Hate Comes to Redlands

This article is a companion story, extending the research beyond  Redlands2024 : a website created by concerned parents, citizens and local antifascists to expose the danger that Christian Nationalism brings to the public education sector and the general public.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has designated October  Hate Crimes Awareness Month . October 2024 also marks the two year anniversary of the first targeted attack by a hate group on the Redlands community that we are aware of. 

From 2022 to now, there has been a rapid rise in right-wing extremist activity towards the LGBTQ+ community in Redlands. As the LGBTQ+ community and its allies pushed back against this wave of hate speech, a rise in hate group activity entered the fray and has continued to support local extremists pushing misinformation about both the queer community and the public education sector. This story serves as direct insight into the hate speech brought into Redlands and how these hate crimes have been resisted by the queer community and its allies. Importantly, we outline actions you as a community member can take to resist the creep of extremism and meaningfully participate in local politics. This insight comes directly from the people on the ground. In this StoryMap you will read about other Southern California school districts (Chino, Temecula, Orange) who were asleep at the wheel, unknowingly letting extremism snatch up positions of power in their city's school boards. Subsequently, these districts have had to spend significant time and resources to recall extremists who have wreaked havoc on their school districts. 

The Inland Empire

Nicknamed the "Jewel of the Inland Empire,” Redlands is known for its orange groves, established trees, Victorian and Craftsman style homes lined with granite slab sidewalks and quaint downtown social spaces. Not a town many would suspect would become a hotbed for right-wing extremism. As national politics skewed into a misinformation highway in 2014, what felt like a thing you only saw on television started to become a local reality in 2021.

Covid-19 vaccinations and masking became a topic of debate among the right, who brought this debate to the school district board room. Armed with false stories and statistics fueled by Facebook misinformation, these "concerned parents" challenged the legitimacy of basic science and drew heightened attention to Redlands school board meetings by filming their own screaming, violence and verbal abuse towards school board members and posting these antics on social media for the world to see.

Christian Nationalists made their debut at a Redlands school board meeting in June 2021 claiming that masks were harming [their] children and demanding schools be opened for good. These speakers often paired their time at the podium with heated bible verses and referred to proponents of mask safety as evil. At one school board meeting a local extremist by the name of JB Marcus asked a mother who sided with mask safety to step outside to discuss it further. Others that became consistent faces at school board meetings were, home-school mom and conspiracy theorist,  Candy Olson ,  Dr. Dale Broome  , who would later go on to fund a school voucher initiative to the tune of half a million and   Jared Gustafson,  a local self-proclaimed pastor and head of the group known as Inland Empire Liberty Coalition, who has a history of abuse allegations, all wielding the same aggressive tone of escalation, stating that COVID was a hoax and that the city should "go back to normal." 

During another meeting, someone in the crowd was documented shouting "Heil Hitler".

 Link to "Heil Hitler" video 

Local school board meetings continued to grow more contentious between those that chose safety and those that chose personal pride. The district responded with installation of metal detectors and increased police presence, even prohibiting cameras and water bottles inside the meetings at one point. As these extremists became frustrated with not only the new safety measures at the board meetings, they became increasingly agitated having not been given carte blanche to implement their demands in local public schools. At the September 2021 meeting Jared Gustafson chose to escalate with threats and  doxxed both Board Member Alex Vara  and a mother attending the board meeting. 

Doxxed/Doxxing is the publishing of private or identifying information, usually home address, to the public with malicious intent

Redlands school board meetings would continue to see challenges in making space for the growing crowds. One side bringing aggression, misinformation and visitors from towns far from Redlands—the other a disparate group of parents and community members challenging this rise of misinformation and hate. A local community against hate was forming.

Enter Safe Redlands Schools (SRS). A community of parents and allies who formed in the wake of covid-19 deniers and anti-safety proponents. Safe Redlands Schools, a group made of parents refused to allow this loud and wrong minority take up all the space in school board meetings. SRS positioned themselves squarely in opposition to misinformation and the creep of Christian Nationalist activity that endangers the public school systems and communities.

