Out-of-state film mogul confirms bankrolling right-wing takeovers of California counties

A Connecticut film producer confirmed that he funded a recall effort that led to the right-wing takeover of a California county, and he admitted that he's helping to fund similar efforts elsewhere.

Reverge Anselmo, who battled Shasta County officials a decade ago over developments on his winery property, spent nearly $500,000 on local races there and confirmed widely held suspicions that he bankrolled a slickly produced documentary promoting the recall efforts -- which he laughed off as a joke, reported the Los Angeles Times.

“I tried to get them better music," Anselmo said of the documentary “Red, White and Blueprint” launched by right-wing activists.

Militia members and their supporters have lobbed violent threats against Republican politicians in Shasta County, where county supervisor and former police chief Leonard Moty was pushed out in a recall effort sponsored by Anselmo, who confirmed that he recently wrote a check for about $180,000 for a similar effort elsewhere.

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“I just sent more,” he said. “Nobody asked for the money.”

Anselmo declined to say where that check had gone, and cracked another joke about his efforts, saying he may have sent the money to the “Competitive Pole-Dancers Assn. Anonymous.”

The 59-year-old Anselmo, a Marine Corps vet, former novelist and guardian of his father's vast fortune, arrived in the deeply conservative Shasta County in 2005, but abandoned his ranch in 2014 following a lengthy and expensive legal battle with county officials that he says destroyed his marriage.

“She married a cowboy,” Anselmo told the Times, "and by the time all this happened, I was just a guy in cowboy boots screaming on the phone to my attorney all day long. She said she had nobody to ride with anymore. I was failing as a husband, but it wasn’t my fault. Somebody had to go screaming on the phone to my attorney about Shasta County.”

Anselmo admits that his political donations are a form of payback and that he'd consider returning to California if all three county supervisors were recalled and the resource management division was eliminated, and he said local officials deserve it.

“They’re evil, and they deserve what is coming to them," he said. “The wind is at [the recall proponents'] backs. They’re going to be free. I don’t say they will be prosperous, but they will be free.”