Chapter Four
A PRESSURE COOKER PRIMED TO EXPLODE
In the coming years, the civility that surrounded Ramstrom’s COVID presentation that March would be in increasingly short supply. Like Sequim’s, the region’s politics would become ever more acrimonious as the reality show that was the Trump presidency and post-presidency ran up against the actual reality of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Over time, these forces would fundamentally reshape Shasta’s image, leading to an attempted recall against three supervisors, one of whom, Leonard Moty, an ex–police chief of Redding, would be booted out of office by a surging right-wing, populist movement furious at the public health restrictions implemented to slow the spread of COVID.
By 2020, with the Trump personality cult in full bloom, America was at a crossroads. Trump’s relentless assault on democratic norms, his empowering of paramilitaries, his flirtation with overseas dictators such as North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and his nod-and-a-wink embrace of white nationalism and the alt-right—be it after the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally of 2017 or during the presidential debates, when he doffed his cap to the Proud Boys—had exposed the fragility of many norms and institutions long thought inviolable in the United States.
In Charlottesville, neo-Nazis protesting the removal of statues commemorating Confederate leaders had rallied with tiki torches, raucously shouting that they would not “be replaced” by other races and creeds. The ghastly apogee of the event occurred when James Alex Fields, an ex-teacher fascinated by Nazi iconography, deliberately rammed his Dodge Challenger into the crowd of antifascist protesters. Thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer died on the scene. Several others were seriously injured. Afterward, unwilling to make a complete break with the white nationalists who were increasingly a significant part of his electoral coalition, Trump had stated that there were some “very fine people” on both sides of the conflict.
Donald Trump “joked” about installing himself as president for life and openly mused about desiring the sort of absolute powers accorded Xi Jinping in China. When he withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, his language and phrasing about how the world once laughed at America but no one was laughing now was eerily redolent of some of the passages from Adolf Hitler’s wartime speeches. Trump’s willingness to push whatever big lie was convenient to meet the political needs of the moment, his overt racism, his misogyny, his labeling of the press and his political opponents as “enemies of the people,” and his extraordinarily effective use of Twitter and other social media outlets, as well as right-wing television and radio networks, to build up a strongman’s propaganda machine were fundamentally reshaping not only American politics but also the broader culture. It was creating a cult of personality based around loyalty to one man and that man’s ever-shifting whims.
“Gaslighting forces subordinates to agree that the person in charge gets to determine what reality is. Victims must surrender either their integrity or their ownership of their own perceptions,” the historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. “In either case, having once agreed to a deliberate lie, it becomes harder to challenge later ones because that means acknowledging the other times they caved.” In Richardson’s telling, adherence to the Big Lie thus became a loyalty test used by Trump and his advisers to deliberately shatter democratic norms. “Big Lies are springboards for authoritarians,” Richardson wrote. “They enable a leader to convince followers that they were unfairly cheated of power by those the leader demonizes.”
Onto that authoritarian fire, two accelerants were thrown: first, in the winter of 2020 came COVID and the resulting lockdowns and prolonged enforced isolation, the move to remote schooling, and the shuttering of “nonessential” businesses. Hundreds of thousands died in those brutal first months of the pandemic.
The psychic trauma that built up, the continual stress—both of not knowing who would be infected and who would die next, and not knowing when the bone-crushing isolation would end—were sledgehammers turning to powder the world that we thought we knew. As psychologists began studying the neurological impact of the disease itself, the stress generated by fear of the disease, and the collateral damage caused by the lockdowns and isolation, they chronicled increases in suicide, in divorce, in domestic violence, in depression, in anxiety, and in PTSD.
Those who were already psychologically fragile were made more so, and a number of studies showed that people infected with COVID-19 were more likely to subsequently receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia and that those who went into the pandemic psychologically healthy ran through more of their reserves just trying to maintain their well-being. Meanwhile, the availability of in-person psychiatric and counseling assistance plummeted, and those on the edge, struggling to hold it all together, were left trying to navigate a new world of Zoom medical appointments and distance diagnoses. Continuity of care, so vital for the effective treatment of serious mental health disorders, largely fell by the wayside. And drug and alcohol use increased as desperate people sought whatever coping mechanisms they could find to manage the loneliness and fear.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario more tailor-made for social explosions. And, sure enough, those explosions came hard and fast: armed uprisings against the lockdowns in several states, plots to kidnap and execute the governor of Michigan, lynch mobs lined up against public health officers, school board and county board of supervisors meetings that degenerated into screaming matches, parents attempting to carry out citizen’s arrests against officials who were keeping the schools closed, supermarket cashiers being violently attacked for asking customers to don masks.
