Mayor criticized for preaching bigotry during secretly recorded speech to high school club

Holly Andreatta’s comments on race, religion, and LGBTQ identity went viral after students documented the talk and challenged her in real time

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Holly Andreatta, the most recent mayor of Lincoln, California, is getting well-deserved criticism after she delivered a speech to high school students telling them her daughter is gay as a result of childhood trauma, rejecting the notion of church/state separation, and disparaging Martin Luther King Jr.

Holly Andreatta speaking to the Club America group (images via YouTube and Facebook)

She delivered all of this to the Twelve Bridges High School chapter of Club America, the high school version of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, one week ago and had no idea she was being recorded the entire time. Now that her words are breaking out of that environment, she’s doing damage control to pretend all the inflammatory things she said were totally taken out of context.

They were not.

There’s been a push by conservatives in states like Texas and Oklahoma to get chapters of Turning Point USA in every public high school. The strange thing about that is no one was ever stopping that from happening. If the clubs didn’t exist, it’s only because students didn’t ask for them. Every public high school has a policy for launching new clubs and they can’t discriminate based on viewpoint. (That’s why you can have Bible clubs after school along with chapters of the Secular Student Alliance.) If a group is denied, it’s almost always because students didn’t fill out the necessary paperwork correctly, despite right-wing claims of persecution.

In any case, this California high school launched its chapter this month. For their first meeting, on December 11, they invited the conservative mayor of their city to speak to them. Andreatta was first elected to the Lincoln City Council in 2018 and has served two stints as mayor (since they rotate that title among members). In addition to being an “ordained minister with the Assemblies of God,” she also a pastor at Lincoln Christian Life Center and an adjunct professor at Epic Bible College and Graduate School. She’s now running to become Placer County Supervisor.

It makes sense why the student group would invite her to speak. Unfortunately for everyone involved, nothing she said was worth listening to. Thankfully, some enterprising young student decided to videotape her talk.

The Sacramento Bee later published six minutes of excerpts that are appalling:

Everything that Charlie [Kirk] did, political or not, he infused Jesus into it...

… When you say you have to have 50% Black pilots, and we need to get it done now, then what do you need to do to get that larger percentage? You have to lower the standards. And when you lower the standards, just like in anything, if you lower the standards and you’re not being properly trained how to fly a commercial jet, you put people in danger.

So he’s not saying Black people aren’t smart enough to be pilots, or women aren’t smart enough to be pilots, or who—whatever, put any, you know, descriptor you want in there—what he’s saying is when you create this large DEI percentage, and then you lower the standards, that puts people in harm’s way. Does that make sense?… Well, actually, actually, in a lot of industries, they did. In the pilots, in the industry, they did say 50% Black pilots. They did say that. And so a lot of the industries do. They have these metrics. So that is happening… I don’t have it on me. We can look it up.

Okay, I looked it up and she’s lying.

United Airlines, in 2021, said they planned to train 5,000 students in their aviation academy, hoping to have 50% of graduates be women or people of color. At no point did they lower their standards—nor would they. All graduates had to complete all the necessary requirements. But the company was specifically trying to help those groups overcome the barriers that traditionally keep them out of the field to begin with. By casting a broader net and providing financial aid, they were hoping to fix a very real problem in their industry.

Andreatta didn’t provide any of that context. She just assumed that if there were more minorities being hired as pilots, the standards must have been lowered. That’s because she’s racist.

As for Charlie Kirk, he said, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” The best-case interpretation of that is that his gut reaction if he saw a Black pilot was that the person may not be fit for the job—because of the same faulty reasoning as Andreatta.

… A lot of research has come out that Martin Luther King was a Marxist and that he was a Socialism [sic].

A lot of the civil rights things that he advocated for were not really helpful. Now, there’s a lot of research to that, but we can argue about that…

If only she would elaborate on which “civil rights things” she opposes... Whatever the case, she’s really not helping defeat those racism accusations.

She’s also using buzzwords to slander MLK without bothering to define what he stood for. Republicans love calling people “Socialist” or “Marxist” without elaboration because those words sound scary. But criticizing wealth inequality, as Bernie Sanders does, or demanding that the government fix structural inequalities, as Zohran Mamdani has advocated for, have long been popular ideas.

… My oldest daughter had a lot of trauma as a child. Something really terrible happened to her when she was very young that I would hope never would happen to any other child. And as a result of it, she’s a lesbian. She’s gay and she’s married to a woman. And sometimes, that’s a little bit of internal struggle for me, because I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and I believe that scripture is very clear on homosexuality.

But on the other side of that, I love her dearly. We are in relationship. And that’s what Charlie Kirk’s message was. It’s like, we may not agree. My daughter knows where I stand biblically, but I love her. We’re actually going to spend Christmas with her in Missouri. We love her, and they have a child, and I love my grandchild, and I love my daughter-in-law, which is weird to say, right? My daughter’s married to a woman. But it is the reality.

