| THE 51st STATE?

The dissidents from the northern counties who want to secede from the Golden State are “a bunch of Bible-thumpin’, gun-totin’, wild-eyed pistol-wavers.” And that’s how one of their supporters describes them. Welcome to the…

The dissidents from the northern counties who want to secede from the Golden State are “a bunch of Bible-thumpin’, gun-totin’, wild-eyed pistol-wavers.” And that’s how one of their supporters describes them. Welcome to Jefferson!

BY SARAH GOODYEAR TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2016 Getting to the heart of the vast region of Northern California that wants to break free and become the nation’s 51st state requires leaving California behind. At least, any familiar notion you may have of California. And that, in a sense, is exactly what you do when you travel there by car, which is pretty much the only way to reach the small towns in this sparsely populated part of the country. Pull onto the freeway leaving the San Francisco International Airport, and you recognize the California from the movies: palm trees, speeding traffic, the glitter of the big city on the bay, the extended slog of suburbia. You may think you’re already in Northern California, but you’d be wrong. You’ll understand just how wrong by the time you reach your destination. It’s not long before the landscape opens up and flattens out. This is the Sacramento River Delta, the rich farmland where they grow rice and almonds, tomatoes and alfalfa, sucking up vast amounts of water coming from the north. A roadside trailer flashes past, painted with the message that Jesus bled and died for you. At a nondescript gas station in the town of Redding, you notice the first sign of the breakaway movement: a rack of forest-green sweatshirts bearing a yellow seal marked with a bold black double X. It’s the seal of the State of Jefferson, an idea that dates back more than 70 years and is currently being revived by a passionate group of separatists. They are pushing to split from the Golden State and form a new state roughly the size of North Carolina, but with one-fifth of the population. It’s a move that would require approval from both the California Legislature and the U.S. Congress. The fight to create Jefferson is the longest of long shots, a Hail Mary pass made by folks who are sick of being underrepresented in the state legislature and ignored by California’s urban centers. Cut off from the seats of power by geography, alienated by the state’s left-leaning politics and tendency toward regulation, enduring stubbornly high unemployment, facing the decimation of traditional industries such as logging, and harboring few prospects for economic growth, these disaffected citizens — overwhelmingly white and mostly conservative — share many of the concerns about central state overreach as the militia members who recently took control of a wildlife refuge in Oregon. They, however, are committed to a political solution rather than an armed rebellion. Sarah Goodyear

The cashier at the Redding gas station allows how she thinks this “Jefferson thing” might be a good idea. “At least we’d get our water rights back,” she says, although the truth is, no one is sure just how the water thing would play out. From here, I-5 is swept up into the mountains and over Shasta Lake, the vast reservoir created by Shasta Dam, the second-largest in the nation when it was completed in 1945. The complex water infrastructure of California is designed to take water from the relatively wet north and channel it to the farmland and cities to the south. This reality — that California as a whole would be unable to function without access to that northern water — is one of the deepest sources of conflict and resentment within the state. The prolonged drought of recent years has only turned the feelings uglier. It’s been a wet winter, but Shasta Lake is still 140 feet below full, its bare brown slopes like a sad bathtub ring. Four and a half hours after leaving San Francisco, a hay barn comes into sight, STATE OF JEFFERSON painted in simple black lettering on its corrugated tin roof. The next exit is the faded gold-rush town of Yreka, Jefferson’s unofficial capital. The Oregon border is only 30 miles further up the road. You are far from the California you thought you knew.



