From "Notes on the State of Jefferson" by James Pogue at Harper's:
Quote
Just after I arrived in Redding, California, a town of ninety thousand people at the north end of the Central Valley, some two hundred miles from San Francisco, a man approached my car and started pummeling my window with his fists. “Go back to the ***** Bay,” he bellowed. “We don’t want you up here!” I wasn’t surprised he had pegged me for an outsider—my truck was indisposed that day, and I had borrowed my girlfriend’s mother’s Tesla. But before I had a chance to explain that I did not, in fact, live in the Bay Area, an elderly woman walking a dachshund appeared on the sidewalk. The man seemed chastened. He backed up, and muttered to himself as he headed into a nearby government building, where a very extraordinary meeting of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors was about to take place. “This stuff is happening a lot, did you know that?” the woman said. “People in this county need to calm down.”
This was January 5, 2021. Two months earlier, a gun-store owner named Patrick Henry Jones had been elected to one of the five seats on the board of supervisors. He had campaigned on resistance to statewide pandemic protocols—his first act after being sworn in was to open in-person council meetings to the public—but his victory had tapped into other strains of local conflict. Among his most vocal supporters were a politically influential militia based in nearby Cottonwood, as well as advocates from a decades-old secessionist movement that aimed to carve out a “State of Jefferson” from parts of northern California and southern Oregon.
Quote
The next day, I dropped by Woody Clendenen’s barbershop for a haircut. I had been having trouble contacting some of the key figures in the crusade to take over the county—Terry Rapoza, one of the Jefferson movement’s highest-profile leaders, had flatly declined to meet with me, and I couldn’t get Zapata to return my calls—so I figured I’d just show up as a paying customer. “You must be the one Terry told me about,” Clendenen said as I walked in. “I’d been thinking you might come by.” He was a graying, fit fifty-five-year-old, wearing a polo shirt over a slight paunch and chatting jovially with a row of customers. I asked how he knew who I was. “You don’t look like you’re from Cottonwood,” he said. A chorus of guffaws rose up. “You don’t smell like horseshit,” someone called out.
The shop was packed, its walls covered in the trappings of defiant rural patriotism: Jefferson flags, framed photos of young men in uniform, Confederate insignia, flyers advertising horse trailers for sale. Clendenen exuded an air of avuncular authority. He was a barber in the way that Tony Soprano was the owner of Satriale’s Pork Store. As he cut hair, he was constantly interrupted by calls from Zapata or Jones, and by people wandering in to ask favors or talk militia business. Just after I sat down, a hefty trucker in a black hoodie walked in. “Well, the FBI just came by,” he announced. Clendenen invited him to go on. “I just told them that I am a legally armed American in my home, I’m happy to talk to them, but they can’t come in the house. They weren’t too bad or nothing.” Clendenen barely looked up from the haircut he was giving to a boy who looked to be about eight years old. “You did good,” he said.
I sat around for at least an hour before it was my turn. Clendenen was surprised to learn that we had some acquaintances in common from my years reporting in the more rebellious corners of the West. He brought up Ammon Bundy, the antigovernment icon who was then running for governor of Idaho, whom he clearly considered a bit of a hero. I mentioned that I’d been embedded with Bundy through most of the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and Clendenen perked up. It turned out that Dwight Hammond, the Oregon rancher whose five-year prison sentence for arson had instigated the standoff, had stopped by the barbershop in 2018, shortly after a pardon from Trump led to his release. “If you know the Bundys, I think Carlos is going to want to talk to you,” Clendenen said. “You guys might have a lot to talk about.”
Forty-five minutes later, I was sitting in the Palomino Room, Zapata’s restaurant. It was sparsely furnished, and looked like it could still use some breaking-in after a recent renovation. Zapata found me at the bar, and turned out to be more interested in the fact that we both practiced Brazilian jiu-jitsu than he was in the Bundys. He handed me a beer and took me to a back room where we could smoke.
I admit I liked him immediately. Most people do at first, even those who regard him as a malign thug. He is square-jawed, with a wrestler’s frame and a deep, raspy voice that lends him an obvious charisma. “I’m a pretty complex dude,” he told me. “The more I drink and the more we talk, the more you’ll get to know the intricacies of my mind. And my mind is a weird place.”
