A Brief History of the Derp!

Welcome to ShasDerp, aka Shasta County!

Shasta is a rural Northern California county nestled between a couple of other counties that are mostly ranches and truck stops. If you live in California, you maybe vaguely remember passing through on a road trip, going directly to the In-N-Out Burgers off Dana Drive, then booking it back to the freeway before the zombie apocalypse can strike your car.

Shasta's long term reputation has been bad. Trump County. Meth. A religious cult with a "mega church." It's hot. Big entertainment acts don't start showing up to perform in Shasta until they've been told to slow things down by their manager because they've OD'd too many times already.

But since 2020, Shasta has morphed like a godless Pokemon into a fucking train wreck of a land mass. In between covering stories about what's going on in places with real airports, the national news will bring up Shasta in bemused tones: "you guys seeing this shit over here? Are these people for real?"

What started really kicking things off? The COVID-19 pandemic, partly. Ironically, a huge portion of the local ShasDerps went absolutely wild at the IDEA of lockdowns and forced vaccinations, having their kids home from school, and the perception that Gavin Newsom was this cartoon liberal devil just absolutely whipping them into submission. The irony here is that at the local level, pandemic mandates were unenforced, so people were just running around doing what they normally did anyway. The megachurch had a large, definitely-not-socially-distanced gathering where they sang by the Sundial Bridge.

Now you would think that people who are upset with mandates imposed by the State of California and recommended nationally would go to the state capitol, Sacramento, to screech at the state legislators and the governor responsible for the tyrannical efforts to try to keep people alive. But that is a sensible choice and we don't have those here in the land of ShasDerp. Instead, locals decided to derp on over to 1450 Court Street in downtown Redding to yell at the 5 members of the Board of Supervisors of Shasta County.

In early 2020, the Board of Supervisors was much more rational than they are in 2023. Instead of Jones, Steve Morgan sat on the board for District 4. Instead of Kelstrom, Les Baugh represented District 5. Instead of Crye, Joe Chimenti was our District 1 supervisor. And instead of Tim Garman in District 2, we had Leonard Moty. Mary Rickert is the only surviving member of the once-somewhat-sane group that ran the business of Shasta County.

They were all Republicans, and they all had a distaste for the pandemic lockdowns. But the thing about Shasta County is it has no major industry and its taxpayers contribute far less to the statewide economy than the county receives in state funding. California is our sugar daddy, and we need to accept state money to stay afloat. Pissing on California is not a great economic decision, so the board shrewdly decided that it would not make a stink and simply declined to enforce the mandates.

That wasn't enough resistance to tyranny for the locals, already whipped up into a frenzy with disinformation and Trump-cult mania. They wore their MAGA hats to the grocery store, with no mask and just a shit-eating grin on their faces as they joked about "sheeple" and "face diapers" to the rest of the safety-conscious public.

They soon realized that it was fun to go do ToastMasters: local government board meeting edition. Suddenly the board, trying to do mundane work like whether to renew department budgets and give 1% raises to county employees, somehow became involuntary representatives of everything wrong with California and America at large. Residents came in to turn them into punching bags during the public comment portion of the board meetings. "You've made bullets expensive, but luckily for you, ropes are reusable," said Timothy Fairfield, local derp and hateful bitch to the government leaders just trying to keep our county functioning. In August of 2020, one speaker made a splash by not-threatening-but-warning-but-pretty-much-threatening the Board of Supervisors with "blood in the streets."

Shortly thereafter, a controversial protest took place at the Sprouts Grocery which shut the entire store down. Protest attendees included the Rapozas, Lori Bridgeford, Carlos Zapata, and other local anti-maskers.

Soon after, a ridiculous but well-funded docuseries came crashing through the wall like the Kool-Aid mascot. The Red, White, and Blueprint was a propaganda machine that pumped hot country patriotic nonsense to the general public in Shasta County. Mostly comprised of slow-motion horses, drone footage, hunky-dory soundtracks, and dramatic performances by people who would have failed high school drama class, the docu-series managed to obtain a tepid following for their planned 10 episode run. Their episodes detailed the effort to recall three of the board members: Moty, Chimenti, and Rickert. They only successfully recalled Moty. They also made some pretty absurd mistakes such as failing to publish their intent to recall with the proper formatting, which caused them to be delayed in their recall efforts. They made it to 8 episodes before declaring the series a victory, not including the infamous Episode 6.5 exclusively dedicated to rewriting public opinion with respect to a legal battle between one of the Blueprint showrunners and a private citizen. The series, sans defamatory Episode 6.5, is now available for shame purchase on Hulu.

Amid the Red, White, and Blueprint drama, several side quests emerged. Parents protested the pandemic by bringing their children as meat-shields (because no one can do a full-throated rebuke of a parent with a cute little kid in tow, obviously) and exposed their children to dangerous air quality due to wildfires raging around the area. Science-denying nurses addressed the public with comments completely at odds with the Hippocratic Oath trying to convince the public that the pandemic was a hoax and that it was not necessary to exercise any precaution.

