MAGA majority turns Surf City into a fascistic Holy Land
Holocaust-challenged mayor leads the way in 2024 with support from her God appointed co-ministers. Pastor Joe Pedick rejoices because "it brings great joy."
This is one in a series of occasional articles examining rising neo-fascism in Huntington Beach, its consequences and efforts to defeat it.
How does it relate to the theme behind SoCal Water Wars?
Simply put, all politics are local and today’s city council person could end up on your local, regional, or state water board tomorrow.
Also, many water agencies are run by cities and Huntington Beach has its own water agency. HB is a microcosm of the current political state of our nation, if any city is.
We either learn from that and act accordingly or ignore it at our peril.
On December 7, 2016 I posted my article, “Surf City commissioner pushes Jewish-Marxist conspiracy theory” in Surf City Voice, the predecessor publication to SoCal Water Wars.
The article caused “a storm of criticisms” at the time that led to the forced “resignation” of Michael Hoskinson from the city planning commission on which he served under then city-councilmember Erik Peterson.
In December 2022 Gracey Van Der Mark and three other newly elected hard-core MAGA partisans, Tony Strickland, Pat Burns, and Casey McKeon became the majority on the seven-member Huntington Beach City Council.
Strickland was voted by his fellow partisans to be mayor for the year and Van Der Mark was chosen for mayor pro-tem, eschewing the council’s traditional (but not always followed) non-partisan rotational process for selecting the mayor.
It was the self-proclaimed Fab-4’s first of many acts of cronyism.
Van Der Mark quickly appointed Michael Hoskinson as vice-chair of the city’s Citizen Participation Advisory Board. The board advises the council on dispersion of federal Community Development Block Grant funds for housing, infrastructure, micro-businesses, and community services in low to moderate income communities.
In December 2023 Van Der Mark was chosen by her MAGA partners to take a turn as mayor. In her acceptance speech she thanked key people who helped her rise to the symbolic top of Surf City’s political hierarchy, including Hoskinson.
“I could never have made it without my family, friends and support of our amazing community, including Michael Gates, Kelly Gates, Mike Hoskinson, and Cari Swan,” she said.
Hoskinson’s political reprieve adds to our understanding of Van Der Mark’s extreme right-wing ideology. It also indicates what the future will bring for Huntington Beach if the MAGA majority, plus City Attorney Michael Gates, remains in control.
Gracey’s Trials and Tribulations
Van Der Mark’s rise to the mayor’s position brought rejoicing from her followers, many of whom came to hear their MAGA pastor, Joe Pedick, the Council’s ex-officio chaplain, praise her godliness in the invocation.
“Lord, you said in Proverbs 29, you said when the righteous are in authority the people rejoice,” he hummed. “So Lord, we rejoice. Because Lord, when the right people are in authority it brings great joy.”
Pedick, whom God regularly advises by telling him whatever he wants to hear, said that God appoints people to government as his ministers and that they must do “things that are good and not evil” according to “the sure word of God that is true,” presumably as extrapolated from the Bible by Pedick.
Thanking God for Gracey, he asked “that we as the church, we as amen people, Lord, would always remember to keep her in our prayers. Because Lord, we know that there is a battle that takes place, that we pray that you Lord would prompt us to pray that she is always doing things that are right.”
There should be no doubt, even among non believers, that Gracey has gone through trials and tribulations—both before and after God appointed her to the city council—due to her ties to neo-fascists and at least one future Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol rioter.
Among them was “Baked Alaska” who was kicked off of Twitter in 2016 for using his account to “send out the so-called 14 Words, a popular phrase among neo-Nazis, and posed the question in December 2016: ‘Internet: Why do you want to gas the Jews?’”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Other evidence against her includes video links (long since deleted) posted on her YouTube channel back in 2017 on a playlist she titled Holocaust Hoax Exposed?
The list included the videos Holocaust Hoax Exposed and Marching to Zion, according to news reports, produced by another God-knowing pastor, the notorious anti-Semite Steven Anderson.
Here’s what the Anti-Defamation League said about Anderson’s anti-Semitic videos:
In addition to arguing that it would be impossible for the Nazis to have cremated a million Jews at Auschwitz [in Exposed], Anderson claims that the slave laborers there got compensated for their work and could buy items at a commissary. He further asserts that Jews were able to play on a soccer team and act in musicals and plays at Auschwitz.
The film [Marching to Zion], released in March 2015, refers to Judaism as the “synagogue of Satan” and claims that Jews are followers of the Antichrist. He also asserts that Jews who deny that Jesus is the Messiah would lie about the Holocaust. He argues, “Why would it surprise you that the people who deny the Christ, who deny that Jesus is the messiah, would lie to you about something else?”
Anderson warns that the “real Holocaust” for the Jews will occur if they don’t accept Jesus as the Messiah. He says, “The real burnt offering is going to be when all of these Jews that don’t believe in Jesus Christ go to hell for eternity. That’s the oven that they ought to be worried about.”
