The Secessionists of Shasta County

Nevin Kallepalli investigates political resentment in rural California, in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 47: “Security.”

By Nevin KallepalliNovember 10, 2025

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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THE CHAMBERS OF Anderson City Hall are round and windowless. It gives off the impression that you’re in an underground amphitheater, despite being on the third (and top) floor of one of the tallest buildings in town. Directly above the bench where council members sit, slightly elevated above the public gallery, the words “IN GOD WE TRUST” are inscribed on the semicircular molding. As in most city councils in Shasta County, California, every meeting starts with a prayer, usually Christian, though occasionally it’s an invocation from a Native or Sikh practitioner. The chambers only seat about 60, and rarely do public meetings reach capacity. Most days the chairs are filled by the same cast of concerned citizens, who skew white and over 65, plus a few public servants and, on occasion, me, the lone reporter.

I first arrived in Shasta County just over a year ago, in September 2024, when summer’s fever was just about to break. The small city of Anderson is one of the last stops before you hit the Klamath Mountains when you’re driving up the mighty I-5, the interior artery of the Central Valley. I had come as a “local reporting fellow” assigned to Shasta Scout, a nonprofit news service, through a UC Berkeley program staffing newsrooms in “news deserts,” typically in remote or disenfranchised parts of the state.

One of my first assignments was covering the weekly council meeting in Anderson on September 17. On the agenda that night was a proposal to declare Anderson a parental “Right to Know City.” This was the small town’s resistance to recent legislation passed by the California State Assembly: the SAFETY Act. The legislation, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in July 2024, bars school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education from adopting “forced outing” policies toward LGBTQ+ students, granting discretion to educators in how much they disclose to parents about, for example, a child’s choice of pronouns in school. This came as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was galvanizing millions around the image of an omnipresent trans witch devouring the nation’s Hansels and Gretels. 

In California, what might have seemed like an uncontroversial policy on much of the coast set off a firestorm in the state’s extremely conservative interior—including Anderson—where a group of vocal parents already believed that a left-wing public school curriculum was brainwashing children with “gender ideology.” According to them, the passage of the SAFETY Act gave teachers broad leeway to encourage students to transition in secret, thereby violating “parents’ rights.” Hence, Anderson’s appropriation of the term “sanctuary city,” employed by liberal municipalities during Trump’s first term to signify their status as a haven to the vulnerable and a bulwark against policies deemed cruel and excessive.

During their discussion of the SAFETY Act, one council member called the new state policy a form of “mental abuse” that would inevitably confuse children while deceiving parents. The mayor called it yet another unconstitutional consequence of the state legislature’s “progressive Marxist bent.” But the council member whose reflection I found most striking, Mike Gallagher, contextualized the bill as part of a larger power imbalance between this small rural town and the liberal behemoth that is Sacramento’s political machine. “It’s the same legislature that pushes this through […] that does housing, that does transportation, that does public health,” he began. “It’s the same group of people. […] There’s an agenda. They’re hitting us from all angles. They won’t ever talk about […] what gets a kid to get to this …” He grew quiet, considering his words. “This place,” he continued. “They think it’s natural. It just crushes me to think that they’re that evil.” 

The vote was a unanimous five ayes. It was a symbolic gesture, as the city council lacks the authority to compel Anderson’s school districts to flout state law, which would bring the risk of being sued. In the coming months, my Shasta Scout editor and I struggled to find a single case of a student who “socially transitioned” in the classroom without their parents’ knowledge, as critics of the bill seemed to think would occur. Sixty miles south, in Butte County, however, there was a lawsuit making headlines: a mother of a fifth grader was suing her child’s school district for allegedly allowing her to transition secretly. The lawyer representing the family was Harmeet Dhillon, who would soon be appointed assistant attorney general for civil rights in Pam Bondi’s Justice Department.

The Anderson City Council member’s conflation of the state government’s control over the county’s infrastructure (housing, transportation, public health) with an ideological imposition revealed a widely felt sentiment I would observe over the next year. In my coverage of Shasta County’s politics, I observed a shared frustration that often cuts across socioeconomic and cultural lines—that rural needs are being willfully neglected by those with real power at the state level, and that their local value system is purposely misconstrued by the sanctimonious and morally bankrupt Left. 

California’s north is home to a hub of counties with some of the lowest median incomes in the state. The human development index for Shasta County is below state average and life expectancy is lower. It is the county with the highest suicide rate in California, crippled by a devastating lack of healthcare and the infrastructure to adequately deal with a widespread sense of despair. For people who feel both underinvested in and fiercely defensive of their way of life on the edge of a wilderness, the “city” is a space that embodies all of California’s corruption, moral or otherwise. In a sense, not being told what to think is the only weapon in many people’s arsenals, as the Bureau of Reclamation oversees the use of water from Lake Shasta and the adjoining Sacramento River for irrigating farmland, the Bureau of Land Management controls exactly where a rancher’s flock of cows can graze, and the Endangered Species Act can be used to shut down once-profitable timber mills if logging poses a threat to an endangered owl. 