This one is just plain stupid. Whatever happened to her daughter as a child is not the reason she’s a lesbian, but that is very much a belief that has taken hold among anti-LGBTQ bigots and conservative preachers. It’s not hard to find sermons that equate homosexuality with sexual abuse that a child suffered. There’s no evidence backing any of that up.

You can have a perfectly fine trauma-free childhood and still be gay.

Andreatta makes it sound like she deserves a prize for spending time with her granddaughters despite having a lesbian daughter. Why would it be “weird” to say you love your daughter-in-law other than that’s not the expectation in conservative Christian circles where hatred against LGBTQ people is the norm?

… There’s an individual in Placer County that… she’s a very lost soul. And my friends, we pray for her. And she likes to trash me online. She trashes other conservative leaders, other elected officials. She says the most horrible things… I’m not concerned because what she does is she takes things out of context. And that’s a dangerous place to be.

Is anyone shocked that Andreatta receives criticism from someone she claims is a “lost soul”?

It’s also hard to believe that person “takes things out of context” when that’s the very same accusation Andreatta is about to make with this video even though everything’s on tape.

… Do you know Christian Nationalists? And all these names, that’s just a name that the left made up to silence people. I am a Christian and I love my nation. Okay, if I’m a Christian Nationalist, but they use it in a negative way. But people are afraid to have those labels!

No one care if politicians happen to be Christians who are also patriotic. But if you think your faith should dictate how people outside your religious bubble ought to live—depriving them of medical care and marriage licenses, and forcing them to treat your religion as the country’s default setting—then you are indeed a Christian Nationalist and you’re a problem that needs to be politically defeated.

Now, let me just clarify, we need to love everybody. We do not need to discriminate. You may not agree with somebody’s lifestyle, but we love them and we’re kind to them. You can have a difference of opinion. It doesn’t mean that you’re hateful… Don’t let the world or politics or the left put a label on you because… to silence you, all right? You have to... And you also need to fear God, not fear man. That’s the tactic that the other side uses, that people who are being used of the devil, they use that tactic to make you feel…

I swear, if we treated conservative Christians the way they treat the rest of us, they would explode. They couldn’t take it. They’re so used to receiving royal treatment and using Christian “love” as a weapon to hurt the people they hate, they have no concept of what it’s like to be oppressed by people just like them.

They do discriminate. They don’t love others. They are not kind. They just like to think they are and surround themselves with other conservative Christians who constantly praise them.

People on the right are not, and never have been, silenced.

… [Student: Also, I hope you understand that things that Charlie Kirk said would make someone like me, who is a genderqueer pansexual Socialist feel unsafe. I feel unsafe because of some of the comments that he made about women. I understand you said, “Please don’t take this out of context.” But when he was asked if your 10-year-old child was raped, and there was going to be a baby made out of it, and both of them are going to survive, would the baby have been born, and he said yes. I hope that that can make some people pause because that would be an incredibly… if that happened to me at 10, I feel like my consent would have been completely [lost]. So I hope that there’s an understanding here that, as much as we don’t want to disagree, there is a lot of feelings of unsafety-ness because of just this club and just so much..]

There’s nothing unsafe about this room. And I understand what you’re saying with Charlie, but again, I think maybe, ask yourself this question: Do you feel unsafe by some of the things Charlie said because that’s what…And I’m sorry if the term “the left” offended you, I didn’t mean that to offend you, but that’s how we, right, left, middle, whatever, right? Okay. Because maybe that’s what the media and what people are saying now. It’s like, oh, he said this or he said that, or whatever. Maybe if you actually spent some time actually listening to what he said. I mean, yes, he advocated for...

Kudos to that student for speaking up. She was referring to an argument Kirk made that if his own 10-year-old daughter were raped and impregnated, he would want her to keep the baby regardless of how his daughter’s life would be impacted. It’s a horrifying thought, obviously, but the bigger issue was that he didn’t believe anyone else should be allowed to make a different decision. He wanted to force his anti-abortion views on everyone.

That’s also what Andreatta believes, and yet she has the gall to claim there’s nothing “unsafe” about that kind of belief. She doesn’t mind destroying someone else’s life because she’s doing it with a smile on her face, don’t you understand?!

She also accused the student of not listening to what Kirk actually said, as if the student was taking him out of context. You don’t need to take Kirk out of context to criticize his beliefs. They were perfectly shitty within context, too.

… I even respect people who are atheists, although I think that it takes a lot more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe that there’s a higher power and a creative designer, right? But of course, I respect other people.

[Student: What do you think about separation of church and state? And do you value other religions as well as atheism? You understand that they’re the same value as Christianity and Catholicism?]

