Empress of Moorish “Washitaw Nation” Dies in California, Age 87

A Louisiana woman who founded a Native American–inspired “empire” with elements of both 1960s-style Black nationalism and the modern “sovereign citizens” movement died on April 26th at her home in California at the age of 87.

Flag of the Washitaw Nation

Verdiacee Hampton-Goston, as she was legally known, was an African-American from Louisiana who also claimed ancestry in the local Ouachita tribal group and preferred to be known as Verdiacee Washington-Turner Goston El-Bey, Empress of the Washitaw Nation—though the federally recognized Caddo Nation of Louisiana and Oklahoma, which represents most Ouachitas, had no formal connection with her.

“Moorish Science” religions date to the 1920s.

The Washitaw Nation (in full, it is called the Official Empire Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah) is in many ways an offshoot of the “Moorish Science” movement, a precursor to modern Black nationalism which emerged in the ferment of religious and political ideas in 1920s and ’30s Detroit, Michigan, where Islam, Freemasonry, offbeat anthropological theorizing, and an infatuation with all things Egyptian and occultic gave rise to Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, among others.  Hampton-Goston believed that her Washitaw ancestors were actually African-featured “Israelites” (this is known as the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis) and that she was their rightful empress and thus sovereign of traditional territories that she felt were illegitimately transferred from Napoleon Bonaparte to Thomas Jefferson in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase.  She spent most of her imperial career living in Oklahoma and was even for a while mayor of Richwood, Oklahoma.

The Empress’s territorial claims were not particularly modest,
but she didn’t press them.

Hampton-Goston claimed to be rightful empress of the entire territory of the Louisiana Purchase, which includes four U.S. states, parts of nine others, and even a decent slice of Canada.  She claimed this right through “matriarchal descent.”  (Most of the indigenous nations in the Louisiana Purchase territory have always, unlike the Ouachita and Caddo, practiced patrilineal, not matrilineal, descent, but, listen, this was hardly the most serious vulnerability in her arguments.)

Looks official—but don’t try using it as I.D.

The number of those who counted themselves Hampton-Goston’s imperial subjects is unknown, but they certainly included a large extended family.  In later years, the Washitaws adopted legal strategies that borrowed heavily from the “sovereign citizens” movement, a vaguely anarcho-libertarian tax-protest phenomenon which otherwise mainly attracts disaffected conservative rural whites.  But—unlike a more high-profile Moorish Science splinter group, the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, which was shut down by authorities in Georgia in 2005—Hampton-Goston stayed clear of troubles with the authorities.  She was once investigated for tax evasion, but the charges were dropped.  (She claimed identity theft caused the misunderstanding.)  She was also once arrested for shooting two pigs in Monroe, Oklahoma.  But charges were brought instead against the animals’ owner, for keeping them within city limits.

How to get pulled over in rural Oklahoma

The Empress was also the author of a book called Return of the Ancient Ones, which encapsulated many of her ideas.

The idea of “indigenous” “Black Israelites” appeals to many politically disaffected
African-Americans in places like Atlanta.

A long-time friend, Vicki Williams, said of Hampton-Goston, “She had her strong beliefs that everybody was supposed to be treated equal no matter what their color, what their race was or what they believed in or what kind of valuable they had.”  Another friend, Umar Bey, of Los Angeles, was quoted as saying, “She was a very spiritual woman.  She had a direct connection to God.  She could think about something and go to sleep and wake up with the information she needed.”  Hampton-Goston niece, Zelia Logan-Smith, age 66, said her aunt’s ashes would be returned to Monroe and scattered in a private ceremony.  Logan-Smith added, “She was one step from a genius.  She would say, ‘When you walk through the jungle, you have to be as harmless as a dove, but as wise as a serpent.’”

[You can read more about the Washitaw Nation, the Nuwaubians, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Her anthropological theories were a tad wonky,
but the woman knew how to accessorize.