In Fort Worth, Texas, a woman at a 7-Eleven store was filmed screaming at a cashier after he asked her to put on a mask. As she left the store, she turned around and spat on the counter. In Wayne County, Pennsylvania, a man spat in the face of another shopper, a sixty-nine-year-old woman who had approached him and asked him to put on a mask. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a woman shopping at the local Kline Village Giant store spat in the face of a young female employee.
The violence picked up steam. Numerous store employees around the country reported being punched or kicked for asking customers to mask up. Flight attendants were pushed, slapped, and punched by passengers infuriated at mask requirements on planes.
Finally, the anti-mask tantrums turned lethal. In Flint, Michigan, forty-three-year-old Calvin Munerlyn, a Dollar Store employee, was fatally shot in the back of the head by a relative of a shopper whom Munerlyn had told couldn’t stay in the store without a mask. At the Big Bear Supermarket in Decatur, Georgia, forty-one-year-old Laquitta Willis was murdered after asking a customer to pull up his mask when he approached her cash register to pay for his groceries.
As the winter of 2020 gave way to spring, COVID became an extraordinary political football. At Trump rallies—gatherings that broke every public health recommendation of both the CDC and the states and cities where the events were held—tens of thousands of unmasked participants screamed obscenities at public health figures such as Anthony Fauci.
The country had become a pressure cooker, primed to explode.
And then, a few months after the initial outbreak, the lid blew off the pressure cooker following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as the renewed emphasis on teaching about America’s brutal racial history that grew out of this traumatic event.
Millions of Americans, pent up and isolated for months, desperate to find an issue larger than COVID to focus on, poured out into the streets that May and June in what would rapidly become the largest racial-justice protests in US history. All of this contributed to the general political swirl around COVID. Those who had objected to masking and isolation mandates from the start of the emergency responses back in March noted that many of these protesters were themselves violating regulations but that they were doing so without arousing the censorious voices of liberal figures who had been so scathing of the Trump rallies held that spring.
Most of the protests that took place in the wake of Floyd’s killing were peaceful, but some, especially in the country’s largest cities, did degenerate into violence and looting. And when they did, Trump was ready, urging the military to get involved in quashing the protests. On May 29 he tweeted out an extraordinarily inflammatory saying from 1960s Miami police chief Walter Headley: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” It was almost as if the president of the United States, far from trying to calm the situation, was egging on his supporters to themselves take to the streets; it was almost as if the commander in chief wanted to see an explosion of violence on those streets. Three days later, Trump amped up the rhetoric further. At a Rose Garden address on June 1, with protesters filling the streets leading up to the White House and police firing volley after volley of tear gas into the crowd, the beleaguered president promised that “if a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” On a call with governors that same day, Trump repeatedly urged them to “dominate” protesters and, again, repeatedly promised—or threatened, depending on how one heard the president’s words—to send in the troops to restore order. He backed off only when the army chiefs made it clear they would balk at any such orders.
Around the country, however, in the last days of May and the first days of June, as protests and rioting spread from coast to coast, state governors took their own decisions to deploy National Guard troops in many of America’s major cities. And in several communities right-wing militias activated their members to patrol the streets as a vigilante add-on to overstretched law enforcement. Over the course of that month, at least nine protesters were killed, according to information compiled by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED). More than two thousand cities saw protests, many of them on numerous occasions, throughout that summer—polling from later in the year found that as many as 26 million Americans took part in the racial-justice demonstrations, making it the largest protest movement in US history. And although the vast majority of those protests did not turn deadly, and the vast majority of the demonstrators remained nonviolent, the 5 percent of protests that ACLED researchers estimated did turn violent resulted in a huge amount of property damage and numerous injuries to police officers and to protesters alike. In Minneapolis alone, more than one thousand buildings were burned or otherwise damaged. In New York City, 450 buildings were attacked. In Atlanta, several buildings and vehicles in the Centennial Olympic Park area were vandalized, the interior of the CNN headquarters among them. Looters emptied out stores in Santa Monica and hit two federal buildings in Los Angeles. Nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that more than 200 federal buildings were damaged. The Associated Press calculated that in the first week of protests alone, more than 10,000 people around the United States were arrested for their role in the demonstrations and unrest. Upward of a quarter of those arrests were in Los Angeles, a city with a strong collective memory of the protests and violence that had followed the Rodney King beating nearly thirty years earlier.
When, two months after the initial protests, a seventeen-year-old white vigilante, Kyle Rittenhouse, shot dead two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Trump and his conservative media allies jumped to his defense. The president announced, even before the teenager’s trial, it appeared to him that Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense. Tucker Carlson claimed that the teenager was “attempting to maintain order when no one else would.” Ann Coulter quipped that she wanted the young man “as my president.” Later on, after Rittenhouse was acquitted by a jury of the charges against him of reckless and intentional homicide, Congressman Matt Gaetz would reach out to him about an internship, and Trump would invite him to come and meet with him at Mar-a-Lago, later pronouncing him a “really nice young man.”
