Escaping Ventucky: Dodging and fleeing Conspiracies and Crazy Thinking in the heart of Conservative California
TW: Suicide, Violence
A few weeks ago, former Growing Pains actor Kirk Cameron, known for his involvement in the evangelical movement, descended in Thousand Oaks to protest Stay at Home orders by caroling in front of the mall there. Seeing scenes like that, along with local Pastor Rob McCoy defying orders by “stripping”, made me incredibly scared for family and friends, who are beholden to their fanatical and conspiratorial beliefs.
Where I grew up is where many prominent Americans have faced the lowest points in their careers. Johnny Cash settled in Casitas Springs in the 60’s after a divorce, jazz singers and rock and roll musicians found themselves at the former Camarillo State Mental Hospital, now California State University, Channel Islands. The low point is often followed by redemption: Cash would go on to have four more decades of career. My lowest points in my own life were found in Ventura County as well, as I tried to navigate my ideological beliefs in an area where conspiracy was everywhere.
Beginnings
As a kid, I had few political memories. Impeachment of President Bill Clinton was the first thing I vaguely remember. The debacle of the 2000 election, and the early administration of George W Bush were a blur to me. I remember two names constantly growing up: Elton Gallegly and Lois Capps. Gallegly was a moderate Republican congressman who was invincible until independent redistricting came along. Lois Capps was in a similar boat: here district was almost entirely coastal, but she was a consistently liberal Democrat. As a kid, however, my immediate upbringing was as apolitical as a suburbanites could be, however, and I never thought much outside of my favorite computer games, outside of visiting Ronald Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley.
Then, 9/11 happened.
I was playing Rayman 3 for N64. I remember distinctly my mother saying that I couldn’t go to school that day because of the attacks. Shortly after, anthrax was mailed to congressmembers, and locally, a Falafel fusion place owned by a family from Iran was burnt down in the post 9/11 xenophobia that sweeped the country and my home county.
In 2003, I made my first political cartoon. A 4th grader with a precocious mind and poor drawing skills, I portrayed the restaurant from my vague memory of eating there being set aflame. I remember very little else from the drawings of my peers, save a classmate that was insistent that Arnold Schwarzenegger return to Hollywood vs. run for Governor in what would be known as the “total recall” once he got elected in 2003. I remember that my teacher, wary of the power of the cartoon over parents from the suburbs, hid it from my peers.
The Lurch to the far Right in Middle School
Race came up significantly more often in middle school. I remember the debate over immigration, with the Bush administration pursuing a more hardline policy despite advocating for compassionate conservatism, prompting many Latinx organizers to stage “a day without an immigrant” A teacher I had, an old fashioned disciplinarian who taught advanced math, made an incredibly racist statement that prompted his firing. No one liked the man, but his ideology was prevalent among many people in Ventura.
One letter to the editor that struck me during this period, during which I started to be bullied relentlessly by people of all races, was from a resident who thought it felt better going to the grocery store because there weren’t people speaking “foreign languages” everywhere. Sentiment was echoed among some family members, who commented on everything from Kanye’s statement that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” made as the popularity of our 43rd president was waning due to a failed response to Katrina. An issue of Newsweek came out discussing the early candidates in the 2008 presidential race, with everything from war weariness, stagnation of the economy, and climate change, then called global warming, being discussed.
My early, primitive views on race and politics were formed during this period.
I will emphasize that I was bullied by kids of all races in middle school. My locker was vandalized by a group of students one day in gym class, an elective that I dreaded taking. I was psychologically bullied as well, called a “fag” and mocked for my lack of any physical fitness in life. I took things the same way that the person in the letter to the editor did though, blaming people of Mexican descent for the issues that I had in my life. I started to read alternative news sources, turning to Infowars and Alex Jones in the mid aughts to inform my contrarian belief that 9/11 was an inside job. In tandem to that, Donald Trump had just started The Apprentice, a show that made the term “You’re Fired” a staple of pop culture and helped cultivate his strongman persona. I liked that at the time, never making the connection that Trump was the ultimate bully until later in life.
Struggling to find my beliefs
As I approached high school, I started to acquaint myself to early social media. I was on Facebook back when it was a college only website, and had a fleshed out Myspace profile I was looking to abandon. The popular YouTube video Zeitgeist fascinated me as a Christian trying to reconcile his faith with the arguments made in the video. It was misleading, however; while Christianity had developed with many preceding God myths, the research done was spurious. The second half of the video played into 9/11 conspiracy theories and xenophobia, postulating that the hijackers were trained goons by the Bush administration slowly looking to to take away our rights. Ironically, Bush never bought into the xenophobic tropes publicly, praising Islam multiple times as “the religion of peace” while secretly having his Department of Defense under John Ashcroft set up CIA black sites around the world to torture supposed associates of Al Qaeda. The discovery of Abu Gharib, a site in which prisoners were tortured by military, had an effect on my social media as well. I remember one of the earliest pictures that I ever put on social media was an image of a prisoner being tortured. My best friend who went to the same church that I went to started to question my pictures on Facebook, as I struggled to reconcile my faith in God.
Warped Tour was another big event that typified my political life. Going in 2007 during the midst of the presidential primaries, I leaned towards the Libertarian booth, which rewarded me with candies when I got a perfect score on their “World’s Smallest Political Compass” test that they use to assess possible interest in the party and their ideology. I also vaguely remember the left of Ventura having a large demonstration at Warped Tour, mostly sound and fury signifying nothing to me. I would probably have considered myself some sort of left-libertarian at that point in my life, still holding on to the conspiracies of my early days on the internet
Freshman Year, Obama, and Proposition 8
By the time I entered high school in 2007, the presidential election was dominant in the ethos of Ventura County. Bush was viewed as a lame duck President, and Obama had impressed after debate performances where he bested Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Mike Gravel. The Republican race was starting to shape up as well. I remember that the church I went to had a “social night” where a group of people prayed for the victory of John McCain later in my freshman year.
Those prayers were unanswered, however, and Obama was elected in November of 2008. McCain gave a great concession speech, despite the fact the crowd was adversarial given his choice of a firebrand from Alaska, Sarah Palin, that poisoned the well. My family was mostly behind senator Obama, as the significance of having the first Black president and first Democrat elected with a majority of both the electoral and the popular vote since 1976 was something to be appreciated. With Democrats having a trifecta in government, Republicans were in the wilderness.
Outside of their success when it came to Proposition 8.
Though Obama won California with an overwhelming majority of the vote, Proposition 8 passed, codifying the belief that religious conservatives had that marriage was between “one man and one woman”. I was against it, arguing that maximum liberty was important, remembering one Halloween going out with friends door to door saying “vote no on prop 8”. The church I went to, however, had many of the senior leadership in support of the ban. It was later discovered that the Church of the Latter Day Saints in Utah was a major funder for the Yes on Prop 8 campaign. The cynicism I had towards individuals, primarily evangelicals, and want of a contrarian belief system made me slowly drift from the church. I started gaming, playing World of Warcraft semi religiously and developing my online persona in earnest.
Sophomore Year, Speech and Debate, and finding a version of myself
Breaking my leg during a camping trip changed the trajectory of my high school experience. I started hanging out with the weirdos: The goths who would stay up until 3:00 AM doing god-knows-what, the theater kids for whom acting was a thing they did both in their personal and professional lives, the kids who struggled with identity, finding much of it in Brit-pop and the music of the Beatles and later Gorillaz. These were the kinds of people that the evangelicals whom I had thrown in with earlier would be morally opposed to. Largely from my experience staging a debate in an AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) class, I was also getting into Speech and Debate, having a conservative debate partner that often challenged my more radical, quasi leftist beliefs.
In the background, debates over Obama’s first term intensified. Everywhere from the local gym that had recently opened up near my high school to the halls of classrooms, and everything from Wall Street reform, to Cash for Clunkers, to school reform was on the table. The overarching topic of debate, however, was the Affordable Care Act and its role. As a young and mostly uneducated communist, I thought it didn’t go far enough, advocating for an actual government takeover of health insurance. The conservative faction of politics in my county wanted repeal, and Tea Party rallies were a semi regular occurrence at our government center. Many of the seats that Obama gained in the US senate were chipped away, as McConnell vowed to make Obama a “One Term President” in 2010. By sophomore and junior year, the House was taken by Republicans, with several votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act being made regularly. Gallegly handily won reelection, as did Lois Capps, while local initiatives to keep open a library and restrict the size of a Wal-Mart failed.
I was beginning to find my identity again around this period. It would be disingenuous to say that my identity as a lefty communist was intersectional: I still harbored racial resentment and dislike of people in the LGBTQ community. While I supported same sex marriage, I still thought that gay people were icky, and that things like Pride and gay bars were not “valid”
Junior/Senior Year, personality shifts, and the last temptation of the Far Right
My last two years of high school felt like the biggest emotional rollercoaster in my life. I briefly had a high school romance during junior year that resulted in a breakup two months in, and was taking a slew of classes at our local community college to get ahead for college. The few that I remember, philosophy and history of film, were engaging, but taught by teachers that were less engaged with the material and would often go into political rants. I began smoking marijuana, and even tried things that I shouldn’t have necessarily tried, like spice and salvia. As a 17 year old taking college classes at community college, I always felt “off”. While community college is great for non-traditional students, I felt isolated from my peers, even engaging in conspiratorial thinking such as falsely believing that my friends had a “fatwa” against me over the course of Junior/Senior year. What was really happening was friends were involved in activities such as track, football, or other sports, and began to form peer groups as I languished alone.
I started playing guitar in earnest around this time as well. My teacher was an old fashioned instructor, making us do scale runs and drills most of the class. Slowly my personality changed. Confidence in guitar led to confidence in other parts of my life, and I began the process of hanging out with other friends outside of the church friends.
The biggest revelation that I had in 2010 was finding out one of my family members was gay. I was shocked, despite the fact that I slightly knew they were since the early 2000’s. It made me question everything, including why I was at a church with people that were so vehemently anti-gay. After a confrontation at an In N’ Out with a younger member of my youth group, I left the church in a blaze of glory, going to my prom date’s home at the time.
The period after prom and graduation but before college was the closest I have ever gotten to the Far Right. To put it bluntly, prom did not go well. I had different expectations than what happened in reality, and was disappointed at everything. The communism of my Sophomore and Junior year slowly changed to anarcho-capitalism over the summer, and I began the process of browsing right-adjacent communities such as Tumblr In Action, The Red Pill, and FatPeopleHate. I watched Fight Club, not picking up on the fact that Tyler Durden was the villain in the movie, treating him as a role model and even researching business management articles about being a boss like Tyler. I started exercising a ton, and ate better. While my physical health was successful, my mental health was deteriorating on the way to college. My paranoia of everything, from my parents trying to poison my food to vaccines being the cause of my autism diagnosis, intensified in this period. I registered for the Green Party because I believed some of their more conspiratorial beliefs. By the time that I had reached college, this resulted in a cocktail that ended up with the one attempt I ever made at suicide. My hypermasculinity and fear that failure was never an option, cultivated by the fact that I never wanted to repeat failure again, made the fall from grace during college feel like a paralyzing one.
Returning to the Mainstream by Being Challenged
In November of 2011, I deleted my Facebook account. I got a seasonal job at UPS that my dad was able to get for me due to his connections, started taking courses at Ventura College. As my brain started the process of reaching balance due to taking medications that facilitated that balance, I began to consider getting involved with extracurriculars again. My mother suggested getting involved with the Julia Brownley campaign for Congress over the summer of 2012 as a way to make friends. Getting involved not only did that, but also reshaped my political beliefs into something reasonable, that of a center left Democrat focused on the election of Democrats. The interesting thing, however, is I still had my very problematic beliefs. In a lot of ways, being involved on the Brownley campaign was the first step of being deprogrammed of my more conspiratorial beliefs. I started listening to Alex Jones from a more skeptical standpoint, completely giving it up after the 2012 election due to my belief in not giving them advertising dollars.
Leaving my local community college was the final step in severing ties with the conspiratorial right. While most of my friends were fairly reasonable centrists or center left people, the occasional 9/11 conspiracy theorist, the antivaxxer, and the nutritionist that believed the paleo diet was the only road to success were left behind when I left that environment.
What I Learned From Ventucky
Looking back on my departure from Ventura County, I remember a lot of my beliefs came from within to an extent. When my parents transitioned from Dial Up to high speed internet, I went down the rabbit holes of conspiracy, without any contextualization of the content I was viewing. Being exposed to extreme ideologies in real life political discourse, including the false beliefs that gays cannot serve effectively in the military or be married, immigrants were trying to steal my livelihood, and Obama is a secret Muslim, tainted me for years. Living in places that weren’t VC has also changed me for the better, and reaching out beyond my small circles helped me become deprogrammed.
The word “Ventucky” has been mentioned a couple of times in this piece, but its a difficult thing to define. Ventura County’s population is built on so many demographics, with east county being those who fled from Los Angeles during “white flight”, and west county having the diversity that most people associate with southern California, with everyone from surfer bums to immigrants from all around the world. I love it, but its hard to fathom going back, particularly with all contradictory memories of the place.