Vermont Snub on Karabakh May Signal Crimea Crisis Has Derailed Armenian-American Pressure-Politics Gravy Train

For decades, the Armenian-American political lobby in the United States has pushed aggressively to chalk up symbolic victories by pressuring state and other legislative bodies into granting utterly-nonbinding “recognition” to the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), the Armenian puppet state which the newly independent Republic of Armenia, with the help of Russia, carved out of Azerbaijan’s western flank in a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing in the late 1980s and ’90s.  The N.K.R. has essentially no recognition in the real world of international diplomacy, except from three puppet states of the Russian Federation: Abkhazia and South Ossetia (within Georgia) and Transnistria (within Moldova).  Not even Armenia or its close ally, Russia, recognizes the N.K.R.  But the Armenian National Committee of America (A.N.C.A.) and other groups have successfully cajoled the state legislatures of Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, as well as the Los Angeles city council, to “recognize” the N.K.R.  (Abroad, Australia’s state of New South Wales recognizes it too.)

Armenian-American demonstrators in Los Angeles display Nagorno-Karabakh flags.

Some reckon that the Armenian lobby is the third most powerful immigrant-minority lobbying group in U.S. politics, exceeded in influence only by the Jewish and Cuban-American lobbies.  They have also been pushing for recognition of the Armenian genocide at the hands of Anatolian Turks a century ago as a genocide, something the U.S. has over the decades resolutely refused to do, mostly to avoid offending Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally.  There are perhaps as many as a million and a half Armenian-Americans in the U.S., mostly in southern California and New England.  There are, for example, only three cities in Armenia itself that have more Armenian residents than there are in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles.  For legislators confronted with an N.K.R.-recognition bill, the choice is between capitulating, passing the bill, and moving on, on the one hand, or, on the other, needlessly alienating and infuriating a powerful ethnic lobby.  There is, by contrast, almost no Azeri-American community of any size to exert pressure of the same kind.

Mammad Talibov tells the Vermont Senate the Azeri side of the story.

But the Armenian lobby’s winning streak, in New England at least, ended last week when Vermont’s state senate declined to wade into South Caucasus politics and recognize the N.K.R.  Vermont senators debating on the resolution were paid a visit by Yusif Babanly of the U.S. Azeris Network and a legal attaché from the Azerbaijani embassy in Washington, D.C., Mamma Talibov.  Babanly and Talibov gave the (in America, rarely heard) Azeri perspective on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and emphasized the strategic relationship between the U.S. and oil-rich Azerbaijan.  Azeris are closely related to the Anatolian Turks of Turkey proper, both culturally and linguistically, and Azerbaijan is a front-line state in the U.S.’s cold war with Iran.  (The Azeri lobby, which is closely linked to Turkey, is no stranger to manipulation and propaganda either.  See an article from this blog which touches on Azeri and Turkish efforts to build up the very minor 1992 “Khojaly Massacre” into a full-fledged “genocide” by Armenians.)  Mostly, the senate threw up its hands and decided the situation on the ground was too complex for the body to take a position on it.  As Norm McAllister, a Republican senator said, “We’re never going to know in this little committee who’s actually telling us the whole story.”

Earlier, in 2004, Vermont’s governor, James H. Douglas, officially recognized the Turkish genocide of Armenians during the First World War.  There are not a lot of Armenians in Vermont, but they include the novelist Chris Bohjalian, possibly the most prominent Armenian-American writer, who has written novels about the genocide and lives in Lincoln, Vermont.  It was Bohjalian who brought the N.K.R. recognition issue to Montpelier.

Chris Bohjalian poses before a statue in Yerevan, Armenia,
of William Saroyan, another Armenian-American writer.

Not only that, but Armenian-Americans are on the defensive elsewhere.  They only just barely managed to scotch Azeri-initiated bills this spring in Mississippi and Tennessee on recognizing Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity—i.e., declaring the N.K.R. illegitimate.  Hawaii, South Dakota, and Wyoming also rejected pro-Azerbaijani bills in February.  Similar Azeri lobbyists to those that swayed Vermont were involved in those states’ efforts as well.

