Home A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office
Home A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office

A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office

Early Saturday morning, a bearded perpetrator in a hooded jacket, wearing gloves, smashed the glass door and windows of the Humboldt Republican headquarters with rocks. He poured an unknown liquid into the storefront office before escaping on a bike into the streets of Eureka in the pre-dawn hours.

There was one obvious clue. The bike had a giant BERNIE sticker on it.

When police caught up to the alleged perpetrator, Michael Valls attempted to escape on his bike, then he tried throwing the bike at the cops, and, when he was finally taken into custody, gave authorities a false name. But police caught him with the Trump flag that he had stolen from the vandalized office.

The Bernie Sanders supporter was charged with burglary, felony vandalism, attempted arson, resisting arrest, and providing a false name. The chemical liquid he had poured inside the office turned out to be flammable. Bail was set at only $25,000, and Valls was out of prison by Sunday. It is California after all.

And in an atmosphere of rising radical violence, maybe this story wouldn’t be so extraordinary.

But this wasn’t the first time that this happened to the Humboldt GOP HQ. It was the sixth time.

Not in a decade, but in only two years.

The small hole in the wall office on 5th Street in Eureka, unprepossessing tan walls, blue framed windows and single door, could just as easily be the bar next door or the burger place across the street. Aside from its narrow “Republican Headquarters” sign, it could just as easily be mistaken for a small business.

The 300 block of 5th Street with a Starbucks and Wells Fargo, adjacent to two motels and an AV shop, seems like an unlikely place for a pitched battle between radical leftism and the national norms. But that’s exactly what the extended campaign against the modest storefront with its “Republicans Register Here” notice and Trump signage on a street in this small 27,000 population city represents.

The small office with its American flag fan banners, a few tables and a bookcase is on the front line of a new war between radical leftist extremists and remaining conservatives in a formerly conservative area.

The windows of the office had been previously smashed in April of last year, before the release of the Mueller report. Like this latest attack, that assault had happened late at night over the weekend. After smashing through the windows with rocks, the “Make America Great Again” sticker was replaced with a “Keep America Green” sticker from the Sierra Club. Nothing says environmentalism like vandalism.

Eureka lefties justified the attack because the office has large cardboard cutouts of Reagan and Trump.

In March 2019, a window had been smashed. In August of 2018, the office was vandalized again, leaving behind signs reading, “Fake President Impeach + Indite”, “45 = Lies House of Lies”, and “Guantanamo and Torture x 20 Years 45 and all supporters." A “Make America Great Again” sign had been crossed out and the elephant on the “Republican Headquarters” sign had been defaced.

A month earlier, President Trump had nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

The windows of the Humboldt Republican Headquarters have been broken three times in two years. They’ve been covered with plywood so often that it’s become a familiar sight. And while this latest incident was the most severe, previous episodes of vandalism had marred the windows, defaced signs, and tried to cause as much damage as possible with whatever the leftist vandals had at hand.

This latest attack is expected to cost thousands of dollars in repairs. Previous acts of leftist vandalism had cost in the $700 range.

And despite the leftist signs, the Eureka Police Department dismissed it as “random vandalism”.

"The local police say, ‘Oh, it’s random vandalism,’ except it’s happened five times to us and nobody else,” Humboldt County GOP Chairman John Schutt said.

"This is the 5th time in two years and on prior occasions I have been told these are random acts of vandalism. Interesting the Democrat Office has not had any 'random acts of vandalism'", the Humboldt GOP noted last year.

There’s nothing random about 6 attacks on a Republican office either carried out by identifiable lefties, leaving behind leftist signage, or specifically defacing Republican signage. That’s as deliberate as it gets.

But Humboldt County, once a Republican area, had swung leftward. And the HQ has become a symbol of everything that the new radical population hates. During the Kavanaugh debate, lefty protesters had gathered outside the small office with signs like, “Party of the Predators” and “Stop Rapeublicans”.

The lefty protesters targeted the office even though it had nothing to do with Kavanaugh and had already been vandalized two months earlier.

When local lefties can’t get to D.C. marches, they target the Humboldt County HQ. That’s where opponents of the Bill of Rights appear toting signs like "Massacre Mitch" and "Republicans: Shame on you!"

Reagan was the last Republican to win Humboldt County which has passed its own sanctuary measure. And Eureka, with its large homeless population and regular anti-Trump protests, leans lefty.

The Humboldt County Republican headquarters has faced a uniquely sustained assault on its existence. It is not the only Republican office to be targeted for vandalism and harassment, but the persistence of the attacks and the general disregard of the authorities, is unique and revelatory. This is the first time an arrest has been made despite the presence of surveillance equipment and attackers who leave handwriting samples. And the one man arrested for this latest incident is already back on the street.

“This is about your friends and neighbors and coworkers and people you live with here. It’s just sad that we can’t exercise our First Amendment rights in peace,” Schutt noted back in 2018. “There is not one member of my party here that would go down and do this down the street at the Democrat office.”

The Humboldt County Democrats enjoy an all-glass office on 4th Street. If there were a random violence problem, somebody would have taken a rock to it by now. That’s because there’s nothing random here.

The sustained assault on the Humboldt County Republican headquarters is not the work of one man, but of a culture of intolerance and hatred. It can be summed up by the Bernie sticker on the bike that the vandal threw at law enforcement as he was trying to make his getaway from the scene of the crime.

In 2017, James Hodgkinson, another Bernie Sanders supporter, came to a Republican charity baseball game with a list of the names of Freedom Caucus members and opened fire. The FBI coverup of that attack, which falsely claimed that it was a spontaneous act with no motive, has yet to be investigated.

Like the “random vandalism” in Eureka, the assassination of Republicans was also treated as random.

Civil wars begin in small ways. They’re born out of intolerance. A refusal to coexist. A failure to enforce the law. To punish violence against people different than the ones who hold political power.

In recent weeks, Project Veritas Action has released videos of Sanders staffers threatening violence before and after a possible victory. The media has maintained a tight ban on covering these videos.

In Jacksonville, Florida, earlier this month, Gregory Timm drove a truck into a Republican voter registration tent to take a stand against President Trump. It is no coincidence that the attacks on the Humboldt County Republican headquarters are linked to Trump’s victory. Or that they’ve been excused by some local lefties because the GOP HQ dared to have Trump material on the premises.

There is nothing random or isolated about the reality that the Democrats have become radicalized.

Radicalism doesn’t just mean the embrace of increasingly extreme policies from denying basic biology to taking away everyone’s health insurance to demanding open borders and suppressing free speech.

There is no meaningful separation between extreme policies and extreme tactics. Anyone willing to take away your rights is also willing to put a rock through your window. That’s what we’re seeing in Eureka.

And across America.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.


Comments

  1. i remember when Dems and Reps shared a office during election time. The room was split with one party on each side. People stood around and talked about candidates and never got mad.

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  2. Anonymous25/2/20

    These Leftists are so sure of their towering
    superiority that personal injury and property
    damage is easy; no consequences. Civilization
    is fragile in the hands of spoiled children.

    Charlie

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  3. And when we make groups like the Proud Boys to fight back against them and their groups like antifa, we all condemn them. The left praises antifa the worse they do, and we say "it's beneath us" when someone wants to hit back.

    The civil war is already here just like Israel is at war, just they attack and we don't attack back.

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  4. Anonymous25/2/20

    I don not know the actual election stats for the Humboldt area but my Sister graduated from Humboldt around 1973. Our Father is a devout anti-Communist and passed that on to me but he had a friend named Carl Prussian who was a former Communist underground recruiter who turned and became an FBI informant. When he heard that my sister had graduated from there he chastised my Dad, Why did you send her THERE?!? That was my most fertile recruiting ground. It may have voted Republican in the 80's but in the 60's it was fertile recruiting ground for the CPUSA.

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  5. Nothing like your hometown in the news. But yes the windows and doors have been smashed out six times in two years. People with Trump stickers on their cars get keyed,spit on, nasty notes left on the windshield, or they just break out the window.

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  6. Anonymous25/2/20

    IMHO, this all resulted from the fake environmental movement and even worse back to nature movement that infected California via the hippies.

    While I would agree that uncontrolled clear cutting and failure to replace trees needed to stop, the near total destruction of the logging and lumber industries was NOT an improvement. These real jobs were soon replaced by the MJ grow industry. These small independent growers gradually were replaced by the drug cartel large grow operations manned by illegal aliens.

    It is not safe to go very far into those wooded areas, even in national parks. There is a lot more to this story, but that is the basic outline. Basically, the LEO's from local to state to fed stand aside for the most part. It is probably not worth going after these operators, if you get the drift.