Two weeks before Rittenhouse fired his fatal shots, with California five months into pandemic lockdowns, with large parts of the economy still shuttered and many residents financially desperate, with most school districts in the state about to enter a new school year of remote learning and no real road map to rapidly reopening schools, and with masking mandatory in public places, Carlos Zapata, who lived on the edge of the small farming town of Palo Cedro, attended the weekly board of supervisors meeting unmasked. Normally, this meeting would have been held in the morning; that day, it was scheduled for six o’clock in the evening.
By then, five months into the pandemic, many of Shasta’s residents were at a breaking point. The lockdown policies, implemented at speed by the governor, using emergency powers, had been haphazardly designed—as they had been by desperate governments all over the world as the pandemic threatened to swamp health-care systems and the COVID death count skyrocketed. Federal relief measures had been passed, but it was taking time to process all the applications for loans and unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, laid-off workers and small-business owners were scrambling to make ends meet, to pay the mortgage or rent, and to put food on the table. That spring and summer, food banks saw huge spikes in the numbers of hungry people coming to them for help. In Las Vegas miles-long lines of cars snaked down the fabled Strip toward food pantries distributing emergency relief to casino workers and entertainers who had been laid off as the tourism industry shut down. It was a particularly stark image of a reality turned upside down. In New York and other large East Coast cities, pedestrians waited in line for hours to get what little food the charity centers could provide them. Food-bank workers reported that the scale of need was surpassing that seen even at the height of the Great Recession in 2008‒2009. In April 2020, as the country ground to a halt, unemployment suddenly spiked at nearly 15 percent. By the summer, millions of Americans were running through what little savings they had, and millions feared that, unable to pay their rent or mortgages, they might lose their homes. (Not until September would the CDC use its emergency public health powers to declare a national eviction moratorium.) Even as Congress passed a series of relief acts that rapidly threw trillions of dollars into supporting the economy, in the short term, before the money started flowing, the economic damage caused to individuals was immense, and the political fallout that resulted from this situation grew increasingly dangerous.
As the pandemic ground on that first spring and summer, so the profound levels of fear and anxiety in communities around the country escalated. Increasingly, how one believed that the public authorities should respond to COVID was determined by one’s political allegiances. In this fissuring, nuance and empathy for one’s political opponents were lost. Progressives overwhelmingly embraced the precautionary principles that animated the lockdowns, and they denounced conservatives as know-nothings; conservatives overwhelmingly came to oppose the COVID restrictions and denounced progressives and public health experts as fearmongering, liberty-shredding, wannabe tyrants. What had started off as simply a once-in-a-lifetime public health emergency was rapidly becoming a stark political litmus test, with both sides talking past each other in increasingly loud and angry terms.
At Shasta County’s board of supervisors meetings, representatives from the county Democratic Party would show up to petition the county to “recognize the COVID-19 reality” and to require the “simple compliance of wearing a mask and practicing social distancing.” Meanwhile, conservatives—of whom there were many more in Shasta—would denounce the whole affair as being simply un-American, the emphasis on public health as somehow unpatriotic. Some would show up in costume—one local anti-vaxxer, ex-supervisor Leonard Moty remembers, would turn up dressed as a syringe—while others would come ostentatiously packing weapons. At the height of the pandemic, when the supervisors themselves were sectioned off behind Plexiglas, each in their own bizarre cubicle, one outspoken local supporter of the idea that rural counties should secede from California and form the State of Jefferson turned up at meetings wearing a mask over his eyes, instead of one over his mouth and nose, to theatrically lambaste the supervisors for what he called their “shameful” defense of mask wearing.
The early August meeting, which would ultimately last nearly six hours, was full of acrimony—young children denouncing masks for making them feel claustrophobic (one twelve-year-old recited an anti-mask poem), adults screaming at the supervisors for making the speakers stand far back from the dais as a social-distancing measure and denouncing the masked supervisors for not looking them directly in their eyes. “Move the desks aside, come outside, and look at the people. Shake our hands. We’re not sick,” one young mother shouted, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “We’re not criminals. But if you make the wrong decisions for too long, you will make the most law-abiding citizens into criminals. And you do not want to do that.”
