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.]

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.]

Lakota Nation Launches “MazaCoin” Digital Currency to Decolonize Reservation Economy

The Lakota Nation, an indigenous group in the northern Plains of the United States, is poised to become the first American Indian group in the modern era to introduce its own currency.  But it will not be a paper or metal currency; instead, “MazaCoin,” as it will be called, is a virtual electronic currency, like Bitcoin, regulated not by a central bank but by its users.  (See the MazaCoin website here.)

Payu Harris, at the New York Stock Exchange to launch MazaCoin earlier this year

MazaCoin was developed in February by Payu Harris, a “web designer and digital currency trader” who is of both Lakota and Northern Cheyenne ancestry.  Proponents envision that MazaCoin could become the main, or even sole, currency in Lakota communities, as part of taking sovereign control over their economy back from the U.S. government.

There are about 100,000 Lakota (a.k.a. Sioux) in the U.S., about half of whom live on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and other reservations, mostly in North and South Dakota.  MazaCoin, however, is not being implemented by the official administering bodies of these reservations, which are regulated under the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.), but by the “Traditional Lakota Nation,” a sovereigntist group of the Oglala “band” or subgroup of the Lakota, who are based mostly on Pine Ridge, in South Dakota. 

Harris has said, “We’re on sovereign soil so we have the right to have Bitcoin, Litecoin, MazaCoin.”  But while Chase Iron Eyes, a legal counsel for the Lakota, agrees in principle, tempers that perspective with some pessimism.  “There hasn’t been a tribal nation that has declared its own currency and has mandated that that currency is used within its borders,” he says.  “But it’s because of this pervasive, ever-present asserted dominion of the United States.  They’ll try to shut us down, try to cite us with law violations.”  However, Iron Eyes is ready for the battle, adding, “We’ve gone through 100 years of imposed poverty.  That’s the fight we’re having.  What we’re trying to do with MazaCoin is just spark something to get us out of this cycle of victimhood.”  The Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations are among the most poverty-battered communities in the U.S., with sky-high rates of unemployment, substance abuse, and suicide.

The Lakota flag

A more quotidian challenge is developing a paper medium for the digital currency, in a community where few have computers, cell phones, or other devices that currencies like Bitcoin rely on.

At the moment, the status of MazaCoin is unclear.  Digital currencies are still mostly uncharted legal territory.  But it seems sure to prove controversial.  Nor is MazaCoin by any means the first foray into innovative approaches to sovereignty by the Oglala.  In the late 19th century, in response to the federal government’s unilateral slashing back of Lakota territories promised by treaty, followed by a deliberate economic blockade that threatened the community with starvation, Oglala and other Lakota adapted a Paiute religious ritual from Nevada called the Ghost Dance that purported to have the power to resurrect deceased warriors, render Lakota people bulletproof, and cleanse their land of the white invaders.  This prompted the U.S. military’s massacre of 300 unarmed Lakota, including women and children, in the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.  In the early 1970s, during the height of the “Red Power” movement, an uprising on Pine Ridge against a corrupt reservation leadership in league with the feds spawned a protest encampment at the site of Wounded Knee that declared an Independent Oglala Nation.  In response, President Richard M. Nixon dispatched military snipers, tanks, and even a warplane to keep order, in the first deployment of U.S. troops against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory since the Civil War.  Three people were killed before the standoff ended.

In 1973 on Pine Ridge, shit got real.

Lakota people have continually refused to accept cash compensation for their lost lands, which include the sacred Black Hills.  There have been several declarations of independence, including a 1974 “Declaration of Continuing Independence of the Sovereign Native American Indian Nations,” signed at Standing Rock, and another by the Confederacy of the Black Hills in 1991, which also included Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe communities.  In 2007, the former Libertarian presidential candidate Russell Means and three other Wounded Knee veteran activists declared an independent Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians, which today, after Means’s death, persists as a provisional government for a Republic of Lakotah covering vast, unceded territory.

The federal government has a very low tolerance for anything that seems like a competing currency.  In 2011, a self-described “ex-surfer guy” named Bernard von NotHaus, founder of the Free Marijuana Church of Honolulu, was convicted of counterfeiting for issuing something called the Liberty Dollar out of his self-described Royal Hawaiian Mint Company.  Just for good measure, the feds slathered on some “domestic terrorism” charges.  He currently awaits sentencing.

If this surfer dude’s play money brought charges of terrorism,
who knows how the feds will react to MazaCoin.

But the Lakota are not just a bunch of ex-surfer dudes.  They have never backed down from a fight.  We’ll be hearing more about MazaCoin.

Your tax dollars at work, 1890

[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:
“Florida Con Man Busted in New Guinea Ferrying ‘Funny Money’ to Self-Styled Bougainville ‘King’” (Feb. 2014)
“Shots Fired as French Authorities Arrest Tahitian ‘King’ Issuing His Own Currency” (Feb. 2014)
“EPA Extends Jurisdiction of Wind River Indian Reservation, Swallowing 3 Wyoming Towns” (Jan. 2014)
“Which Part of ‘Wet’suwet’en Territory’ Don’t They Understand?” (Nov. 2012)
“Obituary: Russell Charles Means (1939-2012)” (Oct. 2012)

Obituary: Russell Charles Means (1939-2012)

Russell Means, the Lakota Sioux political activist, separatist leader, actor, author, and even United States presidential aspirant, died October 22nd at his home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, at the age of 72.

Russell Means is on the far left.

Born on Pine Ridge in 1939, he grew up in California and in the late 1960s and early ’70s gained prominence as an early member and leader of the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.), the premier voice of the “Red Power” movement.  He was a central figure, along with Leonard Peltier and Dennis Banks, in actions such as the Trail of Broken Treaties, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.) offices in Washington, D.C., and, in 1973, the months-long occupation of wounded Knee, South Dakota, which riveted the nation and became the most important act of American Indian resistance in the 20th century.  In it, an Independent Oglala Nation was declared and protesters demanded that the U.S. adhere to treaties which, if adhered to, would create a gigantic autonomous region for Sioux people in the northern Plains.  Two people were killed, and President Richard Nixon suppressed the uprising with the military, the only time since the Civil War that the U.S. military has used violence against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory.

Means confounded categories of political left and right.  Though he railed against American imperialism, he also cooperated with Ronald Reagan’s administration in documenting atrocities against Miskito Indians to demonize the Communist dictatorship in Nicaragua, and in 1987 he ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, losing the nomination to Ron Paul, then an unknown.    He saw parallels between the libertarian cause and the Indian one, saying at one point, “So Indian policy has become institutionalized and the result has been that American people have become more dependent on government and that the American people have become more dependent on corporations.”

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

In 1992 he played Chingachgook opposite Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, and he also appeared in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and in numerous other roles in film and television.  His 1995 autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread was a best-seller.  

Means as Chingachgook, third from left

[Also, 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 in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]