Below is a letter sent in 2018 by the ADL to the Ocean View School District in Orange County, California, asking its school board to remove Van Der Mark from a citizens oversight committee, citing the Holocaust denial video and her far-right associations.
Van Der Mark claimed that she linked to the videos for research purposes after they were sent to her by a Jewish organizer she met at a racial justice workshop [that she and other far-right activists disrupted].
Describing herself as an open-minded truth seeker, whom intolerant liberals want to silence with false accusations of racism and anti-Semitism, Van Der Mark uses the same far-right cliche Hoskinson used to defend himself from critics of his conspiracy theory describing “evil” Jewish-Marxist multiculturalists he says want to destroy western culture.
Her fact-finding tours also delved into Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism with uncritical enthusiasm that makes her defense seem contrived.
We only once heard her say, with a faint “Yes,” that she believes the Holocaust was real.
Councilmember Natalie Moser dragged it out of her at city council last August to determine if she was qualified to sit on an ad-hoc committee that would handle sensitive human rights issues.
The committee was stacked by the previous mayor in order to trash the city’s eloquently written Declaration of Policy on Human Dignity, a bipartisan effort started by former HB Mayor Shirley Dettloff, a democrat, and former Mayor Ralph Bauer, a republican.
Mayor Strickland and City Attorney Michael Gates bullied Moser for her effort, calling it a violation of decorum and unrelated to the agenda item.
Moser’s final punishment—and Van Der Mark’s validation—came on Sept 5 when the MAGA majority censured her.
At the same meeting, the MAGAs voted to replace the Human Dignity declaration with a partisan statement that turned out to be soulless and laced with bigotry.
For example, both the 1996 and 2021 versions of the Declaration of Policy on Human Dignity contain the sentence, “The Huntington Beach City Council states in the strongest terms that it condemns all hate incidents and hate crimes and will vigorously fight criminal activity related to hate with all of the resources at its disposal,” and also refer to racial background, nation of origin, religious practices, sexual orientation, gender, and disability status.
But the city’s new Policy on Human Dignity passed by the MAGA majority is bereft of all such references, eliminating the original document’s intent to prevent hate crimes and incidents based on racism and other forms of bigotry.
Instead, it emphasizes fighting crime in general, including child abuse and “sexual grooming,” an indirect reference to Van Der Mark’s anti-LBGTQ agenda and creation of a book-banning committee.
Instead of denouncing hate based on sexual identifies, it notes the “genetic differences between male and female” and the “strengths and benefits of each” that “warrant separation during certain activities (i.e. sports).”
On the same day, the MAGA majority dissolved the Human Relations Committee that was inspired by deadly hate crimes committed in the city by white supremacists in the 1990s.
A brief history of HB’s Declaration of Policy on Human Dignity as told by Shirley Dettloff, former mayor. Served on the city council 1994-2000.
I was Mayor pro-tem at the time and received a call from a reporter in San Francisco who told me that Huntington Beach was considered the skin-head capital of California. I was taken aback, although I had seen and heard of evidence of them confronting people and recruiting at our local high schools. I immediately went into Ralph Bauer's office where we discussed the issue and remembered other times when members of our community had been attacked. Several years back a black man had been killed on Beach Blvd., and very little notice given to his death. I had a letter from a young woman from out of town who had been confronted on Main St. by a gang of skinheads. She said she would never visit H.B. again. And we had an attack on a Native American on our beach. We also had a history of racism with the John Birch Society. So we called on the head of the Human Relations group for the County to get direction on how to confront the issue. He said it would never work unless we had full City Council support, along with the clergy. So Ralph and I, along with staff and Former Police Chief Lowenberg, wrote the Human Dignity Statement which has been signed by every city council up until 2023. The current city council did not sign the statement, but rewrote it to be almost useless.
Surf City’s rising tide of official bigotry
Even with the rise of local Tea Party politics in the city in 2014, overt bigotry could still get a person kicked off a citizens committee serving an elected body within the city, whether on the city council or local school board.
That happened to Hoskinson in 2016 (as noted above) and to Van Der Mark in 2018 when the Ocean View school board took her off a citizens oversight committee due to her neo-fascist associations.
In 2018, Van Der Mark again faced calls for her removal from the city’s Finance Advisory Committee for the same reasons. But Councilmember Patrick Brenden, her sponsor, stood by her side.
Today, she is the mayor of Huntington Beach and co-rules the city with her fascistic MAGA cohorts. And Michael Hoslinson’s dream has finally become reality.
“We’re on track to hopefully take our city over,” Michael Hoskinson bragged, while giving a lecture to a local Tea Party gathering in 2016.
Related story: Surf City Commissioner pushed Jewish-Marxist conspiracy theory
