"National Divorce" - is it time to split up?

[Occam's Banana]

A QUARTER of all Americans say it's time for the U.S. to split into different nations
https://notthebee.com/article/a-quarter-of-all-americans-say-its-time-for-the-us-to-split-into-different-nations
Joel Abbot (13 January 2021)

According to a new poll (https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/polling/amid-bitter-political-divisions-25-voters-support-splitting-us-two), 25% of Americans say the country needs to be split into two separate nations. [Actually, the poll question only specifies "separate countries", not necessarily "two" of them - although "two" might be inferred from the wording. Disunion would probably involve more than two, if only for reasons of geography and demographics. - OB]

This is insane. [No, it isn't. What's insane is wanting to be or remain in political union with people who hate and despise you. - OB]

It's also not surprising.

Here was the question that the poll (from Just The News and Scott Rasmussen) posed:


"Some have suggested that the Red and Blue States (Republican-leaning states and Democratic-leaning states) should split into separate countries," said the poll. "Would you favor or oppose splitting the Red and Blue States into separate countries?"

Of those who supported this national divorce, 11% were strongly in favor. While 52% were strongly opposed (with another 10% slightly opposed), having 1-in-10 people thinking the Union isn't worth saving is a big deal.

Here's some other interesting demographic data [PDF] (https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/rbct.pdf):

Men were more likely to support separation (16%) compared to women (7%).
Given the media's narrative on MAGA boomers and their whiteness, you'd expect that older white guys would be the first in line for this civil divide. The reverse is actually true. Those over 55 were less likely to support national separation compared to younger whippersnappers.
White individuals were less likely to support separation (23%) compared to blacks (28%), Hispanics (34%), and other ethnic minorities (27%)
Interestingly enough, there wasn't an insane difference between registered Republicans and Democrats – 32% to 22% respectively.

Where it got interesting was in the area of ideology and faith. People who were either "very conservative" or "very liberal" were WAY more likely to favor a split, at 43% and 33% respectively. Only 3% of those who consider themselves to be "somewhat liberal" supported the idea.

When it came to religion, [... FULL ARTICLE AT LINK: https://notthebee.com/article/a-quarter-of-all-americans-say-its-time-for-the-us-to-split-into-different-nations ...]

https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-5fff561b35f7d.jpg

[PAF]

The Empire, directly responsible for the NWO, has nation-built all around the globe. There is no stopping it. What makes them think a few states will be allowed to "split up"?

[Occam's Banana]

The Empire, directly responsible for the NWO, has nation-built all around the globe. There is no stopping it. What makes them think a few states will be allowed to "split up"?

Oh.

Well.

Never mind, then.

[PAF]

Oh.

Well.

Never mind, then.

You may as well spill it, now that you have my curiosity piqued - it won't be long before AI prevents any such thoughts!

[wizardwatson]

The Empire, directly responsible for the NWO, has nation-built all around the globe. There is no stopping it. What makes them think a few states will be allowed to "split up"?

Whatever, dude.

I seceded like 50 times last week. Lots of others have been seceding too.

Stop watching the lame-stream media and start getting out there and seceding.

[PAF]

Whatever, dude.

I seceded like 50 times last week. Lots of others have been seceding too.

Stop watching the lame-stream media and start getting out there and seceding.


LOL read my signature, the one in bold ;-)

[osan]

https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-5fff561b35f7d.jpg

Should read "of Cuomo the huomo".

[enhanced_deficit]

That would be too quick a transition from "Make America Great Again" to "Make America Break" ...

Would also reinforce Never-Trumper's narratives like this on top of other implications wrt our standing as no.1 defender of freedoms around the globe:

https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/10102954-16x9-large.jpg?v=2

[A. Havnes]

Welp, according to that map, I'll be Canadian instead of Murican.

[Occam's Banana]

You may as well spill it, now that you have my curiosity piqued - it won't be long before AI prevents any such thoughts!

"It is possible that we will lose. It is impossible that we must lose." -- Michael Malice

[TheTexan]

Only if the capital of 'Murica is in Texas.

[DamianTV]

This is not like the Schisms we have seen in the past.

This is a TECHNOCRACY.

It wont matter what country you live in, or if you live in an area that was formerly a State of the Republic. The State formerly known as Texas, or Rhode Island, or where ever, it does not matter.

Everyone will still use the same Tech. Google. Apple. Microsoft. Those are your REAL OWNERS. So long as the people choose FACEBOOK over FREEDOM, their ignorance will enslave everyone because they empower the SLAVE OWNERS.

This is NEW SLAVERY.

If you want a meaningful separation from ANYTHING, then get rid of Google and Facebook, and pretty much everyone in Congress and the Supreme Court.

[A Son of Liberty]

https://i.imgur.com/7drHiqr.gif



:up::up::handpeace::handpeace:

[oyarde]

If my state or counties chose to leave I would support that .

[Okie RP fan]

I've got to secede my garden this year. Anyone know of some good secede for yards with hot climates and high water tables?


Oh, secede. Only 25%? Looks like we have some ways to go! Let's start having secession parties. I'm not kidding.



This is not like the Schisms we have seen in the past.

This is a TECHNOCRACY.

It wont matter what country you live in, or if you live in an area that was formerly a State of the Republic. The State formerly known as Texas, or Rhode Island, or where ever, it does not matter.

Everyone will still use the same Tech. Google. Apple. Microsoft. Those are your REAL OWNERS. So long as the people choose FACEBOOK over FREEDOM, their ignorance will enslave everyone because they empower the SLAVE OWNERS.

This is NEW SLAVERY.

If you want a meaningful separation from ANYTHING, then get rid of Google and Facebook, and pretty much everyone in Congress and the Supreme Court.

You're not wrong here, and this is perhaps the biggest "gotcha" they have on everyone.
Still, I want secession.

[belian78]

The entire concept of government needs reworking. Local voluntary communities, spread out over the land with no overall State is the only way humanity can govern and still protect individualism. Any other way and eventually humanity finds itself right where we are now. It's happened before, it'll happen again as long as humanity finds reasons to divide itself from each other.

[69360]

Doesn't work. Like minded people are not necessarily in geographic proximity. You would have to Balkanize America, which isn't happening. All talk.

[belian78]

Doesn't work. Like minded people are not necessarily in geographic proximity. You would have to Balkanize America, which isn't happening. All talk.

Dont have to have perfectly aligned minded people, just have to agree that the point is to live as a free being and to allow others to do the same. Unfortunately it seems historically that humanity only remembers this when in the early years after major calamity.

[Pauls' Revere]

May the odds be ever in your favor.

[PAF]

Dont have to have perfectly aligned minded people, just have to agree that the point is to live as a free being and to allow others to do the same. Unfortunately it seems historically that humanity only remembers this when in the early years after major calamity.

This is possible for a good start. As an Agorist, I do it every day ;-)

[A Son of Liberty]

If my state or counties chose to leave I would support that .

If YOU chose to secede, I'd support that.

[Origanalist]

Those numbers are depressing.

[Occam's Banana]

79% of Americans now agree the nation is "falling apart" (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/15/shock-poll-79-americans-now-agree-their-nation-fal/)

[...]

“Fourth-fifths of Americans — both Republicans and Democrats — say America is falling apart,” Axios said in an analysis (https://www.axios.com/poll-america-falling-apart-4a13376f-f962-46e3-8e2c-174d396f25d1.html) of the poll, which was conducted Monday through Wednesday.

“Why it matters: The question, asked Tuesday and Wednesday, reflects the collision of crises besetting the country — the backdrop of a pandemic, recession, decoupling of red/blue America, and racial injustice and the immediacy of the Capitol insurrection, followed by Impeachment II,” the pollster said.

[...]

• 32% of U.S. adults “strongly agree that America is falling apart”; 41% of Republicans, 29% of independents and 29% of Democrats agree.
• 47% overall “somewhat agree” with the statement; 42% of Republicans, 48% of independents and 49% of Democrats agree.
• 16% overall “somewhat disagree” with the statement; 13% of Republicans, 18% of independents and 16% of Democrats agree.
• 4% overall “strongly disagree” with the statement; 3% of Republicans, 3% of independents and 7% of Democrats agree.

Source: An Axios/IPSOS (https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/ipsos/) poll of 1,019 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 11-13.

[flightlesskiwi]

of those 25% only .02% can correctly spell and say the word "secede".

[flightlesskiwi]

79% of Americans now agree the nation is "falling apart" (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/15/shock-poll-79-americans-now-agree-their-nation-fal/)



“Why it matters: The question, asked Tuesday and Wednesday, reflects the collision of crises besetting the country — the backdrop of a pandemic, recession, decoupling of red/blue America, and racial injustice and the immediacy of the Capitol insurrection, followed by Impeachment II,” the pollster said.

.

I'm surprised they didn't use this as the main thesis.

[Anti Globalist]

If my state or counties chose to leave I would support that .
And I will be right beside you if that happens.

[Occam's Banana]

of those 25% only .02% can correctly spell and say the word "secede".

Quite possibly - and it still might be more than from the other 75%.


I'm surprised they didn't use this as the main thesis.

At least they still managed to shoehorn it in there.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1362548334766952448
1362548334766952448

SOURCE: American democracy at the start of the Biden presidency / Bright Line Watch January-February 2021 surveys (http://brightlinewatch.org/american-democracy-at-the-start-of-the-biden-presidency/)

https://i.imgur.com/H6KyBUp.png

https://i.imgur.com/OFIBGCp.png

[Occam's Banana]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDaUrAJJkYU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDaUrAJJkYU

https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/1438886985498775553
1438886985498775553

[Anti Federalist]

Thanks for posting that, I had been meaning to find that clip for days now.

All that remains to be seen is if freedom folks will seize this once in a lifetime chance to make a bold difference, or do what we usually end up doing, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The fact that many of the usual suspects have already chimed in to tut tut and poo pooh the idea, leads me to believe the latter, as usual.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/LPMisesCaucus/status/1443719579822403595
1443719579822403595

[Occam's Banana]

Dissecting David French's Article Against National Divorce
https://odysee.com/@MichaelMalice:6/dissecting-david-french's-article:9
dissecting-david-french%27s-article/9f2b2ddfc888636c42ed8d1eb36c9b7c3d3c9efb

The article:

A Whiff of Civil War in the Air
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/a-whiff-of-civil-war-in-the-air
David French (03 October 2021)

[acptulsa]

https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-5fff561b35f7d.jpg



https://i.imgur.com/OFIBGCp.png

We need to ignore their propaganda maps and concentrate on this map (and Alberta, Canada too).


I've composed a map of the states for which governors or attorneys general have declared opposition to or criticism of the Biden administration's federal vaccine mandate.

https://i.imgur.com/JGeWtJQ.png

Some of the declarations are pretty weak sauce, and it remains to be seen if even the fire-breathing ones are anything more than the bloviations of posturing gas-bags. Of course, the real test will come if the feds win the inevitable court challenges. If that happens, then we'll see who bends the knee, and the wheat (if any) will be separated from the chaff.

Here are the statements or expressions upon which the map is based:

Alabama (Governor): “Once again, President Biden has missed the mark. His outrageous, overreaching mandates will no doubt be challenged in the courts. Placing more burdens on both employers and employees during a pandemic with the rising inflation rates and lingering labor shortages is totally unacceptable. Alabamians have stepped up by rolling up their sleeves to get the covid-19 vaccine, increasing our doses administered significantly in recent weeks. We have done so without mandates from Washington D.C. or Montgomery. I’ve made it abundantly clear: I support the science and encourage folks taking the vaccine. However, I am absolutely against a government mandate on the vaccine, which is why I signed the vaccine passport ban into law here in Alabama. This is not the role of the government. I continue encouraging any Alabamian who can, to get the covid-19 vaccine. We have a safe and effective tool at our fingertips, so, let’s roll up our sleeves and get this thing beat.”

Alaska (Governor): https://twitter.com/GovDunleavy/status/1436138525355753488
1436138525355753488
Arkansas (Governor): “I fully support continued efforts to increase vaccination rates across our nation, but the federal government mandates on private businesses are not the right answer. I have been consistent in the freedom of businesses to require their employees to be vaccinated, and I have opposed the government from saying businesses cannot exercise that freedom. The same principle should protect private sector from government overreach that requires them to vaccinate all employees.”

Arizona (Governor): “This is exactly the kind of big government overreach we have tried so hard to prevent in Arizona — now the Biden-Harris administration is hammering down on private businesses and individual freedoms in an unprecedented and dangerous way. This will never stand up in court. This dictatorial approach is wrong, un-American and will do far more harm than good. How many workers will be displaced? How many kids kept out of classrooms? How many businesses fined? The vaccine is and should be a choice. We must and will push back.”

Florida (Governor): https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1436623044080975874
1436623044080975874
Georgia (Governor): “I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration.”

Idaho (Governor): https://twitter.com/kxly4news/status/1436389067248254977
1436389067248254977
Indiana (Governor): https://twitter.com/DWilliamsTV/status/1436351350389059584
1436351350389059584
Iowa (Governor): “President Biden is taking dangerous and unprecedented steps to insert the federal government even further into our lives while dismissing the ability of Iowans and Americans to make healthcare decisions for themselves. Biden’s plan will only worsen our workforce shortage and further limit our economic recovery. As I’ve said all along, I believe and trust in Iowans to make the best health decisions for themselves and their families. It’s time for President Biden to do the same. Enough.”

