Shasta County spotlighted in new book on far-right’s rise in small towns

SHASTA COUNTY, Calif. — Shasta County is the star of a new book ‘Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America’ written by political journalist Sasha Abramsky, who is exploring growing extremism in small communities.

The book focuses on two communities: Shasta County and Sequim, Washington. Two places where he said far-right extremists like QAnon-ers and anti-vaxxers took over local governments which he believes was caused by an amalgamation of three things.

“Chaos Comes Calling is a book about what happens when you have all of the media disinformation that comes from social media basically the rumor mills add into that the sort of demagoguery of Donald Trump and then layer on top of that the pandemic and all of the dislocation that comes with the pandemic and what I was doing was exploring how that plays out on the ground. The communities I chose were Shasta County in California and a small town in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state called Sequim,” said Abramsky.

Abramsky’s research landed in Shasta County specifically due to the recall of Leonard Moty back in 2022 that he cites as the time where moderate republican politicians were taken over by extremists.

In his book, he compares the two communities and the differences between the choices they made and how it affected the people in them.