By Nevin Kallepalli
This is a shortened version of the original story. You can read the full article at Shasta Scout.
For years now, Woody Clendenen’s little barbershop on Main Street has doubled as an informal press briefing room for the Cottonwood Militia. While cutting customers’ hair, the cofounder of the Cottonwood Militia has also been known to give interviews to curious national reporters from the likes of Harper’s Magazine and CNN.
Despite national media attention, Clendenen and his partner Dan Scoville — the other founder of the local militia — still feel largely misunderstood by the Shasta County community where local press has rarely spoken to the group.
At the barber shop, a patron chimed in over the hum of Clendenen’s clippers flush against his nape. “Well, what was your opinion about the word ‘militia’?” the patron asked Shasta Scout while strapped into one of two barber chairs. “Did you think of your rednecks and your camo?”
“It’s been tarnished by the media for years,” Scoville added.
The negative connotation most Americans have when it comes to the term “militia,” according to Scoville and others in the barber shop that day, is related to intentional suppression of citizen self-reliance by the U.S. government. Nowadays, most Americans no longer grow their own food, tend to their own wounds or, according to Pew Research, live in a household with a firearm.
The Cottonwood Militia has guns and knows how to use them, but leaders describe a mindset that is more defensive than offensive. “The militia stance on weapons is that the gun is the last line of defense,” Scoville explained.
Modern life is a far cry from the harsh conditions that required early white settlers to fend for themselves, as they slowly inched their way across the continent after landing in Plymouth Rock. Assembling a militia today, many members feel, continues to be not only a constitutional right but a patriotic duty.
Founders say the group is prepared for combat but is mostly focused on survival skills and disaster preparedness. They engage members in tutorials on how to communicate via radio and are prepared for a regional shut down to the power grid. They also provide basic medical training, along with arms training, and coordinate their communication via Signal chats when local wildfires or protests occur.
The Cottonwood Militia bylaws include a quote pulled from the U.S. military oath of enlistment, emphasizing that members “stand ready to defend our nation from all its enemies, be they foreign or domestic.”
Both founders spoke with reverence of the long tradition of militias throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, which, in Scoville’s words, “helped build America, because there was no military force, or not a very good one at first.”
It’s true that early militias were pivotal to building present-day America. But the complex history of early militias also includes paid involvement in the forced removal of the earliest inhabitants of this land. Across California, including what is now known as Shasta County, the mass killing of Native people was carried out in large part by volunteer militias commissioned by the California governor.
Clendenen acknowledges that militias may have been involved in some past violence against California’s Indigenous people, something he strongly opposes, but isn’t convinced they played a major role in destroying Native life. Regardless, he said, that history should have no bearing on the way today’s militias are viewed by the public.
“That has as much to do with us as the fact that there were white plantations that had slave owners and holding us as a modern society responsible for that. You know what I mean?” Clendenen said.
The militia and law enforcement
The Cottonwood Militia began in 2009 at a “barn meeting” for local residents of Cottonwood, California. Founders say the community had been experiencing an uptick in crime made worse by a delayed response time from the county sheriff, whose deputies could take hours to reach the small community on the outskirts of Shasta County.
In its early days, the local militia served as an enhanced neighborhood watch whose members subdued suspected criminals through citizens arrests while waiting for officers to reach the rural town of roughly 6,000. In time, according to militia founders, the group grew into an unofficial auxiliary of the official police force, with — they claim — the blessing of multiple municipal law enforcement agencies and officials, including the California Highway Patrol, the FBI, the Shasta County Sheriff, and some county supervisors.
“We’re not police officers or anything like that, but we do try to help our community,” Scoville explained, framing the group as a peace-keeping force that only intervenes when a crime is committed. They see their presence as support to deputized police officers, especially in situations that require crowd control.
Shasta County Sheriff spokesperson Michael Johnson confirmed that he met with the militia when he first assumed his role in 2024, as he would with any interest group, but did not elaborate on the nature of the department’s relationship with the militia beyond that. A lieutenant with CHP’s Northern Division probed Shasta Scout on what the news agency knew about the militia before suggesting that reporters contact the Redding-based CHP office where Shasta Scout was unable to reach a local lieutenant despite repeated attempts. As for the FBI, a representative from the local field office said the organization has “no comment” on the group and a public records request yielded no related records.
In Shasta, militia members with radios and ear pieces can be seen at local protests, from a 2020 courthouse demonstration connected to the Black Lives Matter movement to a recent one-person sit-in at a county board meeting. Most recently, militia members showed up to a No Kings Protest on June 14. Beforehand, the group discussed plans to surveil the upcoming demonstration in person while emphasizing their central commitment to freedom of speech and expression.