Kansas (Attorney General): “No president has the legal authority to decree a national vaccine mandate or to punish private businesses that refuse to discriminate against employees based on their health status. President Biden yesterday scolded ‘this is not about freedom,’ but the rule of law most certainly is. If the president's overreaching rhetoric becomes federal action, then rest assured we will vigorously challenge it." [source: https://ag.ks.gov/media-center/news-releases/2021/09/10/ag-derek-schmidt-statement-on-proposed-federal-vaccine-mandate]

Kentucky (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/kyoag/status/1436412473553399819
1436412475839291394
Mississippi (Governor): “The President has no authority to require that Americans inject themselves because of their employment at a private business. The vaccine itself is life-saving, but this unconstitutional move is terrifying. This is still America, and we still believe in freedom from tyrants.”

Louisiana (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/thecentersquare/status/1437528269667119111
1437528269667119111
Missouri (Governor): “The Biden Administration’s recent announcement seeking to dictate personal freedom and private business decisions is an insult to our American principles of individual liberty and free enterprise. This heavy-handed action by the federal government is unwelcome in our state and has potentially dangerous consequences for working families. Vaccination protects us from serious illness, but the decision to get vaccinated is a private health care decision that should remain as such. My administration will always fight back against federal power grabs and government overreach that threatens to limit our freedoms.”Montana (Governor): “President Biden’s vaccination mandate is unlawful and un-American. We are committed to protecting Montanans’ freedoms and liberties against this gross federal overreach.”

Nebraska (Governor): https://twitter.com/SKMorefield/status/1436153861681647616
1436153861681647616
New Hampshire (Governor): https://twitter.com/KlandriganUL/status/1437509335156932609
1437509335156932609
North Dakota (Governor): https://twitter.com/jeremyjturley/status/1436371151283003396
1436371151283003396
Ohio (Governor): https://twitter.com/KDKA/status/1436449471064387589
1436449471064387589
Oklahoma (Governor): “It is not the government’s role to dictate to private businesses what to do. Once again President Biden is demonstrating his complete disregard for individual freedoms and states’ rights. As long as I am governor, there will be no government vaccine mandates in Oklahoma. My administration will continue to defend Oklahoma values and fight back against the Biden administration’s federal overreach.”

South Carolina (Governor): “The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats. They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad. Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.”

South Dakota (Governor): “My legal team is standing by ready to file our lawsuit the minute @Joe (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/member.php?u=2118)biden files his unconstitutional rule. This gross example of federal intrusion will not stand.”

Tennessee (Governor): https://twitter.com/FOXNashville/status/1436148671490502660
1436148671490502660
Texas (Governor): “Biden’s vaccine mandate is an assault on private businesses. I issued an Executive Order protecting Texans’ right to choose whether they get the COVID vaccine & added it to the special session agenda. Texas is already working to halt this power grab.”

Utah (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/abc4utah/status/1436146611965542403
1436146611965542403
West Virginia (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/MorriseyWV/status/1436144571570872322
1436144571570872322
Wyoming (Governor): https://twitter.com/NorthPlattePost/status/1436414309534355457
1436414309534355457

Sources (if not given above):

Daily Wire: https://www.dailywire.com/news/governors-immediately-push-back-on-unconstitutional-biden-plan-will-fight-them-to-the-gates-of-hell
Not the Bee: https://notthebee.com/article/heres-a-list-of-states-that-are-immediately-suing-biden-for-trying-to-force-companies-to-mandate-the-vaccine

[kahless]

People like to make out parts of the south are some sort of bastion of freedom. I assuming because they vote for Republican, but when you think about it really Republican Neocons and authoritarians. Some of these places the police are pretty prolific and militarized.

I am all for separation but I think people my be disappointed in what may result in these regions. I know some people have completely given up on trying to reach people but if you don't try to reach people you are going to be sorely disappointed come separation day.

[A Son of Liberty]

People like to make out parts of the south are some sort of bastion of freedom. I assuming because they vote for Republican, but when you think about it really Republican Neocons and authoritarians. Some of these places the police are pretty prolific and militarized.

I am all for separation but I think people my be disappointed in what may result in these regions. I know some people have completely given up on trying to reach people but if you don't try to reach people you are going to be sorely disappointed come separation day.

You realize that right now we have all of that fun plus a rising... I don't actually know what to call it... a rising techno-quasi-socialist-authoritarian-fascist-adjacent... regime emergent within the United States, one nation, indivisible, right? (I get that's a brutal sentence to work thru, but do try, it actually makes sense...).

Anyway, the point is, I'll take my chances with local police who want to play operator vs. the entire USG apparatus crawling up our asses, thank you very much.

[kahless]

You realize that right now we have all of that fun plus a rising... I don't actually know what to call it... a rising techno-quasi-socialist-authoritarian-fascist-adjacent... regime emergent within the United States, one nation, indivisible, right? (I get that's a brutal sentence to work thru, but do try, it actually makes sense...).

Anyway, the point is, I'll take my chances with local police who want to play operator vs. the entire USG apparatus crawling up our asses, thank you very much.

They would just have more power to hassle you without having to worry about things like the Feds interfering, the Constitution-Bill of Rights.

I bet if you questioned the people that wanted to separate in those polls, their kind of freedom is nothing like imagined. Like I said, I am all for and prefer separation but without some movement saying what it is going to be like you may end up with more of the same or worse depending where you are.

For those that think they will be allowed to go off on their own and not be hassled, that is not going to happen when you are outnumbered by people that believe otherwise. People are easily led, it does not have to be this way. If the liberty movement was rebuilt like it was during Ron's 2008 campaign and pushed a list of separation values those people can be led away from authoritarianism.

Right now you have an entire generation of young people that love of government and it's authority is all they know.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1446673203556933633
1446673203556933633

[kahless]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1446673203556933633
1446673203556933633

Besides Lowry being an insufferable douchebag.

[A Son of Liberty]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1446673203556933633
1446673203556933633


It would burn down America to save America, or at least those parts of it considered salvageable.

Yes. Precisely.


A disaggregated United States would be instantly less powerful.

Gasp! Oh noez. Our ability to send our young men and women to die in pointless wars will be less likely!? Perish the thought, Rich. Fucking idiot...


The economic consequences could be severe. The United States of America is a continentwide free-trade zone, creating a vast domestic market that makes us all better off. Exchanging that for a market Balkanized by state or region would be a major loss.

Yes, history proves that the only way to have free trade zones is if states are ruled by a central authority. (Do I need to provide the /sarc tag here, or is it obvious enough?)

So far, I'm basically annoyed that the twit has a national platform while I toil away my days earning a fair living.


Finally, the United States foundering on its domestic divisions would be a significant blow to the prestige of liberal democracy.

Well, first... no. If the US balkanized, it would prove that "liberal democracy" actually works, in that "the people" would have spoken, and their will would have been done. Second, you chimpanzee, you do not understand the actual founding of These united States. And neither did Lincoln.


If there were to be sovereign pure-red and blue places, this wouldn’t look like the relatively neat split of the United States into two in the 1860s, but more like post–Peace of Westphalia Europe, with hundreds of different entities.

I'm sorry, what's the problem here? The Treaty of Westphalia resulted in a dynamic Europe, and contrary to popular opinion did not result in the world wars of the 20th century - those were precipitated by the consolidation of power, not the dissolution of it.


Some proponents of national divorce say not to worry — it can all be worked out amicably. But if we are going to split up because we can’t even agree on bathroom policies or pronouns, how are we going to agree to divvy up our territory and resources?

In 99% of the territory, these aren't even questions. Get out and move around the country a little bit, Rich. It would be a problem in NY and CA, but fuck them. I don't care.


On the other hand, Texas isn’t quite as ruby-red as it used to be. It could secede and still find itself governed by the very Democrats it hoped to leave behind.

And this is the difference between state and national politics... and since you only think of FedGov, you don't understand that.


Besides, would the rest of the country really be willing to watch a state of 29 million people that represents the ninth-largest economy in the world go its own way?

Multiple responses to this, so I'll go with molon labe. Option number 2 would be, "huh?"


The real impetus for the talk of a breakup is despair. It constitutes giving up on convincing our fellow Americans, giving up on our common national project, giving up on our birthright.

Our birthright is the Declaration of Independence, as far as political documents go. Nothing else. Not the constitution, not the lower 48. Not the original 13 colonies. Not any of that. It is the right of self-ownership - the right to life, liberty and property, which is self-evident, and provable. I don't give a DAMN if I'm the only one left on the planet who believes that. I'll assert that right to my death.

I can't believe this simpleton has a national platform, and here I am pointlessly fussing on an internet backwater website, preaching to the choir. Sigh.

[acptulsa]

So far, I'm basically annoyed that the twit has a national platform while I toil away my days earning a fair living.

Don't bitch. You still own your soul.

[Occam's Banana]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to A Son of Liberty again.

[Brian4Liberty]

I know secession is popular to some libertarians, but I would point out it is also popular in the long run to globalists like Soros. They do not want any strong nations, just Balkanized regions, that they will rule as part of a single global empire.

[acptulsa]

I know secession is popular to some libertarians, but I would point out it is also popular in the long run to globalists like Soros. They do not want any strong nations, just Balkanized regions, that they will rule as part of a single global empire.

Of course that's what they want. That's why they keep shoving maps like this in our faces:


https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-5fff561b35f7d.jpg



https://i.imgur.com/OFIBGCp.png

Well, guess what? I don't give a flying fuck what they want. What I want is out from under this federal psychogarchy. And if they want to play their games, and their games set us up with a way out (and all we have to do is play their game, but not by their rules) I'm for taking it.

We need to ignore their propaganda maps and concentrate on this map (and Alberta, Canada too). Tell me this nation as defined in blue, and Alberta too, won't be powerful enough to suit you. Tell me that. Does it not have enough nuke missile silos to suit you? Does it not grow a high enough percentage of the world's food?


I've composed a map of the states for which governors or attorneys general have declared opposition to or criticism of the Biden administration's federal vaccine mandate.

https://i.imgur.com/JGeWtJQ.png

Some of the declarations are pretty weak sauce, and it remains to be seen if even the fire-breathing ones are anything more than the bloviations of posturing gas-bags. Of course, the real test will come if the feds win the inevitable court challenges. If that happens, then we'll see who bends the knee, and the wheat (if any) will be separated from the chaff.

Here are the statements or expressions upon which the map is based:

Alabama (Governor): “Once again, President Biden has missed the mark. His outrageous, overreaching mandates will no doubt be challenged in the courts. Placing more burdens on both employers and employees during a pandemic with the rising inflation rates and lingering labor shortages is totally unacceptable. Alabamians have stepped up by rolling up their sleeves to get the covid-19 vaccine, increasing our doses administered significantly in recent weeks. We have done so without mandates from Washington D.C. or Montgomery. I’ve made it abundantly clear: I support the science and encourage folks taking the vaccine. However, I am absolutely against a government mandate on the vaccine, which is why I signed the vaccine passport ban into law here in Alabama. This is not the role of the government. I continue encouraging any Alabamian who can, to get the covid-19 vaccine. We have a safe and effective tool at our fingertips, so, let’s roll up our sleeves and get this thing beat.”

Alaska (Governor): https://twitter.com/GovDunleavy/status/1436138525355753488
1436138525355753488
Arkansas (Governor): “I fully support continued efforts to increase vaccination rates across our nation, but the federal government mandates on private businesses are not the right answer. I have been consistent in the freedom of businesses to require their employees to be vaccinated, and I have opposed the government from saying businesses cannot exercise that freedom. The same principle should protect private sector from government overreach that requires them to vaccinate all employees.”

Arizona (Governor): “This is exactly the kind of big government overreach we have tried so hard to prevent in Arizona — now the Biden-Harris administration is hammering down on private businesses and individual freedoms in an unprecedented and dangerous way. This will never stand up in court. This dictatorial approach is wrong, un-American and will do far more harm than good. How many workers will be displaced? How many kids kept out of classrooms? How many businesses fined? The vaccine is and should be a choice. We must and will push back.”

Florida (Governor): https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1436623044080975874
1436623044080975874
Georgia (Governor): “I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration.”

Idaho (Governor): https://twitter.com/kxly4news/status/1436389067248254977
1436389067248254977
Indiana (Governor): https://twitter.com/DWilliamsTV/status/1436351350389059584
1436351350389059584
Iowa (Governor): “President Biden is taking dangerous and unprecedented steps to insert the federal government even further into our lives while dismissing the ability of Iowans and Americans to make healthcare decisions for themselves. Biden’s plan will only worsen our workforce shortage and further limit our economic recovery. As I’ve said all along, I believe and trust in Iowans to make the best health decisions for themselves and their families. It’s time for President Biden to do the same. Enough.”

Kansas (Attorney General): “No president has the legal authority to decree a national vaccine mandate or to punish private businesses that refuse to discriminate against employees based on their health status. President Biden yesterday scolded ‘this is not about freedom,’ but the rule of law most certainly is. If the president's overreaching rhetoric becomes federal action, then rest assured we will vigorously challenge it." [source: https://ag.ks.gov/media-center/news-releases/2021/09/10/ag-derek-schmidt-statement-on-proposed-federal-vaccine-mandate]

Kentucky (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/kyoag/status/1436412473553399819
1436412475839291394
Mississippi (Governor): “The President has no authority to require that Americans inject themselves because of their employment at a private business. The vaccine itself is life-saving, but this unconstitutional move is terrifying. This is still America, and we still believe in freedom from tyrants.”

