REDDING The early Shasta County recall results had just come in and Carlos Zapata couldn’t stop smiling.

Zapata, a local restaurant owner and militia member, was a key figure behind the movement that spent much of the last two years haranguing Shasta County’s supervisors, spewing a mix of threats, conspiracy theories and misinformation. Activists demanded the Republican-packed board rebel against pandemic restrictions that conservative Shasta County was mostly ignoring anyway.

After a multi-year campaign accusing Supervisor Leonard Moty of being too soft, too aloof, not rebellious enough, the former Redding police chief was on his way out after a recall election that was likely the most expensive in Shasta County’s history.

At an election night victory party at a Shasta County health club packed with unmasked activists, Zapata said he hopes Moty’s not the last to fall to a far-right rebellion in rural California — and beyond.

“That was the idea behind this: Not only to affect change in our own county, but to create a template for other people to do the same thing,” Zapata said. “And that’s what we’ve done.”

 

California rural government advocates, experts who study extremism and those critical of the Republican Party’s embrace of its far-right, conspiratorial fringe warn that Zapata’s movement in Shasta County may not be an outlier.

It might just be the beginning.

The Shasta County recall was a local affair, but observers say it represents a major political victory and will embolden far-right factions, conspiracy theorists and anti-government activists looking to gain local power across the state.

“This is pretty earth-shattering for us county folks,” Mono County Supervisor Stacy Corless, the immediate past president of the Rural County Representatives of California, said on Twitter.

“Supervisor Moty is a strong, conservative leader,” she said. “If he doesn’t represent Shasta County’s values and a militia does, what happens to local government and the basic services it provides?”

Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican operative who’s a fierce critic of far-right extremists taking over the GOP, called Moty’s defeat “absolutely a canary in the coal mine of what is coming and what is consuming the Republican Party.”

“They literally called the campaign the ‘Red, White and Blueprint’ as a way to use this as an example of how to do this all over the country.”

Nearly 53% of voters in Moty’s district chose to remove him.

The move will tip power on the five-member board toward a faction backed by the Republican-controlled county’s most radical extremists who were furious that Moty didn’t buy into their assertions that the pandemic was part of some nefarious plot to steal away their liberties.

After a year that saw activists unsuccessfully attempt to recall two other members of the board, Shasta County’s future is far from settled.

Two other supervisors have announced they’re not seeking re-election. One, Les Baugh, has the backing of Shasta County’s far-right; the other is Joe Chimenti, one of the three supervisors the activists sought to recall, raising the prospects that power might swing even further to the right.

The fallout to Moty’s loss was nearly instantaneous.

In part because of the conspiracy-driven recall, Donnell Ewert, the longtime head of Shasta County’s health and human services agency, announced last week he was retiring. He told The Sacramento Bee that the political blowback he and his team faced as they attempted “to educate the public about the science of COVID” contributed to his decision.

“It was pretty negative and contentious,” Ewert said. “And that just contributed to the questioning about what I should be doing with my time at this point in my life.”

Ewert oversaw a public health department that activists had been vilifying for months. At one point, police sent extra patrols to the home of the county’s heath officer after she’d received threats.

In a way, Zapata kicked off the recall effort in the summer of 2020 when he stood before the Board of Supervisors along with dozens of others furious over Shasta County’s response to the pandemic. He had a warning.

“Right now, we’re being peaceful,” he said in a short speech that made Zapata a celebrity among far-right groups across the United States. “But it’s not going to be peaceful much longer.”

Zapata and his fellow activists created the “Red, White and Blueprint” and sought to take power. The organization hired a documentary company to create a slick, well-produced series of web videos and a podcast promoting a far-right uprising on the local level. Another figure in the Red White and Blueprint group is Woody Clendenen, a barbershop owner who heads the local company of the California State Militia.

Soon, the movement branched out to include many of the same ultra-conservative activists, conspiracy theorists and local government gadflies who were central to the region’s Tea Party movement in 2009. In a county that traditionally had some of the highest rates of unvaccinated school children in California, they found allies in parents and healthcare workers furious about state-ordered school closures and mask and vaccine mandates.

The activists demanded that Shasta County rebel more, even though local officials weren’t exactly kowtowing to the pandemic edicts out of Sacramento. The county made a point of not fining businesses for ignoring COVID protocols.

Moty argued — often correctly — that the board had no control over state-ordered mandates.

“We would tell them over and over and over again, ‘We don’t have any authority in the schools’,” Moty said on Election Day before the vote totals came in. “They won’t listen to the facts. They want you to change the facts to a different narrative.”

 

There were other grievances, too.

The activists called Moty “anti-Second Amendment” when he voted against a proposal that would have forbidden local law enforcement from enforcing federal and state gun regulations.

Moty said it required every county employee to sign an annual oath that said they supported the Second Amendment, and the measure suggested they could get fired if they refused. Moty said the county’s legal advisor told the board it was almost certainly illegal.

“They say, ‘Oh he voted against the Second Amendment,’ ” he said. “No, I voted against the manifesto that some of these crazy people wanted us to pass, which was totally illegal.”

Further angering activists, as local infection rates spiked (at one point the California National Guard was called in to help overwhelmed Shasta County hospitals), Moty advocated to hold some board meetings remotely or limit the number of people allowed inside the chambers. For in-person meetings, he also moved to change public comment periods to prevent activists from spending hours at the start of each meeting complaining about matters not on that week’s agenda.

The recall activists argued they were being shut out from their government and deserved their say.

Moty also irked even some of his supporters after a high-profile gaffe left the impression he was out-of-touch.

 

A Shasta County Grand Jury report last spring slammed him for using his position to go behind the lines of the 2018 Carr Fire to put gas in the generators supplying his home with electricity to keep cold food from spoiling, while thousands of other evacuees were kept out. Moty didn’t deny the charge, but he told local media outlets he spent several days behind the fire line checking on his constituents’ properties and filling others’ generators as well.

The pro-recall group had plenty of money to spend, thanks to what’s believed to be the largest political donation in Shasta County’s history.

Reverge Anselmo, a wealthy Connecticut movie producer who once lived in Shasta County, donated $450,000 to a local committee bankrolling the recall campaign. Thanks to Anselmo’s cash, local residents were bombarded for weeks with mailers and television and radio ads. On Election Day, a helicopter spent much of the day buzzing the Redding area trailing a “Recall Shasta” banner.

Anselmo, who had a years-long feud with local officials over permits for his ranch and winery, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Moty and a committee backing his campaign garnered hefty donations from major unions and businesses in town, including almost $100,000 from Sierra Pacific Industries, one of the county’s largest employers owned by billionaire timber baron Red Emmerson.

But Moty said the influx in cash to his campaign came too late in the election to offset his opponents’ spending spree.

The conspiracy theories that permeated the race continued well into Election Day, with recall activists expressing unfounded concerns about local voter fraud and the Dominion Voting System machines the county uses to tabulate its votes.

Dominion Voting Systems became implicated in a national conspiracy theory that alleges fraud against former president Donald Trump. (Dominion has since sued prominent pro-Trump figures and the conservative media outlets that allowed them to promote their claims.)

On Election Day outside the elections office, Sally Rapoza, a longtime conservative activist who has for years promoted conspiracy theories, said she had her doubts about the machines.

“You know, Dominion voting machines have been looked at in other states and are still being investigated,” said Rapoza, who started going by the name “Rally Sally” for hosting so many rallies during the 2009 Tea Party movement.

Along with backing the recall, Rapoza also is a key figure in the State of Jefferson movement that seeks to have rural northern counties break away from California and form their own conservative state.

 

“I don’t trust the voting process in this country anymore,” Mark Kent, another longtime Redding activist from the Tea Party era, said later that day.

Shasta County Clerk Cathy Darling Allen said she spent weeks trying to persuade the recall faction that the machines counted votes accurately and that the county elections office wanted nothing else but to make sure everyone’s vote was tallied.

But she said it had little effect.

“They don’t even believe their own eyes,” said Darling Allen, a medallion pinned to her shirt that read, “Trust Me. I’m right.”

“I don’t have any magic trust wand that I can wave over folks who decide not to believe in a process that really hasn’t changed that dramatically since the primary in 2018. That’s when we started using this equipment.”

Threats toward local officials prompted Darling Allen to request more security for election night, but there were no disruptions.

In Nevada County, a similar conspiracy-tinged recall campaign in its infancy boiled over last month when people attempting to remove the board of supervisors went to the clerk and recorder’s office to check on the status of their petition.

The campaign resembles the one in Shasta County. Organizers say Nevada County officials have repeatedly overstepped their authority when it comes to COVID-19 contact tracing, lockdowns and other public health measures that “violated religious freedoms and individual liberty.” They say the five-member board has committed “crimes against humanity.”

“That’s a lot stronger language than Shasta’s,” said Calvin Clark, a proponent behind the recall. “I believe it’s because the proponents from all five districts felt that the lockdown measures in Nevada County were much more stringent.”

When supporters got to the clerk’s lobby, they refused to wear masks, pushed an employee and “stormed our office,” the county said in a statement. Citing “security concerns,” officials closed the elections office lobby until further notice.

 

Natalie Adona, the assistant clerk-recorder/registrar of voters, told The Sacramento Bee that the county had a meeting two days earlier with federal and state officials about physical security in elections offices.

“Quite the timing,” Adona said.

She said the incident brought to light “security elements we need to address before we reopen.”

“It was frustrating,” Adona said, referring to both the physical confrontation and the risks her employees have taken on, many of whom have vulnerable loved ones at home. “I’m trying to make sure my people feel safe coming to work and that they feel protected.”

Adona said her staff approved the recall petition a day before their deadline. Proponents now have 120 days to get thousands of signatures from registered voters in order to bring the measure to a countywide vote.

Recall supporters say county officials have mischaracterized what happened at the office building. It was one of the recall proponents who was hurt when an employee slammed the door shut, Clark said. He said they are considering legal action against the county.

County supervisors were part of a corrupt system under Dr. Anthony Fauci that is forcing a dangerous and untested vaccine on the masses, refusing to treat patients with ivermectin, and stripping them of their liberties by monitoring them for contact tracing, Clark said. Meanwhile, supervisors look the other way when it comes to sex trafficking, even while “perversion is on the rise.”

Clark took exception to a reporter’s question about recall supporters being lumped in with conspiracy theorists or the far right.

“People think, and they could be misled, that this is some kind of extremist program,” Clark said. “It’s not. It’s the furthest thing from it.”

 

Recall talk was unavoidable for much of last year in California in the run-up to September’s referendum on Gov. Gavin Newsom. Like the push in Shasta County, that recall was fueled by furor over coronavirus precautions, riddled with conspiracy theories and mixed with a degree of old-fashioned disdain for a politician seen as being out of touch.

State contests might be better known, but hyperlocal recall pushes are more common, said Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College.

Spivak wrote a book about recall elections and said the majority of campaigns that actually get to the ballot result in the official being removed. But getting there is a process — only 86 of some 555 recall organizing attempts in California since 2011 resulted in someone’s ouster from office.

What makes Shasta County’s vote different and other local recall campaigns noteworthy is how they’ve become dominated by a national uproar over pandemic mandates and culture war grievances including “critical race theory.”

Spivak likened the election in Shasta County to the Tea Party efforts and the Western anti-government sentiment behind what’s known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. He said they’re unlikely to on their own spur widespread change but are potentially seismic at the local level.

“Those events kind of have a feel here with a little bit more conspiracy thrown in,” Spivak said. “The problem for them is they are in California and their impact will be very, very limited.”

Buoyed by their success, the recall activists in Shasta County have other ideas.

Shasta County Supervisor Patrick Jones, a Redding gun store owner who helped lead the charge to unseat Moty, said he’s been in touch with the like-minded recall activists in Nevada County.

“What you’re seeing here,” Jones said, “is exactly what you’re seeing in Nevada County.”

“We have a so-called Republican that is not, and he’s going to be removed from office. We call them RINOs. We want true conservatives. This is a conservative county. The government should reflect that.”

RINO is a conservative slight short for “Republican in Name Only” — a liberal in disguise.

His remarks came at the victory party inside the Country Strong fitness club east of Redding. Recall proponents sipped cocktails and Bud Lights and ate pizza as they watched the results come in.

A man wearing a cowboy hat wearing a shirt that said “No Hablo Libtard” wandered through the 60-person crowd.

 

The Red White and Blueprint activists, including Clenenden, the local militia leader, and Zapata were there. So was “Rally Sally” Rapoza and her husband, Terry, wearing one of his trademark collared shirts featuring a print of the American flag and the Constitution.

The race’s two front-runners to replace Moty — Dale Ball, a construction superintendent, and Tim Garman, president of a local school board — grinned widely when the early results came on TV showing Moty’s downfall.

Ball conceded to Garman after the latest results came back later showing Garman with an insurmountable lead.

In an interview with The Bee, Garman said it was his intention to represent everyone in Shasta County — not just those who supported removing Moty. Garman rejected the idea that the recall was the product of right-wing extremists and militia members.

“It was a group of mothers who started the recall,” he said, adding that he had the county’s best interest at heart and people were tired of not having a say in their local government.

“It’s time to put trust back in it,” Garman said.

Ball said he found the implication that he was some sort of militia member offensive and inaccurate.

“I don’t even own any camo,” Ball said. “I looked at my closet just to make sure, and there was none in there.”

Regardless, the wave of conspiracy theories and extremism that overtook Shasta County was undeniable, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The election, he said, shows those with beliefs of an “ideological, religious, racial takeover of the nation” are determined to take local control.

“In Northern California today,” he said, “being a dyed in the wool longtime, bonafide conservative public servant ain’t good enough.”