When the California Fish & Game Commission attempted to hold a telemeeting on April 9, it quickly devolved into chaos and was cancelled within minutes. It was an illustration of white rage, white privilege, and white noise making other voices impossible to hear. In the debate over safe spaces, this was a perfect illustration of an invaded and colonized space.

Five hundred callers, mostly from rural counties, swarmed the lines and began shouting down the commissioners. They shouted:

Make fishing great again.

Take a stand; join the Klan.

Fascists!

One quoted the Old Testament and referenced his grandfather while another demanded his fishing rights under the California constitution. You can hear some of it here.

The purpose of the meeting was for the Commission, an appointed independent body which sets California’s hunting and fishing regulations, to temporarily give emergency powers to the Department of Fish and Wildlife to manage fishing and hunting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the Department would be able to quickly close fishing sites or delay fishing seasons, it could more effectively protect public health. Furthermore, some rural counties, about to receive an onslaught of out-of-town anglers for much-celebrated trout season openings on April 25, had asked for help. They did not want outside anglers bringing the disease to their small communities.

But that’s not the message many rural anglers in California heard. Instead, a right-wing faux news source spread misinformation, that the state was going to ban all recreational fishing, as the state of Washington did on March 26. The sheriffs of Modoc and Shasta Counties spread the rumor. Republican representatives from much of the Sacramento Valley repeated it, whipping up a frenzy.

Lost in the noise of affronted whites demanding their rights were two other groups: Native tribes and mostly Asian immigrants who depend on “recreational” fishing for subsistence.

I’ll focus on the tribes. There are about 110 federally-recognized tribes in California and about 50 to 100 others, many listed by the state requiring consultation. Almost none of them have fishing rights. In the 1850s, the state of California blocked nineteen treaties between the federal government and the tribes that would have protected their interests. Today, these tribes remain subject to Commission regulations, a point of friction. If anyone has a right to be angry, it is them.

The Department no doubt reached out to all these groups prior to the meeting, seeking narrow “surgical closures” and not a statewide ban. The tribes got it.

But that didn’t stop white rage. Like the Bundy’s in Nevada, the rage seems to come exactly from where it is most tenuously justified. It comes from the same counties where systematic genocide gave these anglers the land in the first place. In the 1800s, they willingly took the state’s reimbursements for their vigilante ethnic cleansing, getting paid by the scalp. But, like white pioneers everywhere, chafed at any government intervention to protect the Natives. The apples have not fallen far from the trees. They still chafe at government regulation. They still claim as rights that which they have taken.