Louisiana (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/thecentersquare/status/1437528269667119111
1437528269667119111
Missouri (Governor): “The Biden Administration’s recent announcement seeking to dictate personal freedom and private business decisions is an insult to our American principles of individual liberty and free enterprise. This heavy-handed action by the federal government is unwelcome in our state and has potentially dangerous consequences for working families. Vaccination protects us from serious illness, but the decision to get vaccinated is a private health care decision that should remain as such. My administration will always fight back against federal power grabs and government overreach that threatens to limit our freedoms.”Montana (Governor): “President Biden’s vaccination mandate is unlawful and un-American. We are committed to protecting Montanans’ freedoms and liberties against this gross federal overreach.”

Nebraska (Governor): https://twitter.com/SKMorefield/status/1436153861681647616
1436153861681647616
New Hampshire (Governor): https://twitter.com/KlandriganUL/status/1437509335156932609
1437509335156932609
North Dakota (Governor): https://twitter.com/jeremyjturley/status/1436371151283003396
1436371151283003396
Ohio (Governor): https://twitter.com/KDKA/status/1436449471064387589
1436449471064387589
Oklahoma (Governor): “It is not the government’s role to dictate to private businesses what to do. Once again President Biden is demonstrating his complete disregard for individual freedoms and states’ rights. As long as I am governor, there will be no government vaccine mandates in Oklahoma. My administration will continue to defend Oklahoma values and fight back against the Biden administration’s federal overreach.”

South Carolina (Governor): “The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats. They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad. Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.”

South Dakota (Governor): “My legal team is standing by ready to file our lawsuit the minute @Joe (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/member.php?u=2118)biden files his unconstitutional rule. This gross example of federal intrusion will not stand.”

Tennessee (Governor): https://twitter.com/FOXNashville/status/1436148671490502660
1436148671490502660
Texas (Governor): “Biden’s vaccine mandate is an assault on private businesses. I issued an Executive Order protecting Texans’ right to choose whether they get the COVID vaccine & added it to the special session agenda. Texas is already working to halt this power grab.”

Utah (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/abc4utah/status/1436146611965542403
1436146611965542403
West Virginia (Attorney General): https://twitter.com/MorriseyWV/status/1436144571570872322
1436144571570872322
Wyoming (Governor): https://twitter.com/NorthPlattePost/status/1436414309534355457
1436414309534355457

Sources (if not given above):

Daily Wire: https://www.dailywire.com/news/governors-immediately-push-back-on-unconstitutional-biden-plan-will-fight-them-to-the-gates-of-hell
Not the Bee: https://notthebee.com/article/heres-a-list-of-states-that-are-immediately-suing-biden-for-trying-to-force-companies-to-mandate-the-vaccine


I say let's teach these bastards to be careful what they wish for. Let them have Wall Street and Hollywood, and all the other portions of this country that produce nothing of value. We'll keep the Constitution and let them have the rest, and see what good a bunch of balkanized self-important parasites does them.

We have to figure out what they want so we don't give it to them. Fuck that. We do not. We have to figure out how to use any opportunity they give us to get what we need. If their celebrity makes it completely impossible for you to ignore the assholes, just take it on faith that we'll make them unhappy in the process.

[A Son of Liberty]

I know secession is popular to some libertarians, but I would point out it is also popular in the long run to globalists like Soros. They do not want any strong nations, just Balkanized regions, that they will rule as part of a single global empire.

I prefer to be surrounded by like-minded individuals, and I'll take my chances with them. I believe I stand a helluva better chance of surviving when the people beside me in the trench believe the same things that I do than I do in a trench filled with snakes, and enemies coming at me from the outside too.

[TheTexan]

Every secession that happens makes the next secession more likely.

And with enough secessions...

Anarchy (the good kind)

[Snowball]

Can't help but think about the Quebec secession vote that almost won.

Probably was rigged.

Everything is a rig job. Don't count on any secessions passing the legal way.

This country already showed how much it's willing to lose to maintain conformity.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1446673203556933633
1446673203556933633

Dissection begins @ 11:00:

Dissecting National Review's Article Against National Divorce
https://odysee.com/@MichaelMalice:6/dissecting-national-review's-article:e
dissecting-national-review%27s-article/eb2b7315cd54fb87c2f00737683332ca9e40d87b

The article:

National Divorce Is a Poisonously Stupid Idea
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/national-divorce-is-a-poisonously-stupid-idea/
Rich Lowry (08 October 2021)

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1446833615057440776
1446833615057440776

[Occam's Banana]

Tom Woods Show Ep. 1989 Secession: The Constitutional, Historical, and Moral Case
I make the constitutional, historical, and moral case for national divorce.
https://odysee.com/@TomWoodsTV:e/ep.-1989-secession-the-constitutional,:3
ep.-1989-secession-the-constitutional%2C/36e45bd521d8b7b73681710bb7c1562296700457

[Occam's Banana]

https://i.imgur.com/ZQbOUmS.jpg

[Occam's Banana]

Three Reasons to Start Taking Secession Seriously
https://mises.org/wire/three-reasons-start-taking-secession-seriously
Ryan McMaken (28 October 2021)

Last month, the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia released a new study (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/) which showed that, at least among those polled, “roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union.”

Moreover, majorities in both groups agreed there are “many radical, immoral people trying to ruin things” and that “it is the duty of every true citizen to help eliminate the evil that poisons our country from within.”

One might conclude that people who think that things are generally going well in a country aren’t so concerned with “the evil within” that they think it’s time to “split the country.”

It seems that President Biden has been unable to “unite” the country after all, in spite of his promises (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/clinching-victory-president-elect-biden-declares-time-heal-america-n1247013) that it’s “time to heal in America” and that he will "be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify." Rather, it appears the country embraces a hard divide over a variety of issues with vaccine mandates and parental rights in public education being only the most current ones.

At this point, there’s no reason to believe these divides are simply going to go away. Secession is likely to become even more mainstream as has been occurring in recent years, and as the old "liberal consensus (https://d2r6h7ytneza1l.cloudfront.net/title/6abe5378-f05c-48dd-b851-d63a6b9e1ab1/mason&morgan_excerpt.pdf)" of the mid-twentieth century recedes ever more into the distant past. Moreover, opponents of secession are clear that they’re not willing to tolerate a separation that would allow Americans in neighboring jurisdictions to embrace other models of society or governance. But in the real world, major political changes can come suddenly and in unexpected ways. In 1987, most Soviet still assumed the USSR would continue to exist for many more decades—if not centuries. Because of this, now is the time to begin asking the difficult questions about secession and how military and financial questions can be addressed.

Considering all this, we see three main reasons why it is increasingly unwise to ignore secession as a serious possibility.

Secession Went Mainstream

The first reason we must now take secession seriously is that it’s no longer a topic of discussion among the most radical.

In 2014, for example, a quarter of those polled said they thought their state should secede (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/poll-seccession). By 2018, 39 percent were saying they think a state should “have the final say” as to whether or not that state remains part of the United States. In 2020, more than a third of those polled (https://johnzogbystrategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/4th-issue-FINAL.pdf) said states have a legal right to secede.

Mainstream conservatives increasingly suggest the possibility, from Rush Limbaugh (https://mises.org/wire/idea-secession-isnt-going-away) to Dennis Prager. Indeed, just last week, Prager admitted that secession offers a chance to live in a country that better reflects one’s own values (https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/youtube-dennis-prager-says-there-might-be-secession-united-states). Should secession happen, Prager said, “ I would live in a state governed by Judeo-Christian values versus one governed by left-wing values.” Even elderly conservatives are started to grasp the idea: separation brings choice, and choice is better than ossified notions of “patriotism.”

Indeed, it appears it’s no coincidence that older conservative operatives like Prager have been among those who are late to warm to the idea of secession. According to Zogby’s 2020 poll (https://johnzogbystrategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/4th-issue-FINAL.pdf) on secession, favorable attitudes toward secession decline as the polled group gets older. In the 18-29 year-old group, a majority (52 percent) think states have a legal right to secede. In the over-65 group the number is only 23 percent. In other words, the dogma of national unity is a dogma of older generations. Not only is secession increasingly mainstream, it may be the wave of the future as well.

Meanwhile, members of Congress—including Iowa's Steven Holt (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/iowa-rep-steven-holt-52-25-of-trump-supporters-favor-secession-to-preserve-the-principles-of-our-republic/ar-AAPpL1m?ocid=BingNewsSearch&pfr=1) and Florida's Marjorie Taylor Greene (https://www.wonkette.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-promotes-national-divorce-between-maga-normal-people)—now openly speak well of secession. They wouldn't say this unless they thought their constituents agree with them.

Moreover, we might measure the growth of the secessionist position by the number of pundits who now feel the need to condemn it. Once upon a time, secession was regarded as so "out there" that it scarcely deserved any attention at all. No longer. Nowadays, conservative beltway pundits feel the need to go on rants about it on Fox News. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6VANItcxso&t=367s)

The Left’s Unionists Want to Run Your Life

A second reason to take secession seriously is the fact that the Left doesn’t seem to be learning anything from the rise of separatism. Just as many Americans appear to be embracing a posture in opposition to rule from the center, the Left is doubling down on the idea that more local autonomy is not to be tolerated.

A clear example of this is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act introduced in the US Senate. The legislation, if passed, would give Washington vast new powers in regulating and controlling how states conduct their own elections. Originally, of course, state governments had almost total control in how elections were governed and conducted within each state. This makes sense in a country that began as a collection of sovereign republics. Just as EU member states conduct their elections in a way that’s locally controlled, the same was once true for the US. Over time—as in most areas—the federal government asserted more control. But with the Voting Rights Advancement Act, local control over elections would be virtually abolished with most any changes subject to a federal imprimatur.

Naturally, opposition to surrendering state elections to federal control is denounced as motivated by racism and other nefarious goals. And this is reflective of the Left’s general opposition to secession and decentralization in general. The idea is “we can’t let those people run their own affairs because they’re sure to use local prerogatives for evil.”

For example, when condemning secession in New York magazine, Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore made it clear he has no intention of letting people do much of anything without federal “oversight.” He writes (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/no-red-state-rebels-there-will-be-no-secession.html):


So might we drift apart more or less peacefully this time around? Possibly, but count me out when it comes to agreeing to a National Divorce. …[H]ow could I happily accept the accelerated subjugation of women and people of color in a new, adjacent Red America, any more than abolitionists could accept the continuation and expansion of the slavery they hated? Would it really be safe to live near a carbon-mad country in which the denial of climate change was an article of faith? And could I ever trust that a “neighbor” whose leadership and citizens believed their policies reflected the unchanging ancient will of the Almighty would leave our fences intact?

Kilgore can barely contain his contempt. He might as well be saying "If those Red State troglodytes are allowed freedom, they’ll surely embrace a racist and misogynistic dystopia that fills the air with poisonous fumes. These are religious zealots, after all!"

Anyone who doesn’t want to live out his or her life as subject to the whims of men like Kilgore should take his few moments of candor as an ominous warning. These people will never “happily accept” self-governance outside Washington’s purview because they quite literally equate it with slavery and the hatred of women.

In other words, the more the Left condemns secession in detail—as they must now do because dismissive scoffing no longer works—they only provide additional reasons for why secession is likely the only real solution to the national divide.

Now Is Time to Ask the Difficult Questions

Finally, the mainstreaming of secession means now is the appropriate time to start asking the difficult questions about how separation would actually take place.

For example, the issue of nuclear weapons cannot be ignored—although the case of post-Soviet Ukraine shows it’s not as intractable a problem as many suspect (https://mises.org/wire/if-america-splits-what-happens-nukes). Moreover, the question of the national debt ought to be approached. It will likely also be necessary to admit that under all realistic scenarios, a partial default is the likely outcome either with or without secession. And finally, there is the problem of “ethnic” enclaves. Historically, this always comes with secession, as with the ethnic Russians in the secessionist Baltics (https://mises.org/wire/nationalism-national-liberation-lessons-end-cold-war) or the pro-Spaniard populations left behind throughout Latin America in the nineteenth century. Moreover, how "complete" would this separation be? It is entirely conceivable that a United States with two or more self-governing pieces could nevertheless remain within under a single head of state or within a single military alliance.

In real life, big political changes have a habit of occurring regardless of what the official planners want, and what the official plans say. That is, events have a way of overwhelming what the elites think is the proper way of doing things. But fostering serious discussion now could help avert at least some unpleasant surprises in the longer term. On the other hand, living in denial about secession won't improve things. And, of course, the matter of secession is not "if" but "when." All polities come to an end at some point either through disintegration or revolution. In many cases, the world improves when old states like the Roman Empire collapse (https://mises.org/wire/greatest-thing-roman-empire-ever-did-was-go-away). The fanciful America-will-last-forever position is something that should seem plausible only to small children or the hopelessly naïve.



"Three Reasons to Start Taking Secession Seriously (https://mises.org/wire/three-reasons-start-taking-secession-seriously)" by Ryan McMaken is licensed under CC BY-ND-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

[Occam's Banana]

Tom Woods Show Ep. 1989 Secession: The Constitutional, Historical, and Moral Case
I make the constitutional, historical, and moral case for national divorce.
https://odysee.com/@TomWoodsTV:e/ep.-1989-secession-the-constitutional,:3
ep.-1989-secession-the-constitutional%2C/36e45bd521d8b7b73681710bb7c1562296700457

And this goes here, too:


Tom Woods - Secession: Yes, It's Allowed (But We Should Do It Even if It Weren't)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRfBrV4iwjk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRfBrV4iwjk

[Anti Globalist]

https://i.imgur.com/ZQbOUmS.jpg
This meme would be much better if the first map of the United States didn't show Indiana as a blue state.

[DamianTV]

How about we kick California the fuck out? Dont give it to Mexico, and DONT let California leave voluntarily, I mean KICKED THE FUCK OUT of the USA because they are the ones promoting the shit that ruins every other state that has gone sideways.

PS California, dont let the door hit you in the ass on the way out because we know in your twisted minds you would all get off on that some how...

[DadaOrwell]

Newer polls have it closer to 50%. And the only "insane" part is the idea of only getting 2 independent countries out if it rather than 50.

[oyarde]

This meme would be much better if the first map of the United States didn't show Indiana as a blue state.
Currently the most red state in the nation.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1466830905155203072
https://i.imgur.com/gINKs6y.png

An American Secession? It’s Not That Far-Fetched
Texit. The new California republic. Polls in the U.S. show strong support for splitting the nation along blue-red lines.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-28/max-hastings-texas-or-california-seceding-it-s-not-that-far-fetched
Max Hastings (28 November 2021)

We know that we live in weird times. Especially for us foreigners, however, it is almost unfathomable to see images of American demonstrators waving placards in support of “Texit” (https://tnm.me/texit/) or a new California republic. (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Independence_Referendum_in_2021_Initiat ive_(2020)) When half the developing world is struggling to get to the U.S., still perceiving it as a paradise on earth, how can the word “secession” have made it even as far as the margins of political debate?

Yet a recent University of Virginia poll (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/) found that 52% of Donald Trump voters now “somewhat” favor Republican-controlled states “seceding from the union to form their own separate country,” while 41% of Joe Biden voters adopt the same stance about blue states.

Last year, the conservative George Mason University law professor Frank Buckley published a book (https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/american-secession/) arguing that the U.S. is “ripe for secession … There’s much to be said for an American breakup.” Meanwhile, left-winger Richard Kreitner, a contributor to the Nation, authored “Break It Up,” (https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/richard-kreitner/break-it-up/9780316510608/) which asserts that Americans must finish the work of post-Civil War Reconstruction or “give up on the Union entirely.”

There is a growing literature of neo-secessionism on the political right, from such bodies as Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media and the Claremont Institute. “We have in America today what are, essentially, two competing, radically different mutually exclusive conceptions of the Good, of justice, and of the proper role of the state in its interactions with its citizens,” writes Claremont’s David Reaboi.

“If we disagree on these big things — which will necessarily manifest in every political issue, large or small,” he adds, “what strong force could possibly reunite us? Or, to ask a question that’s perhaps more pertinent — maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon: what force could keep us from coming apart?”

This seems an important and also chilling statement. Reaboi is an extreme conservative voice, but in the eyes of many outsiders, it is that of the entire Republican Party. Its definition of truth seems something entirely different from that of Democrats, perhaps irreconcilably so.

Some Canadian friends, serious people who are not in the least sensationalist-minded, told me this week that they are getting sincerely nervous about possibilities that beckon if Donald Trump or a Trump clone becomes president in 2024. They ask: could violence erupt, and secession become a serious issue? What might that mean for Canada, where Quebec is already halfway out of the nation, and Alberta (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49899113) is playing with such an idea?

Before considering the past and the future, let us acknowledge that we are talking possibilities, not probabilities, none of them immediate. But in the past half century we have seen so many astounding things happen, most of them scarcely predicted, that it seems foolish to rule out anything.

Because our own memories are relatively short, we forget how much the borders of many nations have surged and ebbed, sometimes shifted by external aggression, more often by the desires of segments of their own people. Take Pakistan. When India was partitioned before the departure of the British in 1947, a single state was forged from the Muslim northwest and eastern Bengal, the two portions geographically separated by more than 1,000 miles.

As a BBC TV reporter a quarter century later, I was a witness to the colossal political upheavals in East Pakistan — the explosion of a separatist movement that provoked brutal repression by West Pakistan, then the war in which India joined with the separatists to expel the western army, and finally the creation of the new state of Bangladesh, today with a population of 165 million people.

Closer to home for me, being British, is the Irish independence struggle that has played a bloody role in our history, and is not yet entirely ended. For four centuries, our monarchs and later politicians regarded “the British Isles” as an inseparable whole, and suppressed Irish freedom movements with ferocity. In the early 20th century, the U.K. Conservative Party supported Ulster Protestants in threatening to resist, by force of arms, the Liberal government’s proposals to grant Irish home rule.

Why did they adopt this reckless, unconstitutional view? Because those Tory grandees believed that if Ireland broke away, it would signal the beginning of the collapse of the Empire. They so far secured their purpose, that to this day the rump of Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland remains attached to Britain, and a focus of political strife, with a shaky peace imperiled by Brexit (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-01/max-hastings-brexit-s-predictable-crises-in-gibraltar-the-channel-ireland).

There are many other examples of modern states uniting and breaking asunder. Think of the Soviet Union, which splintered three decades ago, and which Russian President Vladimir Putin aspires to reassemble. Czechoslovakia was created in October 1918, amid the ruins of the Hapsburg Empire, then in 1993 split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Norway was united with Denmark for four centuries, until in 1814 it was instead joined with Sweden. That marriage ended in a peaceful 1905 divorce.

Many states whose boundaries were set by European colonial powers have since revisited them, or are today attempting to do so. Singapore was ruled by the British as part of Malaya for well over a century, and became part of independent Malaysia in 1963. Two years later, following ethnic strife between Malays and Singapore’s dominant Chinese, the island was expelled from Malaysia, and has prospered mightily as an independent republic ever since.

The above should represent enough history to remind us how fluid national borders can be, even before we start talking about Spain’s Catalan separatist movement, France’s seesaw relationship with Alsace-Lorraine (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/french-regional-elections-what-hope-for-regional-movements/), or the doubtful prospects of Nigeria remaining a unitary nation, save by force of arms. Even now, Ethiopia is riven by bloodshed between the rival forces of the Tigray, Amhara and Afar regions.

Why should the U.S. be different? That may seem an absurd question, especially compared with the post-colonial breakups mentioned above. But consider: For the past 250 years, America has relentlessly expanded, as ever more people sought the privilege of participation in one of the most successful economic, political and social experiments in the history of the planet. Think Texas and the West; the transition of so many territories into states (celebrated exuberantly and unforgettably, in the case of Oklahoma in 1907, by Rodgers & Hammerstein); the accessions of Alaska and Hawaii. (In 1946, some Sicilians even petitioned President Harry Truman to allow their island to join the U.S.)

Why couldn’t this expansion be partially reversed? The U.S. has always been riven by political fissures, profound divergences of view about how different regions’ citizens wish to live. For more than two centuries, the things that bind Americans together have proved greater than those dividing them. But if that changes, it’s possible that some portions of the country may decide to go their own way, most obviously California, with the fifth-largest economy in the world.

To have any prospect of rebuilding a peaceful center in American politics, a critical first step — again, in the eyes of outsiders — must be the disarmament (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-25/max-hastings-i-grew-up-on-guns-now-i-love-britain-s-firearm-control) of the citizenry, which is not going to happen. Moreover, however the issue is dressed up, at the heart of America’s divide is the issue of race, or white tribalism, a polarization getting unimaginably worse than I could have believed possible when I lived in an increasingly liberal mid-1960s America.

New kinds of segregation movements are emerging, some of them created by the left. California, New York, Minnesota, Vermont and Connecticut restricted commerce with North Carolina after it passed legislation requiring people to use public bathrooms based on their birth gender. California also barred state-sponsored travel by its employees to states deemed to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender residents.

Such a swell of anger is running that it’s impossible to predict where it might end. Hundreds of millions of us around the world have no votes to cast, but by gosh we have a dog in the fight, because the U.S. is the only superpower we have got, to serve as standard-bearer for the Free World, against ever-more assertive authoritarian powers, China and Russia foremost among them.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin would, of course, welcome a secession. The Russians, through their online offensives, promote every form of disruption in the Western world, including tensions in the union.

Prominent among the reasons I opposed Britain’s exit from the European Union was the likelihood that the issue would hijack our politics for a generation, for scant advantage. So it is proving. The same objection applies to the possible — even probable — departure of Scotland from the U.K.: Our government would get nothing done for years, save argue with Edinburgh over the division of assets and resources.

The same would apply, in spades, in the event of a secession of a U.S. state. The vastness of the free trade area that is America has been a critical force in forging its dynamic, building its economic might.

Yet arguments of this kind carry little weight with secessionists. Texan Nationalist Movement organizer Joe Shehan says: “I see Texit more as a way of kind of creating … a bulwark or a bastion or a haven that can stop the slide into chaos, because that’s where I see it’s going … I have three daughters, but I have 64 sons because I’m a coach … I care about them and I care about their families.”

State nationalists are still inspired by the 1836-44 Texas Republic experiment that began with the stand of William B. Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and some 200 others at the Alamo. Yet historians chiefly remember independent Texas as having reintroduced slavery, abolished by Mexico, and perpetrated brutal violence toward Mexicans and indigenous people.

If the enthusiasts for Texit ever get their way, the U.S. will wave goodbye to 29 million people and the ninth-largest economy in the world, along with almost 40% of U.S. oil production and a quarter of its natural gas.

[phill4paul]

I've already split. I don't abide Marxists. As friends or family. Saw an old friend at the hardware store today. 2 yrs. ago he defriended me on FedBook because of my conservative values. I didn't defriend him because of his views. He did me for mine and because his friends disapproved of me. He tried to say hello and I just walked on by.
Secession is in full force.

[Anti Globalist]

If Biden announced a universal vaccine mandate enforced by the military, would that lead to secession?

[phill4paul]

If Biden announced a universal vaccine mandate enforced by the military, would that lead to secession?

I'd say yes. Which is why he restricted it to Fed. Gov. and contractors. Using Medicaid/Medicare to force on employees ONLY. Coulda said that no one would be treated for Fed. Gov. medical care unless vaxxed. But, as much as they wanted to I think they realized it would be a bridge too far.

[69360]

If Biden announced a universal vaccine mandate enforced by the military, would that lead to secession?

Yes.

[Occam's Banana]

Book (PDF): Common Sense: The Case for an Independent Texas (https://consultingbyrpm.com/commonsense.pdf)

Audio (MP3): The Bob Murphy Show Ep. 225 - Buck Johnson Interviews Bob Murphy on the Case for an Independent Texas (https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/5b18aa38-ed21-4d1e-a7d1-725e02733c84/bms-ep-225-bob-murphy-talks-texan-independence-with-buck-johnson.mp3)

The Case for an Independent Texas with Bob Murphy
My guest this week is an economist, a professor, an author, a Mises Institute Senior Fellow and a podcast host. He is Robert Murphy and he's here to discuss his new short-form book, "Common Sense: The Case for an Independent Texas". Bob and I go through several common issues of pushback when it comes to the State of Texas becoming an independent nation. We talk: social security, military, money and other logistical issues that you will find interesting. Bob and I both agree that secession is imminent and that a peaceful transmission is the preferable way. To find this new book and all of Bob's work, go here: https://consultingbyrpm.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHx3mhymyn8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHx3mhymyn8

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1471725156473131010
https://i.imgur.com/PrOtTDI.png

Is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie Making a Case for Secession?
https://www.newsweek.com/kentucky-republican-thomas-massey-making-case-secession-1660399
Aila Slisco (17 December 2021)

Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) took to Twitter to ponder the issue of secession on Thursday while recent polls indicate growing support for the U.S. breaking up along ideological lines.

A pair of polls released over the summer suggested that a majority of Republicans supported states seceding from the U.S. for political reasons. Massie broached the topic in a tweet using the Civil War example of West Virginia joining the Union by breaking away from Confederate Virginia. The Kentucky Republican recalled that one of his Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) classmates had been unaware that West Virginia was a state.

"Has secession ever succeeded?" asked Massie. "One of my freshmen classmates at MIT (from Bronx Science, NYC) didn't know West Virginia was a state - he thought it was just a region of Virginia. Most people know it's a state, but few know it seceded from VA. It's a story that's not often told."


https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1471631926368915456
https://i.imgur.com/bKO5UYj.png

It is unclear why Massie used the example of West Virginia, his birth state, to illustrate the issue of secession. Two other states were formed by breaking away from other states in a similar manner but under different circumstances. Massie's home state of Kentucky was also part of Virginia before becoming a state in 1792, while Maine formed following separation from Massachusetts in 1820.

However, secession more commonly refers to states breaking away from the U.S. as a whole rather than separating from other states, a process sometimes referred to as partitioning. The only historical example of secession from the U.S. was ultimately a failure, given that the 11 states that broke away to form the Confederacy were decisively defeated by the Union at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865.

No other states have successfully broken away from the federal government, although Texas broke away from Mexico in 1836 as the Republic of Texas before being admitted as a U.S. state in 1845.

Many failed proposals for states or cities to secede from the U.S. or to partition existing states have been put forward over the years. Polling indicates that the proposals (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-28/max-hastings-texas-or-california-seceding-it-s-not-that-far-fetched) [& see THIS POST - OB] have become increasingly popular as U.S. politics have become more polarized.

A recent poll (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/) [& see THIS THREAD - OB] from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, based on responses from July and August, indicated that 52 percent of those who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 would support "red states seceding from the union to form their own separate country," while 41 percent of those who voted for President Joe Biden said that blue states should break away to form a different country.

A June poll (http://brightlinewatch.org/still-miles-apart-americans-and-the-state-of-u-s-democracy-half-a-year-into-the-biden-presidency/) from YouGov and Bright Line Watch indicated that support for secession among Southern Republicans became particularly enthusiastic after Trump left office, moving from 50 percent who supported a new Southern breakaway country in January to 66 percent who supported the quasi-Confederacy in June.

[Okie RP fan]

Andrew Torba of Gab is really pushing for Christians and other liberty types to build a full on parallel society.
If we can't officially secede, then we need to pursue this where we segregate.

I mean, segregation is en vogue again right? I see the BLMers and Wokers advocating for it all of the time now.

[A Son of Liberty]

Andrew Torba of Gab is really pushing for Christians and other liberty types to build a full on parallel society.
If we can't officially secede, then we need to pursue this where we segregate.

I mean, segregation is en vogue again right? I see the BLMers and Wokers advocating for it all of the time now.

Segregation is wholly inadequate. If we're still in Uncle Sugar's territory, we're still subject to his dictates and "justice".

Secession is literally the only solution to this situation. Otherwise, we're on a fast boat to China... literally.

[Occam's Banana]

Imagine another American Civil War, but this time in every state
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state
Ron Elving (11 January 2022)

Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish.

These days, the notion has not only gone mainstream, it seems to suddenly be everywhere.

Business Insider published a poll in October 2020 saying a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was already in the midst of a "cold" civil war. Then last fall, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released a poll (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/)finding that a majority of people who had voted to reelect former President Donald Trump in 2020 now wanted their state tosecede from the Union.

The UVA data also showed a stunning 41% of those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 also said it might now be "time to split the country."

Researchers have found such downbeat assessments of America's democracy are especially salient among the young. Last month, the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School published a poll that found (https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/fall-2021-harvard-youth-poll) half of voting age Americans under 30 thought our democracy was "in trouble" or "failing." A third also said they expected there to be "a civil war" within their lifetimes. And a quarter thought at least one state would secede.

The more one hears this particular drumbeat, the louder it becomes.

Late last year, the University of Maryland and The Washington Post produced a poll (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/01/post-poll-january-6/)saying that one-third of Americans thought violence against the government was "sometimes justified" — a belief they found even more widely held among Republicans and independents. According to the Post, just about 1 American in 10 held that view in the 1990s.

Do the respondents in all these polls fully realize what these terms mean or their answers imply? Possibly not. Talk is often cheap, and pollsters can ask a lot of provocative questions in pursuit of something noteworthy — or buzzworthy.

What do people even mean by "civil war"? Let us assume it would not be a return to the 1860s, when 11 Southern states left the Union and fought a four-year war to assert their right to do so and preserve the practice of slavery, which had about 4 million African Americans in bondage at the time.

The American Civil War cost the lives of at least 600,000 Americans and contributed to the deaths of many thousands more. It devastated the South economically and left most of those in the region who had been emancipated to lives of peonage and penury.

Moreover, it did little to settle the constitutional issue of "states' rights," a problematic point in our national conversation ever since. Salient in the struggles for civil rights and voting rights, it remains so in the squabbles over the mask and vaccine mandates of today.

States' rights, still with us

The rights of states to go their own way on fundamental issues are also still front and center in the Supreme Court, where abortion rights pose an immediate example (https://www.npr.org/2021/12/29/1068384409/insurrection-abortion-voting-climate-afghanistan-trump-biden-2021-stories). Texas and other states want to make the procedure all but unavailable, while much of the nation prefers the access granted nationwide by the court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

"We already are seeing 'border war' with individual states passing major legislation that differs considerably from that in other places," says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and William Gale, a Brookings senior fellow in economic studies, who have written a pair of articles on the fraying of the American social and political fabric (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/09/16/is-the-us-headed-for-another-civil-war/).

They note that conflicts between entire states are not the only way civil war may emerge in our time, or even the most likely. When and if the issue turns to violent confrontations between local citizens and federal officers, or between contentious groups of citizens, the clash might well take place far closer to home. As West and Gale write:


Today's toxic atmosphere makes it difficult to negotiate on important issues, which makes people angry with the federal government and has helped create a winner-take-all (https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701) approach to politics. When the stakes are so high, people are willing to consider extraordinary means to achieve their objectives.

And what do these careful scholars mean by "extraordinary means"?

"America has an extraordinary number of guns and private militias," they write. How many? They cite the National Shooting Sports Foundation's (https://www.guns.com/news/2020/11/17/data-us-has-434-million-guns-20m-ars-150m-mags) estimate of 434 million firearms in civilian possession in the U.S. right now. That would be 1.3 guns per person.

"Semi-automatic weapons comprise around 19.8 million in total," they add ominously, "making for a highly armed population with potentially dangerous capabilities."

The New York Times recently reviewed How Civil Wars Start by political scientist Barbara F. Walter of the University of California at San Diego. In an interview with NPR member station KPBS in San Diego (https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/kpbs-midday-edition-segments/2021/01/07/political-scientist-warns-second-civil-war-after-c) a year ago, Walter said the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was surprising but should not have been because we had been watching "American democracy decline since 2016."

A scholar of international law, Walter adds: "The U.S. used to be considered a full democracy like Norway, Switzerland or Iceland," she said, "and it's now considered a partial democracy like Ecuador, Somalia or Haiti."

Drawing different lines today

The geographical divides in our time are different from those of the 1860s. We can still trace the original Mason-Dixon line that separated the regions of "free soil" from "slave states," and there are real differences on either side of that ancient demarcation even today.

But the most meaningful geographic separation in our society is no longer as tidy as North and South, or East and West. It is the familiar divide between urban and rural, or to update that a bit: metro versus non-metro.

Thus a "blue state" such as Maine has populous coastal counties that voted for Biden and sparsely populated interior counties that went heavily for Trump, enough to tip the majority to him in one of the state's two congressional districts. Conversely, in ruby red state Nebraska, one congressional district anchored in the city of Omaha went for Biden.

This dynamic also shows up in the biggest population states, the top prizes in the Electoral College. In California, where the coastal cities are famously liberal, the Central Valley counties are still far more conservative.

And in Texas, Biden carried the six largest metros in 2020, due largely to their growing numbers of people of color. But most of the state's 254 counties are outside these metros; in rural Texas, the Republican vote share is still the lion's share.

That may change over time, but for now we're less a nation divided into 50 states than we are two nations that are both present in each of those states. Each is dominant in its own space and certain that it is the real America.

You can measure some of this geographic/demographic division in the 2020 election results. Trump won in 2,588 counties covering most of the national landscape, as Republican candidates usually do. (This is why we are accustomed to Election Night maps that are strikingly red even as the popular vote is close or leans Democratic.)

Biden, in stark contrast, carried only 551 counties, less than a quarter as many as Trump. But the counties Biden carried had a total population of nearly 198 million, while Trump's altogether had just 130.3 million. That is a difference of nearly 68 million people. (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2021/01/21/a-demographic-contrast-biden-won-551-counties-home-to-67-million-more-americans-than-trumps-2588-counties/) Put another way, Biden won the counties that are home to 60% of the total U.S. population.

It is hard to believe when staring at a map on which Biden's counties are scattered blue dots on a sea of red. But those blue dots are where most of the country lives. When you look at the top ten states by metro percentage of total state population, Biden won all ten.

Trump did win a few inner-core urban counties here and there, with a combined population of 4.7 million. Biden won the rest of that category with a combined population of 97 million. That is a ratio of 20 to 1.

Moreover, the Biden counties are where most of the population growth is happening. Less than a fifth of the counties account for 77% of the Latino or Hispanic community and 86% of Asian American community nationwide.

Is civil war a self-fulfilling anxiety?

The forces of disunity are disquieting, to say the least. But must it all come to blows? Can we still center ourselves and pull back from whatever brink we are approaching?

Irish Times writer Fintan O'Toole offered a cautionary message just before Christmas in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/america-civil-war-prophecies/620850/), recounting some of his horrific memories from "the troubles" in his homeland in the late 1900s. Even then, he says, with all the provocation on both sides, "it never got to a full-blown civil war."

It doesn't do to behave as if our divisions must compel us to bloodshed, he adds, because dwelling on such thoughts and making such predictions may bring that prospect closer to reality, even if intended to do the opposite.

That makes sense, especially if you believe that too much thinking about the unthinkable can become acceptance of the unacceptable.

And however you personally regard the meaning of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, we know now that nothing in American politics is unthinkable.

[Occam's Banana]

"We already are seeing 'border war' with individual states passing major legislation that differs considerably from that in other places," says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and William Gale, a Brookings senior fellow in economic studies, who have written a pair of articles on the fraying of the American social and political fabric (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/09/16/is-the-us-headed-for-another-civil-war/).

They note that conflicts between entire states are not the only way civil war may emerge in our time, or even the most likely. When and if the issue turns to violent confrontations between local citizens and federal officers, or between contentious groups of citizens, the clash might well take place far closer to home. As West and Gale write:


Today's toxic atmosphere makes it difficult to negotiate on important issues, which makes people angry with the federal government and has helped create a winner-take-all (https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701) approach to politics. When the stakes are so high, people are willing to consider extraordinary means to achieve their objectives.

Of course.

This is the reductio ad absurdum of continent-spanning mass "democracy" on a scale of a third of a billion people.

How else could it be? What else was to be expected?

[Occam's Banana]

The New York Times recently reviewed How Civil Wars Start by political scientist Barbara F. Walter of the University of California at San Diego. In an interview with NPR member station KPBS in San Diego (https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/kpbs-midday-edition-segments/2021/01/07/political-scientist-warns-second-civil-war-after-c) a year ago, Walter said the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was surprising but should not have been because we had been watching "American democracy decline since 2016."

A scholar of international law, Walter adds: "The U.S. used to be considered a full democracy like Norway, Switzerland or Iceland," she said, "and it's now considered a partial democracy like Ecuador, Somalia or Haiti."

"Democracy" as "considered" by whom?

"Democracy" as defined by whom?

"Democracy" by what standard?

This one?


"It's only democracy when my side is succeeding."

https://i.imgur.com/GiQCIQ1.jpg

[A Son of Liberty]

"Semi-automatic weapons comprise around 19.8 million in total," they add ominously, "making for a highly armed population with potentially dangerous capabilities."

Tell me you know nothing about guns without saying that you know nothing about guns.


The New York Times recently reviewed How Civil Wars Start by political scientist Barbara F. Walter of the University of California at San Diego. In an interview with NPR member station KPBS in San Diego a year ago, Walter said the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was surprising but should not have been because we had been watching "American democracy decline since 2016."

A scholar of international law, Walter adds: "The U.S. used to be considered a full democracy like Norway, Switzerland or Iceland," she said, "and it's now considered a partial democracy like Ecuador, Somalia or Haiti."

In addition to the paragraph preceding regarding guns, I'd like to congratulate the author on compiling the 3 least coherent paragraphs I've ever read in an article.


Irish Times writer Fintan O'Toole offered a cautionary message just before Christmas in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/america-civil-war-prophecies/620850/), recounting some of his horrific memories from "the troubles" in his homeland in the late 1900s. Even then, he says, with all the provocation on both sides, "it never got to a full-blown civil war."

I'm not familiar with Fintan O'Toole, but the Irish did in fact fight a civil war in the 1920's. Also I'd like suggest to Mr. O'Toole that "the Troubles" are often exactly what civil wars actually look like in most cases. That the fighting wasn't more widespread than it was is more due to the fact that the area of conflict was largely contained in Ulster, rather than the whole of the island. In my opinion, and I remember saying this to friends at the time, the biggest reason that the Troubles petered out was because of September 11th. Funding from the US dried up, on both sides of the conflict; and the will to fight a guerrilla war largely evaporated. There have been minor outbreaks from time to time since, but nothing like the '90's. I spent a semester in Ireland in '96 - our flight landed the same day as the Canary Wharf bombing in London.

[Anti Federalist]

"Democracy" as "considered" by whom?

"Democracy" as defined by whom?

"Democracy" by what standard?


A scholar of international law, Walter adds: "The U.S. used to be considered a full democracy like Norway, Switzerland or Iceland," she said, "and it's now considered a partial democracy like Ecuador, Somalia or Haiti."

Bemoaning that which they themselves created.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1513983662039130122
https://i.imgur.com/QuANLgw.png

[Anti Federalist]

1387253413151485959

[Occam's Banana]

THREAD: SPLC poll re: civil war, political assassinations, and "Replacement Theory"


Polling for this was conducted by the SPLC (for whatever that is - or isn't - worrth).

Here is a summary of the reported results:

Civil war:

53% of Republicans said the U.S. “seems headed toward a civil war in the near future.”
39% of Democrats said the U.S. “seems headed toward a civil war in the near future.”
44% of all respondents said the U.S. “seems headed toward a civil war in the near future.”

Assassination of politicians:

44% of young male Democrats polled said they could countenance political assassination.
40% of young female Republicans polled said they could countenance political assassination.
Those 50 and older were not fans of assassination, no matter their party or gender.

Replacement theory:

48% of all respondents said they believe that “progressive and liberal leaders” are “actively trying to leverage political power by replacing more conservative white voters.”
Two-thirds of Republicans said they believe that.
35% of Democrats said they believe that.
42% of independents said they believe that.

[Pauls' Revere]

Only if the capital of 'Murica is in Texas.

Isn't it already?

[TheTexan]

Isn't it already?

Your damn right

[paleocon1]

Rather than dividing the USA which would solve nothing, I prefer the Solution use in Indonesia in 1965 and in Chile in the early 1970's- mass physical elimination of the marxist Left. It is clear normal folks and the Deep State Left's minions cannot share the world in peace.

[TheTexan]

Rather than dividing the USA which would solve nothing, I prefer the Solution use in Indonesia in 1965 and in Chile in the early 1970's- mass physical elimination of the marxist Left. It is clear normal folks and the Deep State Left's minions cannot share the world in peace.

I would prefer to peacefully secede but I find your alternative to also be acceptable

[Occam's Banana]

IT’S BEYOND TIME FOR A NATIONAL DIVORCE
https://mises.org/power-market/its-beyond-time-national-divorce
Matthew Arostegui (14 June 2022)

It’s been about six years since Michael Malice wrote his article “The Case for American Secession,” for the Observer. Link here: https://observer.com/2016/06/the-case-for-american-secession/ [OR see post #78 below - OB]. Since then, the talk of a disuniting of the American Empire has been discussed by people on the right, left, and the middle. There has always been a multitude of cultures in the USA, however recently the cultures on the right and the left have bubbled over into the political sphere. Everything from BLM protests gone violent, to January 6 protests entering the Capitol, shows that the political discourse is at a tipping point.

Every four years, a portion of American citizens go out and vote for who will sit in the White House and dictate many aspects of their lives. The right calls whoever is running on the left a commie, and the left calls whoever is running on the right a fascist. The political divide is getting deeper, you can see it at your Thanksgiving dinner table, in the media, and in national research polls. The question I ask, and asked by Michael Malice six years ago, is why should we remain as one country?

What is holding us together anymore? For those on the left, why would you not want to separate from the racist, fascist, hillbillies that you despise so much? You could have a much more left leaning country, where you could have UBI, universal healthcare, etc. You could adopt a model like the Nordic states in Europe. For the right, why would you not want to separate from the evil baby killing, commie, uppity yankees that you hate, and who don’t want you to be able to carry a firearm to protect your family? You could have a country where you could have constitutional carry, the Bible taught in schools, and outlawed abortion.

When I speak with my family and friends on the right side of the culture, their adverse reaction to a national divorce is usually about either what would some foreign powers do, or what about the idea of America. Well first, the idea of America is dead. We are a debtor’s economy now, with a global empire that is vastly overstretched and we are paying for it here at home. Inflation, caused not just by Biden, but by all those in congress that have voted for decades to keep the money printer going burr. And on the foreign power, such as China? The paper tiger economy of that quasi communist state is surrounded by enemies, and would have trouble mounting the largest amphibious assault in the history of earth on Taiwan, let alone America.

Any friends I speak with on the left that are against the idea of a peaceful national divorce, they’ll just say things like, “Well what would happen to all those minorities in the new conservative country or countries?” I don’t know, they’d likely go about their daily lives, with a better chance of affecting their government with it being smaller. The arguments I generally get from the left are all about what the left generally wants, power. They want you to submit to their drag queen story time hour for toddlers, and if you reject that, then you must be put in your place.

There are many valid questions to ask when discussing national divorce, what would happen to the nukes, federal government property, national debt, etc. This can all be done peacefully and without bloodshed. Look at the dissolution of the Soviet Union not long ago. A couple months after I turned one, the Soviet Union fell, and if you would have asked experts in the decades leading up to that, most never saw it coming. That was done mostly peacefully, and nuclear weapons were not spread out across the world and used in dirty bombs like you would see in Hollywood movies. Federal property, the national debt, and other issues are all something that will have to be negotiated by lawyers and politicians, but I repeat myself, if and hopefully when states begin to secede.

Recently the Libertarian Party, the third largest party in the USA, had sweeping victories for the Mises Caucus, who then proceeded to add secession to the planks of the party. It is time for Republican parties in each state, to do the same. Add secession to the planks of your state party, and fight like hell for it. I don’t see state Democratic parties adding this to their planks, but if you are involved in your state democratic party, you should really consider the opportunity this would give you.

I have looked at countless different national divorce scenarios, from two different countries to ten different countries. When the dust settles from the breaking up of the world’s largest empire in the history of the world, we would see a peaceful and more prosperous America, or Americas I should say. You may ask, what about my favorite sports teams, yes, they can play other teams from other countries, it happens in most major sports already with teams in Canada, or throughout Europe. You may ask, what about defense? Well, we’d likely see mutual defense pacts form for the new countries, so that if any foreign powers, as unlikely and disastrous for them as it would be, decided to invade the former borders of the USA, then they would have a defensive pact.

If you need any other motivation to entertain the idea of a national divorce, just look at the national debt, the skyrocketing prices for everything from food to homes. I’m in my early thirties with a stable good paying job, and it’s still hard for me to purchase a home. Multiple debt bubbles are ready to burst, social security running out in the next fifteen years. The US government has troops in over seventy countries worldwide, with about eight hundred bases! The global empire is just not sustainable, it never was, and our politicians in DC used it to enrich themselves and their friends. It’s time we broke away from the corrupt DC swampy empire, that has done nothing but destroyed our economy and our culture.

National divorce is a scary proposition. Just as anything you do in life that will better yourself or your family will likely be a scary decision. Can we afford a house at this mortgage rate, another car, school, etc. Just as on an individual level, we make the decision for being better in the long term or short term, we must make that decision on a national level as well. I fear that if we do not have peaceful votes at state levels to secede and join new forming nations, we are all headed down the path of most other falling empires. Ruin, and death.

[Occam's Banana]

The Case for American Secession
Why it’s time to disunite the States
https://observer.com/2016/06/the-case-for-american-secession/
Michael Malice (29 June 2016)

Even when we were united ideologically as a country, we have never been united culturally.

The United States of America has spent very few years truly unified. There was the Era of Good Feelings, which followed the collapse of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist party. There was the FDR administration, up to and including WWII. And there were brief windows during the Bush presidencies, during the Kuwait war and post-9/11 respectively. It is a sad irony that the biggest flag-wavers in the United States are also the main opponents of multiculturalism. In fact, American patriotism is multiculturalist at its very core and in all its manifestations. The two are conceptually inseparable.

But such moments of national consensus hide the deeper point: even when we were united ideologically as a country, we have never been united culturally. We have never had a single culture in the United States, and it is increasingly unlikely that we ever will. Albert Camus opined that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. The rest of us might consider other paths to happiness than rolling the same rock up the same hill for centuries and expecting a different outcome. It isn’t “the definition of insanity”—but it certainly isn’t very sane.

The creation myth for evangelical progressivism is the Civil War. For them, it’s when the United States truly became a nation and repudiated its racist, slaveholding origins. A look at the current Liberty Bell exhibit in Philadelphia, for example, implies that the most important thing that George Washington did was to manumit his slaves upon his death. This view of American history is a recent one but it is a valid one. For one culture, this is what the real America is: a colorblind society where the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant.

For the other American culture, this is sheer propaganda. Lincoln expressly and repeatedly said he would gladly retain slavery if it would politically reunite the country. The idea that white Northerners would send hundreds of thousands of their sons to die on behalf of American blacks would seem preposterous today. It’s even more absurd to accept this as the state of affairs 150 years ago, when white supremacy was largely considered an indisputable fact. This was an era where a man like William Lloyd Garrison was almost lynched in Boston for espousing full legal equality between the races.

Southerners like to claim the Civil War was about States’ Rights. In a sense, that is certainly true. Similarly, gun rights can be regarded as the extension of the right to property. With gun owners, said property is intended to be used to hunt or in self-defense. Yet with the Confederates, those “states’ rights” were about the “right” for one human being to own property in another. Which perspective is correct is somewhat beside the point. The real point is: will either side be able to persuade the other?

Wars establish dominance, not truth. Hitler would have been wrong if he managed to win some sort of negotiated European peace. Stalin’s victory over the Nazis does not vindicate his knowingly and consciously murdering of millions. Yet when it comes to the American South, this concept goes completely out the window. The question of secession was settled by the Civil War, we are told. To defend secession is to defend slavery or at the very least racism. Legally and politically, this is a difficult position to maintain. The two concepts are hardly synonymous, despite their historical confluence.

The issue at hand has never actually been resolved: Does a state (or group of states) have the right to secede? Is that right predicated upon the reasons, de facto or de jure, for the attempted secession? Are there no-fault “divorce” laws here, or does there need to be some sort of culpability before the relationship is sundered?

One fundamental question that progressives struggle with is whether racists, Nazis, white supremacists and all sorts of ‘phobes have the same rights as regular people. If not, then to what extent do they lack them? The homophobic grandfather and the rabid Klansman both practice bigotry, but are clearly different phenomena. They differ in terms of their capacity to be educated, and they differ in their level of threat. Are they both worthy of equal shame and approbation—let alone identical legal repercussions?

The real conundrum is why two cultures should attempt to move forward as one unit when they are increasingly diverging in their world views—and never had the same worldview to begin with. We couldn’t bring liberal democracy to Iraq, and we couldn’t bring it to the South. At some point American progressives need to stop viewing the South as their whipping boy, being perpetually flagellated for its sins. It’s long past time to allow Kansans to live as they see fit, regardless of how wrongheaded they may sound—instead of wondering “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” True, a house divided against itself cannot stand. But some houses don’t need to remain standing at all.

[Occam's Banana]

SOURCE: American democracy at the start of the Biden presidency / Bright Line Watch January-February 2021 surveys (http://brightlinewatch.org/american-democracy-at-the-start-of-the-biden-presidency/)

https://i.imgur.com/OFIBGCp.png

This is from a year ago, but in just half a year since the prior survey (see the quote above), every percentage went up everywhere, except among Republicans in the northeast (which declined by only 1%, well within the margin of error).

(h/t Michael Malice (https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1536893990397673473) - "National divorce is coming, inshallah.")

SOURCE: Still miles apart: Americans and the state of U.S. democracy half a year into the Biden presidency / Bright Line Watch June 2021 surveys (http://brightlinewatch.org/still-miles-apart-americans-and-the-state-of-u-s-democracy-half-a-year-into-the-biden-presidency/)

Secession

President Biden made it a signature goal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/01/20/lincoln-inauguration-biden-unity/) to reunite a country scarred by partisan and regional divides. Our surveys seek to assess whether the animus that characterized the Trump era persists. We therefore repeated a question from our January/February 2021 survey (http://brightlinewatch.org/american-democracy-at-the-start-of-the-biden-presidency/) asking respondents in our public sample about their support for breaking up the United States. As in last winter’s survey, we asked respondents the following:

“Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with ?” The response options were: Strongly support, Somewhat support, Somewhat oppose, Strongly oppose. For simplicity, we group responses in the map by support versus opposition.

We constructed five prospective new unions and inserted the relevant states for respondents into the question wording above. For example, a participant from California in our survey would be asked about joining a new union along with Washington, Oregon, Hawaii and Alaska. These sets are provided below:

[LIST]
Pacific: California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska
Mountain: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico
South: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee
Heartland: Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska
Northeast: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia

As in our previous report (http://brightlinewatch.org/american-democracy-at-the-start-of-the-biden-presidency/), we caution that this survey item reflects initial reactions by respondents about an issue that they are very unlikely to have considered carefully. Secession is a genuinely radical proposition and expressions of support in a survey may map only loosely onto willingness to act toward that end. We include the question because it taps into respondents’ commitments to the American political system at the highest level and with reference to a concrete alternative (regional unions).

Support for secession under the specific hypothetical unions format is illustrated in the map below. As in the previous survey, levels of expressed support for secession are arrestingly high, with 37% of respondents overall indicating willingness to secede. Within each region, the dominant partisan group is most supportive of secession. Republicans are most secessionist in the South and Mountain regions whereas it is Democrats on the West Coast and in the Northeast. In the narrowly divided Heartland region, it is partisan independents who find the idea most attractive.


https://i.imgur.com/qCu26lK.png

These patterns are consistent from our January/February survey, but the changes since then are troubling. Our previous survey was fielded just weeks after the January 6 uprising. By this summer, we anticipated, political tempers may have cooled — not necessarily as a result of any great reconciliation but perhaps from sheer exhaustion after the relentless drama of Trump. For instance, the historian Heather Cox Richardson posited (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-27-2021) that sustained consideration of the Big Lie narrative would diminish political ardor among Trump supporters, which she related to waning popular support for secession in the Confederacy during the spring of 1861.

Yet rather than support for secession diminishing over the past six months, as we expected, [B]it rose in every region and among nearly every partisan group. The jump is most dramatic where support was already highest (and has the greatest historical precedent) — among Republicans in the South, where secession support leapt from 50% in January/February to 66% in June. Support among Republicans in the Mountain region increased as well, by 7 points, from 36% to 43%. Among Democrats in the West, a near-majority of 47% (up 6 points) supports a schism, as do 39% (up 5 points) in Northeast. Support jumped 9 points among independents in the Heartland as well, reaching 43%. Even subordinate partisan groups appear to find secession more appealing now than they did last winter, though only increases for Democrats in the South, Heartland, and Mountain regions are statistically discernible at the 0.05 significance level. The broad and increasing willingness of respondents to embrace these alternatives is a cause for concern. [bold emphasis added - OB]


https://i.imgur.com/LHycyxz.png

[TheTexan]

levels of expressed support for secession are arrestingly high

https://i.giphy.com/media/8fen5LSZcHQ5O/giphy.webp

[Occam's Banana]

Bump for TEXIT.

THREAD: Texas GOP platform now has support for Texas independence - #TEXIT

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1540858123056885760
https://i.imgur.com/ZGdoH9r.png

https://twitter.com/duty2warn
https://i.imgur.com/2ZTflde.png

//

[Occam's Banana]

A quarter of Americans open to taking up arms against government, poll says
Survey of 1,000 registered US voters also reveals that most Americans agree government is ‘corrupt and rigged’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/30/poll-americans-guns-against-government
Victoria Bekiempis (30 June 2022)

More than one quarter of US residents feel so estranged from their government that they feel it might “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, a poll (https://uchicagopolitics.opalstacked.com/uploads/homepage/Polarization-Poll.pdf) released on Thursday claimed.

This survey of 1,000 registered US voters, published by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), also revealed that most Americans agree the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me”.

