I first arrived in Shasta County just over a year ago, in September 2024, when summer’s fever was just about to break. The small city of Anderson is one of the last stops before you hit the Klamath Mountains when you’re driving up the mighty I-5, the interior artery of the Central Valley. I had come as a “local reporting fellow” assigned to Shasta Scout, a nonprofit news service, through a UC Berkeley program staffing newsrooms in “news deserts,” typically in remote or disenfranchised parts of the state.

One of my first assignments was covering the weekly council meeting in Anderson on September 17. On the agenda that night was a proposal to declare Anderson a parental “Right to Know City.” This was the small town’s resistance to recent legislation passed by the California State Assembly: the SAFETY Act. The legislation, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in July 2024, bars school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education from adopting “forced outing” policies toward LGBTQ+ students, granting discretion to educators in how much they disclose to parents about, for example, a child’s choice of pronouns in school. This came as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was galvanizing millions around the image of an omnipresent trans witch devouring the nation’s Hansels and Gretels.

In California, what might have seemed like an uncontroversial policy on much of the coast set off a firestorm in the state’s extremely conservative interior—including Anderson—where a group of vocal parents already believed that a left-wing public school curriculum was brainwashing children with “gender ideology.” According to them, the passage of the SAFETY Act gave teachers broad leeway to encourage students to transition in secret, thereby violating “parents’ rights.” Hence, Anderson’s appropriation of the term “sanctuary city,” employed by liberal municipalities during Trump’s first term to signify their status as a haven to the vulnerable and a bulwark against policies deemed cruel and excessive.

During their discussion of the SAFETY Act, one council member called the new state policy a form of “mental abuse” that would inevitably confuse children while deceiving parents. The mayor called it yet another unconstitutional consequence of the state legislature’s “progressive Marxist bent.” But the council member whose reflection I found most striking, Mike Gallagher, contextualized the bill as part of a larger power imbalance between this small rural town and the liberal behemoth that is Sacramento’s political machine. “It’s the same legislature that pushes this through […] that does housing, that does transportation, that does public health,” he began. “It’s the same group of people. […] There’s an agenda. They’re hitting us from all angles. They won’t ever talk about […] what gets a kid to get to this …” He grew quiet, considering his words. “This place,” he continued. “They think it’s natural. It just crushes me to think that they’re that evil.”

The vote was a unanimous five ayes. It was a symbolic gesture, as the city council lacks the authority to compel Anderson’s school districts to flout state law, which would bring the risk of being sued. In the coming months, my Shasta Scout editor and I struggled to find a single case of a student who “socially transitioned” in the classroom without their parents’ knowledge, as critics of the bill seemed to think would occur. Sixty miles south, in Butte County, however, there was a lawsuit making headlines: a mother of a fifth grader was suing her child’s school district for allegedly allowing her to transition secretly. The lawyer representing the family was Harmeet Dhillon, who would soon be appointed assistant attorney general for civil rights in Pam Bondi’s Justice Department.

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 had not yet reached them.

Here, too, one finds active state-building projects, such as the longstanding State of Jefferson, a secessionist movement to carve out a state in Northern California and Southern Oregon, with origins dating back to the 19th century. Born of an outrage over the respective state governments’ failure to maintain roads, the movement culminated in a brief armed—albeit bloodless—rebellion in 1941. Its younger cousin and adversary, New California State, would see a partitioning of California along rural and partisan lines, first proposed circa 2015. Less particular to far northern California, there is Calexit, whose aim is to leave the United States entirely, taking inspiration from Scottish independence referendums, or California assemblyman James Gallagher’s recent and curiously named “two-state solution,” an attempt at a diplomatic negotiation with Gavin Newsom over his controversial redistricting plan.