Right On Daily Blog

Why does it always have to end this waaaaaay?

First off, your intrepid blogger would like to thank all of the people that have come forward with color on the events leading up to the convention and at the 2025 CAGOP Convention itself. It is heartening to know that several people that are not normally a part of the “establishment” are equally as appalled at the tactics being employed by the opposition.

The CAGOP officer election cycle followed the all-too-familiar pattern.

Step one: The opposition has high hopes, recruits a few good and a few bad candidates.

Step two: Everyone outside the group is labeled a heretic and a traitor to the GOP regardless of ideology

Step three: with the opponents dehumanized, the opposition begins running off the rails with their behavior

Step four: when the tactics fail, the coalition starts to splinter and there is infighting

Step five: Go to CAGOP Convention for a rage fest

Step six: WE WUZ ROBBED!

When I ran Steve Frank’s campaign in 2021 against the McCarthy Machine, I tried as hard as I could to break that curse. As you can see it did not work and the behavior 4 years hence is worse than anything I saw 4 years ago.

For those of you that read that are outside the CAGOP bubble – this post and posts are a synopsis of the of events that occurred at and leading up to the CAGOP Convention concluded last weekend. If you want to know why internal party politics are a mess (and other states have their own issues as well) this is a good primer.

ON Friday afternoon, there is the pre-convention board meeting. Leading up to the convention were fights in 20+ counties over leadership and who the delegates to the party from said counties were going to be. The fighting was fierce and made even more fierce because the legislative leadership did not endorse Corrin Rankin until just days before the convention. Their absence from the majority of the campaign contributed mightily to the false hope many in the opposition clung to leading in to the weekend. The late engagement also made the reaction to the weekend and the aftermath more severe as well in my opinion.

Said meeting started with the antisemite John Paul White serving every member of the board a legal demand letter with a variety of hyperbolic claims, but clearly attempting to set a narrative to undermine the legitimacy of the CAGOP convention. I thought “Conservatives” were against abusing the legal system to achieve political ends? Again, refer to step 3 in the process. As I wrote previously, White falsely claimed the CAGOP Staff was retaliating against him for distributing the letters. My guess is they were all laughing at him and the others behind this.

Also on Friday afternoon, the County Chairman’s Association Met. They elected a new chair. Former SFGOP Chair John Dennis was re-elected “Chair of Chairs”. Going in to the meeting, most observers believed John was going to win by a slim margin. The first vote was tied, meaning a couple of county chairs may well have lied when queried about their position. ON vote #2, Dennis won by 4 votes (or two people).

My experience running organizational elections is that upwards of 20% of the stakeholders will lie about their position on a secret ballot election. (FYI – under Robert’s Rules, officer elections are secret ballot)

I began to hear stories of arguments in the halls of the convention and the like almost from the opening bell.

Saturday Morning featured several “Regional Vice Chair” races.

Joe Day won in the Central Valley

Michael Greer (sp?) – whose son is a high ranking Trump admin appointee beat Charlie Schaupp for North Coast Vice Chair. The opposition supported Schaupp, not the dude whose son is a Senate-Confirmed Trump admin appointee… add that to the list of inconsistencies…

Bay Area – the opposition candidate won

Central Coast – the opposition incumbent, Randal Jordan was beaten handily. It should be noted that Randal took his own home county San Luis Obispo off of the ballot. One could only conclude that Randal knew his grip on power was tenuous or he’d have problems finding 21 people to file – or a combination of both. By not having an election for SLO County GOP Central Committee, this removed 4-6 potential delegate appointments from the opposition column. Given that Randal lost by about 13 votes, you’d think he had other issues as the universe in that tilt was allegedly evenly split.

This theme of hiding from election repeated in other counties as well, most notably Solano County, and a smattering of smaller rural counties. I thought Conservatives were all about voting, and eschewed insider party outcome rigging? My head hurts, make it stop…

In the Northern Region, Mark Wright hammered Tenessa Audette 81-38. You need to know nothing more about Tenessa then the fact that she’d challenge one of her biggest supporters in 2024 for his party office in 2025. I was told that there was some sort of split in the Audette camp late in her ill-fated blowout loss to Heather Hadwick in 2024 and she may well have been attempting some sort of revenge suicide mission against Mr. Wright. See also step four in the above list.

If Tenessa Audette runs for office again, I may well have to unload everything I have learned as I held 90% of what I knew off the pages of this blog. She needs to go somewhere far far away from any position of authority. But remember, she was the opposition darling until she wasn’t.

Effectively, the Opposition lost a board seat on this exchange as the outgoing North Coast Vice Chair was aligned with them. Then, there was a trade of the Bay Area for the Central Coast. The Bay Area Vice Chair is a guy I have known for a long time. He has drank the gerbil special kool-aid and was trashing the incoming CAGOP Officers to mutual acquaintances.