Palace coup The chairs are full at the Palace Barber Shop on Miner Street in downtown Yreka (the town’s unusual name, pronounced Why-REE-ka, is a rough approximation of the Native American word for nearby Mount Shasta). Since the 1880s, people have been coming here for a haircut and the latest town news, in a building straight out of a Hollywood gunslinger movie. If you squint a little, it’s hard to tell just what year it is. The men waiting for a turn under the clippers are immune to trend or fashion, dressed to get things done outdoors and without fuss. This right here is prime Jefferson country. A snarling bear, mounted on a plaque overhead, presides over an ongoing conversation about the grievances suffered by the 43,799 people of Siskiyou County. From the opposite wall, a mountain goat looks on impassively. John Lisle, who has owned the shop for about a decade, is quick to respond when asked whether he thinks splitting from California is a good idea. “It’s a pretty hot topic here,” Lisle says. “It would be great to have some representation. The way it is, we’re governed by Los Angeles and San Francisco.” “We now have wolves being shoved down our throat. It’s no different than putting wolves in Golden Gate Park where they go to walk their dogs.” It’s hard to argue with that view from the Palace, especially when the seats of power and influence are several hours in your own rear-view mirror. Of the 120 state representatives and senators in the California State Legislature, only seven hail from the 25 counties north of Sacramento, which have a combined population of about 2 million. The man in the chair next to Lisle, whose gray hair is falling to the floor with each snip of the scissors, is Michael Adams. Until a few years ago, he made his money mining gold from the area’s rivers, a way of life that got shut down when the state banned the suction-dredge techniques used by local prospectors on the grounds that they were endangering the Coho salmon. “They just took my livelihood away based on speculation and falsehoods,” Adams says. “California takes away our property, takes away our rights. That’s a form of tyranny. If we govern ourselves, at least we’re responsible to ourselves.” Adams, freshly shorn, says his goodbyes and walks out the door, to be replaced in the chair by Rick Shipley, a retired cop. Shipley takes up the conversation without a hitch, expressing support for the Jefferson idea and then moving on to criticize the federal government. “They’re making decisions that are contrary to the public good,” he says, specifying President Obama’s recent executive actions on gun control, which he called “arbitrary.”

Sarah Goodyear POLE POSITION Splitting from California is a hot topic in the Palace Barber Shop in Yreka. Left: Ray Haupt, a member of the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors, is an avid Jefferson supporter. Right: Owner John Lisle (far right) gives retired cop Rick Shipley a trim; Matt Rokes (far left), president of the Siskiyou County sheriff’s posse.

“He’s acting like a king,” mutters an older man sitting in the corner. Shipley agrees. Their concerns may be local, but their rhetoric and anger about the Obama administration echoes that heard in many rural, predominantly white communities around the country, as well as on the 2016 Republican primary trail. Matt Rokes, whose brown jacket is emblazoned with a sheriff’s star and the word POSSE, reinforces the message of disenfranchisement and discontent. “We have no voice,” says Rokes, whose family has been ranching in the area since the 1850s. “We’re constantly being told how to live our lives. Our whole way of life is under attack.” That star isn’t just for show. Rokes is the president of the Siskiyou County sheriff’s posse, an official nonprofit organization that helps the local lawman’s office with jobs like search and rescue. Rokes calmly recounts the time he and other posse members were called upon to round up a load of cattle that had gotten loose on I-5 when a tractor-trailer overturned in the middle of the night. “The cattle were black,” he says calmly, explaining how he almost got run down by a panicked animal on the dark road. Rokes says the people of the north country are used to being self-reliant and dealing with extreme situations with their own resources and ingenuity. That’s why he’s angry when people in urban centers dictate policy on things like wildlife protection. “We now have wolves being shoved down our throat,” he says, referring to the 2014 decision to protect wolves under the California Endangered Species Act. Wolves had been absent from California for generations, but a pack migrated over the Oregon border in the last couple of years, and has been blamed for the death of a calf in eastern Siskiyou County. “It’s like if there were a criminal running loose in the woods,” Rokes says, suggesting that city dwellers should imagine themselves in his situation. “It’s no different than putting wolves in Golden Gate Park where they go to walk their dogs.” “People who feel helpless are taking matters into their own hands. If that means violence, they’re ready for that. You can only push people so far.” Then there’s the famous case of the spotted owl. Federal and state protections for the bird led to severe restrictions on logging starting in the 1990s, and the timber industry has since collapsed in the region, although there is significant dispute between environmentalists and logging interests about how much of the decline is due to market forces and how much is the result of environmental protections. The unemployment rate, though, is hard to deny: in November 2015, it was 9.2 percent in Siskiyou County. In San Francisco County, it was 3.4 percent. With almost 70 percent of Siskiyou owned and controlled by the federal and state authorities, it’s easy for people to lay blame at the government’s door. Ray Haupt, a member of the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors and a strong Jefferson supporter, enters the barber shop. He was a forester with the U.S. Forest Service for 33 years, and he thinks the way the region’s timber stands are being managed is based on politics rather than science. “I think in the United States in general, there’s a disconnect between folks who live in a city and the people who live in the rural communities,” he says. “I don’t think a lot of folks understand where their food comes from, where the raw products come from that support their lives. All they see when they come to the rural counties is what they consider backward people who are doing something on the land that they don’t like to see.” Three days before I visited the Palace, a group of armed militia members occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, some 340 miles to the northeast of Yreka, in support of a couple of local ranchers who had been convicted for setting fire to public lands on federal anti-terrorism charges. I ask posse president Rokes what he thought about the situation at Malheur. “I think it’s a sign of ultimate frustration,” Rokes says. While he doesn’t agree with their methods, he sure can relate to their concerns about what he calls federal overreach. “People who feel helpless are taking matters into their own hands,” he says. “You have some people dead set on making their point. If that means violence, they’re ready for that. You can only push people so far.”