The data suggests that extreme polarization in US politics – and its impact on Americans’ relationships with each other – remain strong. These statistics come as a congressional committee is holding public hearings on the January 6 insurrection.

This deadly attack on the US Capitol stemmed from the false, partisan, pro-Donald Trump belief that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election. Rioters attempted to thwart certification of the election, in an effort to keep Trump in office.

Although the violent insurrectionists targeted Republicans and Democrats alike, GOP Trump loyalists have insisted that the committee is illegitimate. These attacks on the committee intensified after Trump staffers themselves – including former attorney general Bill Barr – publicly described his efforts to push “the big lie” that the presidential election was stolen.

The survey indicates that distrust in government varies among party lines. While 56% of participants said they “generally trust elections to be conducted fairly and counted accurately”, Republicans, Democrats and independents were dramatically split on this point. Nearly 80% of Democrats voiced overall trust in elections, but that number dipped to 51% among independents and a mere 33% of Republicans.

Per the poll, 49% of Americans concurred that they “more and more feel like a stranger in my own country”. Again, this number reflected sharp political divisions: the sentiment was held by 69% of self-described “strong Republicans”, 65% of self-described “very conservative” persons, and 38% of “strong Democrats”.

Of the 28% of voters who felt it might soon be necessary “to take up arms against the government”, 37% had guns in their homes, according to the data.

One-third of Republicans – including 45% of “strong Republicans – hold this belief about taking up arms. 35% of independent voters, and 20% of Democrats, also agreed, the poll said.

Meanwhile, those polled voiced negative sentiments about persons from opposing political parties. Seventy-three per cent of self-described Republican voters agreed that “Democrats are generally bullies who want to impose their political beliefs on those who disagree,” and “an almost identical percentage of Democrats (74%) express that view of Republicans”.

“While we’ve documented for years the partisan polarization in the country, these poll results are perhaps the starkest evidence of the deep divisions in partisan attitudes rippling through the country,” said the Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducted the survey in May with and Democratic pollster Joel Benenson.

The survey also stated that almost half of respondents expressed averting political talk with other people “because I don’t know where they stand”. One-quarter described losing friends, and a similar proportion claimed to have avoided relatives and friends, due to politics, per the survey.

[Anti Globalist]

Funny how both sides want to secede yet both sides are scared to pull the trigger first.

[Jenard Butler]

A quarter of Americans open to taking up arms against government, poll says

I’m sure Uncle Sugar’s internal numbers show this as well, hence the uptick in mass ‘shootings’.

[Occam's Banana]

https://i.imgur.com/ORSwgT3.jpg

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1548703599810715649
https://i.imgur.com/a2S14JL.png

NEW POLL: More Trump Voters in Red States Say Secession Would Make Things Better
https://www.mediaite.com/news/new-poll-more-trump-voters-in-red-states-say-secession-would-make-things-better/
Tommy Christopher (16 July 2022)

More Trump voters living in Republican-controlled states said secession would make things better in their states than those who said it would not, according to a new poll.

Respondents to a new Yahoo! News/YouGov poll (""https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/pst9hlpdz5/20220708_yahoo_tabs.pdf) were asked “Do you think your state would be better off or worse off if it left the United States and became an independent country?”

Among all respondents, more than twice as many said they’d be “worse off” (43%) as those who said things would be “better off” (18%), while 15% said things would be about the same and another 24% responded they were “not sure.”

But Yahoo News West Coast Correspondent Andrew Romano broke down the responses to a more granular level, and found people in red states who voted for former President Donald Trump were much more amenable to seceding:


Red-state Donald Trump voters are now more likely to say they’d be personally “better off” (33%) than “worse off” (29%) if their state seceded from the U.S. and “became an independent country,” according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

It’s a striking rejection of national unity that dramatizes the growing culture war between Democratic- and Republican-controlled states on core issues such as guns, abortion and democracy itself. And an even larger share of red-state Trump voters say their state as a whole would be better off (35%) rather than worse off (30%) if it left the U.S.

The survey of 1,672 U.S. adults, which was conducted from July 8 to 11, comes as a series of hard-line conservative decisions by the Supreme Court — coupled with continued gridlock on Capitol Hill — have shifted America’s center of political gravity back to the states, where the parties in power are increasingly filling the federal void with far-reaching reforms of their own.


Given the attention surrounding the blockbuster January 6 hearings into the Trump-fueled attack on the Capitol, the numbers could have been worse.

[Occam's Banana]

The Economics of National Divorce

Lots of Americans now openly discuss the idea of National Divorce, focusing on the political, cultural, and social divisions in America. But what about the economics? How would issues like debt, entitlements, and defense be addressed if the US split into two or more new political entities?

Mises.org senior editor and economist Ryan McMaken joins Jeff Deist to discuss.

Listen to Hoppe on centralization and secession: https://mises.org/library/political-economy-centralization-and-secession



00:00
Introduction


02:16
Research on National Breakups


04:16
Are Bigger Nations Better?


07:20
Decentralization and Secession


10:25
What Happens to the National Debt?


14:34
The 1995 Quebec Referendum


27:19
Entitlements Under a Breakup


34:48
Breaking up the Cultural and Economic Divide


41:51
Will China Take Over the World if the USA Splits?


46:13
Global Trade with Divorced States


https://odysee.com/@mises:1/the-economics-of-national-divorce:5
the-economics-of-national-divorce/5f6a8380709b4ce14c75d19d858297ffa59bf451

[Anti Globalist]

Time to stop messing around and secede already.

[Occam's Banana]

A quarter of Americans open to taking up arms against government, poll says
Survey of 1,000 registered US voters also reveals that most Americans agree government is ‘corrupt and rigged’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/30/poll-americans-guns-against-government
Victoria Bekiempis (30 June 2022)

More than one quarter of US residents feel so estranged from their government that they feel it might “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, a poll (https://uchicagopolitics.opalstacked.com/uploads/homepage/Polarization-Poll.pdf) released on Thursday claimed.

This survey of 1,000 registered US voters, published by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), also revealed that most Americans agree the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me”.

The data suggests that extreme polarization in US politics – and its impact on Americans’ relationships with each other – remain strong. These statistics come as a congressional committee is holding public hearings on the January 6 insurrection.

This deadly attack on the US Capitol stemmed from the false, partisan, pro-Donald Trump belief that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election. Rioters attempted to thwart certification of the election, in an effort to keep Trump in office.

Although the violent insurrectionists targeted Republicans and Democrats alike, GOP Trump loyalists have insisted that the committee is illegitimate. These attacks on the committee intensified after Trump staffers themselves – including former attorney general Bill Barr – publicly described his efforts to push “the big lie” that the presidential election was stolen.

The survey indicates that distrust in government varies among party lines. While 56% of participants said they “generally trust elections to be conducted fairly and counted accurately”, Republicans, Democrats and independents were dramatically split on this point. Nearly 80% of Democrats voiced overall trust in elections, but that number dipped to 51% among independents and a mere 33% of Republicans.

Per the poll, 49% of Americans concurred that they “more and more feel like a stranger in my own country”. Again, this number reflected sharp political divisions: the sentiment was held by 69% of self-described “strong Republicans”, 65% of self-described “very conservative” persons, and 38% of “strong Democrats”.

Of the 28% of voters who felt it might soon be necessary “to take up arms against the government”, 37% had guns in their homes, according to the data.

One-third of Republicans – including 45% of “strong Republicans – hold this belief about taking up arms. 35% of independent voters, and 20% of Democrats, also agreed, the poll said.

Meanwhile, those polled voiced negative sentiments about persons from opposing political parties. Seventy-three per cent of self-described Republican voters agreed that “Democrats are generally bullies who want to impose their political beliefs on those who disagree,” and “an almost identical percentage of Democrats (74%) express that view of Republicans”.

“While we’ve documented for years the partisan polarization in the country, these poll results are perhaps the starkest evidence of the deep divisions in partisan attitudes rippling through the country,” said the Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducted the survey in May with and Democratic pollster Joel Benenson.

The survey also stated that almost half of respondents expressed averting political talk with other people “because I don’t know where they stand”. One-quarter described losing friends, and a similar proportion claimed to have avoided relatives and friends, due to politics, per the survey.

Regarding the same poll:

Nearly one in three Americans say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against the government
https://thehill.com/homenews/3572278-nearly-one-in-three-americans-say-it-may-soon-be-necessary-to-take-up-arms-against-the-government/
Brad Dress (24 July 2022)

A majority of Americans say the U.S. government is corrupt and almost a third say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against it, according to a new poll (https://uchicagopolitics.opalstacked.com/uploads/homepage/Polarization-Poll.pdf) from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

Two-thirds of Republicans and independents say the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me,” according to the poll, compared to 51 percent of liberal voters.

Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 37 percent of gun owners, agreed “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government,” a view held by around 35 percent of Republicans and around 35 percent of Independents. One in five Democrats concurred.

The findings come after a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol wrapped up its final hearing for the summer, seeking to place former President Trump at the heart of efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The panel also said Trump readily accepted and even encouraged the attack from his supporters, watching violence play out on television for nearly three hours before finally making a statement telling them to go home.

Despite the hearings, Trump still enjoys broad support among Republicans, who are more concerned about inflation, education and crime than they are about Jan. 6.

About 56 percent of Americans say elections are fair and accurate, but that number falls to 33 percent among Republicans, according to the Chicago University poll.

The division between conservatives and liberals across the country is only growing, the poll shows, and a quarter of Americans say they have lost friends over politics.

More than 70 percent of Republicans and more than 70 percent of Democrats both agree the other side “are generally bullies who want to impose their political beliefs on those who disagree.”

And half of all Americans believe the other side is misinformed about politics because of where they get their information and news, the poll found.

The University of Chicago-Public Opinion Strategies-Benenson Strategy Group poll was conducted May 19 to May 23 among 1,000 registered voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.53 percentage points.

[Occam's Banana]

A National Divorce?
Dave Smith and Reason's Zach Weissmueller discuss the libertarian case for and against breaking up the United States.
https://rumble.com/v1dlc3s-a-national-divorce.html
v1az66k

Should Libertarians Root for a National Divorce?
Dave Smith discusses the libertarian case for and against breaking up the United States.
https://reason.com/video/2022/07/25/should-libertarians-root-for-a-national-divorce/
Zach Weissmueller (25 July 2022)

Is it time for blue states and red states to stop fighting over their differences and just get a divorce?

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) (https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1476395186930475014), along with many on the political right, says (https://attackthesystem.com/2021/10/08/national-divorce-is-expensive-but-its-worth-every-penny/) it's time to seriously consider (https://observer.com/2016/06/the-case-for-american-secession/) breaking the country apart.

The Libertarian Party (L.P.) has also been promoting this idea on Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?q=national%20divorce%20from%3A%40lpnational&src=typed_query) since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

"Pro-lifers, why share a country with those who support the dismemberment of babies in the womb?," the L.P. tweeted (https://twitter.com/LPNational/status/1540387205155274753) in June. "Pro-choicers, why share a country with those who would take a woman's right to abort away? #NationalDivorce."

The politics of abortion are thorny and contentious even among libertarians (https://reason.com/podcast/2019/05/14/pro-life-and-pro-choice-libertarians-calmly-discuss-abortion/), but what about when it comes to the more straightforward libertarian positions on free speech, guns, and private property? Is trampling on individual rights more legitimate when a state or city government does it?

Why would it be acceptable at the local but not the federal level to relinquish our liberties to the tyranny of the majority?

Also, the kind of national divorce between red and blue America that partisans like Greene are calling for doesn't accurately capture the rich political diversity of a country designed from the founding to contain multitudes.

When I tweeted (https://twitter.com/TheAbridgedZach/status/1540493392160952323) that talk of a "national divorce" implies "there are only two sides, that you must choose one," and that the discussion is mostly about "tribal rage," I got a lot of pushback, including in the form of this (https://twitter.com/verlorkind/status/1540498431176855553) map, showing America divided into its thousands of counties, suggesting that we can Balkanize into a limitless number of political tribes.

"I love how [discussing a national divorce] gets people thinking about something that seems almost off limits," says comedian, podcast host, and possible L.P. presidential candidate Dave Smith (https://reason.com/video/2022/06/20/dave-smith-comedian-podcaster-presidential-candidate/). I talked with Smith about the possibility of a national divorce after we exchanged words (https://twitter.com/ComicDaveSmith/status/1542183525444640769) on Twitter about it. You can see a fuller discussion between us in the video above. He says the topic is a political litmus test.

"I think the question becomes how bad do you really think this current situation is?" says Smith. "Is it an inconvenience? Or is this something that is really dangerous? And I think the situation of us being a union right now is very dangerous."

The increasing centralization of political power in America is indeed concerning and dangerous. But is rooting for the breakup of the U.S. at this moment in time really all that libertarian?

This question reminds me of the litmus test posited (https://mises.org/library/do-you-hate-state) by the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard, whose work has had a major influence on Smith and the current L.P. leadership: What if a button existed that would immediately abolish all government? A radical libertarian, Rothbard writes, would "blister his thumb pushing" it, while so-called gradualists—including fellow anarcho-capitalist theorist David Friedman, whose work Rothbard was critiquing in the essay, and many of us at Reason magazine—would hold back as we fretted over the unintended consequences.

Smith, who says he's a fan of the work of both Rothbard and Friedman, says he'd blister his thumb pushing the hypothetical button.

"I think why so many people are at the point of entertaining this idea of a national divorce is that the Constitution has already been disregarded," says Smith. "Give me an amendment to the Bill of Rights, and I'll tell you how the federal government has wildly violated it in every possible way you could imagine."

