The Mountain Top Media team, from left: Mark Kent, Katie Gorman, Win Carpenter, Terry Rapoza, Leslie Sawyer, Woody Clenenden and Lyndia Kent. Not pictured, Mountain Top Media editor Chriss Street.
I want to start out by saying that I don’t think that I speak for the writers or the editor of A News Café when I’m weighing in on the other local media outlets out there. I’m just a person whose eyeballs and ears have endured the continued existence of Sound House recording studio-based nonsense for years.
Here’s my take on Mountain Top Media:
Facts actually matter, and the hours spent listening to self-indulgent echo chamber rants about imaginary issues are approximately the same valuable contribution one earns through comment wars on social media.
At the Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting June 23, 2024, local constituent and frequent meeting attendee Jenny O’Connell witnessed a ridiculous statement from former Board of Supervisors chair/seasoned liar Patrick Henry Jones.
The backstory is that Jenny’s husband Benjamin Nowain had been nominated to serve on the Shasta County Elections Commission, and his appointment was up for board discussion. Patrick Jones’ freshest batch of dishonesty was that Jenny and Benjamin Nowain had only wished to see that same commission disbanded. After several angry outbursts from the audience that led to a meeting recess, Jenny didn’t leave. She sat.
That meeting could not possibly resume safely, what with Jenny remaining seated and unmoving, dressed in her clearly menacing pink strawberry overalls, quietly sitting on the floor and awaiting a well-deserved apology. The board and county staff have all presumably seen people sitting down before, yet were so ruffled by the situation (and so unwilling to apologize, in the case of Patrick Jones) that Jenny ended up physically carried away by a group of sheriff’s deputies. As angry fellow constituents cheered Jenny on from the atrium, she briefly raised a fist in protest and solidarity.
Mountain Top Media’s “journalistic” takeaway? According to a recent post, Jenny is now a Trump supporter.
You can’t even make this up. If you could, you might just end up wearing grippy socks in a padded room.
Here’s Sawyer explaining to MTM editor Chriss Street her editorial path to create and publish the meme that mocks O’Connell, starting with getting the OK from Jon Knight.
Earlier this month, instead of taking cover or concerning himself with those who had just been seriously injured or killed at his rally, Donald Trump’s immediate reaction was to a photo-opportunity: he angrily raised his fist into the sky, an American flag conveniently in frame.
If I could bend the ear of the FBI, I might even suggest a quick look into that photographer’s phone history. Trump’s supporters predictably wasted no time turning that same photo into endless merchandise and political propaganda. I think we’d all suffocate if we held our collective breaths waiting for Trump and his supporters to express any concern whatsoever about the dangers of political violence (other than pearl-clutching outrage about the appalling idea that it could ever affect them).
The fist-in-the-air gesture symbolizes resistance and historic fights against oppression. Usually when you find examples of this gesture in action, it’s in struggles for equal rights. Think about this. Where have we seen this gesture? At Black Lives Matter protests. At women’s rights protests. Had you ever even seen a Trump supporter make this gesture, at the horrific-to-them risk of being labeled a “progressive?”
A phrase I’ve heard a fair bit lately is “bad faith.” That’s fitting. Bad faith is a dishonest transaction, usually carried out through specious arguments (the rationale tends to sound okay unless you really think about it). Remember “whataboutism?” That’s bad faith. What about her emails? What about his birth certificate?
When groups of people say “Black Lives Matter” because they are sickened from watching police brutality take out people of color without consequence, and someone comfortably living in the safety of a homogeneously Caucasian environment pipes up with “but ALL lives matter,” that’s bad faith. (No one worth talking about has ever attempted to indicate that Black Lives Matter more than other lives, merely that they should matter at all, and changing the subject is a bad faith way to avoid engaging with the real issue at hand.)
Mountain Top Media is one local example of bad faith in action. From the comfort of a posh recording studio, undecorated, no-award-nominated civilians complain about the perceived difficulties plaguing their lives while surrounded by expensive patriotic merchandise.
From left to right: Mountain Top Media personalities pose for a group photo at the Sound House, the rhinestone-bedazzled flag tumbler that often accompanies Leslie Sawyer while she suffers endlessly in a country that is absolutely being destroyed by the leftists, and Leslie Sawyer poising with Katie Gorman in front of a product-placement flag.
Pesky facts need not apply, and when they do get in the way, they are quickly swaddled in bad faith and set aside. When it’s a public servant like Kamala Harris, former prosecutor and Senator/Attorney General now serving as Vice President of the United States of America, these “patriots” quickly show their true colors as by mocking and shaming her.
Yet, when it’s anyone who aligns with their conservative values, our same “patriots” cheer and wrap them in American flags even as they hear things like:
– The former Republican president was convicted of 34 felonies and has pending cases involving many more, and was found to have committed sexual assault in a civil matter
– A current supervisor has used taxpayer money to go across the country to visit the man who promised to pay for hand-counted voting, mocks constituents for pleading that money be spent wisely while raking in ELOP funds on the government dime, reportedly attempted to rape a high school classmate at a pool party, and has been involved in a pattern of abuse against women and minors in the decades since
– That same man who had pledged to pay for a local hand-count system (and subsequent possible litigation) was forced to vacate a Shakopee warehouse for not paying rent, owes millions in legal fees, had Fox News drop him as an advertiser over a payment dispute (he reportedly owes them $8 million dollars), and has been sued repeatedly for election-related lies
Mountain Top Media shares another product placement flag behind the head of a man whose only consistent trait has been narcissism.