Well, that’s a really good question. I’ll tell you, I just spoke to a whole group of students in the LDS Church. I’m not Mormon, but I love them. I have a lot of friends. I respect what they believe. Separation of church and state is a myth, okay? It’s not in the Constitution. Our world has flipped up and tried to say that there’s no place for faith in the public life… And so that’s not really what he meant. To answer your question like this, now, when I’m on city council, I don’t sit up on the dais and preach a sermon. That’s inappropriate, right? We’re there to do city business. But the decisions that I make—and we don’t really deal with political stuff on city council, but if I wish to do higher office or whatever—the decisions that I make are based on my biblical worldview, just like my colleagues that make their decisions are based on their biblical or not-biblical worldview, right?

This old argument again: Atheists require more faith than Christians. It’s bullshit and it’s been debunked repeatedly, but it’s always amusing when Christian apologists use this line, because it doesn’t take extraordinary faith to dismiss ordinary bullshit.

I’m much more concerned about an elected official claiming church/state separation is a myth because the words literally don’t appear in the Constitution, even though that’s how the Establishment Clause has been interpreted decade after decade.

Separation of church and state doesn’t mean there’s “no place for faith in the public life.” We know that because conservative Christians constantly shove their faith into public life—without a problem. It’s only an issue when the government treats religion or Christianity specifically as the only game in town, like erecting a Nativity scene outside City Hall. The fact that Andreatta either doesn’t get this, or willfully chooses not to get it, is why she has no business in public office.

Anyway, if you ever needed a reason to defend these conservative clubs, this is it.

They create a platform that allows the public to see who’s not worth listening to.

Andreatta spoke off-the-cuff and revealed so much about her own moral depravity that even students who attended the meeting in good faith called her out on it in real time. Hell, this week, the club’s president Garrett Culp even attempted to defend her bigotry by pretending it was all part of some respectful dialogue—as if preaching hate without yelling, or debating the very nature of LGBTQ people, is respectful in any meaningful way.

“My purpose with club America is to host and create respectful dialog and to uphold the principles of American exceptionalism and Christianity,” he said.

“I am not a hateful person, nor is my club a hateful group,” he went on. “We are simply students trying to foster conversations between people of different opinions. While those topics and opinions may be uncomfortable for some people, I assure you that they are not hateful.”

If you have to defend your club as one that’s “not hateful” after a single meeting, then maybe your club has a problem.

Yes, it’s hateful to say being gay is the result of childhood trauma, and it’s ignorance to pretend that’s not what’s happening. It’s factually untrue. It contributes to discrimination against LGBTQ people. Guys like this just don’t care what that kind of rhetoric does to their classmates because they don’t care about anyone but themselves. The issue isn’t discomfort. High schoolers have uncomfortable conversations all the time. Conservatives just act like being cis, straight, white, and Christian is (and should be) the default, and anyone who threatens the hierarchy where those people are at the top need to be corrected.

Just look at the effect of Andreatta’s speech moments after it ended:

Senior Rebecca Warner, who identifies as a lesbian, did not attend the meeting, but was approached by one student leaving the meeting who made a hurtful comment about her sexuality.

“One student told me they learned that God was working on me because I’ve endured trauma, causing me to become gay,” she said. “Taken aback by what I had been told, I listened to the full audio of the meeting and was hurt by what had been said.”

…

Now Warner and two friends, who both asked to remain anonymous due to concerns about their safety on campus, are petitioning the school to remove the club. They said that Andreatta’s rhetoric was inflammatory enough to embolden students to say racist or homophobic things.

If the club is actively promoting hate, it could be disbanded, and that’s where districts have to figure out where the line needs to be drawn. If you disparage people of color and LGBTQ people in a calm voice, as Charlie Kirk regularly did, does it cross the line at a public high school or is that just a consequence of allowing a public forum? It’s a legal question as much as a philosophical one. Just because you don’t require members to put on a white hood doesn’t mean your group isn’t promoting racist ideology.

As Warner said later:

“I have complete respect for their political ideologies,” Warner said. “I wish that they would have respect for my identity and for my existence.”

During a school board meeting this week, at which Andreatta was present, there were at least some intelligent voices calling out her bigotry—and condemning the board for their own complicity and hypocrisy.

“Two months ago… I listened to you cut an ethnic studies class that hundreds of students had already signed up for, that you paid $60,000 in curriculum for,” parent Jessica Martinez said. “You took it off because members of the community who said, I see some of them here right now, said it was divisive. So surely you can disband a club that is equally as divisive for free.”

“Holly [Andreatta] should not devalue civil rights efforts and spread homophobic rhetoric to students,” Quest Rhodes, a former district valedictorian said. “Devaluing civil rights efforts by Martin Luther King Jr. is a slap in the face to every student in the school district. It sends a horrible message that nonviolent protest and standing up for your rights is inherently meaningless and will not enact social change. It dehumanizes and belittles those who fought for equal protections and treatment under the law.”