Zapata grew up in California’s wine country, the son of Peruvian immigrants. He told me a sweeping, hard-to-confirm narrative about his family’s arrival in the United States: his grandfather, he said, had been Salvador Allende’s cousin, and had owned a grand house with eleven maids before being imprisoned by the Peruvian government. When he died, he left Zapata’s grandmother with nothing. She came to the Bay Area and cleaned houses. “We have a rich history of revolting in our family,” he said. “It’s strange because they were socialists, but if you think about it they were only socialists because they were revolting against a military government, right? I don’t know. It’s ***** crazy.”
At seventeen, Zapata enlisted in the Marines and moved to Redding to attend a small Christian college while still in boot camp. He spent six years on active duty, including a stint in Iraq, then seven years in the reserves, eventually achieving the rank of major. He got his black belt in jiu-jitsu, opened a gym, and started a business raising rodeo bulls.
Then the pandemic hit, and he became a rebel. His awakening was a faster, harder-edged version of one that more than a few people—who, like Zapata, had voted for Barack Obama and considered themselves politically moderate—experienced in the months to follow. It started with the angry sense that masks and lockdowns were forms of unaccountable government overreach, and evolved into the sense that liberal speech-policing and the new power of Big Tech over daily life were signals of an impending dystopia. He began to think, as many in northern California did, that liberals were conspiring to build a nation of docile people who lived in condos and communicated via Zoom, too scared to challenge the dictates of experts or government officials. “Believe it or not, I’m not this right-wing nut,” he said. “If you and I were sitting here a year ago and you’d asked if I would join the militia, I’d be like, ‘***** no, dude. Those are a bunch of paranoid tinfoil sons of bitches.’ ”
But he had become convinced it was time to “take a hard stand.” He asked around about the militia and was directed to Clendenen. “I was like, ‘Woody is the head of the militia?’ ” he said. “The guy with the barbershop? Dad?” Clendenen saw Zapata’s potential as a leader, and set about immersing him in the politics of the Western hard right.
Shasta County’s conflict with California was part of a worldwide struggle, one in which local identity was under assault as much from Davos as it was from Berkeley. “Even just waving the American flag now,” he said, “they want you to think that’s racist, that you’re a white supremacist. Every country has done some bad things. How the ***** is patriotism a bad thing now?” His media appearances after his speech had marked him as somebody willing to say what others were not: that resistance to lockdowns was only the beginning of what would likely be a bloody resistance to everything liberal America represents.
We went back to the bar, where we were interrupted by a waitress who said there was a woman on the phone offering ammunition to the cause. “Save her number,” he said. “If she’s got ammo, *****, I’m going to call her.” “She’s been very persistent,” said the waitress.
Zapata was getting a lot of calls from strangers. “I became kind of the de facto face of the movement,” he told me. He was convinced that he had been conscripted into a world-historical struggle, and that the times called for men like him who were willing to risk it all. “Guys who were in the Marines with me tell me sometimes, ‘You know, like there’s something about you. You were the guy,’ ” he told me. “And I’ll admit it, I am a violent mother*****er, dude. Some people can probably attest to that.”
A few weeks later, I showed up at the cheery little house of a sixty-five-year-old woman named Doni Chamberlain. She had been chronicling Shasta County politics on her website A News Cafe for fifteen years, and had recently started to get national attention for her reporting. She showed me into her living room, which doubled as her office, then served me iced tea and homemade coffee cake, which she later insisted on boxing up for me to take home.
As Jones had hinted to me, a campaign had been organized to recall the three board members who hadn’t voted to defy Sacramento’s pandemic restrictions. Both supporters and opponents of the recall described this to me as a battle for the “soul of the county.” Threats were circulating on Facebook, and many liberals opposed to the recall, including Chamberlain, feared that the vitriol would soon turn violent. She had started peering into her mailbox to make sure no one had left a rattlesnake. “I actually asked my sister if that was a normal thing to do,” she told me. “She was like, no, it’s not.”
