“In the west, whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting,” the saying goes. And in California, the wealthy coastal elites that dominate the Democratic Party have been using water to beat up rural farming communities for decades.

The latest casualty in the Democratic Party’s war on farmers is the residents, most of them farmers and ranchers, of Potter Valley, a community 18 miles northeast of Ukiah, and 80 miles north of Santa Rosa. The hundreds of family farms that define a way of life in this corner of Mendocino County are about to lose their water supply, which means they are about to die.