The battle for Jefferson Which counties want to separate? Depends on who you ask. Jefferson Supporters Keep It California Supporters

In the beginning… The would-be State of Jefferson has a hell of an origin story, an all-American tale of thwarted manifest destiny played out in a spectacular but unforgiving frontier landscape. This is a place where sheriffs assert themselves as the highest authority in the land, answerable only to the Constitution of the United States. Where citizens vie for primal resources — gold and water and fish and game. Where Native Americans fight to protect the salmon runs that have sustained their people for thousands of years, and sixth-generation white farmers fly the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flag popularized by the Tea Party. Where guns are toted by many and marijuana grows (often illegally) in enormous, fragrant emerald bushes. Many citizens of “Jefferson,” whether or not they call it that, like to see their home as a land apart, a bastion of exceptionalism. And to a certain extent it is. Its residents live outside the lines of convenience, largely invisible to the humdrum society that surrounds them — but also without access of their own to the comforts and protections of that society. It all makes for an intoxicating mixture of legend and fact that has a persistent hold on the imagination of people both inside and outside its shifting borders. In the fall of 1941, interest in the idea of a State of Jefferson was reaching a carefully orchestrated crescendo. Residents of several counties in Southern Oregon and Northern California had long been angry with the way their basic needs were ignored by their respective capital cities of Salem and Sacramento. A man named Gilbert Gable, the mayor of Port Orford, Ore., was talking big about steering the region into independence as the 49th state (this was, of course, before the admission of Alaska and Hawaii). The new state, he argued, would be rich in timber and copper, and would thrive economically, if only it were allowed to set its own course. Sarah Goodyear It wasn’t the first time people in the region had expressed the desire to run away together. The first secession movement in this part of the world dates back to 1852, when California was just two years old and Oregon had yet to be born. Many others followed. Things had never gotten quite so much attention as they did in 1941, though — and that’s precisely because attention was the goal of Gable and his cohort in California, who came on board that fall. Their rebellious rhetoric captured the imagination of a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle named Stanton Delaplane, who had a shrewd eye for a story that would appeal to the self-congratulatory sophisticates of his home city. It seems, from the newsman’s own account years later, which is included in Peter Laufer’s 2013 book “The Elusive State of Jefferson,” that Delaplane even helped Gable package his message in a more marketable way. It made for very good copy. “If you advocate for liberty, you can’t say, ‘I advocate for liberty in all the things I like but none of the things I don’t like.’ It applies to all things all the time. Liberty is messy.”

Gable died suddenly on Dec. 2, but the show went on. And a show it was, fit for the 1940s version of reality TV: the newsreel. A few folks in Yreka picked a “provisional governor” to preside over the new state, although they did so without any legal authority. Some locals set up a PR-ready “roadblock” on Highway 99 at the Oregon border, Newsreel cameras rolled to capture footage of gun-toting citizens stopping cars and handing out flyers proclaiming Jefferson’s independence. The same cameras were there when residents, dressed in “western costumes” at the direction of the local Siskiyou County Daily, paraded through the streets of Yreka in a torchlight procession. They carried signs saying OUR ROADS ARE NOT PASSABLE, HARDLY JACKASSABLE and IF OUR ROADS YOU WOULD TRAVEL, BRING YOUR OWN GRAVEL. The story was ready to hit the theaters and entertain a nation. And then came Dec. 7. Pearl Harbor. The day that would live in infamy. Suddenly, a light-hearted tale of rustic rebellion seemed inappropriate. The rebellious Jeffersonians stood down and committed themselves to the war effort. The episode left a few lasting mementos: the Pulitzer Prize that Delaplane won for his stories hyping the Jefferson crusade; the Great Seal of the State of Jefferson, that double X on a golden miner’s pan, symbolizing how the people of this part of the world had been double-crossed by the capital cities of Salem and Sacramento; and the name itself, chosen from several suggestions submitted by ordinary citizens. The man who came up with “Jefferson” wrote a letter to the editor saying he thought it appropriate because the third president was “author of the Declaration of Independence, the great instrument that states that people have the right to govern themselves.” In the years since, the concept of Jefferson has floated around in the popular imagination, attracting a number of different fantasies and serving as a brand identity for a random array of ventures. There’s Jefferson Public Radio, an NPR affiliate in Southern Oregon, and a right-wing radio show called “Jefferson State of Mine” in Northern California. There’s a reggae-infused jam band in Oregon called State of Jefferson, which plays tunes such as “Sunset on the Ganja Farm” and is a fixture at the annual Jefferson State Hemp Expo music festival. And there’s the Jefferson State Militia, whose organizer, Jim Mark, posted a picture of himself on the group’s website wearing camo and holding a pitchfork and tiki torch, alongside multiple far-right diatribes and tips on beating thermal imaging systems.