Armenians with their national flag

Why did Azeris manage to keep Vermont in their column—or at least out of Armenia’s—after trying and failing to do so in those other five states?  The answer may have something to do with Crimea.  Armenia was one of only eleven countries which (as discussed recently in this blog) sided with Russia and against Ukraine in a recent United Nations General Assembly vote condemning Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.  Others in that small club included some of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, like North Korea, Syria, and Sudan.  It is possible, in fact, as an Armenian politician recently suggested (discussed recently in this blog), that Kremlin arm-twisting brought Armenia into Russia’s new “Eurasian Union” trade bloc with Belarus and Kazakhstan, using the threat of seeing to it that Armenia would lose its grip on the N.K.R. (which many Armenian nationalists hope, and most of the rest of the world fears, could be among the next territories President Vladimir Putin is eyeing for annexation).  We may never know whether the Armenian government was bullied by Putin into backing him at the U.N. or whether it found immoral and hypocritical reasons of its own for doing so.  But Armenia’s international standing has taken a hit.  Pre-Crimea, it was a mere detail of Caucasus geopolitics that Armenia was more aligned with Russia while Georgia and Azerbaijan were more aligned with NATO and the West.  But after Crimea, it matters quite a bit.  Supporting Armenia’s foreign-policy agenda is now, in a not so indirect way, support for Putin’s new cold-war project of aggressively expanding the territories in which Russians—and allied nationalities, like Armenians—are in charge.  “Recognizing” N.K.R. is, for state legislatures today, not just taking an irrelevant position on an obscure struggle.  It’s actually siding against U.S. interests.

The Armenian lobby in the U.S. should have just stuck with the genocide question.  Their moral stance on that issue is unassailable.  Instead, they opted for mimicking the fundraising model of Jewish-American groups raising money for Israel in the early days of Israeli settlement.  In fact, the N.K.R. was largely built with money from Armenian-American donors.  But Armenia has now squandered the moral authority it enjoyed as a nation victimized by genocide.  Armenian-Americans had better climb down from their support for the N.K.R. now.  Because if Nagorno-Karabakh does become the next Crimea-type battleground in Putin’s Russo-fascist expansionist schemes, it could get very uncomfortable for them in the U.S.

You won’t see this picture on the Armenian National Committee of America
website: Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad with Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan

Oh, and one other thing.  The chair of the Vermont senate’s Government Operations Committee, Sen. Jeanette White, told a reporter while discussing the setting aside of the N.K.R. question, “I believe that countries should be able to determine their own destiny.  However it isn’t Vermont seceding from the U.S., which we have threatened to do.  It’s complicated.”  She is reminding us that Vermont has its own independence movement, a left-wing, environmentally-oriented movement called the Second Vermont Republic (S.V.R.).  (Vermont was an independent nation before joining the U.S. in 1791.)  So if Vermont ever does become an independent state, it can just forget about getting any diplomatic recognition from Armenia.  In the South Caucasus, people have long memories.  They never forget a slight.

Flag of the Second Vermont Republic

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Let a Thousand Secession Petitions Bloom: The U.S. Balkanized, but Perhaps Only on the White House Website, Nowhere Else—but Most Importantly: What Does All This Have to Do with Topless Car Washes and the State of Jefferson?

Since the day after Barack Obama’s re-election on November 6th as president of the United States, “Let’s secede from the Union!” has become conservative Republicans’ equivalent to liberal Democrats’ refrain after George W. Bush prevailed (“won” is too strong a word) in the 2000 and 2004 elections: “I’m moving to Canada!”  In both cases it’s mostly bluster and the venting of steam—or is it?  As discussed in detail in a blog article here three days ago, the Obama administration provides a “We the People” feature on its WhiteHouse.gov website, where any individual can start a petition, and the administration commits itself to giving at least some sort of a reply to any which garners 25,000 signatures in the space of a month.  This has inspired a proliferation of petitions for individual states to secede from the Union.  Louisiana and Texas (Texas has more separatist sentiment than any other state—though Louisiana was a surprise here) led off within the first 24 hours.  The Southern states were early adopters of the idea and have made the strongest showing.  Three days ago, only four states, and arguably the most liberal four—Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Vermont—had no petitions, but since then that has ceased to be the case (though their numbers are still laughably low).  Now there are petitions from all 50 states.