Some people spoke calmly, respectfully—one local doctor, for example, fully accepted the gruesome reality of COVID but, with great dignity and with a powerful sadness at the mental health damage and loss of education that school shutdowns were imposing on poorer, more vulnerable children, pushed back against the continued closing of schools. Later on, the doctor would become a prominent voice in the local anti-lockdown movement that was bubbling up from the grassroots. But, whether loudly or softly, in these meetings the rejection of California’s statewide mandates was nearly unanimous. Locals paraded to the dais to compare COVID to the flu, notwithstanding the vast difference in mortality rates between the two diseases; to denounce masks as being un-American; to demand the county push back against the mandates originating out of Sacramento. Some implored the supervisors to unshutter churches. Others pled for small businesses to be reopened so that the owners could make payroll and also feed their children. One impassioned small-business owner told them, “I employ fifteen employees, not minimum wage.… We are the people that donate to your Little League team, church, every school function, organization, sports team imaginable, Carr Fire victims,1 the mission, adopt-a-family, and more.” She continued, pivoting to a more general political critique: “We are tired of carrying the load of a welfare state, tired of being told we can’t open our business after doing what was asked of us, tired of early-release criminals roaming our neighborhoods… we are just tired of being tired. The damage of being shut down will be far-reaching and long-term.”
A Cottonwood resident, whose father had died fighting in Korea, told the supervisors that they were “complicit” in destroying American liberties and needed to open up the churches “immediately, immediately. It really is tyranny. You need to consider your place, and your responsibility, in this lockdown. You need to open up, search your heart. You need to stop obeying Fauci and the so-called medical experts who are forcing this country into the disaster we are headed into.”
“I’m a God-fearing, patriotic, flag-loving, tax-paying citizen here. It’s time for us to go back to work,” one local woman implored the board. “My seventy-five-year-old mother is contemplating bankruptcy. My twenty-three-year-old daughter just had a baby and hasn’t had a paycheck in seventeen weeks. My house is on the chopping block because I deferred my payments so I could help my kids eat. I don’t understand what is going on.”
But none of the speakers were a patch on Carlos Zapata. The ex-marine strode to the speakers’ podium and launched a broadside against the political leaders around the state who had signed off on the public health measures. He was wearing a black baseball cap and a white T-shirt, his muscular arms bulging out of the sleeves. He looked a bundle of pent-up energy, his arms folded in front of his chest, his torso hunched slightly forward as he leaned into the mic. There was something undeniably charismatic about him, something almost hypnotizing in the way he could conjure up the fury and angst that so many people were feeling when confronted by a poorly understood new disease and emergency public health measures of open-ended duration.
Zapata was a natural-born crowd-pleaser, a skilled orator who knew how to gin up the crowd, how to pace his words, how to adjust his volume to play to the emotions of the audience, how to build to a magnificent climax. In some ways he was a right-wing version of Mario Savio, the University of California at Berkeley graduate student who had lit the flame of the free-speech movement nearly sixty years earlier when he stood atop the steps at Sproul Hall and announced that there came a time when the system proved itself so corrupt, so rotten, that you had no real choice but to stand in its way, to gum up the works of the machine until it was forced to a stop. There was a magnetism to his presence, a rock-star quality to his stagecraft, and when he got into his rhythm, he simply owned the meeting.
“It’s absolutely horrendous what you’re doing to people,” Zapata shouted. “I’m a business owner; I tell you, our families are starving. Right now, we’re being peaceful,” but, he continued, “it’s not going to be peaceful much longer. Good citizens are going to turn into revolutionary citizens real soon.” And when that happened, Zapata promised, they would become an unstoppable force. “If you don’t hear this in my voice, then open your ears and listen to what I’m saying, because this is a warning.”
Directly addressing the five members of the board of supervisors, who, by now, four months into the pandemic, were sitting socially spaced and wearing masks, Zapata demanded that they “open the county. Let us citizens do what we need to do. Let owners of businesses do what they need to do to feed their families. Take the masks off. Quit masking and muzzling your children. The psychological damage you’re doing to them is horrible. I’ve had six friends kill themselves since this happened; veterans who lost their jobs. How do you feel about being complicit in perpetuating that? The greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people—and you’re part of it by wearing your masks. In Shasta County we’re supposed to be a red county up here. Not a blue county. You guys know that; you claim to be conservatives, maybe you’re not, maybe you’re liberals.” The way the word “liberals” came out of his mouth, it might as well have been “pedophiles” or “devil worshippers.” Each sentence was a rhetorical gunshot, a sharp, explosive detonation: “I don’t know, but by God we’re Americans, and remember that! Take your masks off! Quit muzzling yourselves! Join us! Fight what’s going on in Sacramento!”
Within hours of Zapata’s short screed being posted online, it had gone viral, and the previously unknown ex-marine had become a lodestar for the anti-lockdown movement that was coalescing in many countries around the world. Later, Zapata would estimate that, posted and reposted around the internet, his broadside had been viewed roughly 30 million times.
