An update on alleged insurrection plans in far northern California

Jessica Garrison reports under the headline, "A far-right insurrection aims to take over this Northern California county, at the ballot box," for the Los Angeles Times.  This story follows up on a number of reports from January and February this year, when a local militia supported the successful recall of a Republican member of the County Board of Supervisors.  (You can find those and earlier stories about the county's and region's politics here, here, here and here, among others).

Here's the gist of the new story, which features something of a focus on gender and a faction's desire to keep women out of positions of authority in the county:

Far-right activists, including members of a local militia, led a successful recall campaign in February against a Republican supervisor. Now the newly formed "Liberty Committee" is backing a June 7 election slate of Crye and five other candidates to further consolidate power. The group’s website declares that “our country is under assault. It’s time to take it back, one state, county and city at a time.”

In recent months, county government has been in near chaos. Board meetings have been raucous, with anti-establishment activists screaming and threatening violence. Some county workers say they fear for their safety. Amid it all, an astronomical amount of money has flooded into local politics. Reverge Anselmo, a former Hollywood filmmaker turned vintner who abandoned the county after a bitter land-use dispute, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the recall and has given hundreds of thousands more this spring, including to the Liberty Committee, according to records.

In May, the new conservative majority on the Board of Supervisors fired the county’s health officer, Dr. Karen Ramstrom. Shortly after that, the county’s chief administrator, Matt Pontes, announced that he was leaving — but not before he told the local paper that one of the pro-recall supervisors, gun-store manager Patrick Jones, had been "blackmailing" him." Pontes could not be reached for comment. Jones said the allegation was a "total" lie, adding: "I asked him to take a polygraph, and he won’t do it."

The county’s voters now face a stark choice between the Liberty Committee's slate and the traditional Republican establishment. Though Shasta County is home to just 180,000 people, the election is being watched as a harbinger of rising radicalism in local government, particularly because the recall contingent has touted their playbook as a national model.

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Last month, Anselmo told a reporter from the Redding Record Searchlight that it was no accident that the committee is only backing men. Women tend to be too emotional and “squishy,” the paper reported Anselmo as saying. He did not respond to an email asking him to elaborate.

Shasta County is the second most populous county between Sacramento and the Oregon state line.  Though it's a metropolitan county, Shasta County covers a lot of territory and is sparsely populated; it's surrounded by nonmetro counties.  The region has long been referred to as the "State of Jefferson" based on its desire to secede from California and Oregon, an impulse that dates back to the days before WWII.