San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris

Jefferson’s Washington Mark Baird, the most visible spokesman for the would-be 51st state, says he’s never heard of the Jefferson State Militia. He isn’t always thrilled with the way the Jefferson name is used, and he knows that some of those usages might contribute to a negative impression of his cause. Still, he tries to put a good face on it. “You can have the Jefferson Marijuana Farm or the Jefferson Manure Farm,” he says. “I can’t stop that. I wouldn’t try if I could. Because unfortunately, liberty means liberty. If you advocate for liberty, you can’t say, ‘I advocate for liberty in all the things I like but none of the things I don’t like.’ It applies to all things all the time. Liberty is messy.” A retired pilot, rancher and volunteer deputy sheriff of Siskiyou County, the 63-year-old Baird is a big man with a rough, weathered face that is perpetually shadowed by the brim of a baseball cap. He meets me at the Yreka radio station he owns, KSYC-FM, just before he leaves town for Sacramento. The next day, he he will be presenting declarations from 15 counties expressing interest in joining the state of Jefferson at the state Capitol, at an event he and his colleagues are calling “Declaration Day.” Baird has a speaking style that is simultaneously folksy and erudite, and his pitch for the State of Jefferson comes out in complete paragraphs, dense with facts and figures and citations. He quotes President Dwight Eisenhower. (“Eisenhower called [Supreme Court justice] Earl Warren the worst damn fool mistake he ever made. And he was right, by the way.”) He throws in a reference to Sir William Blackstone, the distinguished 18th-century English jurist, and Blackstone’s explanation of the “absolute rights” of humans. Sarah Goodyear

Several times over the course of the interview, Baird expresses his reliance on the primal wisdom of the United States Constitution. He whips out a pamphlet copy of the document, its cover creased and soft with use, to underline his points. “It’s important that we use interposition — which is the use of local authorities, local governmental entities — so that we approach state split legally, morally, and ethically,” he says. That means pursuing the formation of a new state under Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. constitution, which would require both the California State Legislature and the U.S. Congress to pass legislation to separate the counties of Jefferson — whatever they might end up being — from the rest of California. It’s an approach that has been used in the past, albeit a long time ago: Vermont split from New York in 1791, Maine from Massachusetts in 1820, and Kentucky and West Virginia left Virginia in 1792 and 1862, respectively. There have been similar, unsuccessful secessionist movements, fueled by rural resentment of urban power, in New York, Colorado and Maryland. An initiative to split California into six parts failed to make it onto the ballot just a couple of years ago. If a new state were to include all 21 counties Baird currently counts as supportive of separation, the California legislature would be voting to relinquish approximately 52,000 square miles of territory, including the source of almost all the state’s precious, much-debated water. Baird says a new Jefferson government would honor existing water contracts, but both sections of the state are well aware of what kind of leverage a northern breakaway would possess. An Article IV, Section 3 split is, almost everyone concedes, an extremely unlikely proposition. As of late January, the group has not found a legislator willing to introduce a bill to even get the process started. “It just defies logic to think you can take all the poorest counties in California, cluster them together and somehow end up with a prosperous new state.” “If the California Legislature ignores us, and it’s likely they will — there’s no monetary incentive for them not to do that — then we will pursue a judicial remedy,” Baird says. That remedy would be to sue California for lack of representation and dilution of vote. If the suit were successful, it could go to the Supreme Court. Any such case would rely on a challenge to the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims, a landmark in that era’s voting-rights struggle. In Reynolds, the plaintiffs argued that urban districts of Alabama (home to a significant percentage of the state’s black citizens) were harmfully underrepresented in the state’s legislature. The court ruled 8-1, on the “one man, one vote” principle, that state legislatures had to be apportioned on the basis of population, not geography. The way Chief Justice Warren put it in his famous decision was, “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.” That meant that in a state like California, the system for apportioning legislators — in which each county had one state senator, regardless of population — had to change. In 1964, L.A. County had 6 million residents and just one senator, the same representation as Lake County, with 14,000 residents. Today, thanks to Reynolds, L.A. County, with 9.8 million people, has eight state senators whose districts are completely within its borders, while 11 counties in the northern part of the state share just 1. That, Baird says, means that the residents of rural northern California, where trees and acres are much more plentiful than people, don’t stand a chance of getting anyone to listen to them. To solve that, he says a brand-new state is the best solution. In Baird’s imagining, Jefferson would have less government, more local control, and an almost archetypal incarnation of the democracy envisioned by the Founding Fathers. It is, at its heart, a fundamentalist vision. “It’s absolutely exciting to think that this document — it’s like 6,000 words — could foster that kind of positive change,” he says, waving his copy of the Constitution in the air once again. “What an exciting prospect, to form a state where we could do a full reboot and get back to basic, common-sense government.”