One of the key contradictions about life in the most remote parts of California is that, although the state is more deeply entrenched and the presence of federal agencies more pronounced than in almost any other part of the country, there is, at the same time, a profound lack of investment and inadequate infrastructure. Despite the fact that the government owns almost all the land west of the Rockies, the spirit of the frontier is still alive in these untamed parts of the nation, where mountain towns are regularly submerged in darkness during fire season, residents may lack access to electricity, and the nearest post office can be an hour’s drive away. On the margins, there is a palpable fear that public agencies and private corporations alike are whittling away the little autonomy that residents still enjoy and further restricting access to the natural resources residents unequivocally believe are theirs and theirs alone. Shasta is where small farmers at what should be an anodyne public meeting invoke the depletion of the Owens River Valley’s crystalline aquifers to serve the masses in Los Angeles as an omen of their own future, or curse the Resnick family’s monopolizing of water rights to feed their growing pistachio empire. For outsiders, it may seem obvious why locals should not have total reign over the land and resources around them, but it’s more complex for rural Californians, who often see “government overreach” and environmental initiatives as threatening their livelihoods.

In parts of Shasta, Modoc, Siskiyou, Tehama, Butte, and Glenn counties, it is not a given that you are in California. At the very least, many residents feel that there are de facto two Californias. Theirs is the resource-rich hinterland where an undomesticated sense of freedom is still possible, while the other California lies in the coastal cities, where power has been consolidated. It is the residents of the latter who benefit from statewide policies, which only serve their needs, their value system, their version of “inclusivity,” and their consumption habits, all too often at the direct expense of the other California, out of mind and out of sight. Aside from the Rancherias and Tribal Nations that actually do exist partly beyond California’s authority, somewhat hazily between federal control and actual sovereignty, there are citizen militias, intentional communities, preppers, and bands of feral wanderers, hoping to live as if the embalming effects of state bureaucracy had not yet reached them. 

Here, too, one finds active state-building projects, such as the longstanding State of Jefferson, a secessionist movement to carve out a state in Northern California and Southern Oregon, with origins dating back to the 19th century. Born of an outrage over the respective state governments’ failure to maintain roads, the movement culminated in a brief armed—albeit bloodless—rebellion in 1941. Its younger cousin and adversary, New California State, would see a partitioning of California along rural and partisan lines, first proposed circa 2015. Less particular to far northern California, there is Calexit, whose aim is to leave the United States entirely, taking inspiration from Scottish independence referendums, or California assemblyman James Gallagher’s recent and curiously named “two-state solution,” an attempt at a diplomatic negotiation with Gavin Newsom over his controversial redistricting plan. 

Although the resentment of Sacramento and Washington, DC, has deep roots here, it wasn’t until the seismic disaster of 2020 that many got their first taste of what they believed was true authoritarianism. Amid the pandemic fugue, the 200 miles between Shasta and San Francisco seemed greater than ever. While city dwellers sequestered themselves indoors under lock and key with a kind of religious fervor, the residents of Cottonwood, a small satellite of Anderson, flatly refused to comply with most mandates. The local volunteer Cottonwood Militia, a regiment of the statewide California militia, mobilized people to resist lockdowns and refuse vaccines no matter the cost, because to them these were more than just moral litmus tests imposed by the Left: they were the very manifestation of state tyranny. County and city politicians, compelled by the state to uphold the law, were deemed traitors, and whatever fragile political stability had existed was eviscerated. 

Reporters from Harper’s to The Nation descended on the one-road town to interview the militia’s founder, Woody Clendenen, in his barbershop. A narrative was taking shape in national and state media that Shasta County had been taken over by an armed fascist militia. The image of homegrown brownshirts, California Klansmen, or a full-scale military junta was a hysterical distortion, but there were legitimate concerns. Local progressives, many elected officials (all lifelong Republicans), and journalists—including my boss—were threatened. Militiamen were convinced that busloads of “antifa” and “outside agitators” were going to infiltrate the county seat of Redding, as broadcast images of the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct on fire flickered in living rooms across the United States. When there was a Black Lives Matter protest in Redding later that summer, militiamen acted as an undeputized auxiliary to law enforcement to “keep the peace,” engaging in crowd control over a nonthreatening group of demonstrators.

