Ex–Reagan Aide Wants 3 Southern States to Secede as Republic Named for the Gipper and with Not So Many Gays and Mexicans

In my most recent blog post, I discussed proposals by civic leaders in South Miami, Florida, that the Sunshine State divide in two.  But this week Douglas MacKinnon, a former White House aide, has been promoting an upcoming book which has other plans for Florida: joining South Carolina and Georgia in a new independent republic based on traditional values.  This is in response to what MacKinnon sees as a takeover by gays and lesbians and their erosion of the soul of our republic.  Not only that, but the new nation would be called Reagan, named, naturally after Ronald Reagan (shown below).

No, no, that’s the wrong picture.  This is Ron Reagan, Jr.  No, I mean Ron’s dad, the Gipper.

There, that’s better.

MacKinnon, a conservative Republican columnist who served as speechwriter to both Reagan and President George H. W. Bush (Sr.), explained his views in a radio interview this week, with a strong focus on how modern America has accepted homosexuality as part of the norm. “If you happen to make a donation in favor of traditional marriage, you can lose your job,” he said.  “If you happen to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple because it goes against your religious beliefs, you can be driven out of business.”  So, according to MacKinnon’s forthcoming book, The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country . . . Now, some of the more conservative states should secede so that citizens can grow up in a country where they won’t be forced to bake cakes for gay people.

In the interview, MacKinnon explained his thought process: “We look at what states would be viable in terms of doing something like this.  In fact, what states would provide sort of the new landmass for a new republic dedicated to traditional values.  And the consensus was that the three best states in the union would be South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.”  The otherwise obvious choice of the frequently secessionist-minded Texas is not on the list, he said, because “there have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico.”

MacKinnon isn’t the only person promoting a Civil War do-over.  The League of the South and the New Confederacy are two fringe groups advancing the secession of the Southern states.  The League, which is classified as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.) (see a recent article from this blog about its new paramilitary arm), differs slightly from the New Confederacy in which set of states should secede, but their idea is the same: to return to traditional values, including, it is hard not to infer, segregation.  Meanwhile, an organization called Christian Exodus has been trying since the early 2000s to convince enough conservative Christians to move to South Carolina so that it can become an even more conservative-dominated state, reserving the right to secede if necessary to implement God’s law.  A group called Third Palmetto Republic advocates South Carolinian secession for similar reasons, with rhetoric focusing squarely on President Barack Obama.

The League of the South

It is natural to think of the name Reagan when thinking of a revived Southern confederacy.  After the Texan Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through civil-rights legislation in the 1960s, his Republican successor, Richard Nixon, exploited the anger of traditionally-Democratic white Southern voters with his “Southern strategy,” appealing to “Negrophobe whites,” in his words.  (As Nixon put it at one point, in a conversation about African-Americans captured on tape in 1971 and unsealed by the National Archives in 1999, “I have the greatest affection for them, but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years.  They aren’t.  You know it, too.  The Mexicans are a different cup of tea.  They have a heritage.  At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life.  They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”)

Candidate Richard Nixon, pictured here just moments before a vigorous hand-scrubbing

Reagan completed that strategy by almost single-handedly turning the entire South into a Republican-dominated region, sweeping away the century-old phenomenon of the “Dixiecrats.”  When Reagan launched his presidential campaign in 1980, he did so with a speech on “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an obscure hamlet whose only significance was that it was the site of a grisly Ku Klux Klan triple murder in the Civil Rights era—crimes authorities in Mississippi (as is their “right,” the argument seems to be) refused to investigate until Johnson sent the meddling Feds in.  And in Southern whistlestops (this was long before YouTube began magnifying tiny local micromessaging soundbites to a global audience) Reagan railed against “strapping young bucks” spending food stamps on “T-bone steaks or booze and cigarettes.”  But MacKinnon insists he himself is no racist.

Reagan in Mississippi in 1980.
(I believe that is Lee Atwater, one of the openly-racist
architects of the “Southern strategy,” to his immediate left.)

Nor is the idea of naming a geographical entity after Reagan new.  The monniker has been proposed for the inland Southern California state some Republicans (as discussed in an article in this blog) want to carve out of the heartland near where Reagan’s original conservative base dwelt when he was governor of California—and also for South Dakota, a state which has long been irked by its obscure place in alphabetical order, as well as in the population-density rankings.  (Renaming itself Reagan, though, will not fix that problem as much as another proposal, to become simply Dakota.)

Another possible “State of Reagan,” including, of course, Orange County

But MacKinnon’s proposal would not be a State of Reagan but a Reagan Republic or Reagan Confederacy.  (A loose federal structure is an idea common to all neo-Confederate movements.)  Another possibility, then, would be Reagania, but that would have the disadvantage of having the word gay in it.

Look for MacKinnon’s book soon.  It can be grouped with Chuck Thompson’s left-wing book Better Off without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession as fringe-of-the-fringe bookends to our divided red-and-blue America.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with 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.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  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 though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

“State of Jefferson” Backers Remain Optimistic, While 6-Way Partition of California Heads for 2016 Ballot

The mixed results in three northern-California county ballot proposals on forming a “State of Jefferson” have not discouraged proponents of the idea—nor have its low chances of success even if majorities could be rallied.  Meanwhile, a more bizarre and ambitious plan to subdivide California into six separate states (discussed recently in this blog) has now gathered enough signatures to be put to voters in a state referendum in 2016.

The “Six Californias” initiative is the brainchild of the Silicon Valley venture-capitalist and sitcom actor Tim Draper, an enthusiastic Bitcoin investor and all-around eccentric cocky billionaire, who wants to divide the Golden State into the separate states of Jefferson, North California, Central California, West California, South California (that idea has its own grassroots movement, as discussed in this blog), and a—knock on wood—libertarian utopia in the State of Silicon Valley.  This week, his allegedly bipartisan group of backers revealed that more than the required 807,615 signatures—out of a promised eventual total of 1.3 million—have been collected and delivered to the state legislature in Sacramento, which enables the partition plan to be put to voters on the 2016 state ballot.

This Draper is a bit of a mad man himself.

In a recent poll, 59% of Californians were against the idea, which means some public-relations work will be necessary between now and then—though that is smaller than the gap an aggressive Québécois sovereignty campaign was able to nearly close in the 1995 referendum on secession from Canada, which it lost by a whisker.

An early map of the proposed entity

The numbers look a little different, though, when you examine the far northern rural reaches of the state along the Oregon border, where in June of this year three counties held referenda on whether to join a future State of Jefferson (reviving a 1941 plan to create an—as it then would have been—49th state straddling the old California–Oregon line).  In last month’s vote, 56% of voters in Tehama County gave the 51st-state idea a thumbs-up, and that advisory (i.e. non-binding) measure result was bolstered on July 15th by Tehama’s board of supervisors voting 5-0 to back the idea in light of public opinion.

In two other northern counties which polled voters on the question in June, Del Norte and Siskiyou, the idea was defeated by “no” votes of 59% and 56%, respectively.  In Siskiyou, at least—which is the heart of the Jefferson movement—the final count probably belies a majority support for the idea: some voters were turned off by a more radical strain of Jeffersonian separatism which wanted to erect a libertarian-anarchist-style “Republic of Jefferson” with its own currency and judicial system.  The head of the Jefferson Republic Committee, Anthony Intiso, promises a new approach after the Siskiyou results, saying voter turnout could be key.  Opposition to the idea was strongest in the county’s southern half—data Intiso plans to use as the republicans regroup. “With better education,” Intiso says, “Measure C would have passed, I believe. Last time, we pulled the entire thing together in just six months. I think we did pretty good for that.”

Anthony Intiso, third from left, father of the “Republic of Jefferson” movement

Even some of the opposing voices in Tehama should give Jefferson proponents reason for hope.  A letter to a Tehama County newspaper by one Diana Thompson, a former county administrator now living in Red Bluff, Tehama’s county seat, warned direly the other day, “The result [of a full-on push for statehood] would not be a State of Jefferson, but a U.S. Government protectorate or territory, something between Samoa and Puerto Rico because Congress will never accept us as a state.  In effect, we will lose all representation and be governed by Congress like Alaska and Hawaii were before statehood, which took decades.  Both the Philippines and Puerto Rico have [sic] been waiting almost a century to become states, and as we all know, Congress takes forever, if it even does anything.”  In addition to apparently thinking the U.S. still owns the Philippines (it became independent in 1946) and that U.S. territories don’t have their own legislatures, Thompson, bless her heart, also seems to think that it would be constitutionally possible, through some occult legal process, for Tehama County to sever itself irreparably from California—but not the United States—without gaining any kind of new status.  (And just think: this is a sample from the minority of Tehama County residents who even read newspapers to begin with!)  If I were a Jefferson proponent, I would be thinking: this lady is somebody who, if she had the right Tea-Party-distorted factoids lobbed in her general direction, could be brought around to believing just about anything.  (You know, like Bernice Cressey, who wrote to the same local paper, the Red Bluff Daily News, to warn that “those who oppose the State of Jefferson are either stupid or just plain liars.  Liberals will do anything to get their agenda passed.  Look at the I.R.S., N.S.A., V.A. scandals, too many to mention.  We’re already dealing with Agenda 21, with Common Core brainwashing our kids.”  Etc.)  (You know, she’s beginning to make sense.  Come to think of it ... say, I’m not sure I trust the pointy-headed intellectuals who run that newspaper in the first place.  After all, doesn’t “red bluff” mean ... Communist lie?!)

One proposed shape of a State of Jefferson, with counties
that have held referenda or passed resolutions on the matter highlighted in red.

But Thompson is right about one thing: any candidate for statehood must be approved by the U.S. Congress, and something like the State of Jefferson, which would be solidly Republican, would never gain the necessary votes unless a solidly Democratic 52nd state—with two Democratic senators to balance out the two new Republican Jeffersonian senators in the nearly perfectly divided upper chamber—were admitted simultaneously.  And why would Congress bother?  Both parties are busy enough trying to shore up and maintain their precarious 50%-ish share of national power without introducing crazy new variables like new states.

The original movement began in 1941.  (As you can see from the dateline,
other political matters were about to crowd out 49th-state movements
just as the Jefferson push gained momentum.)

Multiply that degree of unlikelihood by six and you get something like the level of quixotic, hallucinatory self-delusion necessary to think that California could simply tic the box for six-way partition and then move inexorably toward just such a subdivision.  For one thing, why would Tim Draper’s borders be better than those which county-level referenda might generate (and, in Jefferson, are, after a fashion, generating)?  Can you just imagine the decades of wrangling, at county, state, and congressional levels, over which of the 58 current counties would belong to which of the six states?  Draper—who, in addition to managing astronomical sums of money, played Principal Schmoke on the Nickelodeon series The Naked Brothers Band—insists that all that could be sorted out later.  He is optimistic that leaner, nimbler, more accountable smaller governments can be put in place, with the people bypassing the party “oligopoly” in the legislatures.  How he plans to keep the very body exclusively entrusted with creating new states—Congress—out of the process is unclear.  It would require some kind of revolution—which is much more the State (or Republic) of Jefferson’s style than Silicon Valley’s.  Watch this space.

The tie that unbinds: Tim Draper’s sartorial choice
on the day he announced the petition threshold had been reached.

[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.]

Related: hear the author of this blog discuss the Cascadia independence movement in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia in a recent interview for Seattle’s N.P.R. affiliate station KUOW-FM.  Click here to listen.

Related articles from this blog:

“Yuba Is Latest California County to Join ‘State of Jefferson’ Movement” (April 2014)

“Sutter County Supervisors Mull Secession from California as Part of State of Jefferson” (March 2014)

“Study Finds Silicon Valley’s 6-Way California Split Is Doable” (Feb. 2014)

“Glenn County Becomes 4th California Jurisdiction to Opt to Join ‘State of Jefferson’” (Jan. 2014)

“Northern Californian Voters Torn between ‘State’ or ‘Republic’ of Jefferson” (Jan. 2014)

“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)

“State of Jefferson Idea Won’t Go Away: Activists across Northern California Push for Statehood” (Nov. 2013)

“Silicon Valley Technocrats Plan to Flee U.S. for Libertarian Floating Cities” (Nov. 2013)

“Modoc County Joins Siskiyou in Seeking to Split from California as State of Jefferson” (Sept. 2013)

“Other California & Oregon Counties May Be Jumping on ‘State of Jefferson’ Bandwagon” (Sept. 2013)

“Siskiyou County, California, Takes the Plunge, Votes to Secede as Kernel of New ‘State of Jefferson’” (Sept. 2013)

“Colorado’s Secession Wildfire Spreads to Northern California: Siskiyouans Raise “State of Jefferson” Flag” (Aug. 2013)

“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?” (Nov. 2012)

“‘South California’ Statehood Movement Reignites in Election Year” (Sept. 2012)

San Diego County Partition Would Complicate Foundering “South California” Statehood Movement

While several plans to secede from, or subdivide, the State of California gather steam—including the State of Jefferson and a new “Six Californias” proposal—one languishing statehood movement in southern California faces a new challenge to its already-gerrymandered map: the possibility of San Diego County splitting in two.

Though it is still a new idea, some residents in the arid, less populous east of California’s southernmost county, think they would be better off on their own.

The current flag of San Diego County

A Valentine ’s Day “reader’s editorial” in East County magazine (which seems to think “editorial” means any opinion piece), by one (possibly pseudonymous?) Libby Belle, lists the ways in which eastern communities like Julian, Ramona, Alpine, Jamul, and Jacumba Hot Springs are slighted by San Diego’s eponymous county seat: fire safety, public safety, rural poverty, access to public services, and the county government’s imposition of wind energy programs on east-county residents, at the expense of solar energy.  The new entity would be called Chaparral County, inspired by a series of stories in that same publication which called east county residents’ revolt against takeovers of local fire departments “the Chaparral Rebellion.”

And local media quoted one resident as saying, “For instance, like the sheriffs would respond faster.  Then [San Diego Gas & Electric] wants to put their Powerlink in further … Drained our lake … They want to put the sexual perverts out here, too … I feel like San Diego does not care.”

San Diego County has subdivided before.  It used to stretch all along California’s border with Mexico and to the Arizona state line until Imperial County was created out of its eastern half in 1907.  That was the last time a new county was created in the state.

A county partition would have repercussions beyond the current county borders.  For one thing, it throws a wrench into the works of one Jeff Stone, the county supervisor in Riverside County, to the north, who would (as reported earlier in this blog) like a swathe of 13 Republican-dominated counties in the south and east of the state to split away as the State of South California.

Stone’s “Rebellion 2012” plan, as it was originally known, would form South California out of the existing counties of Fresno, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Mariposa, Madera, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Tulare (see map above).  The choice of counties makes a certain amount of sense.  Orange County, one of the most consistently Republican-voting counties in the United States, was at the heart of Ronald Reagan’s rise to the governorship in the 1960s and is the birthplace of Richard Nixon and site of John Wayne International Airport.  But the Stone plan eschews the traditionally liberal Los Angeles County and the southern coastal areas in favor of a state boundary that snakes upward through Death Valley, almost all the way to Lake Tahoe, taking in many rural and desert counties that are overwhelmingly Republican.

The one thing that makes Stone’s map look odd is San Diego County.  Though San Diego voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 (but only by a Florida-like, wafer-thin margin) and John Kerry in 2004, and tends to send Republicans to Washington, it went for Barack Obama by comfortable margins in both 2008 and 2012.  Like many border areas, it is rapidly Hispanicizing, and most observers feel sure it is headed toward becoming a solidly “blue” (Democratic) county.  Surely, that is one component of the secession drive in the county’s more rural and conservative east, but it also makes San Diego County one that Stone would have a hard time convincing to join his new state.  As I pointed out in my analysis of the South California movement a couple years ago, the proposed state would need to include deep-red Orange County and exclude left-wing L.A., and San Diego and Imperial need to be included so as not to leave the remaining part of California split into two noncontiguous chunks.  (Not that that sort of thing hasn’t been done before—see Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or Virginia’s Northampton and Accomack counties or Point Roberts, Washington—but why push it?)  San Diego also brings South California a decent amount of coastline, rather than settling for only Orange County’s smaller coastline, which contains mostly public beaches anyway, instead of San Diego’s world-class global shipping facilities.  And San Diego would make a much more respectable capital for the new state than a backwater like Riverside or Bakersfield, or even Irvine.  But the idea of San Diego County residents consenting to leave California and becoming the most Democratic part of a solidly-Republican state is quite far-fetched.

A not-serious suggestion for a “South California” flag

A successful drive to create Chaparral County would have the effect of making what was left of San Diego County even more Democratic-leaning than it was before.  Chaparral would be a reliably Republican part of South California, but it would put San Diego—and Jeff Stone’s dream of a state that is a bit more than a high-desert gerrymander—permanently out of reach.

Barack Obama (blue) and Mitt Romney (red) voters by county
in the 2012 election in California

But there is another problem, too.  As southern California becomes more Latino with each census, it is not just San Diego County that has become more “blue” in the Obama era.  In 2012, Obama took comfortable leads in other “South California” counties, including Mono, Fresno, San Bernardino, Imperial, and—bad news for Stone, though the margin was narrow—Riverside County itself (see map above).  Gosh, perhaps even “Chaparral County” could be blue!  How much of this is the “Obama effect”—Latinos identifying with and rallying around a candidate of color—or whether the leftward drift of Hispanics in the last two elections is a trend in and of itself, is the $64,000 question among party strategists.  It’s also one that Stone and his “South California” rebels would do well to pay more attention to.

Latino culture thrives in San Diego—and not just under the freeways.

This may not be an issue quite yet.  Of late, South California has taken a back seat to the resurgence of secessionism in the far-north State of Jefferson region and in Silicon Valley, but California has rarely been as fissiparous as it is now.  Stone better dust off his map, and come up with something more viable.

Hollywood votes blue, but the real housewives of Orange County vote red.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a 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.  Look for it some time in mid 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Related articles from this blog:

“Study Finds Silicon Valley’s 6-Way California Split Is Doable” (Feb. 2014)

“Glenn County Becomes 4th California Jurisdiction to Opt to Join ‘State of Jefferson’” (Jan. 2014)

“Northern Californian Voters Torn between ‘State’ or ‘Republic’ of Jefferson” (Jan. 2014)

“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)

“State of Jefferson Idea Won’t Go Away: Activists across Northern California Push for Statehood” (Nov. 2013)

“Silicon Valley Technocrats Plan to Flee U.S. for Libertarian Floating Cities” (Nov. 2013)

“Modoc County Joins Siskiyou in Seeking to Split from California as State of Jefferson” (Sept. 2013)

“Other California & Oregon Counties May Be Jumping on ‘State of Jefferson’ Bandwagon” (Sept. 2013)

“Siskiyou County, California, Takes the Plunge, Votes to Secede as Kernel of New ‘State of Jefferson’” (Sept. 2013)

“Colorado’s Secession Wildfire Spreads to Northern California: Siskiyouans Raise “State of Jefferson” Flag” (Aug. 2013)

“‘South California’ Statehood Movement Reignites in Election Year” (Sept. 2012)

Study Finds Silicon Valley’s 6-Way California Split Is Doable

In December, when the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Draper suggested splitting California into six separate states, it seemed like a pie-in-the-sky side show to the more serious movement gaining steam in the state’s far north, to create a separate State of Jefferson.  But Draper’s “Six Californias” idea has just got a sort of thumbs-up—from Sacramento, no less.  A 16-page report drafted for the California legislature concludes that splitting the Golden State into pieces is “clearly legal and doable.”

This would probably not be the flag of the State of Silicon Valley,
but it’s a nice try.

Draper may be best known to the general public as Principal Schmoke on the teen situation comedy The Naked Brothers Band, but in tech circles he is heir to a high-profile venture-capital dynasty.  Silicon Valley’s discontent with California’s corporate regulations and its redistribution of tax revenue from the wealthiest areas to the poorer, more remote ones has been discussed in this blog recently—notably with the San Francisco genetics entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan planning the Valley’s “ultimate exit” from the state by some means or other, as well as organizations like the Seasteading Institute which want to set up floating free-market cities off the California coast outside United States jurisdiction.  But Draper’s solution is more old-fashioned, following a state-secession trend going back to Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, who sliced a new state, Vermont, out of New York’s western flank in the colonial period.

Creating new states through secession has occasionally worked in the past.

Draper’s “Six Californias” plan includes a State of Silicon Valley, which would include the San Francisco Bay area and points south; a State of North California running in a thick band from Napa Valley to Lake Tahoe; a State of Jefferson composed of the state’s 14 northernmost counties; a primarily agricultural State of Central California centered on Fresno; a State of West California, stretching from San Luis Obispo to Long Beach, including liberal Los Angeles; and a State of South California composed of some of the inland, conservative, desert states that a Riverside County politician (as reported in this blog) is already trying to form, with a coastal toehold at San Diego and the Republican Party stronghold of Orange County.

A sketch by Draper shows which counties would be in which of six new states:
Jefferson (top), North California (just below it), Silicon Valley, Central California (the largest),
West California (including L.A.), and, at the bottom, South California.

The current state of California, the most populous in the U.S. and the most diverse in terms of ethnicity, landscape, and local economy, is, according to Draper, “ungovernable.”  There is already a movement to gather the necessary 1 million signatures which will put the proposal on the ballot in November.  The report, which was prepared by a legislative expert, Mac Taylor, and a financial specialist, Michael Cohen, notes that the states of Silicon Valley and North California would each have a higher per capita income than California’s current $46,477.  In fact, Silicon Valley would surpass Connecticut and become the state with the highest average income.

Tim Draper—guru of the state-partition movement

Draper says the highest interest in the “Six Californias” proposal is in the areas that would be Central California and the State of Jefferson.  The problem is that which counties want to be in Jefferson (listed in this blog as one of “10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014”) is being sorted out right now at the grass-roots level, without waiting for a top-down partition by any city-slicker millionaire technocrat.  To date, the boards of supervisors in Siskiyou and Modoc counties have voted in favor of secession, and Siskiyou and Tehama will put the question before voters in June.  Other counties are considering it, and in Siskiyou there is even going to be an alternate ballot initiative to create a sort of sovereign “Republic of Jefferson” within Siskiyou County’s territory.

But ultimately, the problem is that Draper is approaching the alleged problem of California’s ungovernability like a businessman, not a politician, and it will be politics that will decide, all on its own, whether to partition the state.  Just for the sake of argument, even if the U.S. Congress did agree to a subdivision of California that, let’s say, maintained the same balance between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, that still doesn’t tell us why California Democrats, who already control the largest state in the U.S., would settle for a smaller place to run.

Related articles from this blog:
“Glenn County Becomes 4th California Jurisdiction to Opt to Join ‘State of Jefferson’” (Jan. 2014)
“Northern Californian Voters Torn between ‘State’ or ‘Republic’ of Jefferson” (Jan. 2014)
“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)
“State of Jefferson Idea Won’t Go Away: Activists across Northern California Push for Statehood” (Nov. 2013)
“Silicon Valley Technocrats Plan to Flee U.S. for Libertarian Floating Cities” (Nov. 2013)
“Modoc County Joins Siskiyou in Seeking to Split from California as State of Jefferson” (Sept. 2013)
“Other California & Oregon Counties May Be Jumping on ‘State of Jefferson’ Bandwagon” (Sept. 2013)
“Siskiyou County, California, Takes the Plunge, Votes to Secede as Kernel of New ‘State of Jefferson’” (Sept. 2013)
“Colorado’s Secession Wildfire Spreads to Northern California: Siskiyouans Raise “State of Jefferson” Flag” (Aug. 2013)
“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?” (Nov. 2012)
“‘South California’ Statehood Movement Reignites in Election Year” (Sept. 2012)

[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 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.]