The school board said the future of the right-wing club wouldn’t be affected by those speeches or a petition to disband the club that hundreds of students have signed. It would be up to lawyers to decide if the club was violating state or federal law. (Spoiler: It’s probably not.)

For what it’s worth, Andreatta has since released a statement apologizing to… her own daughter for saying out loud what she should have kept private. But not to the students she offended or the various groups she feels are beneath her:

“I want to publicly apologize to my daughter. Her story is hers alone, and I should not have shared personal details about her trauma,” Andreatta said. “To be absolutely clear: I did not say that trauma causes homosexuality. I never said that, nor would I ever say that or think that. I was referring to a very specific personal experience.”

She literally said, “Something really terrible happened to [my daughter] when she was very young that I would hope would never happen to any other child, and as a result of it, she’s a lesbian.” (Emphasis mine.) Okay, she didn’t say trauma in general causes homosexuality; she said that a specific kind of trauma experienced by her daughter causes homosexuality.

But that’s also not how anything works, so she’s still a liar.

She also said in her statement that she wasn’t sharing her own views, merely echoing Kirk’s.

During the question-and-answer portion, protesting students were given the first opportunity to ask questions and, in fact, dominated the discussion. Many questions centered on statements attributed to Charlie Kirk or Turning Point USA. I repeatedly clarified that I was not giving my own personal views, but rather responding to questions about what Mr. Kirk has publicly stated, while encouraging students to seek full context and make up their own minds.

She was very much giving her own views a lot of the time. But even if she was explaining what Kirk said, she had a responsibility to explain why he was full of shit, and she didn’t, so it’s natural to assume she’s in agreement. (She only said of the MLK references, “Given the opportunity, I would have said clearly that I disagree and believe Dr. King’s legacy stands on its own moral authority.”)

The most telling part of her statement may be this line:

Until now, no one has ever accused me of being racist, homophobic, or hateful, because that is not who I am.

Or maybe it’s because no one gave her the opportunity to talk at length about her beliefs on these topics. Turns out when you hand the worst people a platform, they often say racist, homophobic, hateful things. In this case, we have video proof of it.

If she doesn’t like being called a racist or a homophobe, she should stop having racist and homophobic beliefs.

And if any of her statements are out of context, by all means, she can always release a video explaining why there’s nothing wrong with being gay or trans, or why she supports diversity initiatives, or why atheism should be treated no different from Christianity under the law, or why church/state separation is the foundation of our country.

She won’t do that because she holds absolutely abhorrent views that deserve to be condemned by her entire community. She should be voted out of office at the next possible opportunity and she would then have complete freedom to share her deranged ideas at whatever church function allows her to have authority over them.

One last thing: Andreatta apparently said to the students that her lesbian daughter was a fan of Charlie Kirk. On Monday, after releasing that written apology, she released a separate video statement to clarify her lesbian daughter was not a Kirk supporter at all: “It was wrong for me to say that she loved him or that she was a true fan, because that’s not the case.”

(What was the daughter’s angry phone call like that led to that video? Inquiring minds want to know.)

What Andreatta refuses to acknowledge in her comments to students, her clarifying statement, and her clarifying statement in response to her clarifying statement is that her beliefs are the problem. She wasn’t taken out of context. She was quoted accurately and people are finally realizing who she’s always been.

And much like Charlie Kirk, she’s not engaging in good-faith debate. She’s just repeating a bunch of right-wing talking points that launder prejudice through polite rhetoric. That strategy doesn’t make her points any more salient. They just shield how cruel and ignorant she is.

That’s precisely why the pushback matters. And why it was so important for a student to take that video. And why we need more students to fight back against everything this club stands for—not by shutting it down (because that’s legally untenable) but by letting the student body know that conservative bigotry has no place in their community and that the victims of Republican ideology have allies throughout the school.

Those students and adults remind us that moral authority doesn’t come from a title or elected office but from people with empathy, facts, and the courage to stand up for what they believe even when they risk being alienated. That video showed us that Andreatta got to where she is by hiding her real views. It also showed us that the teens challenging her are the ones who deserve to be in positions of power because they’re far more courageous and intellectually honest than conservatives like her ever could be.

What Andreatta stands for are threats to pluralism, equality, and basic human decency. The backlash against her isn’t cancel culture run amok but a community that refuses to accept that her brand of hate is welcome in their school.

That’s the hope. The future isn’t with haters like her but protesters like everyone else. Andreatta has no political future as long as the people she dismisses—liberal students, queer kids, people of color, atheists, and all their allies—refuse to accept being treated as problems to be solved. They understood immediately what was at stake, and they weren’t going to let her comments be the final words on this issue.

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