Quote
Last December, realizing that I rather enjoyed the State of Jefferson lifestyle myself, I moved up to Shasta County full-time, renting a place in a tiny canyon hamlet about an hour north of Redding. Patrick Henry Jones was now my county supervisor. The recall organizers had struggled to gather signatures. In addition to disorganization, they had to contend with evacuations caused by wildfires, including the Dixie Fire, one of the largest in California’s history. But with the help of $450,000 in political contributions from Anselmo—the same donor who helped Jones get elected—they managed to successfully force an election in the district held by Leonard Moty, a former Redding police chief. All the viable candidates running to replace Moty were sympathetic to Jones, which meant that if Moty were voted out, the secessionists would command a majority. They could very plausibly claim to have taken control of the county.
Recall supporters planned to flood the last meeting before the February 1 election, in a show of force they were calling Operation Last Supper. But the volume of death threats being sent to supervisors prompted the county to move the meeting online. Jones, whose key card to the county administrative building had been disabled, set up a large television and sound system outside. When I arrived, he was looking dapper in a black overcoat and white dress shirt, standing before a crowd of around one hundred people and a handful of sheriff’s deputies. Doni Chamberlain stood only a few feet away, filming the proceedings.
At the back of the crowd, I spotted Elissa McEuen, a Bay Area transplant who had done much of the organizing work behind the recall. She’d moved to the region only six years earlier, and, like Zapata, had experienced a political awakening when the pandemic hit. She was frustrated by the way that Moty and his supporters had portrayed themselves as fighting an effort led “by extremists, by insurrectionists,” she said. “The driving force behind the recall was mothers.”
But to Chamberlain and the county’s liberals, the recall was very much about the militia, their guns, and the tacit support they seemed to enjoy from local law enforcement. Zapata often acted as if he was untouchable—several months prior he had been acquitted of a battery charge after accosting a comedian who had mocked him online. Recall opponents tried to paint Jones and his allies as a bunch of fringe extremists, but they seemed to miss the fact that what they called extremism appeared to constitute majority opinion in Shasta County.
On Election Day, a helicopter flew over Redding, trailing a banner reading recall shasta, as a trickle of voters filed into the county elections office. Moty, apparently concerned for his safety, decided not to have an election-night rally. But I heard a rumor about a pro-recall party at a weight-lifting gym near Zapata’s ranch, in Palo Cedro. When I arrived, Jones was watching the returns with Clendenen, who said a friendly hello and encouraged me to take advantage of the open bar. Everyone seemed nervy, and the early returns showed the recall attempt failing by a narrow margin. Zapata was in a pensive mood. “We knew this was going to be tough,” he said. “We gave it absolutely everything.” But he grinned when I told him I’d moved up there. “That’s the thing, man,” he said. “Once you get a taste of this lifestyle, you just can’t let it go.”
When I drove into town the next day, the winds had shifted. The pro-recall contingent was winning by five percentage points. Moty put out a terse statement, thanking volunteers and saying he had been proud to stand against the “anarchists, extremists, and white supremacists wanting to take over our county.” It still wasn’t clear who had won the seat, but it didn’t really matter. Jones declared victory. Shasta County had a new political order.
The state’s major papers reacted with predictable alarm. could populist, militia-backed shasta county recall effort provide roadmap for other races? the Mercury News wondered. extremists are set to take over this california county: will more of the state be next? asked the Los Angeles Times, noting that the recall proved that elections could go “very wrong, even in liberal California,” and worrying that insurrection might sweep across the rest of the state’s restive hinterlands—just as Zapata hoped it would.
There’s no doubt that Shasta County will serve as a model for other rural counties. Already, advocates in California’s Nevada County are hailing Zapata and Clendenen as inspirations. But the recall did not go wrong. It went the way that 56 percent of the voters in District 2 of Shasta County—who were not bothered by the idea of voting alongside militiamen, or by the thought of electing a government that reporters from California’s metropoles regarded as extreme—thought it should go. “I’m not calling for violence,” Zapata told me when we first met. “We’re ready to do violence to protect ourselves.” He often talked about the recall as a last stand before civil war. But his side had won. So for now, they would have to get down to the business of trying to govern, in a state that was still only a dream.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter