Shasta County, California, has become home to a group of far-right extremists aiming to take control of the county. So, when Reverge Anselmo, a former U.S. Marine, writer, director, vintner, and a wealthy guy with a serious grudge against Shasta offered to bankroll the local efforts, his money was taken without question.
On Feb. 1, Shasta County voters successfully recalled Supervisor Leonard Moty, a Republican and former Redding, California, police chief they deemed to be not conservative enough. Backers of the recall, a group of militia members, say they plan to win more seats in June and use their takeover style in local elections across the nation.
RELATED STORES: California recall race bellwether of far-right militia groups pivoting from fringe to local politics
Anselmo left Shasta County for Connecticut in 2014, after a years-long battle over a plethora of legal, personal, and political tangles, but importantly, over a permit war involving his passion project to build a Catholic chapel on his vineyard.
Anselmo blames the county for ending his marriage. But, before all of the legal troubles, Anselmo was the happily married owner of 1,500 acres of land, with a vineyard, ranchlands with access to Bear Creek, and a 200-foot waterfall all on his property. He and his wife owned a restaurant, and had an in with the sheriff and other local officials to whom Anselmo would lend his private helicopter for flyovers to look for illegal pot growers.
All of that ended in 2007 when the county came down on him about sediment from his property flowing in the Bear Creek. As The Los Angeles Times reports, the State Water Resources Control Board issued him an order to clean it up and restore the area.
And that’s when the war began.
Shasta County sits inside Redding, known as the “second sunniest city in the U.S.” has been something of a ticking time bomb, with residents deeply divided over COVID-19 mitigation measures and the government’s power. Many are ready to take control of the county—and preferably be armed while doing it.
The Sacramento Bee reports that experts on extremism are keeping a keen eye on this and other local elections as a bellwether. From school boards to county boards, swarms of far-right activists such as the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and Three Percenters have been showing up and violently threatening local lawmakers and community members with wild conspiracy theories and lies. Now, these extremist groups are demanding political change on a local level.
In 2020, Anselmo heard that activists were making a documentary about recall efforts in Shasta County. So he invited the filmmakers to his home in Greenwich, which he calls the “Marie Antoinette’s House,” as it is modeled after the Palace at Versaille, per the Times. And then he began shelling out money for the county races—to the tune of a record-breaking $550,000.
According to Talking Points Memo reporter Matt Shuham, local Shasta County militia member Carlos Zapata, a darling of the movement and a Marine Corps combat veteran, launched into a frightening torrent in Aug. 2020 at a county supervisors' meeting, threatening that “it’s not going to be peaceful much longer,” and “good citizens are going to turn to real concerned and revolutionary citizens real soon.”
"In Shasta County, we're supposed to be red country up here, not blue country," he said. "Take your masks off. Quit muzzling yourself. Join us. Fight with us against what's going on in Sacramento."
Two months later, Zapata showed up as a guest on Alex Jones’ show, InfoWars, and a few months later, he was on the incendiary “news” outlet, Fox, which published an article about a documentary series he’s supposedly producing called Red, White, and Blueprint.
In 2020, Anselmo also contributed a whopping $100,000 to a local former Redding mayor, Patrick Jones, running for a supervisor seat. Jones had been in support of Anselmo during his Shasta legal battles. Jones went on to win his coveted seat.
Zapata says the movement didn’t really need Anselmo’s money but also didn’t turn it down.
“The thing you have to understand is, people are fed up,” he told the Times. “To think that a community needs a billionaire to fund this movement is completely disingenuous.”
Militia-style groups like the ones in Eatonville and in Shasta County have pivoted from the fringe and have their sights set on a more traditional conservative political movement.
“If you’re going to make a change, you don’t do it by storming the Capitol. You make change by using the process that you’ve been given and starting at the bottom,” Matt Marshall, founder of the Washington Three Percent movement and a member of the Eatonville School Board told The Seattle Times.
CORRECTION: In the initial publication of this story, it was written that Anselmo sent $180,000 to fund the documentary Red, White and Blueprint. This is incorrect. Anselmo in fact declined to say where the money he gave went, per the Times.
