Stalin, Mao, and the nice lady who runs the county health department

The function of criticism at the present time is to figure out various ways to keep religious lunatics from destroying this country:

In late January, Moss came face to face with the head of the department that he saw as most responsible for trampling freedom in Ottawa County. Adeline Hambley, a 43-year-old with long gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses, had started with the county’s health department 19 years earlier as a field septic inspector.

In one of the previous board’s last acts, the commissioners had picked her to replace her retiring boss. To the old board, Hambley seemed like a person who could work with the new Ottawa Impact board members. She had a reputation for being steady and calm. As the longtime head of the health department’s environmental division, she had nothing to do with coronavirus policy or the mask mandate that had so infuriated Moss and his supporters.

To Moss, Hambley wasa barrier to badly needed change. It was not clear under state law whether they could remove her without cause. And so here she was, standing nervously before the board. “Hi, I met a couple of you, and everyone else, nice to meet you,” she said, before launching into a rapid-fire summary of her 120-person department’s dozens of responsibilities.

Moss and the new board members did not seem interested in any of it. “I just want to be clear that the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners has a very firm stance on mandates, and there will not be mandates in Ottawa County,” he told her.

“We do issue orders regularly as far as systems that have sewage on the ground,” Hambley replied.

“I was referring to mandates regarding parental rights and the once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic. That kind of thing,” Moss said.

Moss and the board’s choice to run the county health department was Nathaniel Kelly, an HVAC service manager with degrees from an online university and no experience working in public health. Kelly, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, had regularly pushed discredited covid treatments, such as the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin.

Before Moss could install Kelly, he needed a reason to fire Hambley. Then came a report on an obscure right-wing website that thehealth department wasa sponsor of a local public university’s “Sex Ed Week,” which included an event called “Kinky Karaoke” and information about polyamory.

Hambley’s office issued a press release saying the health department’s role in the student-organized eventwas limited to testing for sexually transmitted diseases, which it did monthly on the campus. The new county administrator ordered Hambley to retract the statement, claiming it was a lie.

And Moss, appearing on a conservative radio show, suggested Hambley was engaged in a coverup. “There needs to be accountability,” he said. The next day, Hambley filed a lawsuit in state court, accusing the board of micromanaging the department and illegally attempting to dismiss her without cause.

This is just a small piece of a fascinating article in the WAPO about how radicalized evangelical Christian zealots took over the government in Ottawa County, which is one of the whitest and most conservative places in Michigan, but somehow also in the grip of various satanic cabals. (The county had always been run by old-style boring Republican white guys before the insurrectionists took over). A key subtext to all this is the way that even the most moderate pandemic restrictions — and they were extremely moderate in the USA — radicalized and deranged people whose grip on reality was already tenuous to begin with.

It’s very much worth reading.