Some five years later, I paid a visit to the barbershop, reporting my own profile of this armed organization after the dust had more or less settled. I was surprised to learn how large the pandemic memory continued to loom over them. The group had since expanded its recruitment to include women and even children, offering boys and girls life skills in training camps. Contrary to the widespread accusations that the militia was a bona fide hate group, the truth is much more ambiguous. There may be little diversity in political thought, but there were Latiné and Native members among the crowd at the weekly community meetings. Yes, we are a militia, members told me over the hum of clippers, seated in barber’s chairs, but why are people so intimidated by the word militia? They posited that the militia should be destigmatized, claiming that historically there had been informal volunteer platoons in every hamlet across the continent from the time of Plymouth Rock (though the genocide of Native people in California perpetrated by these very militias, assisted directly by the governor, was something they were less willing to confront). 

Yes, California’s private paramilitary laws could present legal limitations to their activities, but this was just another way that the state law was at odds with the Second Amendment, they told me. And besides, arms practice was only part of a larger philosophy of self-sufficiency. They train members in wildfire preparedness, food preservation, communication via radio, and basic first aid; they have essentially created their own disaster-response infrastructure that they say the state has not provided, or will not in the future. Yes, they may tread the legal boundary between acting with law enforcement and acting as law enforcement, supporters acknowledged, but who was there to help evacuate livestock as swaths of Shasta County were reduced to embers? The militia is manifold, I found out, and their commitment to Tea Party–style libertarianism was backgrounded by the fact that they have had to fend for themselves. Rather than languish, they make their own solutions—solutions that, militia members attest, liberal lawmakers, with their byzantine legal system, want to withhold from afar. 

From my past reporting on armed resistance in the Indian subcontinent, this dynamic was eerily familiar. It reminded me of the cognitive divide between the central government in Delhi, which believes unequivocally that its dominion extends far into the curtain of mountains that separates South from Central Asia, and the many Kashmiris who recoil at the thought of being referred to as “Indian.” It is reminiscent of the damming of rivers that run through the Punjab during the first decades of independence, hugely consequential public works that irrigated the deserts of Rajasthan at the expense of Sikh farmers, who in turn led an insurgent movement that attempted to establish the sovereign Sikh nation of Khalistan (which still has a significant support base among the thousands of Sikh immigrants who have made huge strides in the Central Valley’s trucking and agricultural industries). 

Feelings of injustice over material dispossession were augmented by the religious differences between India’s interior capital and these two borderlands. The scores of youths who gave their lives to the Khalistani and Kashmiri guerrilla movements respectively—which reached their bloody apexes, one after the other, in the late 1980s and early ’90s—believed they were engaged in a fight against both neocolonialism and a national assault on their cultural identities, often articulating their struggle in theological vocabularies. At times, they targeted civilians and were pursued as terrorists, while state paramilitaries collectively punished “insurgency-prone” areas, making martyrs of thousands of men, women, and children, all in the name of retaining some semblance of secular “democracy” that relied on the structural integrity of Indian’s post-1947 borders.

Sitting in Shasta County Board of Supervisors meetings, as officials lamented the lack of local control and the imposition of regulations by a government of outsiders, I was reminded of the political dynamics of the separatist movements in India that I covered, whose supporters describe Delhi in imperialist terms, as a metropole extracting resources from a politically disenfranchised colony. As the relationship between Governor Newsom and President Trump continues to deteriorate and the chasm widens between California’s Democratic bastions and its errant Republican congressional districts, giving credence to the fear that a nebulous “Left” hundreds of miles away will root out local conservative values by increasingly violent means, I ask myself hesitantly: Does Sacramento exercise an imperial relationship with Californians on the geographic and ideological periphery? Put more cautiously, is invoking the metaphor of imperialism an effective way to illustrate, for coastal liberals, the stakes and bitter resentment felt by their inland fellow citizens? 

I do not mean to make a glib comparison between communities terrorized by Indian soldiers and California’s disgruntled and at times misunderstood right-wing voter bloc. Nor do I mean to gloss over the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Californians who continue to live in the shadow of actual colonization, rarely figuring into the multiple renderings of California’s Balkanization. Rural voters, even those supportive of state-building movements, do not use the framework of imperialism to describe their discontent, and of course, like any place in the world, public opinion varies. Beyond some vague sense of cultural conservatism, many residents are disengaged from local politics almost entirely. There are political outliers in Shasta: a contingency of college-educated middle-class Shasta County Democrats who toe the party line under any and all circumstances, as well as committed progressives who are affected by the same rural issues that inspire secessionist urges on the conservative fringe, and who are equally critical of the governor’s policies. The distrust of state and corporate power can lead to a strange dovetailing of interests across perceived political divisions. Earlier this year, as the snow enshrouding ‘ith ‘aq’o (Mount Shasta) began to melt in May, progressive members of the Pit River Tribe welcomed hyperconservative white ranchers to organize alongside them in warding off a Spanish multimillion-dollar clean energy project that would have desecrated the holy land, a project empowered by California’s official legal mandate to go carbon zero by 2045.

It is against this backdrop that those who do actively engage in politics lament that representation is structurally withheld from them by a patronizing (if not draconian) political network hundreds of miles away. The few on the most extreme fringes of the county’s political spectrum—those assembling state-building movements, who count some of Shasta County’s elected officials among their allies—claim that an exit strategy is their only chance at real freedom. No other state in the continental US has so many varied political movements disputing its borders, and the sheer number of California partitionists, separatists, and secessionists reveals something uniquely destabilizing about the state’s political mosaic: California is the epicenter of the liberal opposition on a national level, with Democratic supermajorities in both the state senate and assembly, yet nearly 40 percent of its popular vote went to Donald Trump in 2024. Witnessing the national Democratic establishment’s humiliating fall from grace, many conservative Californians finally felt like their perspective was being validated. But Trump’s triumph only exacerbated the long-standing feelings that Newsom had taken the entire state hostage, now in defiance of the executive branch’s perceived popular mandate. On the inflammatory issues that garnered national support among Republicans—a hard-line stance on immigration, opposition to trans rights and vaccine mandates—many conservatives feel that Newsom has less justification for his positions than ever before. That is, if they didn’t already see him as a traitor.

I witnessed these dynamics coming to a head nearly one year after my first city council meeting in the Anderson chambers. The New California State movement held an election at precincts across the state to ratify their draft constitution. NCS, which began holding constitutional conventions in 2018 in the Central Valley, models its state-building process after the formation of West Virginia during the Civil War. In 1863, a group of politicians and farmers from the western region of the Virginia Commonwealth appealed to the Confederate Virginian government and President Abraham Lincoln to allow them to break off and rejoin the Union, drafting a state constitution and organizing a referendum on the split. Supporters of NCS see themselves as captives of an insurrectionist government led by Gavin Newsom, who has in practice seceded from the United States, and the movement’s leadership claims (without evidence) that they’ve made similar strides with the Trump administration to support the formation of a New California. Of course, unlike West Virginia, NCS is not seeking the approval of the state, nor has Newsom’s California actually seceded.

The precinct in Shasta County was located in Redding’s Red Lion Hotel, across the street from a casino. The election was attended by the county’s actual registrar of voters, Clint Curtis, who cast a ballot in the prosaic conference room. I scanned the (likely unconstitutional) proposed constitution, which abolished gay marriage, reworked the state senate so that every county had the same number of senators regardless of population, and included special protections for citizen militias. Fewer than 1,000 ballots were cast across the state by voters who imagined themselves tasked with deciding the fate of 40 million. Outside of the movement, this gesture was a kind of cosplay. Even locally, the small, vocal group is a laughingstock to many of our skeptical readers. But in reporting about state-building movements, from NCS to Khalistan, I’m less interested in the solvency of their vision than in people’s motivation to join as a window into their worldview, which is often grounded in a coherent critique of power relations, however unpalatable their politics may be to others. How do they narrativize their own despondency, and what parts of their stories might even the most ardent critics find (reluctantly) relatable? They may seem absurd or seditious to most observers, but there are moments when so-called “extremists” make what many would agree is a valid point. 

Upon querying the crowd of NCS voters on what brought them there that day, I heard the hyperconservative culture-war issues I expected, some more polarizing than others. The United States was being invaded by criminal hordes of migrants; radical doctors were mutilating children with their so-called “gender-affirming” care; despite the Republican victory, the election process could not be trusted; Silicon Valley must be prevented from imposing its regime of artificial intelligence, and the CDC its regime of vaccines. Then there were the talking points about the issue of representation. One retired engineer figured that rural Californians will never stand a chance in the current system, where the city of Los Angeles has 11 state senators while the roughly 10 counties that make up Shasta’s state senate district share one. He asked a simple question: if Northern California’s daily problems more closely resemble life on the open range in Montana or Idaho, why can’t we govern ourselves like they do? This may seem unfair to city dwellers, an opinion shared by the Supreme Court on this very issue in Reynolds v. Sims in 1964, when Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the majority opinion that “legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”

Exactly one month later, Gavin Newsom responded to Texas’s undemocratic redistricting with his own attempt at blue gerrymandering, releasing a redrawn congressional map that lassos Shasta County into the same district as Marin. These were extraordinary circumstances, California politicians insisted, and besides, the key difference between the Golden and Lone Star maps was that voters would decide in California. Apparently, fighting fire with fire is using democracy to undermine democracy. Sacramento certainly does not represent trees and acres. Nor does it represent the people who live near them.

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Featured image: Captain Budd Christman (NOAA Corps). Shasta Reservoir, April 1980. CC0, noaa.gov. Accessed November 6, 2025. Image has been cropped.

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Editor's note: This essay has been updated for accuracy.