Do you have a headache yet?

On Saturday, one of the two people banned for life from the CAGOP attempted to gain entry in to the convention and was ushered out by security. (I can not confirm if the actual police were called)

… as we continue, we will discuss the elections in the four statewide offices + more garbage and some interesting notes about what happened after the convention was gaveled down.

Opposition leader Tom Hudson

This is the Treasurer of the Marin GOP. The Marin GOP messed up so bad that they were stripped of their delegates to the CAGOP because they did not know Robert’s Rules and failed to have a proper organizational meeting. In short, Francis and crew believed that the outgoing chair was going to try to screw them, but they did not listen to advice (shocker). They did not make motions to vacate the chair or challenge the chair – choosing instead to scream and yell and melt the meeting down. As a result, they organized at a meeting without proper notice and with several members not invited.

Then you see this Social Media Post and you understand why a large part of the opposition are not taken seriously, rather are treated like they are clinically insane:

“Corrine Rankin crossed our path as we pulled up to the Hyatt. Missed our chance to take her out.”

Note the misspelling of Corrin’s name – this emanates from Steve Frank’s Heard on the Flim Flam updates where he deliberately misspells people’s names despite being told by several the correct spelling. (Speaking of mature leadership, sigh)

When people expressed outrage over this post by the Treasurer of the Marin GOP – rather than say, “That was inappropriate”, the response was “He was joking”. Given that Francis has filed tons of FPPC complaints against opponents, is reputed to have threatened people he disagrees with and is known to have outbursts of anger – such a post is not out of character for him. Worse, the ideological narcissism is on display when people close ranks and defend this behavior because admitting fault is a fate worse than death. (P.S. none of his paranoid, fantastical FPPC complaints have stuck, either…)

Why the opposition can’t have nice things.

Another member of the opposition Mitch Clemmons when confronted for calling a member of the LAGOP a bitch, doubled down, played the victim, then called her evil. This is projection and gaslighting. No one on the opposition side took this guy on publicly at the time. (Click the screenshot to blow it up if you can’t read the text)

And this leads in to the five alarm idiotic “Corrin Rankin is the DEI candidate”, attacks. The opposition can’t stop saying stupid s–t and certainly refuses to do anything close to controlling the seething rage that has infected so many of them. (More on that in a bit)

Mike Morrell, their candidate for Chair was basically forced to send out a communication calling for calm and raising the bar. He denounced in a soft way the insanity that had been coming out of the opposition (we’ve written about the Jew, Muslim and Black bashing already)… but the DEI attacks persisted and commenters on this blog are parroting that crap even still.

Is John Park a DEI candidate? Jack Guerrero? Lani Kane (she is API)? Robert Rego? The absurdity of the mental obsession some in the opposition had with incessantly parroting the DEI candidate is made even more absurd when there were several “Of Them” running for CAGOP office at all levels. Sigh.

The convention started with John Paul White serving the entire CAGOP Board with some sort of legal demand letter over their credentialling process and election system. You know – setting up the “We Wuz Robbed” cry that has taken over the hard right. In their minds losing an election means there was cheating as they seem to be unable to self-reflect and understand the impact of their behavior.

John Paul White was also whining on his social media that the CAGOP was trying to throw him out of the hotel. False. He whined about a $200 charge for extra cleaning in the suite room he rented.

Yep – this John Paul White that liked a post accusing Israel of Genocide. And the post is STILL IN HIS CONTROLLED GROUP. Given what has come out about Hamas and what they have done to the hostages they took – he should be ashamed of himself. But, similar to the others I have profiled, he will never back down or apologize even when morally wrong. I can say that based on his behavior I have observed.

“We Wuz Robbed!” – voting machines, braaak! After getting crushed in her campaign for vice chair by John Park who won with over 800 votes versus Lani Kane and Soo-Koo (who I call Koo-Koo) Lani posted this:

Once again, technical problems strike and conspiracies follow.

However, let me ask one uber-obvious question of this crew… if the CAGOP Elections were rigged, riddle me this:

That’s right, the opposition candidate for CAGOP Treasurer won. And, he won by about the same margin Corrin Rankin did. Was that more DEI by the CAGOP? Why wasn’t his race rigged by the machines? Inquiring bloggers want to know.

Don’t worry though, they will attack me instead of dealing with the blatant hypocrisy.

I didn’t leave the CAGOP “Conservative” Opposition, they left me. I don’t identify with this behavior and I had to keep a lot of this at bay in 2021 when I ran the campaign of opposition leader Steve Frank, but it is even worse now than it was then… as this series continues, We will break down more of the specifics of what was done in the name of Conservative Values.

P.S. The LAHRC is basically a fake paper group controlled by David Hernandez but this meme looked great so I used it.