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REDDING, Calif. It was a slow night in the trendy Market Street Blade and Barrel restaurant when line cook Nathan Pinkney, a budding comic and Black Lives Matter activist, spotted Carlos Zapata at the bar. He knew it meant trouble.
For weeks, he had been making political parody videos of Zapata, a high-profile militia member and a leader in a movement to recall a trio of Republican Shasta County supervisors who supported Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pandemic health orders.
Soon after the two saw each other, Zapata threw a drink at Pinkney, according to police. It escalated from there. That night, the BLM activist ended up with a black eye after two associates of Zapata allegedly assaulted him at the rear entrance of the restaurant while Zapata was present, according to police and interviews with people involved.
Thursday, May 20. I’m Laura Newberry, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.
The city of Redding has long been known for its 300-plus days of sunshine each year and proximity to lush hiking trails and alpine lakes.
Now, the Shasta County community has become a political tinderbox. Residents are increasingly divided over the health risks posed by the pandemic, governmental power and the degree to which a local armed militia should be able to take matters into its own hands, write my colleagues Anita Chabria and Hailey Branson-Potts.
Tensions came to a head on May 4 when Carlos Zapata a high-profile militia member and a leader in a movement to recall three Republican Shasta County supervisors who supported Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pandemic health orders allegedly assaulted Black Lives Matter activist Nathan Pinkney at a trendy local restaurant.
South of Redding, residents formed the Cottonwood militia more than a decade ago when five local businesses in the town were robbed on five subsequent nights, according to one of the group’s founders and leaders, Woody Clendenen. It has since grown from 11 members to a sizeable political force, including Zapata, with an increasingly savvy media reach across Northern California and beyond.
Its members are well-known in the community, offering a scholarship each year, hosting a boys’ camp, and sometimes being called in lieu of the police, said Clendenen.
“It grew into almost kind of a political action committee,” said Clendenen, a Cottonwood barber and bit actor in Hollywood B-movies. Candidates for office would call and court militia members for support, he said. Before the pandemic, he said, “our fundraiser dinners, the sheriff and the supervisors come.”