Among over a million signatures in all of the secession petitions, seven have reached the 25,000-signature thresholds: Texas, with 113,120 signatures as of the morning of November 17th, Louisiana (36,094), Florida (33,617), Tennessee (30,133), Alabama (29,468), North Carolina (29,446), Georgia (31,135, plus two identical petitions with an additional 19,906 votes)—all Southern states.  Another Deep South state, South Carolina, would be at the threshold if its effort were not divided between two petitions, with 23,321 and 14,762 votes.  This is also true of Missouri (34,244 signatures spread among three petitions) and Oklahoma (26,576 in two petitions).  Four additional states have over 20,000 and seem poised to exceed the 25,000 mark: Arizona (22,313), Arkansas (22,196), Colorado (21,288), and Indiana (20,600).  Others may reach it as well; there’s plenty of time left.  Other strong performers like Pennsylvania, California, Mississippi, and Kentucky may well reach it, as well: there’s plenty of time.

A University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill study produced this map showing the density of secessionist sentiment after an analysis of this week’s online petitions.  Compare to this map of how the election went ...

There have also been counter-petitions: ones to keep the U.S. united, ones to keep individual states in the union (pretty weak showings there), some to strip citizenship from secession petitioners or to say a brisk “sayonara” to secessionist states.  Austin, Texas (with 7,817 signatures), and Atlanta, Georgia (with 1,436), are petitioning to stay in the U.S. if their states secede—which would be tricky, since they are landlocked capitals.  Likewise El Paso, where 1,130 residents wish to stop being part of Texas—though whether they want to stay in the U.S. as a separate state or become an independent nation themselves is not specified.

Even the State of Jefferson—an old idea to cobble together a new state out of rural counties in southern Oregon and northern California—has gotten a boost with 611 votes.  The Jefferson idea has lots of Tea Party fans, but it is not clear if these petitioners want to stay in the union in case California and Oregon secede, or want their own separate country, or are merely hopping on the bandwagon with their own, pre-existing idea for a 51st state.

So how will Obama react to these petitions—since he has already indicated he will respond to those that reach the 25,000 threshold?  Probably by invoking the fact that there are theoretically procedures in place for states to pursue secession.  It is only folklore that Texas has a special constitutional provision allowing it to secede at any point.  Though legally untested, probably departures from the union, like admissions to it, will need to be ratified by Congress.  The State of Alaska, famously, once brought its Alaska Independence Party to court and prevailed, exempting it from any obligation to hold a plebiscite.  But this could change—and each state would have to pursue its own course.  Theoretically, of course.  These numbers may be reaching surprisingly high numbers, but they are still low as popular movements go.

Here, by the way, are some other reactions to the secession-petition wave ...

Rick Perry “Shares Frustrations” but Won’t Back a Split; Ron Paul Warm to Idea.  The office of the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who took flak during his run for the Republican nomination for the presidency for favorable comments on Texan independence, tamped down talk of secession this week, with a spokeswoman saying, “Gov. Perry believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it.  But he also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government.”  The governor’s office was responding to the nearly 100,000 signatures on the online petition—started by Micah Hurd, a U.S. Marines veteran University of Texas–Arlington freshman.  Meanwhile, Cary Wise, membership director for the Texas Nationalist Movement (T.N.M.), reported a surge in interest in his group, adding, “We’re not gonna start a revolution; we’re not gonna go shoot anybody.  We’re gonna politically and peacefully, through the pressure of the sovereign people of the State of Texas, we will change this.  People ask if Texas independence will really happen.  Folks, it is inevitable.”  The president of the T.N.M., Daniel Miller, said that this month’s presidential elections proves that “ a majority of the people in the United States ... esteem the principles of Karl Marx.”

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Ron Paul, the several-times Libertarian and Republican presidential candidate who represents part of southern Texas for the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, said that Paul “feels the same now” as he did when he recorded a controversial 2009 video on YouTube in which he said it was “very American to talk about secession.”  The right-wing talk-show host Alex Jones proposes a secession-oriented “second American revolution” led by Paul.  And Bob Smiley (his real name), a former research assistant for the gratingly effete crypto-fascist William F. Buckley, Jr., and author of a new comic novel about a separatist Texan governor titled Don’t Mess with Travis, is reiterating this week that Texas would be quite viable as a separate nation.

