It might have failed to generate news as recently as 10 years ago, but an Orange County, California, city making conservative noises has captured the attention of no less a stalwart of progressive thought than the Los Angeles Times.

According to that paper, Huntington Beach is “sticking it to ‘woke’ California.” MAGA is alive and well in Surf City! (READ MORE: Newsom’s California: Latest Evidence of a Death Spiral)

This northern Orange County beach community has run afoul of the “woke” code in numerous egregious ways. Since being elected in November 2022, a new city council has:

• refused to fly the gay pride flag from city hall;
• declared itself a “no mask and no vaccine mandate city”;
• appointed a review board to screen children’s books in the city library for sexual content;
• removed references to “hate crimes” from a human relations document but added to the document references protecting children from “exploitation” and “sexual grooming” and pledged the city to “recognize from birth the genetic differences between male and female and respect the strengths and benefits of each” (see old document here and new one here); and
• written a ballot initiative to require voters to provide identification at the polls.

On top of this, consider pro-Trump parades and rallies (even a cameo fly-by from the former president at a recent air show); demonstrations protesting the former president’s federal indictment, wherein protesters gathered at the pier waving flags saying “Make America Great Again” and chanting “God bless Trump”; and the strident pushback against lockdown provisos back in 2020, including beach closures, wherein thousands clogged the Pacific Coast Highway in protest, some refusing to don — gasp! — masks.

Make no mistake, the town that calls itself Surf City is still an outlier in what is a fast-purpling Orange County. Long one of the most stalwart and reliable Republican redoubts in the country — it launched Richard Nixon’s political career, served as a springboard for Ronald Reagan’s, sent to Congress the likes of “B-1 Bob” Dornan and Dana Rohrabacher — this suburban county has fallen victim to the same demographic and ethnic forces that have swept through its Southern Californian peers.

Now, apart from enclaves like Yorba Linda, San Clemente, Newport Beach (and Huntington Beach), the O.C. leans left. County voters in the 2016 presidential election gave the nod to Hillary Clinton, and, in 2020, 53.5 percent of voters went for Joe Biden and 44.4 percent for Donald Trump, with 2.1 percent voting independent. The four presidential elections prior to 2016 all went for the Republican candidate.

Huntington Beach, which went for Trump over Biden by fewer than 4,000 votes, looked to veer left as well. The election of two liberals to the city council in 2020, along with the surprise resignation of a conservative mayor in 2021, and the subsequent appointment to the council of a liberal in his place, Rhonda Bolton, threw the city council’s majority to the left. (READ MORE: San Francisco Swings and Misses on Crime, Theft, and Shohei Ohtani)

The new council’s failure to fight hard enough against state-mandated high-density housing in the city and anger over the appointment of Bolton sparked a 2021 recall effort against the new liberal council members. That recall effort failed, and that failure stoked general angst in Republicans that they were losing their community. For the 2022 election, hoping to avoid the sort of vote splitting that eventuated in past Democrat victories, the Republicans responded with a unified four-person ticket and, when voters convincingly swept all four into office, took back control of the council. They now command a 4–3 majority on the panel.

Said one local conservative activist, Cari Swan, to the Los Angeles Times: “[The previous council] came on so aggressive with a massive government intrusion” that they “pushed us so far to a bigger government footprint” and “created this pendulum swing.” She added, this to CalMatters: “The left kind of brought it on themselves. They were poking the bear and the bear fought back.”

Said City Attorney Michael Gates, elected to a third term last November, to LAist, “Our voters have no more appetite for progressive governance or the wokeism.” 

Some are complaining, however, about the disconnect between campaign promises of the four Republicans and the actions of the council in its initial months in office. The four new members ran on issues important to locals, like cracking down on homeless encampments, ensuring that regulations are business-friendly, and concerns about housing density and preserving the town’s beach vibe. Once in office, however, the council has embraced culture-war issues in their council actions.

Opined the Orange County Register: “Little did we suspect that the most widely attended meetings would focus on pointless culture battles rather than the nuts-and-bolts issues — infrastructure, parks, budgets, policing — that are the mainstays of local governance.”

Conservative council members say they’re merely acting on citizen concern. Tony Strickland, one of the four new members, admitted that while the matters taken up by his peers were not the usual fare of city councils, “they are issues that have been brought to us by constituents.”

We’ll know more about the mind of Surf City in March 2024 when the ballot measures regarding flags over city hall and voter IDs come before voters and the three liberal council members stand for reelection.