I met Mary Rickert in late April. Blonde, with dark brown eyes and a silver Catholic pendant around her neck, Rickert is a California rancher and staunch Republican. “I’m very conservative,” she told me. “Just not their kind of conservative.”
On that balmy Spring evening, Rickert joined several dozen of her neighbors from Redding, in rural Shasta County, for a crash course on American democracy.
“I’m very, very concerned,” she said, referencing the coming elections in June. “I don’t see how it’s going to be a fair election. I don’t trust it at all.”
Rickert served eight years on the Shasta County Board of Supervisors. She’s as well versed in the intricacies of local politics as she is running her internationally celebrated ranch. But what you hear from her isn’t the usual Republican talking points about voter fraud or mail in ballots.
“I think there’s been a lot of money poured into this county for these elections,” Rickert said. “It’s all about power and control.”
Shasta is one of the reddest counties in California. Majority white and mostly rural, the region is defined by its rugged, agrarian landscape, and by its distance from the state’s urban, largely liberal core.
Before President Trump returned to the White House, residents, including Rickert, say Shasta was also something of a proving ground for Project 2025, the far-right playbook that laid out a roadmap for Trump 2.0.
During the Covid 19 pandemic members of the far right managed to wrest control of the county board and have since maintained an iron grip on local decision making, affecting everything from county health and education policy to local policing and immigration enforcement.
With the June primaries approaching, Rickert and the others gathered that evening for a nonpartisan civic education event, where they spoke candidly about issues of transparency and accountability among board members. “I’m very concerned about the future of this county,” said Rickert.
There are also burning questions surrounding the county’s Registrar of Voters (ROV), Clint Curtis, a Florida conservative and proponent of hand counting ballots who once boasted of designing vote flipping software.
Curtis was appointed in May 2025 and is running for reelection despite accusations of campaign law violations and substantiated findings of managerial misconduct, the latter of which figured prominently during a contentious board meeting two days earlier.
Thadeus Greenson is a press education specialist with the First Amendment Coalition. He joined with the local independent news outlet, Shasta Scout — which organized the event — in moderating the evening’s discussion, centered on the Brown Act, what he calls “California’s first sunshine law.”
Passed in 1953, the law governs requirements around open meetings for local agencies in the state, in essence guaranteeing the public’s right to attend and participate in local legislative sessions. It is, at its core, a distillation of what it means to have open government in a democracy.
Thadeus Greenson is a press education specialist with the First Amendment Coalition.
“We are in a time where lots of First Amendment issues are under threat from all sides,” noted Greenson, adding FAC “works throughout the state to put out fires when they come up.”
One of those fires was sparked by the November 2024 arrest of Redding resident Jenny O’Connell-Nowain for what her lawyer argued was protected speech. O’Connel-Nowain had attended a Shasta County Board meeting that day where she protested after a supervisor launched into a verbal attack against Joanna Francescut, then the county’s assistant registrar of voters.
Francescut, who is currently running to replace Curtis as ROV, was not present during the meeting and so was unable to defend herself. O’Connell-Nowain’s husband, Benjamin Nowain, explained that his wife felt employees — in this case Francescut —
“should be protected.”
In January, a Judge sentenced O’Connell-Nowain to 90 days jail time, telling her, “You’re not being punished for your views. You’re being punished for your conduct.”
Her husband, who works in the county’s Health and Human Services department, disputes that allegation. “We believe that it’s viewpoint discrimination,” he said, noting his wife had again been arrested during the previous board meeting two days earlier for essentially the same reason.
But Nowain admits that “it is difficult because … she’s sort of acting out of the [accepted] decorum. It’s a grey area.”
It’s questions about those kinds of grey areas that brought residents to the Redding public library that evening, where they pressed Greenson and FAC Legal Director David Loy — who spoke via a live video feed — on a range of topics. These included questions from the time required for public notice on changes to agenda items to the time allotted for public comment.
Several members of the audience queried Loy on regulations over how and when board members share information, citing concerns over backdoor discussions taking place outside the purview of the public.
Over the course of some two hours, a conversation that began as a largely technical, legalistic breakdown of the Brown Act developed into something more akin to lifting the hood on the engine of our democracy.
Benjamin Nowain is an activist and independent journalist in Redding, California. He says divisions in Shasta don’t fit into the typical Republican versus Democrat narrative.
“I learned today that the Brown Act is a little more constrained,” said Nowain, who has been as outspoken as his wife in pushing back against what he describes as a hostile takeover of local government, and who was also arrested at a public meeting recently.
The pair continue to face legal battles for their actions. After serving her initial 90-day sentence under house arrest, O’Connel-Nowain is now fighting her second charge, a process that can drag out for months, even years.
Nowain, who has also faced his own legal challenges over a whistleblower case he brought in 2021, says the result is a “chilling effect” on the public. “Other people … are starting to self-regulate because they are afraid of what might happen to them,” he said. “People are even afraid to petition their government for grievances.”
Still, says Nowain, whose politics skew left, the political divide in Shasta doesn’t quite fit so neatly into the Democrat versus Republican script playing out at the national level.
“Nationally, it’s seen as right and left. And it really isn’t,” he said. “I’ve been working with conservatives for almost four years now. They’re just my friends and family now. We probably wouldn’t have a political discussion about national politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But we don’t have to.”
He added, “We don’t live in Washington. We live here in Shasta County. We should be worried about Shasta County things.”
As for Rickert, she says some of the questions that brought her to the event had been addressed. “I was really pleased to get that kind of information,” she said, adding she plans to follow up with the team at Shasta Scout on filing public records requests.
In a statement to her audience after the event, Shasta Scout Founder and Director Annaliese Pierce wrote, “We appreciate the opportunity to inform every member of the public, regardless of their political ideology or beliefs. Civic engagement is the heart of a healthy community.”
Feature image published under CC License 4.0