“Didn’t We Try That Once Before?” Dixie Governors React to Secession Petitions.  The Republican governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, called the petitions “silly,” adding, “We are proud to be part of the greatest country in the history of the world.  Whatever our political differences, we are American first.”  Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Haslam, said on November 13th, “I don’t think that’s a valid option for Tennessee.  I don’t think we’ll be seceding.”  The governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, another Republican, said of the petitions, “Didn’t we try that once before?  I love this country.  I’m going to fight for this country.  I’m going to do everything I can for this country, and this country is going to be great.”  However, she did not specify which country she meant: the U.S., the Confederacy, or South Carolina.

South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley

The same day, a spokeswoman for Robert Bentley, Alabama’s Republican governor, poured cold water on attempts to stoke separatism in that state, saying, “Governor Bentley believes in one nation under God.  While there is frustration with the federal government, Governor Bentley believes that states can be great laboratories of change.”  Alabama’s secession petition was started by Derrick Belcher, a 45-year-old truck driver who calls himself “an absolute Libertarian.”  Belcher said, “If you look at a map of the red states, we have all of the oil and we produce all of the food.  We’re the ones that are carrying the rest of the nation.”  Belcher is the former owner of a topless car wash in Mobile which was shut down by the authorities in 2001 on obscenity charges.  Of those events, he says, “The government ripped my business away, and now they’re choking America to death with rules and regulations.”

The former career path of Alabama’s separatist revolutionary Derrick Belcher.

Meanwhile, in a quiet northwestern corner of the nation, secession plans that were already underway are proceeding apace ...

New Hampshire Separatist Foundation Established, with Libertarian Links.  Five citizens of New Hampshire have registered a new non-profit organization called the Foundation for New Hampshire Independence.  Neal Conner, a technology consultant originally from Florida who lives in Manchester, N.H., and who is treasurer of the Foundation, told media, “This nation has grown too large to be represented by a few people, a few bureaucrats, in Washington.”  Conner is affiliated with the Free State Project, a libertarian initiative to encourage libertarian-minded individuals to move to low-population U.S. states so as to create the conditions for greater autonomy and libertarian-style government.

Watch this space for more updates.  If the United States breaks up like Yugoslavia, we’ll be the first to know.

One liberal’s vision for the future

[You can read more about these and other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

The Tea Party Discovers Secessionism

When George W. Bush stole the election from Al Gore in 2000, and then again when Bush was, unbelievably, reelected in 2004, liberals and progressives in the United States talked a lot about moving to Canada, though very few did.  Mostly this was just a rhetorical way of venting steam.  It had a logic to it, though: Canada is a country where no one becomes homeless because of unpaid medical bills, where no one dies of a treatable disease because of an inability to get health insurance, where the government acknowledges the existence of anthropogenic global warming, where gays and lesbians are allowed to marry (this was not fully true until 2005, of course), where politicians who believe the story of Noah’s Ark is literally true are laughed out of office, and where, more to the point, the government did not operate a gulag of extrajudicial prison camps and torture chambers and where trillions of dollars and thousands of young lives were not being dumped contemptuously down the black hole of a war against an invented enemy in Iraq.

But when Barack Obama was reelected last week and conservative and right-wing Americans were equally baffled and outraged, Canada was not really an option for them.  Canada was, after all, more or less what America would look like if the folks who voted for Obama had their way completely.  No; if right-wing Republicans wanted to move to a country where religion played a central role in formulating laws and where traditional family values were upheld and where gays and lesbians were treated as second-class citizens and enemies of the state were thrown into torture chambers without due process, they would have to move to ... um ... Saudi Arabia or, um, Iran or Syria or the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.  And that would run counter to one of the core values of the Republican Party’s right wing, which is Islamophobic bigotry.  What a quandary for the poor fellas!

But the right-wing extremists who had buffeted Bush into power and who organized against the advent of a black president with the Tea Party movement shortly after Obama’s election have finally hit on another solution.  If they can’t leave the U.S. as individuals, they can take whole chunks of the U.S. with them as they leave.  Yes, the Tea Party has discovered secessionism.

Starting the day after the election on November 6th, the White House’s website began to receive petitions from state residents wanting to secede from the United States.  According to the rules for the website’s “We the People” online petition program, any petition gathering 25,000 signatures in the space of a month will “require a response” from the Obama administration.

The petition page from Whitehouse.gov

So far, 46 states have also been represented in secession petitions on the website, starting with Louisiana and Texas within 24 hours of Obama’s win.

The former Confederate States of America were among the first to launch petitions, and some of these have the highest numbers (these numbers are as of the morning of November 14th and will be higher by the time you read this): Georgia with 43,306 (though split among three separate petitions, one of them calling the state “georgia” and only one reaching the 25,000 mark), South Carolina with 33,008 (split between two petitions), Louisiana (32,927), Florida (28,706), Alabama (26,365), Tennessee (26,268), North Carolina (25,639), Arkansas (25,190, but split between two petitions, neither reaching 25,000), and Mississippi (15,343).  (Virginia, which has over the past decade become an Obama-supporting swing state, has gotten 9,714 secession signatures, split between three petitions.)

The proud rebel flag

Texas, of course, which has a vigorous (if usually only rhetorical and symbolic) separatist movement (discussed in a recent article in this blog), has the highest number of signatures: 95,838.  Other states with high numbers of signatures include the hard-core red states Missouri (29,166, split between two petitions), Oklahoma (22,660; two petitions), Arizona (17,783), Indiana (17,088), Kentucky (15,611), Montana (11,487), and North Dakota (10,075).  Some swing states have also gathered lots of signatures, notably Colorado (18,108), Pennsylvania (17,078), and Ohio (15,368—split between two petitions, one of which calls it the Republic of Ohio).  New Hampshire, a red state with one of the country’s few fully active, though small, separatist parties (the individual-sovereigntist, Tea Party–affiliated New Hampshire Liberty Party, discussed earlier in this blog), has garnered only 3,475.

The only states not represented in the petitions are Hawaii, Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts—four of the most Democratic-dominated states.  In fact, these may be the four bluest states on the list.  (Ironically, Vermont has its own left-wing separatist movement (see a recent blog post on this) and Hawaii has decidedly-not-politically-conservative indigenous separatists, but they are not participating in the petition process.  Hawaii is, of course, Obama’s home state.)  But there are some true-blue states that are petitioning for secession this week: Delaware with 12,782 signatures (two petitions), New Jersey with 12,000, and Maine with 1,430.  This makes little sense.  If Delawarean Republicans, for example, feel they have little voice in national politics, they would have even less if Delaware were independent.  New York’s 19,659 signatures seem like a lot until you realize that one of the two New York secession petitions originated in North Dakota.

Flag of the “Second Vermont Republic” movement

Nor are there petitions to secede from the District of Columbia (the most Democratic jurisdiction in the U.S.), the Northern Marianas, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or, of course, Puerto Rico—which in fact just voted on November 6th in favor of full statehood (as discussed in a recent article in this blog).  If all the folks with the petitions, of course, get their way, then Puerto Rico can join Hawaii, Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts in designing a five-starred U.S. flag.

There are also petitions in reaction to the secession petitions: 3,187 have signed a petitioned to allow the secessionist states to secede, while only 1,029 signed a petition to “keep the United States united”—confirming the “don’t let the screen door hit your ass on the way out” attitude that many blue-staters have towards Southern and other Bible Belt separatists.  A petition with 1,504 signatures asks that states pay their share of the national debt before being allowed to secede.  A paltry 224 North Carolinians signed a petition to stay in the U.S.  But 14,170 Americans signed to urge that signers of secession petitions be deported, and 8,410 signed another urging that such signators be stripped of their citizenship and “exiled.”

And in Texas, 3,802 citizens signed a petition asking that Austin, an ultraliberal university town, be allowed to stay in the U.S. if Texas secedes.  This would be tricky, since Austin is landlocked and the state capital.

So far, only eight states have reached the 25,000 mark: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.  Minus the comparatively unpopulous Mississippi—which may well reach 25,000 before the month is out—and the newly branded swing state of Virginia (see above), this is essentially the heartland of the old slave-holding South.  Of course, that’s just a complete coincidence.

[You can read more about state secession in the U.S. and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

[Thanks to Amy P. and Mike B. for, independently of each other, bringing to my attention the image used at the top of this article.]