SLO County Connections to January 6 Capitol Attack
Nearly two years before the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, I published a book about combating disinformation.
I had concluded my story about my trials and tribulations involving CalCoastNews, a San Luis Obispo County-based online tabloid. I decided to not chase down any more leads about them, fact-check their “reporting,” or regularly write columns about the various conspiracy theories they published that they knew were false and defamatory. More people in the community knew exactly who they were and their less-than-stellar journalism ethics. I don’t have to take them on anymore, I thought. Now I could turn my attention to journalism that required me to dive deeper into local issues.
Then on Jan. 6, 2021, my initial reaction to those events was to unravel how we, as a nation, got to that point. Then I stumbled upon some local parallels that wound up intertwining with the insurrection itself.
In 2016, as Donald Trump rose to power with the help of disinformation and conspiracy theories that sowed deep political division, there was a feverish attempt to unseat then-SLO County District 3 Supervisor Adam Hill. Hill, a vocal critic of CalCoastNews, was a frequent target of the tabloid. For example, he was accused by them of being in a years-long campaign to shut down their operation using his liberal…