In the era of Trump, COVID, the echoing chambers of social media, catastrophic fires, and the collapse of life’s certainties for so many of its residents, Shasta County, centered around the gold-rush–era city of Redding, had embraced vitriol—and miracle seeking—with at least as much gusto as any other locale in the country. In consequence, it was beset by increasingly acrimonious and often irrational and even violent turmoil. Many of its political leaders would be hounded out of office during the pandemic, and graphic death threats against election officials, public health officers, and moderate political leaders would become a dime a dozen.
Yet it was, at the same time, undeniably a genuinely warm and extraordinarily generous place. In 2018, after the Carr Fire, thousands of residents, many of them too poor to afford insurance or who were homeless, had to fall back on local largesse. Their neighbors lived up to the challenge: Go Fund Me’s year-end report listed Redding, with its population of roughly ninety thousand, in the top ten of the most generous cities in America. It had an active philanthropic culture, historically centered around the McConnell Foundation, its assets originating with a McConnell ancestor’s lucky investment, nearly a century ago, in the Farmers’ Insurance Company. Redding’s residents took pride in volunteering long hours with the homeless, the victims of domestic violence, and others.
Much of this charitable impulse was channeled through the Bethel megachurch, one of the largest fundamentalist churches in the country, with eleven thousand members and a Dominionist mandate to create a local version of Heaven on Earth. The church had been founded more than a half century earlier, in the 1950s, and after Pastor Bill Johnson’s hiring in 1996, it had morphed into what believers termed an “ecstatic” church.
Johnson was an imposing figure, with a weathered face and a shock of wavy gray hair, brushed backward off his forehead and hanging down toward his shoulders. When he gave speeches, he wore natty sports jackets and polo shirts or, sometimes, a buttoned shirt open at the neck. He came from a long line of charismatic pastors, and observers noted that he adhered to the tenets of the New Apostolic Reformation, a hands-on ideology that promoted the nuts and bolts of miracle work over abstract readings of Scriptures, believed in near-continual spiritual warfare, and sought to take cultural and political control over the broader society.
A quarter century after his hiring, Johnson was now a fervent MAGA supporter, and he argued that, at least in part through elections such as the one that had brought Trump to power in 2016, America stood on the edge of the greatest religious revival in its history. His book, Invading Babylon: The Seven Mountain Mandate, was cowritten with Lance Wallnau, who was described in an article by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone magazine as a “self-styled ‘prophet’” who argued that Jesus wanted his followers to take over nations, not just churches, and that America had a special historical mission to spread Christianity over the face of the Earth. In December 2020, Wallnau was one of the main voices in the “Jericho March” in Washington, DC, in which participants prayed for divine intervention to keep Donald Trump in office. Participants in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, of which Wallnau was a leading figure, believed, according to Dickinson, that “the physical world is enveloped by a supernatural dimension, featuring warring angels and demons, and are convinced that demons afflict their enemies on behalf of the devil.”
Looked at locally, Pastor Johnson’s goal of earthly conquest in the name of the church wasn’t doing half badly. By some counts, in fact, as of the early 2020s a majority of the members of the city council were Bethel adherents.
Bethel’s worshippers came from around the world, many to study at the church’s School of Supernatural Ministry, one of five schools that it ran in the county. Students would live in local houses, sometimes as many as a dozen in a single small building, and devote their days to studying the mysteries of Bethel, to tales of angel sightings and stories of pastors communicating with the dead ensconced in their roosts in Heaven. At Bethel gatherings they might discuss the Prosperity Gospel, a school of thought, adhered to by some of the church’s pastors, that preaches the value of acquiring material possessions and wealth. They would participate in healing services, in which the sick were miraculously cured. Some Bethel pastors also praised the benefits of gay-conversion therapy.
In a normal year, the school, which taught students how to attain “intimacy with God,” “intercession” (the act of intervening with God on behalf of others), life coaching, and miscellaneous additional skills, enrolled 2,300 students. In the fall semester of the pandemic year of 2020, in concession to the power of the virus to spread rapidly among crowds in indoor spaces, it limited its enrollment to 1,600 students, each of whom was paying the school more than $5,000 per year, for three years, to attend. The reduced numbers, combined with a mandatory fourteen-day quarantine for new arrivals, didn’t have the desired effect. Within weeks of in-person classes commencing, the school had reported 137 infections, a large proportion of the students and staff had been ordered to quarantine in their homes, and the School of Supernatural Ministry had been temporarily forced by the virus to beat a hasty and ignominious retreat into online classes. That didn’t, however, stop one of its pastors, Sean Feucht, from holding massive rallies on the steps of the California capitol in Sacramento, in Washington, DC, and elsewhere against what the demonstrators argued were unnecessary restrictions on the freedom of worship. On his website, Feucht railed against bans on in-person worship that he saw as being about “silencing the faithful.” Another senior figure in the church posted videos arguing that the wearing of masks was a waste of time.