After the dramatized era of the Red, White, and Blueprint, the Board of Supervisors remained the epicenter of local culture wars and drama. After the recall attempt of Chimenti and Rickert and successful recall of Leonard Moty, several new political candidates emerged with the help of slush money donated by Reverge Anselmo. Bryan Caples ran for school superintendent despite leaving multiple school districts on not-so-stellar terms already. Rich Gallardo ran for the school board, lol. Authur Gorman, best known for showing up to harass Cathy Darling Allen on Election Day, managed to secure a seat at the Shasta County Board of Education. Erik Jensen, an attorney with minimal experience in criminal law and no non-internship experience as a prosecutor, ran to be the elected District Attorney of Shasta County and was beaten by incumbent Stephanie Bridgett.

Kevin Crye and Chris Kelstrom ran to replace Chimenti and Baugh respectively, with Crye only winning by 90 votes over local Bethel-adjacent former Redding City Councilmember Erin Resner.

One of Kevin Crye's first actions in office was to send a brochure for the Shasta County CEO position to Chriss Street, former leader of the "New California" secessionist movement. Street went on to apply and nearly receive appointment, but failed the background check (not to mention the vibe check) and ended up a salty reject voted down 5-0 (a rare unanimous vote not to appoint). Street, as is consistent with his track record of litigiousness, made noise about suing Shasta County, but so far nothing has taken hold.

Soon after Patrick Jones realized his wet dream of having at least two other supervisors willing to fall in line with his agenda, the Board passed a resolution to scrap the current contract with Dominion Voting Systems at a huge cost to the local taxpayers. The public responded with immediate uproar and when Kevin Crye attempted to host a town hall, it could be best summarized as "the comments section is not going how OP expected."

The controversial decision to disenfranchise local voters was met with an immediate effort to recall Kevin Crye. "Recall?! Hwhaaaat? How dare you waste county money on this completely ridiculous attack on our supervisor!" said the mega-derps who had just tried to recall not one, not two, but three supervisors at the same time barely over a year ago. Reverge Anselmo ponied up for some slick advertisements to try to liken the Crye Recall to communist socialist kitten murder and suggesting to the District 1 voters that recalling Crye was basically equivalent to buying Gavin Newsom a sex toy. Despite the well-financed hit campaign against the recall, the devoted team of actual civic-minded constituents were able to gather enough signatures to put Crye's recall on the March 2023 ballot.

Another fun thing that happened was the board-sanctioned racial slur in late May 2023 when Alex Bielecki decided to say, "I'm not ignorant, I'm not a ni\*\*\*r" to the whole ass public meeting. Nathaniel Pinkney, the only black man in the board chambers at the time, called Bielecki a racist piece of shit and told him to leave, which should honestly be the default reaction when someone uses that word in your presence, but instead of chastising Bielecki for using the "n" word, Patrick Asshole Jones decided to criticize Nathan for his outburst instead. He then offered a grade school C- constitutional law lecture as justification for why he doesn't want to interrupt speakers during public comment (unless he doesn't like them, then he will interrupt them gratuitously).

At the next meeting, a whole Antifa Bus full of locals who are simply not racists decided to show up and yell at Patrick Jones for his dumbass behavior. Hours of public comment did nothing to change Jones' attitude to the fact that racism is bad. In fact, he and/or one of his cronies decided to go hunting for dirt on Nathaniel Pinkney and came up with a several year old video of Nathan singing "My N\*\*\*\*" by YG. The whole idea of linguistic nuance is apparently totally lost on white boomers flush with money, go figure.

This popped off a series of incidents where individuals were ejected from subsequent board meetings because Patrick Jones decided that the slightest defiant peep out of a liberal was grounds for arrest. First he tried to kick Nathan out AGAIN for being "disruptive" because he was responding to someone who started using the podium to launch personal attacks and insult members of the crowd. This time Nathan said no. He stood his ground and Jones got so mad he came down off the dais as if he were about to physically attack Nathan but then caught himself. Jones couldn't figure out what to do because no one would touch Nathan, so he cleared the entire chambers--everyone had to leave. During the recess board and county employees had a pretty entertaining-looking crash course with county counsel over what they could legally enforce. Jones went as far as sending actual police to go try to convince Nathan that he'd be charged with a misdemeanor if he went back into the chambers. About 20 minutes later, Jones had a sudden "change of heart" (probably didn't want to feed a potential lawsuit) and Nathan was allowed to return to the meeting.

Then Jones tried to kick out Christian Gardinier for talking out of turn. Again, he refused to leave, again, the room had to be cleared. Gardinier made it clear he wasn't going to leave without being arrested, so the recess went extra long and then he was the first person to march back into the room. He proved Jones' threats were toothless and made the whole thing look like the absolute farce that it is.

Then one more person got kicked out, this time for an actual meaningful disruption. Steven King showed up to the chambers and started shouting at Jones from his seat, saying Jones was going to prison. While that seems kind of extreme, it turns out that King suspected (reasonably so) Jones of being involved in an incident where Richard Gallardo showed up to King's private residence in the middle of the night. It also turns out that some of the conservatives in town have been wrongfully labeling King a sex offender. King is a vocal liberal without much of a filter, but the allegations that he has engaged in any criminal conduct were based on others who shared his first and last name, not his own misdeeds.

Nowadays every meeting is nearly guaranteed to pop off with crazy. Every week is a new disaster.

More will be added to this wiki as the constant nightmare continues.