These certainly seem to be the “heroes” Mountain Top Media and its ilk cannot stop drooling over. It’s un-American, and I personally reject this faux patriotism. Someone can wear flag gear all day, every day, but it does not make them a veteran, a public servant, an expert, or a journalist. I strongly encourage all of you to resist the urge to click, engage, or even spread awareness through valid criticisms. One of the problems facing the community is a tendency to treat these God/country/family LARPers like a roadside car accident—horrific, but to be stared at nonetheless. Deny them the attention and benefits exposure. Heck, maybe even do yourself a sanity favor and block them into oblivion. We value freedom of speech, but especially when “free” is a fitting value for a pretty worthless statement, remember that you can usually still decide what you’ll listen to.
Things are changing—now that Kamala Harris is a contender for the upcoming presidential election, bigotry has been running rampant, especially in the social media world. Maybe it’s time for us to all stop conveniently forgetting that Donald Trump was a registered Democrat and that he and his daughter Ivanka had actually donated to Harris back in 2013 and 2014 when she was running for re-election (this donation would have been after he had already returned to the Republican party in April of 2012). Trump has even said that the economy did better under Democrats. The importance of past behavior to the MAGA crowd has been rather selective. It’s not your moral character or basic human decency, but your perceived party preferences that seem to ultimately determine whether a MAGA follower will forgive and forget—or do the exact opposite, and fact-checking be damned.
So here’s my proposition. Those of you who actually care about real democracy, those of you who want a better life (for EVERYONE, not just for yourselves), and those of you who want this country to stand for something more meaningful than an hour of badly-articulated kvetching about imaginary problems into a microphone: the time is now.
Go watch Kamala Harris deliver this important message at her first rally in Wisconsin.
“We won’t go back.”
If you’ve seen what Shasta County has gone through over the last several years, that address feels a touch more personal. Since 2021, we have consistently made the news for all the wrong reasons. We’ve watched people put on a whole show of being angry and intimidating, threatening to come to our houses, using the internet as a weapon of harassment, trying to take our jobs and our good names by playing dirty and sneaky until we’re so tired of standing for the truth that we want to sit down. They think they’re the scary ones, so they’ve been altogether too comfortable abusing power and breaking the same rules that actual patriots died to protect.
In the pro-Trump camp, it’s all about law and order—until certain people don’t like the laws or they decide that it’s time to insurrect the order.
They think it’s just fine to call lifelong conservative cattle-rancher and dedicated public servant Supervisor Mary Rickert a “RINO” because she committed the grave sin of being so deeply invested in serving her community that she can also resonate effectively with the people who probably wouldn’t agree with her about every political issue.
They think it’s just fine to still insult Leonard Moty, the former police chief and county supervisor who was recalled because a bunch of locals started wearing tacky shirts and making cringeworthy documentary propaganda. Remember the Red, White, and Blueprint with its absurd fantasy-footage of life from the perspective of the so-called patriots? That wasn’t reality. If you really want to push your liver to the limit, turn that same docu-series into a drinking game where you just take a tiny little sip each time you see outlandish images of squeaky-clean oversized trucks, expensive boots that have never seen a hard day’s work, or someone talking a big game about the country lifestyle despite not even being from Shasta County or having any real insight beyond the bought-and-paid-for opportunity to smile for a shiny camera. Maybe schedule a doctor’s appointment before you do that.
The Trump supporters think a whole lot of absolutely disgusting behavior is just fine. But the rest of us? Those of us who just want this to be a country where no one gets treated like garbage over how they were born? Those of us who want the rich to stop profiting wildly at the expense of the middle class and the poor? We’re angry. Unlike the groupies greedily snatching up Anselmo money contributions after his Hollywood foray was a swing-and-a-miss, we are really not acting. We’ll sit quietly down in the chambers of the Board of Supervisors to make a point about the lies. For all these feisty comments about a “civil war,” it seems that certain violence-obsessed people really haven’t given quite enough thought to what happens if they just keep on attacking the people who have now spent several years trying to keep disagreements peaceful and productive.
The anger is nothing new, but now we have hope. If you want to talk about how Joe Biden is a “coward” for dropping out of the race—save it. That man already faced down one of the most contentious elections the world has ever seen. If people in Shasta County think the threats of political violence have been wild, just imagine a day in the life of a president who has spent a term in office being constantly accused by the willfully ignorant who refuse to accept that he simply won by enough votes. If you want to talk about the supposed misdeeds of Kamala Harris, I hope you actually watched the video of her at the Wisconsin rally, and you might also want to check out a few examples of her questioning the likes of William Barr, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Sessions. Still think that our energetic Vice President who is already breaking records for the most campaign donations in presidential election history in a 48-hour period is a worse choice than the person who was recently convicted of 34 felonies and has more indictments still pending? If you have something to say, don’t be like Mountain Top Media. Make your words count for something. Or maybe we’re done listening.
Silence DoGood is an anonymous guest writer who would like to help stop the insanity in Shasta County. Motivated by the strong desire to go back to doing the dishes instead of worrying about a potential civil war, DoGood seeks to bring humor, sarcasm, and insight to the sane folks who have resisted the very reasonable urge to move somewhere that isn’t currently determined to eat itself.