“We’re founded on being able to protest our government,” Clendenen reminded militia members who showed up to the regular weekly meeting, a subset of the larger group. They ranged vastly in age and gender, mirroring the racial makeup of Shasta County — that is, mostly but not exclusively white. Clendenen advised group members that their purpose isn’t to stop protests from happening but to make sure nothing “gets out of hand.”
From the founders’ viewpoints, only lawbreakers should feel unease when militia members show up to conduct citizen patrols, monitor public events or have conversations with those at homeless camps about missing goods. “We know all the outlaws and thieves in our area,” Clendenen said. “I mean, we get new ones every now and then, but we know them.”
Clendenen said the militia offers the unhoused one-way bus tickets to “anywhere but Cottonwood,” adding, “If we go down to look for some stolen stuff in some of the homeless camps — if you show up with 10 guys, and I’m the littlest one and the oldest, they’re very polite. We never have any problems.”
The statement illustrates how the militia treads the line of vigilanteism, relying on the strength of the larger group and their connections in the community to respond to perceived threats. In 2020, Carlos Zapata, a producer on the documentary series Red White and Blueprint who self-identified at the time as a member of the militia, warned that it wasn’t going to be peaceful much longer unless COVID restrictions were dropped.
During a 2020 George Floyd-era racial justice protest, individuals who identified as militia members showed up at what they said was at the behest of local law enforcement in response to rumored threats of violence — including a bus full of “antifa” agitators headed to Shasta — that turns out to have never existed. Militia members pushed protesters towards a line of police in riot gear that night. The night eventually ended peacefully.
In 2020 and 2021 several militia members made vague threats to a Shasta Scout reporter both in person and by phone, noting that they were being watched and should be careful what they do. In 2022, Clendenen compared journalists to Nazi war criminals saying “there’s a day coming when the media will have to pay.”
And in late 2024, after protestor Jenny O’Connell-Nowain was arrested for protesting at a public meeting, militia members lined up at the back of the chambers as the meeting resumed. When asked if a county official requested the militia presence that night, Clendenen took a beat, then answered cryptically.
“I’ll just say we found out about it,” he said.
In the grand scheme of public safety, Clendenen believes that militias and rightwing organizations more generally, have a cleaner track record than protesters on “the left” who he accused of burning “over 50 cities” in 2020. Reporting shows the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests were nondestructive, with notable exceptions in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis.
But Clendenen doesn’t trust media reports, which he accused of covering for the alleged crimes of protestors on the left. “Nobody can name a protest from the right where there are any cops attacked,” he said.
When asked about the reports of officers injured by demonstrators at the Capitol on January 6, Clendenen was skeptical. Police “might have got pushed around,” he said, “but there was not one person there with a gun.” Multiple investigations of the events of J6 have come to the opposite conclusion, finding that some protestors were armed not only with guns but also molotov cocktails.
Identifying who’s law enforcement
When some members of the Cottonwood Militia showed up to local BLM protests in tactical gear five years ago, it was hard to decipher civilians in tactical vests and gloves from what could have been a member of the National Guard or a DHS officer.
Today, the porousness between vigilante and law enforcement has gone in the other direction, with the recent conduct of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) marking the agency as “vigilantes” in the eyes of some California politicians.
Those blurred lines led California lawmakers to introduce both a state and national bill calling for agents to be required to clearly identify themselves. Senator Alex Padilla told Shasta Scout that it’s important for the safety of both law enforcement officers and community members.
“You don’t know how an individual or a community is going to respond when they’re not sure if it’s law enforcement or not,” Padilla told Shasta Scout.
As Clendenen carefully groomed the hairline of one customer at the barbershop, Shasta Scout asked if the militia would consider coordinating with ICE in future. He paused briefly. “We’d help if they asked,” he chuckled, adding that he can’t imagine ICE actually doing so.
He said that he’d heard that individuals in Texas were being given awards for their assistance with such work, a rumor that has yet to be corroborated. That mention prompted one customer to joke to Clendenen just before he left the barber shop, “It might be a good retirement gig for you!” as the little barbershop on Main Street filled with laughter.
This is a shortened version of the original story. You can read the full article at Shasta Scout. Nevin Kallepalli reports for Shasta Scout as a member of the California Local News Fellowship. This story is part of “Aquí Estamos/Here We Stand,” a collaborative reporting project of American Community Media and community news outlets statewide.