Keep it California Common sense, in Kevin Hendrick’s opinion, is in short supply when it comes to Jefferson. Hendrick is the a spokesman for Keep It California, a political action committee formed in 2015 to push back against the separatist movement — “the Jeffersons,” as Hendrick calls them. “It just defies logic to think you can take all the poorest counties in California, cluster them together and somehow end up with a prosperous new state,” says Hendrick, who lives in Del Norte County, which is located on the coast in the far northwestern corner of California. Hendrick first got involved with the issue when Jefferson supporters showed up at a board of supervisors meeting in Del Norte, not far from the part of Oregon where the whole idea of Jefferson was born. He says at first, no one took the proposal seriously. Then the supervisors voted to put the question on the ballot in 2014, and he started organizing to defeat the measure, which ultimately failed by a margin of 58-42. Hendrick, a registered Democrat, says the initiative failed because he and members of his coalition built bipartisan support for the idea of remaining within California. “These were just good, rational people voting their self-interest,” says Hendrick, who points out that Del Norte, like many of California’s rural counties, get more back in services from the state than they pay in taxes. “The self-interest for our county is, we need California, and we’re part of California, and we want to stay part of California.” When the Jefferson movement started picking up steam early in 2015, Hendrick was approached to be part of a statewide coalition opposing Jefferson. Now that group regularly show up at board of supervisors meetings where the Jeffersonians are presenting, to provide a counterargument. “As a libertarian, my ideal neighbor in Jefferson is a lesbian and her transgender spouse guarding their marijuana field with their .50-caliber machine gun. And unlimited ammunition.” He doesn’t deny that the problem of underrepresentation is real, and Hendrick is as aware as anyone of the real problems the northern part of the state is facing — an economy where the traditional industries of timber, mining and logging have shrunk to nearly nothing; a tax base that is inherently limited because the federal and state government owns a significant chunk of the landmass (76%, in Del Norte’s case); the ongoing threat posed by wildfires; the lack of opportunity for the region’s young people. But Hendrick says that working within the system, by building relationships with legislators from other parts of the state, for instance, is a more effective strategy than separating. He and other members of Keep It California invited the California State Senate President pro Tempore, L.A.’s Kevin de León, up to El Dorado County last year to discuss the region’s needs and concerns. Hendrick says it was an amicable and productive meeting, and that his group is hopeful about a couple of pieces of rural-friendly legislation that will be considered by the legislature this session. He gives the Jefferson movement some credit for helping to catalyze these developments. But the region’s best chance for success, Hendrick insists, lies not in separating but in becoming yet more unified with the more prosperous part of the state. “I have a lot of compassion for these people that are afraid, poor, unemployed,” he says. “That’s real. But I think it’s cruel to give someone false hope. I just don’t think that forming a new poor state is going to help.”

