The Secessionists of Shasta County

NEVIN KALLEPALLI INVESTIGATES POLITICAL RESENTMENT IN RURAL CALIFORNIA, IN AN ESSAY FROM LARB QUARTERLY NO. 47: “SECURITY.”

Los Angeles Review of Books

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 have not yet reached them.