But Bethel wasn’t just about the school and the communion with God, about the faith healing and the miracles that, for a hefty fee, it taught students to be a part of. It wasn’t just about the speaking in tongues that worshippers practiced or the possibility of the raising of the dead that its leaders preached. And it certainly wasn’t just about opposition to state public health orders. It was also about charity as a religious mandate and about making sure that the megachurch’s clout was felt in venues large and small around the county and points beyond. That was why Johnson’s crew founded a nonprofit, Advance Redding, to generate funds to save the civic auditorium, the city’s largest performing-arts venue. It was why they raised half a million dollars to pay the salaries of four Redding police officers who, after a sales-tax initiative failed, were about to be laid off because of lack of funds, and why they launched a huge fund-raising effort to stop several firefighters’ jobs from also being eliminated. It was why the church gave one thousand dollars to every family in the region that had lost its home during the Carr Fire. It was why, too, the church established a global disaster-response team. “Bethel’s success in assisting Redding suggests a broader lesson,” wrote the columnist Joe Mathews in the Redding Searchlight in 2019. “Stop overthinking, and throw yourself, heart and soul, into addressing your neighbors’ needs.”
The buzz-cut Patrick Jones wasn’t a Bethel member, but his religious and charitable impulses did run in similar directions to those of the megachurch members. Sitting under a huge stuffed buffalo head and an almost equally impressive preserved stag’s head, mounted in his gun store on the opposite wall from the high-velocity rifles and next to a cardboard shooting target, its chest riddled with bullet holes, Jones—who would eventually become the hard-right chair of the county board of supervisors—recalled the time that a bear hunter from the area got badly burned. The man had ended up in the UC Davis Medical Center’s specialty burn unit in Sacramento, and Jones, smiling fondly at the memory, proudly recounted how fellow hunters held an auction to raise funds for him that ultimately collected tens of thousands of dollars. Fund-raisers held for local hunting clubs, sports associations, and other community groups also routinely netted tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Second Amendment Banquet, held to help fund a lawsuit against California’s restrictions against the open carrying of guns, was a guaranteed barn raiser, at which everything from flintlocks to loads of gravel were auctioned off. At other events, Jones would emcee while his board of supervisors colleague Chris Kelstrom would put up for sale goats, puppies, hogs, even chainsaws—“Whatever we get donated,” Jones explained.
To boosters, these were golden days for Redding. The center of the town, flush with Bethel donations and an array of other charitable contributions, was undergoing something of a renaissance, with hip new cafés and galleries opening, new condos being built, and new health-care and other service facilities slated for construction. The stunning Sundial Bridge, which had spanned the Sacramento River for the past couple of decades, attracted huge numbers of visitors, with annual winter light shows that drew impressive crowds from throughout the region. Performance artists and climbers came from around the world to hang off the steel cables of the suspension bridge. To celebrate the bridge’s tenth anniversary, in 2014 the Bandaloop Dance Company’s members created a “vertical dance” that took the troupe up and down the entirety of the soaring 217-feet-high mast from which those hundreds of tons of steel cables hung. Outré performance art notwithstanding, the modernizing impulse had its limits. At its core, Redding remained a rigidly traditionalist place, a spot far from California’s big cities—both in terms of miles and in terms of worldviews—where conservatives tended to cluster to avoid the interference of big-city bureaucrats and where libertarians and back-to-landers and gun freaks and Bible thumpers came to live their vision of the mythical State of Jefferson, a sort of Idaho-writ-large, far removed from the hippie-liberal-Communist wing nuts down in Sacramento and the Bay Area.
Jones, who was unabashedly nostalgic for an America that resembled something out of a 1950s TV sitcom, spoke with pride about how he hewed to a Southern Baptist “fire and brimstone” worldview, one that believed in the curative power of the rod. He talked nostalgically of how his father “wooped” him with a leather strap when he was a boy and how such parental whippings helped ensure a respect for morality and a broader societal tilt toward law and order that since the 1960s had, he intuited, been in increasingly short supply: “A little bit of fear from your father, you respect your father.” As for homosexuality, although he wouldn’t go so far as to advocate corporal punishment for gays—they did, after all, have constitutional protections, he grudgingly admitted—he was clear that he “look[ed] down on those things; it’s the destruction of morals in society.” For Jones, the world was black and white, the gray zones of ambiguity places to shy away from: “There’s right and wrong. When you do wrong, you will be punished. I believe in a very simple world; you try to be honest, be fair, be respectful. And you gotta believe in Jesus Christ.”
The county was a segue region linking the picturesque orchards and farmlands of the Central Valley—which stretches from Redding in the north nearly five hundred miles south to the dusty oil town of Bakersfield—to the wild mountain lands of the northernmost part of the state, exclamation-pointed by the volcanic and glacial vastness of Mount Shasta. It had long been ultraconservative, its Democratic and trade-union heritage buried, in recent decades, by a blizzard of God-and-guns politics. And it was getting more conservative by the day. Now, the “God” and “guns” components often overlapped, with Second Amendment absolutists talking of war against the gun controllers in Sacramento, defending their “God-given” right to carry any weapon they damn well pleased, and arguing that all the rights delineated in the founding documents originated, quite literally, from God himself. One could almost see, in this worldview, Saint Peter, AK-47 strapped over his shoulder, patrolling the Pearly Gates to make sure that only the armed faithful got admitted.
Shasta County was, in other words, a paradox: a place of great beauty and generosity but also of growing intolerance and incivility, a place where, like so many other spots in modern America, a half-century-plus of social change was being litigated and litigated again on a daily basis. It was a place where those in search of miracles placed their faith in snake-oil salesmen and where those snake-oil salesmen in turn placed their faith in Donald J. Trump.
The visible presence of weapons in public spaces wasn’t anything new in this part of the country. Shasta County had an active militia, widely known as the Cottonwood Militia, although to supporters it was simply a chapter of the California State Militia. On podcasts, militia members joked about doling out “Cottonwood justice” to vagrants, criminals, and other undesirables. Those militia members had been joined by local bikers, cowboys, and miscellaneous self-described “patriots,” all heavily armed, in a show of force to patrol the region’s towns and hamlets during the protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder in late May 2020. When a local sheriff discovered an abandoned van filled with bricks, the militias were convinced that an orchestrated Black Lives Matter effort to sow the seeds of riot in Redding and the smaller communities surrounding it had been narrowly averted. From one Facebook post to the next, rumors of the impending BLM assault grew. And as they did so, more men and women strapped on their weapons and took to the streets to patrol against the expected arrival of these outside agitators. To the militia members’ immense pride, Tucker Carlson singled them out for praise on his nightly Fox show.
Shasta also had more than its fair share of provocateurs. There were far-right “citizen journalists” such as Rich Gallardo, who attempted to enact citizen’s arrests of the moderate supervisors back during the lockdowns—Supervisor Leonard Moty simply laughed when Gallardo tried to arrest him during a board meeting, and Gallardo was, shortly afterward, escorted out by a local sheriff’s deputy.2
Then there was Zapata, whose call-to-arms public appearances had riled up anti-lockdown supporters not only in Shasta County but also globally, and who had gone on to coproduce The Red White and Blueprint, a slick, eight-episode documentary series, accompanied by dozens of podcasts, narrating, from Zapata’s perspective, the political upheavals rocking the county and the country as the pandemic played out.
In addition to the soapbox orators, there were plenty of other right-wing activists, many of them small-business owners. Chief among these was the Cottonwood barber Woody Clendenen, in his mid-fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a gray goatee, originally from the little Central Valley town of Turlock, 240 miles to the south. Clendenen and several friends had set up the local militia back in 2010, two years after Barack Obama’s election and shortly after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. In the spring of 2020, as the COVID lockdowns took hold and as violent opposition to both Governor Newsom and local county officials grew, Clendenen had posted a cover photo on his Facebook page showing five men in a forest, their faces painted like special-forces operatives, their bodies clad in camo, each holding a high-velocity rifle. The public health response, Clendenen explained to me, “came down to tyranny. People realized ‘this government is way out of control.’” Implied in the Facebook image was a not-so-subtle message of armed resistance.
Clendenen’s boxy wooden barbershop—perhaps, at a stretch, 60 feet square—was on the corner of Olive and Main Streets, in the tiny town of Cottonwood—opposite the headquarters of the California State Militia, the door of which was adorned with a poster helpfully telling visitors that “socialism has no home here.” Some days, particularly in the late afternoon, the barbershop’s floor was coated with a carpet of what appeared to be weeks’ worth of shorn hair. On the wall just to the left of the door upon entering, a large rifle hung. Also on the walls were bumper stickers with decals such as “Build El Wall,” “Not a Liberal,” and “Liberty or Death. Don’t tread on me.” Behind the two barber chairs was tacked up a price list: $15 haircuts for men/boys, $12 for seniors, retired military $11, families of two or more $13, buzz cuts $8, complaints $20, Liberals $40. Months after the first list went up, he added a second one, a “Biden Price List.” On that list, liberals were charged $100, and “Vaccinated” were charged an additional $5 on top of that. When clients came in, he sat them down in one of his old swivel chairs, draped them in a huge Stars and Stripes flag sheet to protect their clothes from the trimmings, and quickly set to work with his razor.
Clendenen ran his little business as a neighborhood meeting place—an old-school barbershop, like the one his father, the child of Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma, had operated for more than fifty years—a place where people came to shoot the breeze, to gossip, to trade neighborhood stories about crime, about love, about intrigue, even on occasion to debate. He was a homespun philosopher, entertaining, raw, full of homilies, charming at times, willing to talk for hours with anyone who walked through his door.
The barber and his coworker, Jennifer, a middle-aged woman with seven grandchildren, made no bones about their worldview. When customers came in, they had on hand for those who were interested piles of anti-COVID vaccination literature, including Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System data—raw data that hadn’t been vetted by scientists and that often leaped to conclusions that were way out beyond where the experts in the field were willing to go—purporting to show huge numbers of serious and often fatal reactions to COVID vaccines. They discussed their strong antiabortion views, bemoaning California’s supposed abortion-on-demand-until-birth policy (the state has no such policy). They whipped each other up to paroxysms of anger about transgender people playing women’s sports and about doctors performing gender-reassignment surgeries on young children.
Every so often, a crime victim would come into the shop and say that so-and-so had told them to seek out Woody for help. He would listen attentively and take notes on one of the legal pads that he kept on hand among his barber’s tools, would find out details about who had beaten the person or robbed them, and would then promise to take action—though what action that would be, he left deliberately vague. He wasn’t accredited law enforcement, but apparently locals knew that if Woody and his militia members got involved, as well as their friends in the huge local Community Watch network, there was a pretty good chance that the offenders—the local homeless, drug addicts, the mentally ill—would take the hint and quickly get out of town.
Woody himself somewhat improbably claimed never to have heard the phrase “Cottonwood justice,” although members of the militia had joked about it on local right-wing radio shows and podcasts. But when I asked about it, his customers didn’t seem terribly surprised. One, a retired construction worker and paper-mill laborer named Sergio, smiled as he recalled a story that he had read in a local history book about a notorious late nineteenth-century bully who had ended up facedown and dead in the local irrigation district’s canal waters. “What happened to him?” Sergio asked, and then he answered his own question: “Use your imagination. Cottonwood justice.” He laughed heartily and sat down under the flag for his haircut, content in his knowledge the bully had simply gotten what was coming to him. How common was the doling out of informal summary justice in Cottonwood? I asked Sergio. “A little more common than most places, but not common enough.”
Clendenen had to reside in a small, conservative town, he said, because he simply couldn’t abide the prospect of living surrounded by people with a Marxist worldview, and his definition of who was a Marxist and what ideas were beyond the pale was suitably broad. Supporting the Affordable Care Act qualified. So did support for Black Lives Matter. So did antipathy to organized religion—he himself was a fundamentalist Christian, steeped in evangelical beliefs, a member of a small church in town that, when the pandemic hit, moved its in-person services outdoors to grasslands on Woody’s ranch. So did belief in public health restrictions to slow the spread of COVID. “A lot of the COVID deaths they wrote down as COVID deaths weren’t really COVID deaths,” he explained authoritatively. “It’s a bunch of horseshit. And they’re totally hiding the damage the vaccine’s done to people.”
When customers used the barbershop’s small bathroom, off to the side of the cluttered storage closet next to the main haircutting area, they were presented with a choice of toilet paper: they could wipe their rear ends with either Barack Obama’s image or Hillary Clinton’s.
From the 1960s onward, and most especially in the years following Obama’s election, the culture had, the barber feared, swung way too far from the center. In so doing, it had led to the empowerment of faux conservatives, “RINOs,” like Supervisor Leonard Moty. These were people, Clendenen argued, who proceeded to treat Ordinary Joes with grievous disrespect and pushed a “woke” agenda down the throats of residents who had no patience for it.
“Moty has never been a real conservative,” he explained testily, “but it was never really on full display until COVID. In the end, his arrogance got him. He had a flippant attitude toward his constituents. They’d go and talk, and he’d look at his phone. He really needed a butt stomping most of his life. He was an arrogant rich kid. He needed more spankings when he was a kid. He was just a disrespectful guy.”
As for the woke worldview, “We’re not going to put up with that here. Critical race theory, talking about seventy genders. We’re not going to lie to our kids. The middle ground up here is probably between conservatives and RINOs. The Far Left really has no say up here.”
Footnotes
1 The Carr Fire had torn through the county a few years earlier, leaving charred hillsides and ashes where homes once stood.
2 When I contacted Gallardo to request an interview, he wrote back, “Your writings show as an extreme leftist, almost statist, and facistic [sic]. I don’t think anything I would have to say would be fairly reported by someone of your mindset.”