Strange bedfellows Skepticism about the way the current push for statehood is being handled comes from Jefferson supporters as well as detractors. Take the case of Sam Toll, an active proponent of the statehood effort who lives in Loomis, in Placer County, and jumped on the Jefferson bandwagon in 2015. Toll, an entrepreneur with a background in communications, says he collected 2,500 signatures for the cause. He also says he has tried to help the movement to take a more modern approach to marketing itself — setting up an LGBT Jefferson Facebook page, for instance, even though he is not gay himself and many in the Jefferson movement have expressed views that would alienate potential LGBT supporters. “Anyone who’s center of the fairway or left-leaning is going to look at our regular Facebook page, and they’re going to run like hell,” Toll says. “Because you know what? It’s full of a bunch of Bible-thumpin’, gun-totin’, wild-eyed pistol wavers.” It’s true that a quick scroll through comments on Jefferson’s Facebook page or official website would give anyone the impression that this is, at its heart, a Tea Party movement, with pronounced conservative social views and a heavy focus on the Second Amendment. Not to mention poor graphic-design skills. Courtesy of Sam Toll Toll, a liberal turned libertarian, says that Jefferson won’t get far if organizers won’t expand its base and acknowledge the social, ideological and economic differences within its own proposed borders (the southern counties of the would-be state are significantly more prosperous than the northern ones). His own vision for the new state is nothing if not broad. “As a libertarian,” Toll says, “my ideal neighbor in the State of Jefferson is a lesbian and her transgender spouse — they’re married — guarding their marijuana field and their hemp field with their .50-caliber machine gun. And unlimited ammunition.” Toll’s insistence on speaking publicly about things like the potential for a legalized pot industry in a new state has led to an epic falling-out with Baird, who calls him “the marijuana guy.” Things blew up when Toll discussed the potential for legal weed as a source of significant tax revenue for Jefferson on a Sacramento talk radio show. “Can you imagine your horror, if you’re listening to a radio show and a guy who calls himself the communications coordinator for Jefferson says, ‘I want the State of Jefferson to lead the nation in pot production’?” Baird says, showing emotion for the first time during our interview. “I said, ‘I’m a cop, you idiot. You really want me to sign onto that? Sorry.’ This isn’t about the dope, it isn’t about gay marriage, it isn’t about forest, it isn’t about water. It’s about liberty through adequate representation.”

“Follow the money” Even at this stage in the process, though, there’s some significant question about just what and who is being represented — what benchmarks Baird and his core group of supporters in the movement are using to gauge enthusiasm for the idea of separation. So far, “the Jeffersons” are counting 21 counties as part of their movement, basing that status either on votes of county boards of supervisors on resolutions of varying types, or on signatures gathered by supporters on a simple declaration of support for the idea of a new state. If the number of signatures equals 50% plus 1 (or more) of the number of voters in the last general election, Baird says, they are marking that county in. Yet the group is not entirely consistent in its approach. It includes in the pro-Jefferson camp two counties, Lake and Plumas, where boards of supervisors have rescinded earlier votes placing the Jefferson question on the ballot in this June’s primary election. It also includes, on the basis of signatures gathered, three counties where the boards of supervisors have explicitly rejected the idea of Jefferson — Trinity, Shasta, and Sierra — saying, in effect, that the declaration signatures, which are not verified as they must be for an official petition, trump the vote of the supervisors. “It’s a bad start when you say you want better representation for rural counties to be disrespecting the will of the people’s duly-elected representatives,” says Keep It California’s Hendrick. Baird dismisses the discrepancies, as well as any concerns raised by critics about the legitimacy of the signatures gathered by Jefferson supporters. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “And when you harken back to a much earlier time, I doubt Samuel Adams went out and got 51% petition-grade signatures before they started the Revolutionary War.”

Sarah Goodyear BANNER DAY Some 200 Jefferson supporters turned out for a Declaration Day rally at the Capitol in Sacramento on January 6. Clockwise from above: Supporters flying the official “state" seal; test-driving a new 51-star U.S. flag; even kids showed their true colors.

He insists that no county is being forced to join the movement. “We are very clear both to counties’ boards of supervisors and to individuals, this isn’t a pill we’re selling,” Baird says. “If you don’t want liberty, you can vote yourselves out just as quickly as you voted yourselves in. Because if you don’t want representation, we don’t want you. Our goal is representation for every single county. Can you imagine why anyone wouldn’t want that?” Exactly the question I was going to ask, I say. “Well, follow the money,” Baird says, darkly. “My own state senator doesn’t want it, because his power base and his goodies would shrink dramatically. And he’s a Republican, by the way.” That state senator, Ted Gaines, told the Record Searchlight of Redding in November 2015 that he could help his constituents best by working within the system. “I feel there are enough battles and enough opportunities to work across the aisle,” he said, adding that he thought a new state didn’t stand a chance of gaining approval from the Legislature. “I don’t know how you make that a reality.”

