude, this goes in the devil’s journalism, the fake debate where you want one side to win. You want one point to come out. So you stage a straw man debate in which the first person in a very weak way makes the argument against the case that you want to win. And then the other person comes in and says, “Yeah, but no matter how much money you have, you can still be a victim in this country.” Ding, let’s just put that up now on the list of agreed points, New York Times covered that indisputable folk hero. That’s now a bullet point. But what about him being rich? How can he be a folk hero if he’s really rich?

Matt Taibbi: Because anybody can be a victim.

Walter Kirn: Because anybody can be a victim. Indisputable folk hero. Anybody can be a victim. Vigilantism, is it right?

Matt Taibbi: Even generational wealth is no longer the end all crime of …

Walter Kirn: Right. So there they have just solved the real quandary of the progressive movement in America right now, which is that it represents really rich people, but they can still be… Taylor Lorenz also comes from a really wealthy family, by the way. They can still be victims of this horrible capitalist system that actually made them rich in the first place. Nobody argues the case well. See, these aren’t real debates because nobody goes in for the kill, nobody notices the contradictions in the other side and say, “I wonder if the family owns stock in UnitedHealthcare, or any companies that do. I wonder if this family’s wealth has anything to do with the healthcare industry.” Well, actually, it does, Matt.

Matt Taibbi: Does it?

Walter Kirn: Yes, and they didn’t discuss that. So what they’re doing is they’re preparing his case for him, both before the jury and the American people. They’re shooting down all the potential weak points in their arguments, or cross-examination points, they’re pre-trying the thing, so that our minds and those of the jury are all prepared for the simplistic defense that will come. And meanwhile, the politicization of the thing has already been set in motion, and they’ve already described him as a peer to people who have been not guilty, so they’ve implanted that not guilty.

I once came up with a screenplay idea that everybody said was too outrageous. I said, a killer runs for the President of the United States, he got off. He’s not guilty, but they all know he did it, and he wins because that’s what America finally… You think Donald Trump represents a corruption, the salesman becoming President, America won’t be complete until a killer, who we all saw kill, becomes president. Just like the movie Network, we saw Orwell ‘84 come true, we’re seeing Network come true. In that movie, yeah, the network actually pays for the acts of violence so that it can cover them.

Matt Taibbi: Right, yeah.

Walter Kirn: We’re getting precious close to it.

Matt Taibbi: It’s funny, this week, I don’t know if you’ve read this book yet, We Have Never Been Woke, by Musa al-Gharbi, he’s a professor up, I think it’s Stony Brook now. But it’s a really interesting book, he’s making the rounds in media, and one of the things he talks about, he places the beginning of the current iteration of insanity at the Occupy movement, which I thought was really interesting.

And as I read, I realized… I had already come to this conclusion a long time ago, but now it’s back in full force. At the time, one of the contradictions and one of the tensions about the Occupy Wall Street movement was, yeah, I was expecting some kind of blowback from the population from all the financial crime after 2008, having been to foreclosure courts and all kinds of other places, watched evictions, somebody was going to get pissed off and there was going to be an explosion that was going to come out somewhere. But when you get to Occupy, what you see is a bunch of Princeton and Columbia kids, and it’s not the same class of people who are actually the victims of financial crime.

Walter Kirn: That’s interesting.

Matt Taibbi: I totally mistook that at the time. I eventually came around to this idea, well, okay, they don’t have any specific demands, which is weird, but okay, I’ll buy it. And then, I remember being told by a fact-checker who quoted Matt Stoller’s line about this being a church of dissent, and I was very disturbed at the moment. But now, looking back, and this is what that book is about, it talks about, basically, this is an upper-class phenomenon, the Occupy Wall Street, and it birthed a series, or it was like the first in a series, of political crazes, where the main political actors were wealthy, upscale, white, Ivy League or equivalent schools, people from that world, and they were now claiming victim status. That was another big part of this whole thing, suddenly they were part of marginalized communities, they were gender-fluid, they had other issues that previously hadn’t been considered.

Now, this has come full circle. Now, the very wealthy can be victims of an even bigger wealthy evil, and I think that’s what we’re dealing with. As you said, the tension, the problem for the modern progressive movement is that the Democratic Party is indisputably, I hate to use The Times’ word, the party of wealth now.

Walter Kirn: Sure.

Matt Taibbi: That’s where all the richest districts vote, Democratically. But how are they going to galvanize that movement in the same way that you get… You don’t get the same explosion of underclass rage that you have animating, say, the early Bernie movement or this or the Trump campaign. That’s what they’re going for here, I think.

Walter Kirn: Yes, definitely. They replaced the proletariat in the Marxist equation with the educated, affluent, and even rich, as a stand-in, playing the same role. Now, they’re making arguments that, in at least the healthcare situation, the rich can be just as oppressed as the poor, because… But really, how can they? This still doesn’t make any sense. This guy had access to the best healthcare, his family is apparently worth $140 million, so whether he got paid back or not didn’t fricking matter.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: He could have paid cash or gold coins or Bitcoin for these surgeries. If he didn’t get a good surgery, isn’t that a problem with doctors, not insurers? How did they turn this into an insurance problem for a super rich family that could self-insure? They’re skipping past all the contradictions. But you’re absolutely right, they put the elite in and they’ve subbed them in for the downtrodden factory worker, they’ve done it before our eyes.

But I’m going to tell you something, the next phase of this, I’m going to make a testable prediction, is going to bring up a couple of names you haven’t heard in a while if you’re young in America, and they’re Italian names, a lot like Mangione.

Matt Taibbi: Sacco and Vanzetti?

Walter Kirn: Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchist avengers of the underclass and the oppressed and the hurt, who went out and killed a guy named… Let’s see, what was his name? Frederick Parmenter, a guard and paymaster of the Merrell shoe company, another representative of capitalist evil. In those days, the paymasters and the guards and the goons of the capitalists were the most hated part, not the healthcare CEOs. This is the deep cultural level that they haven’t got to. They’ve worked their way down through the JFK stuff

Walter Kirn: But Sacco and Vanzetti is the next

Matt Taibbi: Maybe George Metesky too, the Mad Bomber, there was a little bit of that too.

Walter Kirn: Or Bonnie and Clyde or Pretty Boy Floyd, the guys who robbed banks during the Depression, but that’s where this is going. And Matt, when you start to see Sacco and Vanzetti trend on Twitter, please do a shot for me, who doesn’t drink.

Matt Taibbi: I will, yeah. Look, that’s a great point, because the great debate in that era, from what I understand, obviously we can only read about something that happened that long ago-

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: … but this was a time when there were a lot of people discussing the question of can we wait for social change, can we go through channels, can we accomplish it through nonviolence? A little bit of this resurface during the Battle of Seattle, when there was a debate about whether or not we can break windows and that sort of thing. But for the most part, it hasn’t happened.

But post-Occupy, there has been this thing that’s happened on the political left, which has alienated people like me and probably Thomas Frank and some other folks who are traditional ACLU liberals-

Walter Kirn: Right.

Walter Kirn: … sometimes you go all the way to the Kool-Aid, you go all the way to the jungle with your leader, you follow Rachel Maddow to a camp in Nicaragua where you have the Rachel Maddow show for 24 hours, and Rachel sits up on a throne with her last 500 devoted viewers until she finally says, “I want you all to take these little knives I’m giving you and stab them into your heart and say, ‘Rachel, I love you.’”

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. She wouldn’t do Kool-Aid. Kool-Aid, that would be too consumerist, I guess.

Walter Kirn: Right.

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GOOD NIGHT! (Vintage French postcard, 1913)