by Edward Ring
California’s latest secession push is a delusional stunt driven by contradictions, but Trump’s growing support proves that voters may be waking up to reality.
Californians disgruntled with President Trump are promoting a ballot initiative to allow the state to secede from the United States. The initiative is being promoted by Marcus Ruiz Evans, a Fresno resident who describes himself as an activist, debate moderator, and author. After the initiative was cleared for circulation by the California Secretary of State, in a local television interview, Ruiz Evans claimed that 2016 polling found 32 percent of Californians supported full secession.
It’s worth wondering whether Evans, the politicians and journalists who will inevitably capitalize on his project, and the millions of Californians likely to support it have considered what life would be like in an independent California. Would it still be a one-party state? Would it double down on all the progressive policies that dominate policy today? And how would that look?
Imagine California’s politicians without a federal government to moderate the implementation of their cherished beliefs. Imagine a state where oil and natural gas production is halted completely and only all-electric vehicles are built. A state where construction of single-family homes is outlawed, water is rationed, and household appliances are all “connected” and monitored by the public utilities to efficiently “manage” energy consumption. Isn’t that where California is already headed? Imagine all that going into high gear.
California’s policymakers claim these steps are being taken to save the planet. Imagine a California where if you openly question the theories and “settled science” being used to essentially put the entire populace on lockdown, you are not merely ostracized but prosecuted. Why wouldn’t that happen if the fanatics that drive the progressive movement in California didn’t have to respect the U.S. Constitution?
The other cherished belief among the progressives who run California is, of course, the plight of the underrepresented and disadvantaged, a plight attributable to alleged institutional and systemic racism, sexism, etc-ism. The introductory remarks made by a television journalist in the January 28 report on Ruiz Evans’s initiative sum up the mentality among his potential supporters:
“With the current political climate, uncertainty among minorities is at an all-time high.”
To be fair, there are a lot of ways to take this comment, but if politically biased journalists are banking on the national “political climate,” ala Trump, to be universally repellant to the state’s millions of Latino, Black, and Asian residents, they are making a huge mistake. In 2024, Trump’s share of the vote improved nationwide among nonwhites, and California was no exception. According to an analysis published by the ultra-liberal “nonpartisan” website Cal Matters, “Most… of California’s 12 Latino-majority counties gave a larger share of their vote to Trump compared to 2020, and counties with a higher share of Latino population swung further toward Trump.” The reason? As Cal Matters acknowledged, “The bottom line is money.”
So how’s that going to work? When it comes to the solvency of the average household, what California’s resurgent “resistance” hasn’t come to terms with is that the woke, identitarian, racist, resentful ideology of the allegedly disadvantaged, underrepresented, and oppressed minorities is utterly incompatible with the ecological, Gaia-worshiping, climate crisis-obsessed, renewable energy, “smart growth” green movement. They are on a collision course. And yet these two fitfully aligned ideologies constitute the supposed moral foundation of progressive power in California.
In both cases, these ideologies are a disaster. California’s decision to turn the state into a petri dish for green bleeding-edge technologies has made the state unaffordable. Its decision to elevate identity over competence, training K-12 students to consider themselves either oppressors or victims depending on what group identities they can claim, is a psychopathic dead end that destroys the character of anyone who accepts its premises.
What Trump understands, along with most of the rest of the country, is that there is only one practical way to strive for “equity” without destroying equal opportunity, and that is to reward competence, integrity, and achievement, i.e., merit, and nothing else. And the only way to achieve broadly distributed prosperity, which is what California voters, regardless of their group identity, seem to care about the most, is to restore a balance between genuine environmental concerns and economic opportunities.
California today is proof that extreme environmentalist regulations make life impossible for working families. Before stepping into the great unknown of independent nationhood, Californians need to look in the mirror. Trump isn’t the one who threatens their freedom and prosperity. The delusions of progressives and the special interests that profit from those delusions are the forces that keep them down.
As it is, maybe a publicity-seeking major donor will come along and finance this latest iteration of CalExit. Proponents have until July to gather the nearly 600,000 signatures necessary to put the initiative on the state ballot. Even if it passes, however, it would only be an advisory measure. Its only concrete effect would be to create another state-funded commission to study the feasibility of secession.
California’s disgruntled Democrats and Never Trumpers may still be the majority in the state, but that majority is dwindling. In 2016, Trump received 31.6 percent of the vote in California. By 2020, that had improved to 34.3 percent, and in 2024 it was up to 38.3 percent. The “resistance” is shrinking.
Ultimately, California’s political future will not be improved through the anger of its fractious progressive coalition, whether they recognize their discontent as a consequence of their own contradictory and universally destructive policies or allow it to be manipulatively channeled into resentment of Trump. The real question is what positive solutions can be offered to California’s disgruntled voters.
If Trump, for example, successfully cuts through California’s
monstrous thicket of state and local bureaucracy and environmentalist
obstructionism to swiftly bring help and rebuilding to burned-out
neighborhoods in Los Angeles, his supposed toxicity will dissipate into
the wide Pacific, and California will realign with the rest of America.
Edward Ring
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/05/californias-secessionist-delusions-are-back/
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