God’s country A respectable crowd turns out for Declaration Day on Jan. 6, especially considering that the sky over Sacramento is a dismal gray and it’s been raining all morning, sometimes sideways. Baird heads into the State Capitol to file pro-Jefferson declarations for 15 counties, adding to the six he filed in January 2015. About 200 Jefferson supporters stand outside on the steps, carrying signs and flags that whip in the wind. The crowd is cheerful and enthusiastic in spite of the weather, applauding an acoustic rendition of a new song, “Jefferson State of Mind” (“You don’t know us, you have no clue, and still you’re telling us what to do”), and cheering the speakers. No matter what Baird says about this being an inclusive movement, the crowd is undeniably homogenous — only five or six non-white people show up. Many of those present wear camouflage, whether military or hunting style. Even the tie-downs for the tent shielding the speakers from the chilly rain are camo-patterned. The Tea Party’s beloved DON’T TREAD ON ME flag is omnipresent, and the State of Jefferson seal on the podium, crookedly applied, doesn’t quite obscure the NorCal Tea Party logo underneath. There’s a gun raffle for people who commit to calling three legislators a day about the State of Jefferson. “Our first gun is an AR,” the announcer says to whoops of approval. “And next month it’s probably going to be a handgun, and the next month it’s going to be a long gun. We’re going to be doing this for a while.” “Anybody that has his (church) elders happily conceal and carry, you gotta love him.”

The speakers at the podium frequently invoke the name of God — and this isn’t some vague, conceptual Divine Being. This is a hands-on deity, One who is invested in conservative politics. “Our rights don’t come from government, they come from God,” says Terry Rapoza, a member of the Shasta County Jefferson committee, who is emceeing the event. It’s a Christian God, naturally. Rapoza introduces pastor Dave Bryan, who runs the hard-core evangelical Church of Glad Tidings in Sutter County, as the “official pastor” of the State of Jefferson. Bryan’s is the kind of church that stands in defense of “traditional marriage” and pronounces on its website, “We encourage a zealous devotion to the things of God that some may view as a bit radical.” “Anybody that has his (church) elders happily conceal and carry, you gotta love him,” Rapoza says, drawing knowing chuckles from the crowd. What would happen if this happily like-minded group of people got their way, if Jefferson became a state and had to write its own constitution? At a constitutional convention, the folks attending the rally would no longer exist in a bubble of consensus. Sure, they wouldn’t have to deal with East L.A., but they still would have to contend with a certain amount of diversity. The southern counties of a putative Jefferson have a more cosmopolitan and liberal bent than the northern ones. The stubborn American reality of difference remains, even here. By rejecting the American dream of strength through diversity, the Jeffersonians might be setting themselves up for a fall. “All of these details — Are we going to be an open-carry state? Are we going to have asset forfeiture? Are we going to force transgender people to go to a bathroom of our choice and not their choice? Are people going to smoke weed? — all of that is going to be handled at this mythical constitutional convention,” says Toll, the libertarian renegade. “You’re talking about people who are ultra-right-wing, Bible-thumping pistol-wavers. Then there’s the ultra-left-wing, ‘let’s give everything away to everybody and tax everyone’ (contingent). And these dope-smoking anarchists. You’re really going to put all these people in a room and expect lollipops and ice cream to happen?” Such concerns don’t deter Baird or his core supporters. “God, how exciting!” is his reaction when asked about how the tough issues would get hammered out at a constitutional convention. And Baird insists he isn’t worried about money, either. He’s confident, he says, that “responsible resource management” and smaller government would result in a fiscally solid state. Baird says he would feel no nostalgia about saying goodbye to citizenship in California — which he sees not as a sun-bathed dream state uniting a diverse citizenry but, rather, a debt-ridden, dysfunctional, failed example of bloated government. Would Jefferson be poor? Maybe so, but he already knows what that feels like. “You can’t get much poorer than we are here in Yreka,” Baird says. “I’d rather be free and broke. Here’s the deal for us: Our worst economic day will be the last day we call ourselves Californians.”

CREDITS: Digital Longform Editor, Joe Angio; Deputy Digital Longform Editor, Bruce Diamond; Interactive Developer, Evie Liu