kymkemp.com The Big Kymhuna Kym Kemp has one of the best or possibly worst jobs around here. A self-made woman, she’s created her “Redheaded Black Belt” (RHBB) news website and become the most powerful person, or one of the most, in SoHum, maybe in Humboldt County, and possibly the North Coast and beyond. (She had been planning on being a lawyer, starting with a UC-Berkeley education, but then she got pregnant.) It’s a bad job if Kym actually has to sit around all day reading every comment that appears on her site, like a human data-storage unit, a pulsing synapse absorbing and processing all the community bullshit spewed from mostly anonymous and often negative commenters on RHBB. Taking in all the community’s angst cannot be good for her mental health either, I would be interested in how she deals with that, what coping mechanisms she has developed, though she seems fine judging from her positive online personality and her healthy sense of humor. (Well hey, it pays the bills and augments the bottom line as she navigates the financial vicissitudes of her family marijuana business as well, although I sometimes think the place she provides for a lot of repetitive bickering about issues like covid and the vaccine feels divisive.) Is Kym dying for our sins everyday? We can glance at a story or comment stream, read a few if we’re interested or bored, but our local hero has to monitor the community exchange constantly, unless she has outsourced some of that to her staff. She has become our cultural gatekeeper, providing access to her site for anything she wants, any breaking news story, announcement, listing of an event, opinion, column, or even a newsflash for a spontaneous local protest demonstration scheduled for later that day. (A function “All Sides Now” on KMUD used to supply until the station was taken over by timid millennials, along with a couple of their pet boomers.) I asked if I could interview her as I was curious and fascinated about how her site worked and how money was generated. She agreed to the idea but wanted to wait till after her busy time, the fire season. Meanwhile I came up with a whole lot of questions about her life up to creating RHBB but decided to just pick one thing, how her site functioned, instead of a huge biographical project. (One thing I had been wanting to submit to RHBB was an editorial about censorship of the feature called “All Sides Now” at KMUD, about how they have one foul-mouthed angry old White guy in charge of what we’re allowed to say during what was once respected as the most important two minutes on the air.) I sent Kym my latest interview, the last in a series of five or six I had recently conducted with early arrivals to Whitethorn, circa 1969, to give her an example of my process and style. She said she liked it and I posed the idea of running the series on RHBB once a month. (I had been inspired to do the interviews to make a documentary, realized I didn’t know anything about that, and they just sat there, some edited some not, in my computer for months.) She enthusiastically agreed to run the series, called “Early Arrivals,” once a month last winter. The first one was with “Bubba” and for his interview she added a hilarious (to me) disclaimer at the top warning readers something like “don’t try this at home.” Another fire season came and went and I finally proposed to Kym a once-a-month, fifty part series about hippie history, from 1972 to 2022, one which I had already written, typed up, and it was ready to go. I sent her the first one as an example, my arrival story to SoHum as a raw seventeen year old hitchhiker from Indiana, and she said, “Wow Paul, that’s pretty wild. I’m going to have to think about it.” (Oh shit, that didn’t sound encouraging, maybe she’s just tired of all the old hippies from the past?) The nasty trolls she has to oversee and discipline who would have no life without RHBB might think she’s kind of a schoolmarm, but in his obituary she did publish the naked protest photo of her father-in-law Hardy and his fellow radicals, so she ain’t no prude. When Kym doesn’t want to run something she’ll say, “This doesn’t fit my audience” but that felt disingenuous to me and I told her I didn’t believe her. If her audience doesn’t like something they are stuck, there’s nowhere else to go, they’re not going to stop surfing and reading RHBB because there’s some post they disagree with. Kym’s audience is everyone around here, a diverse group of mostly White people. Soon after she seemed to reject my project (and yes that first installment was the most wild, assuredly, of the series) she published a salacious news story by Matt LeFever including details, which I thought unnecessary, about an assault case in Mendocino county, and quoted the alleged victim in lurid graphic language, which made my “wild” arrival story seem tame and innocent. (Conversely, I was proud of her, she was “erring” on the side of openness and honesty, completely uncensored, which illustrates the difference between her and the weenies at KMUD who must be irrationally terrified that their funding might be pulled and they’ll lose their jobs if they are as untamed as Rock Star Kym and her free-for-all on wheels.) When Kym talks about “her audience” what I think she really means is the audience of one: herself. And of course it’s her site, she can run it however she wants and publish whatever she wants as she’s created herself, with hard work, into being the major conduit to the perception of reality in Southern Humboldt USA. Whenever I push pack against power, power always wins, granted I’m just talking about this small town reality, which doesn’t really matter much, right? Power gets annoyed by the non-powerful, people like you and me, who have the audacity to think we actually have unfettered free speech, which reminds me of those lyrics from “The Clash” song which go “These are your rights: You have the right to free speech, just so long as you don’t actually try it!” (I was banned from KMUD for insisting on being able to air an uncensored “All Sides Now,” contrary to Kym’s policy where anyone can say just about anything and link to any other site, in the comments section at least. It’s the “free for all” which the KMUD censors don’t want, to make sure freedom of speech is limited on our local community station, formerly called Rebel and Outlaw radio.) Power loves power and wants more, even petty institutions such as Kym, KMUD, and other local cultural brokers like the Indie or the NCJ. Bruce Anderson, editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, was not amused when I sent in an article mentioning his run-ins with power over the last thirty years, including fistfights, going to jail, disparaging remarks, and other wild times in Mendocino during his early publishing decades. (Jeez, who’d a thunk it that “The Beast of Boonville” had feelings? And I guess I hurt them, but really, it was more like a love letter than a hit piece. The AVA is the other local news site and paper which will publish virtually anyone’s opinion, and he’s also a big admirer of Kym’s work, which he calls essential.) What is this all about? Why did I want to have a monthly fifty part series about hippie/grower history on Kym’s site? Because I am a voice of my generation...and no one is listening. As always it comes down to attention, I want some and don’t like to self-censor, believing the raw truth is the most interesting and entertaining. The other day I tried a new tact, emailed Kym about her obituary policy, specifically if she ran ones about members of locals’ families, and for the first time she didn’t respond. Was she officially annoyed because I questioned her veracity? Had I become just another obnoxious troll in my quest for attention? Kym can be described as tough but fair, she detests meanness, and is especially triggered by terms like “grow-ho” or any other words which she thinks are disparaging to women, or anyone else. (I don’t think it’s necessarily a sexist term, I definitely knew a few dudes who were grow-ho’s, and before two-income households became prevalent hasn’t marriage been cynically compared to a grow-ho situation, ie, prostitution?) She strongly discourages, if not deletes, comments criticizing anyone’s grammar, probably because she doesn’t want to discourage the text generation, and other uneducated oafs who make up a good chunk of her audience? Yes, her site is a free-for-all for freedom of speech, although she does come in with her little “(edits)” daily with no explanation, which mean she’s censored a word or sentence, some insult or an anonymous accusation of breaking the law posted by one of the trolls. (I’m still not clear on that one. I told her about when a still-living local, Tuna Jackson, spiked a nursing mother’s coffee with LSD fifty years ago at Needle Rock and she said she wouldn’t publish that, although any statute of limitations have long-since run out, right?) It’s Kym’s Kommunity, her very extended family where old hippies and rednecks, boomers, millennials and everyone in between, living in little cities, towns, villages, or out lonely dirt roads, from Orick to Hopland and beyond, check out the very latest breaking news or interesting opinion piece. Most don’t comment and some of the ones who do can be very disturbing, humorless right-wingers appear on every thread, probably satisfied to have a safe place to express themselves in deep blue California and Humboldt, although they never seem very happy doing their rote Biden-bashing. Kym is welcoming to all, maybe that’s the click-bait business model which brings in a penny a comment or whatever, but man, some people take it really seriously, have intense conversations with each other, and treat it like the virtual neighborhood it is, a meeting place to share any thoughts, ideas, and links. When it gets too heated Kym has to enter the conversation and “rap some knuckles” when the “insult quotient” ramps up beyond her level of comfort. (She’s trying to run a clean show here people!) These anonymous characters, after a few years developing their online personalities, “know” each other and their tendencies. Most are civil, good citizens, but the whiners are probably mostly angry old White men to which things aren’t going that well, any fun has passed them by, but they can put their hands on their phones or laptops and feel the ersatz connection to this community Kym has somehow, someway, created for the huddled masses yearning to be heard. (It is serious fun getting a letter or column on RHHB, seeing the comments pour in, and responding to them.)