I asked Jones [member of Shasta County board of supervisors who supported the recent recall of Leonard Moty] whether he thought things would calm down after the pandemic, or if something larger had snapped. “This is going back to the 1850s,” he said. “You have this tension, those two different groups.” I assumed he was talking specifically about California, and the regional differences that helped build the Jefferson movement. But he was referring to a national gulf between the centers of globalized cosmopolitanism and the rest of the country. “The people in the rural areas—we’re different from the city areas. Because we want our freedoms and they want more controls,” he said. “You know, if I were living back in the 1850s, I’d think that this was probably what led up to the Civil War.”
I was still a bit hazy about what Jones wanted to accomplish in office. Everyone seemed to be talking about issues far bigger than anything that could get sorted out by a county board. And he didn’t have a majority to support his plan to pull out of the state’s COVID protocols. I asked whether he was involved in the movement to recall the governor, Gavin Newsom, which was then gaining momentum. Jones gave me a mischievous look and leaned over the counter. “You might want to check back on that here soon,” he said. “We haven’t announced it yet, but there’s going to be a recall here too.” I found the idea hard to take seriously—a sitting board member leading a recall against his fellow members in a fight that was more a clash of values than policy—but Jones looked serious. “Check back,” he said. “It’s going to get interesting.”
That local recall did happen, of course, earlier this year. The next passage in the Harper's story refers to two men, Clendenen and Zapata, members of the so-called Cottonwood militia, who loomed large in that recall. You can learn more about them and that recall of a Republican county supervisor here.
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.
You can find more on the would-be State of Jefferson in the series of posts here.
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