October 2022 Redlands USD School Board Member Patty Holohan was up for reelection in Area 1. A new candidate, new to Redlands entered the field to run in opposition to Holohan: Erin Stepien, a corporate biotech executive who brought not only hefty financing but also the trending conservative platform of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-CRT messaging, messaging ripe for conservative ears. Stepien hired Candy Olson as her campaign manager. This was a huge red flag to Safe Redlands Schools organizers. As Stepien’s campaign became established in the race, she turned to social media to continue the practice of posting misinformation about local queer events in Redlands. Her social media accounts, (likely ran by Olson) tagged members of outside hate groups, individuals from many different towns and cities across the country who shared a growing agitation, feeding off similar misinformation.

Organizers at Safe Redlands Schools had become well aware of Candy Olson, having been face-to-face with her at school board meetings. This team-up by the right prompted SRS organizers to start recording behavior, noting dates, archiving screenshots and collecting receipts. This would mark the beginning of the data collection that you see here on this StoryMap.

Ultimately, Candy's/Stepien's calls were answered by groups known as  Gays Against Groomers  (GAG), Latino Exit (LEXIT) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated hate group   known as the "Proud Boys"  who were active in planning the January 6th Insurrection. This combination of groups would press forward in support of this hate speech, as they organized to attend and disrupt the October 25, 2022 school board meeting. Safe Redlands Schools had spent months preparing for this escalation and put a call out to the community to show up, and that they did. 

This meeting, while heavily attended by progressive community members resisting the wave of extremist activity was not without right-wing theatrics. Frank Rodriguez of GAG, from Orange County stepped up to the podium and opened his comments to the board by screaming "You're all pedophiles!" LEXIT members, Proud Boys, Stepien campaign staffers and supporters verbally attacked  LGBTQ+ and Redlands community members (including minors) in an attempt to intimidate oppositional voices. The abnormally large crowd (news agencies reported up to 1,000 but it was closer to 300) drew larger area news coverage from KCAL, which was later published in  their reporting . 

October 2022 marked a turning point in how the Redlands community would respond to extremist activity in their own town. Safe Redlands Schools had effectively organized and brought together a large number of people from within the community to stand in opposition to these hate groups.While a resounding success, this came with consequences, the bullies had been embarrassed and they were angry. From then on, Redlands started continuously facing a barrage of attacks that followed a pattern, paired with violent threats and intimidation from predominantly out-of-town agitators who backed a few local extremists. The Christian Nationalist groups associated with Candy Olson continued to amplify hate speech spreading it further and further across Redlands. The amount and frequency of this messaging varied but consistently centered bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, and later xenophobia, Islamophobia and Antisemitism.

How this hate was showcased also varied: large banners hung on freeway overpasses, stickers or posters glued to storefronts, hate group symbols posted to intersection signs, hundreds of flyers littered across Citrus Plaza and Redlands High School, miles of Antisemitic propaganda strewn throughout the city. Some of the events were targeted at Redlands residents directly using their names (due to being doxxed). Some residents had their homes targeted, one organizer’s trans teenager had their tires slashed. Threatening letters, printed photos of their deceased sister, and cryptic postcards are among some of the things sent to this same organizer’s address, along with defaced photos of her face glued to her front door. All because she was standing up for children's right to exist. For the safety of the victims, names have been withheld from the data. The events were stacking up quick. 

large banners hung on freeway overpasses, stickers or posters glued to storefronts, hate group symbols posted to intersection signs, hundreds of flyers littered across Citrus Plaza and Redlands High School, miles of Antisemitic propaganda...

As the physical hate speech continued to mount, a community of people began offering assistance to SRS. These folks added to the data SRS had been collecting by establishing information networks and using SRS organizers as a hub. Teams were then built to both deal with the physical hate speech and document the data in spreadsheets. Classifying it using GPS location, the day it was found, material, messaging, symbols and other characteristics. This data set would become so large that a more practical visual tool was needed. 

Enter the heat map -Blue represents the lower count (say 1 or 2), like one banner. -Yellow represents the higher count (in the hundreds), like hundreds of posters. Some events were more significant based on quantity, others due to size, some due to direct targeting of people, others due to the hate speech language itself but here they are only cataloged by density.

In exploring the next heat map, one can see the density of the attacks centered in Redlands. Each of these events was responded to by a community member or ally that took it upon themselves to document and remove the hate messaging from Redlands and beyond. Most large-scale events (large banners placed high upon 30-foot billboards) would have remained for multiple days if it were not for community members scaling the billboards and taking them down.

Click on the map to explore locations targeted

Redlands is considered a politically purple area: a blend of conservatives and progressives, but is it shifting with the national political winds? 

The idea of the  Overton window  can help us make sense of this rise in extremism. This window, or, spectrum of acceptability, describes what is considered politically acceptable within political policy in a particular time and place. What the public deems as acceptable public policy relates to how in-crisis a country is at a given time. As Trumpism seeped into a broader segment of society, hate speech would become mainstream and has had disastrous impacts on  policy targeting the LGBTQ+ community . These national policy positions, pushed along by large conservative think-tanks, would stand to reinforce local bigotry by those who sought to spearhead shifting Redlands from purple to red. 

"Wokism," Critical Race Theory (CRT) and LGBTQ culture would become the next topics fear-mongerers espoused to their base as they grasped for power. Each of these topics deserves its space, deeper understanding and recognition in how our society can be more intelligent, more inclusive and enact vital social change. But instead, these words became a frequent scapegoating tool at the level of local politics, used to fill the podium and continue the agitation of the Christian Nationalist base. Redlands would continue to face the echo chambers of conservative talk radio (local radio host and Redlands Tea Party founder Greg Brittain, notably accelerated by alt-right social media) as they called on their base to save America from this shifting boogeyman.

In the wake of the previous school board meeting, continuous misinformation campaigns (from Candy Olson, Erin Stepien, Inland Empire Liberty Coalition, Redlands Tea Party and others) against the Redlands School Board were well underway. Their new topic: book banning. The November 2022 school board meeting, led by board member Jim O'Neill, hosted legal council and a librarian from Redlands East Valley High School to dispute all previous claims made by the loud extremist audience in the months prior. Borrowing boilerplate verbiage from larger national conservative bodies (CNP and CRI), these extremists targeted a very specific set of books—namely ones written by and about marginalized people.

Many community members were not familiar with the standards and procedures RUSD maintains for materials in their libraries. O’Neill explained that proper vetting was performed on all the "objected to" titles and that vetting is based on a variety of educational state standards to assign books to appropriate grade levels. O’Neill and the librarian explained that any parent can choose to prevent any book from being accessed/issued to their child at any time by following an established process. Meaning that instead of challenging a certain book's presence at a school site, demanding the book be banned for all students, a parent can choose to not allow their child access that book. Yet at the time of the meeting, O'Neill stated that not a single person had attempted to submit the document to restrict access to any book, despite months of manufactured agitation over the subject.

"any parent can choose to prevent any book from being accessed/issued to their child at any time by following an established process."

An election ultimately occurred and the incumbent candidate Patty Holohan for Area 1 remained victorious in the election results by nearly a 2:1 vote. Stepien lost, but the damage these groups inflicted on other cities became clear after election day. Neighboring Chino, Temecula and Orange school districts saw their school boards flip towards an extremist majority. The fact that Redlands voted against bringing in Erin Stepien sent a message that would further agitate the extremist hate crowd. The local resistance that Safe Redlands Schools mobilized towards this Christian Nationalist pressure helped inform the public and defend the school board, for now…

The perpetual national news cycle manufacturing culture wars around LGBTQ+ culture, book banning and CRT had fueled a fire in local right-wing extremist groups. With this unfounded claim of harm to children, local extremists decided they needed to escalate their threats towards LGBTQ+ community members, this happened on two fronts. Blatant hate groups such as the Proud Boys stepped up their tactics with literal fash-trash. The other faction of these extremists, the electorally minded, formed a nonprofit called  Awaken Redlands  in April 2023. Awaken Redlands claims to be "a non-partisan group of parents and community members focused on preserving traditional values in our city and schools” (Source: Awaken Redlands website) but the true intentions of Awaken Redlands is to provide a nonprofit funding front for the school board candidates of 2024; Candy Olson,  Jeannette Wilson , the event coordinator for Inland Empire Liberty coalition, and  Lawrence Hebron, an Islamophobic author who has self-published three books espousing hatred toward Arab people and the Muslim faith. 

Today, Safe Redlands Schools and the parents, engineers, teachers, mental health professionals, artists, writers, cartographers and so, so many more in our community are dedicated and already working on round 2 of keeping those with fascistic ideologies away from positions of power. Local news is woefully under-resourced and or unwilling to call these right-wing extremists what they are with their full chests, but we aren’t, and we’re counting on your bravery. Awaken Redlands crowd have drawn attention from major bodies like the Capital Resource Institute (CRI), Council for National Policy (CNP), Moms 4 Liberty and Turning Point USA and now have a troubling influence in local electoral politics, providing templates, training and funding to allow for the extremists like Candy Olson,  Jeannette Wilson  and  Lawrence Hebron  to weaponize their positions on the Redlands school board should they win them. (For a deep dive into how the Awaken Redlands extremists are tied to those national bodies,   visit this link  .)

Local news is woefully under-resourced and or unwilling to call these right-wing extremists what they are with their full chests, but we aren’t...

We need your help spreading this information. This is why we’ve created this interactive fash-trash map of Redlands. So you, and the Redlands community can see for yourselves the hateful messaging that is only the tip of the iceberg. 

If Awaken Redlands and Co. are willing to send men with records of violence to woman and children and to the homes of families, what are they willing to do once in a position of local government?

Let's not find out.

As a quick and important aside, we all recognize a swastika when we see it, but what about other hate group symbols? Would you recognize them? What would you do if you saw a swastika? Ignore it? What would that lead to if you did? What about if you saw a series of hate symbols put in the places you shop? Would you do anything if it wasn't directly targeting you? Ignoring symbology plays a role in allowing the spread of hate. One set of predominant symbols you should familiarize yourself with in the context of this article are the Proud Boy hate group symbols:

The following is a visual timeline that showcases the escalation of hate symbols and hate messaging that has targeted Redlands, its community members and surrounding areas, as well as the escalation over time to physical violence and even murder. It comprises a time period from December 2022 to October 2024. Proud Boys often bragged via social media posts about installing them or were documented on-site when the community went to remove them. Begin the tour be clicking on the first image to reveal further details.

We cannot afford as a community to look the other way. Think; this may not effect you now, but will that always be the case? Think; are you a safe space for your community? What are you doing to showcase that?

If hate speech continues to permeate the fabric of Redlands, it will tarnish the reputation of the town. But more is at stake than reputation. With a rise in hate speech comes inherent violence.

Reject the Mainstreaming of Extremist Narratives: 

We must name hate when we see it and refuse to let its purveyors whitewash extremism and monopolize public discourse. Dog whistles such as “parental rights,” “traditional values,” or “men’s rights,” help mainstream misogyny and white supremacy. Whether you see it online, in your community, or among elected officials, call this rhetoric out for what it is: deliberate fear-mongering and disinformation with a result of harm. 

A “Dog Whistle” is political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people, but which also communicates something more insidious either to a subset of the audience or outside of the audience’s conscious awareness — a covert appeal to some noxious set of views

Get Involved:

A vibrant democracy represents all of its citizens and requires your participation. Vote local and down ballot! We hope you’ll use this Storymap and Redlands2024 to inform your decision of local candidates. We encourage you to get involved with the Redlands school board and city council, attending the meetings, as well as participating in local elections. Be active, express and perform acts of solidarity with communities that are under attack and join events that uplift their voices. We all have a role to play to ensure all members of our community have equal rights.

October is  Hate Crimes Awareness Month , it’s also when this story began, but this October we give you this fash-trash heat map in-hopes that come next month, November, we do everything possible to put an end to this chapter of Redlands' history.