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  7. Anonymous26/2/20

    What did you expect? Failure to reply by the authorities, no matter what their politics, to violent aggression in what is a already a low level civil war, just encourages thee enemy to continue. The irony here is that so many leftist authorities are actively colluding (by ignoring) the activities of the Antifa type scum who commit these crimes. In my world, like those in the UK and any and ALL authorities, including elected representatives, staff and on call advisors(psychologists and sociologists etc.) should be brought to trial for their dereliction of duty. The alternative as we have seen in ?NZ(still suspect in my mind) and Germany is the unleashing of our own pent up anger and making the civil war an open on. Local authorities are always too comfortable and the larger the city the worse they are. Accountability has to the ENFORCED.

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  8. This will continue as long as the Right allows it. When Conservatives have had enough, it will then turn ugly.

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  9. Anonymous26/2/20

    Unknown commented: "The civil war is already here just like Israel is at war, just they attack and we don't attack back."

    Excellent comment. However, unlike Israel, the non-left in the Western world has no "We". This is why the non-left is losing and will lose to the left who are nothing but "We"; "We" is their modus operandi.

    The non-left to conservatives is made up only of other conservatives -- this is their mistake. The non-left is made up not only of conservatives but of a mass of people who are genuine Independents -- not merely political independents who vote issues and ideas and never party -- but elemental Independents as human beings who are non-partisan by nature -- lone wolf anomalies who are not aligned to any hive or colony politically or philosophically or in any manner. Such independents include an authentic diversity of differing peoples and for a brief time in the 20th century independents were the stabilizing keel that kept the ships of left and right from capsizing into war or anarchy by confronting both with their hypocrisies and agendas. But this required a free media and when it died so did any possibility of Independents speaking to either side.

    As a natural born life time Independent who associated for decades with the left because I was young and full of myself and was repelled by the mean vindictiveness of what constituted conservatives back then. But as the left metastasized into outright globalist socialist/communist totalitarianism (which is what we are living in now), I was repulsed and fled to the anti-left (and gave up left-warped friends, family and career).

    All the while shaking my head at how conservatives constantly remain the architects of their own misfortunes. By inertia, corruption, selling each other out for money and status, willful refusal to admit the reality of the operationalization of human evil and not merely its moral existence, playing by rules that the other side mock as the dead games of idiots, pushing away anyone who does not align exactly to a conservative's "party line" thus alienating a critical mass of anti-left allies. I see it every day in online articles and comments -- the constant attacking one another or anyone deviating the slightest bit, and think, this is why they will lose.

    continued...

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  10. Anonymous26/2/20

    ...continued

    Conservatives cannot seem to grasp that all left wing people do not merely despise conservatives -- you are their Satan literally -- their entire lives (and they get worse with age) are organized around your extermination. I know because I lived amongst them for 40 years and it was this insane hatred of conservatives that drove me from the left. I never particularly liked conservatives but I never hated any of them or blamed them for any problems in my life (I own my own faults and sins!) but hatred of conservatives is what left wing people do! You are not just opposite political views -- you are their nemesis, an Evil that must be Ended for their lives to be "free" - this is how they think and you ignore this truth at your peril. Wake up!

    That is why there is no "we". That is why they will win. There are two things the left does well: Terror (both soft and hard) and the propagandizing of a constituency of raging "We" whose psychological hatreds are laser focused onto anything anti-left: all conservatives and the "right" of course, but also all Independents who are now swept into their leftist hate net. And now it's game over.

    For any truly free mind, this historical moment is a terrible time to be alive. I am old and have an inheritance (that my grandparents and parents worked their asses off to leave me and I bless them for it daily) so I can hide within the far-leftist city I was born in and where lived my entire life -- safe in my Ark with my Archives of the past, my books and films and music and art. Lucky for me I have a genuine monastic nature so just have to remember when I leave my apartment to put on my phony neighbour mask of pretend bland civility (knowing they are all left wing maniacs because I hear their conversations with one another as I pass them and see the papers and magazines they subscribe to in the lobby) and I manage to exist as a sheep in wolves' clothing invisible among the pack of mad dogs that surrounds me.

    Homo homini lupus: Man is a wolf to men.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous27/2/20

    There is always some ‘extinction rebellion’ to justify horrendous crimes. ‘No one is above the law’ mantra only applies to other people’s crimes, thought crimes to be precise. Don´t ask, don´t tell, if you are conservative…

    ReplyDelete

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