He's right that words written down on an old piece of paper aren't enough to protect our rights if politicians disregard them. But they do matter.

As Austrian Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek wrote (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Constitution_of_Liberty/kV34DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=these%20individual%20rights%20and%20make%20the m%20part%20of%20a%20political%20creed), "the only safeguard" against creeping tyranny is "a clear awareness of the dangers" by the public. Having a written constitution that venerates individual rights makes "them part of a political creed which the people will defend even when they do not fully understand its significance."

Defending and improving institutions that emerged to meet precisely the challenge of safeguarding liberty—such as the courts, the media, think tanks, and advocacy organizations—was a major theme in Hayek's work.

"What we must learn to understand is that human civilization has a life of its own," he wrote (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Constitution_of_Liberty/kV34DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=What%20we%20must%20learn%20to%20understand%20i s%20that%20human%20civilization%20has%20a%20life%2 0of%20its%20own%20that%20all%20our%20efforts), and that we must cautiously and humbly "aim at piecemeal, rather than total" reform to avoid the kinds of bloody and barbaric upheaval that ideologues of the 20th century inflicted on much of the world.

Does this cautious approach mean every government institution must be preserved? Of course not. What Hayek criticized in particular, and what libertarians should aim to abolish as quickly as possible, is the monopolization of services by the state.

"A free society demands not only that the government have the monopoly of coercion but that it have the monopoly only of coercion," Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty. "In all other respects it [should] operate on the same terms as everybody else."

I'd like to see a libertarian president immediately shut down monopolistic federal agencies, end America's foreign military occupations, and for the Supreme Court to declare the modern administrative state unconstitutional.

Libertarians are and should be engaging in political struggle and pressuring courts however they can to protect Americans' liberties against all levels of government: federal, state, and local.

And the most effective method for increasing freedom is the use of technological tools that allow us to bypass the state altogether and extend the scope of the Bill of Rights: Print (https://reason.com/video/2016/11/23/3d-gun-printer-cody-wilson-on-the-right/) your own guns, communicate (https://reason.com/video/2021/02/17/how-to-fight-deplatforming-decentralize/) through encrypted services, build new worlds in cyberspace, and hold and transact in bitcoin, which the government can't censor or devalue (https://reason.com/video/2022/07/20/bitcoin-can-become-untraceable/).

In a reply (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Libertarianism/Rothbard.pdf) to Rothbard, Friedman stressed the value of humility in politics, writing that "my arguments and [Rothbard's] could be wrong; some sort of government might be the least bad alternative among workable human institutions." Rothbard, on the other hand, was "certain he was right and viewed disagreement as war."

That's why I'm not a button-pusher like Rothbard or Smith: I need to know what comes after the collapse of the state. And we simply cannot know. Always proceed with caution in the face of uncertainty.

A dramatic national divorce—and the ensuing "total" reform that Hayek warned about—could lead to a more libertarian world, or it could lead to chaos and destroy the hard-won liberties that emerged from centuries of unplanned human effort.

It's a gamble. How lucky do you feel?

The Constitution isn't a holy text. It's not an all-powerful shield against government tyranny. But it is, as Frederick Douglass once put it (https://edsitement.neh.gov/student-activities/frederick-douglasss-what-slave-fourth-july) "a glorious liberty document." For libertarians, it can be a weapon—quite a powerful one—in the arsenal needed to defend our liberties and decentralize power. Instead of tossing it aside, maybe the task is figuring out how better to wield it.

Watch my conversation with Smith in the video above.

[TheTexan]

Zach makes a ton of weak excuses in that video for why not to secede, but it all seems to be based on his quivering fear of big daddy Lincoln coming to kill him.

Give your balls a tug Zach.

[CaptUSA]

Zach makes a ton of weak excuses in that video for why not to secede, but it all seems to be based on his quivering fear of big daddy Lincoln coming to kill him.

Give your balls a tug Zach.

When the plane is in a nosedive, you'll always have some trying to pull back on the yolk and others grabbing the parachutes.

[donnay]

Serious question: If what everyone wants, is to secede, will they become the new Amish? What will this new country do when the ones they secede from starts sabre rattling and put sanctions in them--etc...

[acptulsa]

Serious question: If what everyone wants, is to secede, will they become the new Amish? What will this new country do when the ones they secede from starts sabre rattling and put sanctions in them--etc...

Where are the nuclear solos? They ain't in Manhattan.

[acptulsa]

As for the new Amish, huh? I'm pretty sure the old Amish are gestating the new Amish. Are you saying you don't think Flyover Country can build cars, can openers, fingernail clippers? What do we do with Washington's input that we can't do a damned sight better without it?

[donnay]

As for the new Amish, huh? I'm pretty sure the old Amish are gestating the new Amish. Are you saying you don't think Flyover Country can build cars, can openers, fingernail clippers? What do we do with Washington's input that we can't do a damned sight better without it?

I do not think for one minute that people in America can basically go off this grid and do better than what they left. However, I am not sure if people are realizing that we are dealing with very evil people. They are not going to let people live freely without a fight.

[acptulsa]

I do not think for one minute that people in America can basically go off this grid and do better than what they left. [You speak of "this grid" as if the electric distribution network up there in New England and the one here cannot function independently, yet we've never had a blackout or brownout. When they happen, we laugh at New Yorkers while we watch them on TV.


However, I am not sure if people are realizing that we are dealing with very evil people. They are not going to let people live freely without a fight.

Rest assured that you aren't the only person in the country who has had that thought cross their mind. Why do you think that, even as they were trying to start WWIII they were trying to purge the military of the non-woke and vax-resistant?

That said, I'll ask you again. Where are the silos? Are they all on the national mall?

[donnay]

Rest assured that you aren't the only person in the country who has had that thought cross their mind. Why do you think that, even as they were trying to start WWIII they were trying to purge the military of the non-woke and vax-resistant?

That said, I'll ask you again. Where are the silos? Are they all on the national mall?

I guess I am not following what you are asking. I am saying these evil people want a civil war. If a quarter of the country chose to secede, it will give them exactly what they want. Have we learned nothing from history?

[acptulsa]

I guess I am not following what you are asking. I am saying these evil people want a civil war.

Do they?

History hasn't really taught us how to handle a situation where one side of a civil war has ostensible control of enough weapons of mass destruction to end life in Earth, but the majority of them are in the territory of the other side, manned by troops who are part of those local communities.

[Occam's Banana]

Zach makes a ton of weak excuses in that video for why not to secede, but it all seems to be based on his quivering fear of big daddy Lincoln coming to kill him.

Give your balls a tug Zach.

In the accompanying article, he is bizarrely obsessed with the question of anarchy, and particularly the opposing takes of Rothbard & Friedman with respect to the "would you press a button to abolish the state?" thing - none of which has anything at all to do with the issue of "national divorce". (And in any case, there is no such button and never will be, so arguing over whether one ought to want to push it is purely symbolic, at best - and no more useful than arguing over whether pink unicorns fart flower-scented rainbows.)

[donnay]

Do they?

History hasn't really taught us how to handle a situation where one side of a civil war has ostensible control of enough weapons of mass destruction to end life in Earth, but the majority of them are in the territory of the other side, manned by troops who are part of those local communities.

Absolutely they do.

Proverbs 6:16-19 KJV
These six things doth the LORD hate: Yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, Feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, And he that soweth discord among brethren.

[acptulsa]

Do they?

History hasn't really taught us how to handle a situation where one side of a civil war has ostensible control of enough weapons of mass destruction to end life in Earth, but the majority of them are in the territory of the other side, manned by troops who are part of those local communities.

Absolutely they do.

Proverbs 6:16-19 KJV
These six things doth the LORD hate: Yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, Feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, And he that soweth discord among brethren.

Hm.

Good advice, bit kind of lacks specificity. They may be proud, bloody, scheming, lying, mischievous and divisive, and God may well be spectacularly unimpressed. But do they want absolute rule over an empty, radioactive wasteland?

[donnay]

Hm.

Good advice, bit kind of lacks specificity. They may be proud, bloody, scheming, lying, mischievous and divisive, and God may well be spectacularly unimpressed. But do they want absolute rule over an empty, radioactive wasteland?

These people are psychopaths, if it get's rid of you but takes them out in the process, their agenda is done.

[acptulsa]

These people are psychopaths, if it get's rid of you but takes them out in the process, their agenda is done.

You don't understand psychos in the least.

It's all about them. If killing you inconveniences them too severely, they don't do it. Nothing else will stop them. But that does.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/ProgStateProj
https://i.imgur.com/VWXkfIG.png

https://twitter.com/ProgStateProj/status/1552114031472803841
https://i.imgur.com/l7vfg98.png

[acptulsa]

https://i.imgur.com/l7vfg98.png

Do it. Secede and kick all your white people out. I dare you.

Where's the popcorn?

[Occam's Banana]

According to a mega-survey (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/19/one-in-five-us-adults-condone-political-violence-survey) conducted by researchers at University of California, Davis, and released this month, one in five US adults say political violence is justified at least in some circumstances. A much smaller portion of survey respondents, 3%, believe that political violence is usually or always justified. [see this post in this thread - OB]




Remarkably, just over half of the sample group – 50.1% – agreed with the contention that in the next few years the US would confront another civil war.

//

[Occam's Banana]

"Our nation's ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1563698354592387072
1563698354592387072

[TheTexan]

"Our nation's ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1563698354592387072
1563698354592387072

I'm a little disappointed that she didn't say Texas, I must work harder .

[Anti Globalist]

"Our nation's ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1563698354592387072
1563698354592387072
Conservatives still living in New York should have taken her advice years ago.

[Occam's Banana]

"Our nation's growing ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1564651933297696769
https://i.imgur.com/BfCtEF6.png

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1573347690381209605
https://i.imgur.com/3sbGBhn.png

[Snowball]

Possibly the most concise and accurate defence of secession as a fully American right, steeped in historical affirmation, that I've ever heard:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Mg7H8-v2c

Audio download page:
https://www.thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-24

[Anti Federalist]

That said, I'll ask you again. Where are the silos? Are they all on the national mall?

When the USSR broke up, the satellite states behind the iron curtain that did NOT have nukes, were the ones that suffered the most bloodshed.

[Anti Federalist]

I'm a little disappointed that she didn't say Texas, I must work harder .

You really want more New Yorkers showing up in TX?

[Anti Federalist]

"Our nation's ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1563698354592387072
1563698354592387072

They've been doing that long before you started shooting your mouth off, sugar britches.


Goodbye Big Apple: More People Are Leaving New York Than Any Other State In The U.S.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/people-leaving-new-york/

1 Jan 2020

"New York has lost nearly 1.4 million residents to the rest of the country since 2010 – and largely as a result of this outflow, the Empire State's total population barely budged during the decade,"

[Anti Federalist]

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1573347690381209605
https://i.imgur.com/3sbGBhn.png

Sounds like a good trade:

Let's abort our children, so we can continue working deep in the bowels of Mega-Global-Hyper corp, make this man a billionaire in the process so at the end of it all, instead of children and grandchildren to provide joy and support in our waning years before we die and get composted, we'll receive a sweatshirt and a Chinese made gold plated watch inscribed "Thank you for your service".

Oooo...sign me up.

Make it a package deal with a Chairman Mao bike, a soybean Yurt to live in and some bug burgers, accompanied by a Cardi B soundtrack 24/7.

Yay.

[Occam's Banana]

Breaking Away: On Secession and Small States

Until the day comes that a majority of the population wants to abolish all states, it makes sense in the meantime to look to ways that will reduce the power of states, localize that power, and take at least some of it out of the hands of some of the most powerful ruling state elites. This episode of Radio Rothbard features Ryan McMaken's talk presented at the Mises Institute 40th Anniversary Supporters Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 7, 2022.

Recommended Reading


"On Secession and Small States" by Ryan McMaken: https://mises.org/RR_102_A

"What We Mean by Decentralization" by Lew Rockwell: https://mises.org/RR_102_B

"The European Miracle" by Ralph Raico: https://mises.org/RR_102_C

"Nations by Consent" by Murray N. Rothbard: https://mises.org/RR_102_D


Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at https://mises.org/RadioRothbard

https://odysee.com/@mises:1/breaking-away-on-secession-and-small:3
@mises:1/breaking-away-on-secession-and-small:3

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/katiehobbs/status/1580942935650025475
1580942935650025475

[Anti Globalist]

Who wants to bet that no matter what happens in the 2024 election there still won't be a separation from either side?

[PAF]

Who wants to bet that no matter what happens in the 2024 election there still won't be a separation from either side?

2024 election. People who vote will never separate.

In fact, even among the people who claim to want to secede, they constantly insist the Fed.gov "do something".

[PAF]

Who wants to bet that no matter what happens in the 2024 election there still won't be a separation from either side?

For sh|ts and grins, I've been looking at candidates positions, and talking to folks to get an idea of what they feel is important to them. I have yet to find anybody who is furious about the new 87,000 armed IRS agents. A couple of people mentioned it, but all they said was "what can you do about it, just be extra careful how you file, you might be better off paying to have it done". Aside from that, the #1 biggest complaint is "stolen election". Which tells me as long as they feel like their vote counted, they are perfectly content with the way things are.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1612595605536219136
https://i.imgur.com/UUD2xjr.png

[page 92] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/0g9mwkpaky/econTabReport.pdf
https://i.imgur.com/GT9n5Wl.png

[Origanalist]

https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1612595605536219136
https://i.imgur.com/UUD2xjr.png

[page 92] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/0g9mwkpaky/econTabReport.pdf
https://i.imgur.com/GT9n5Wl.png

So, there's hope?

[A. Havnes]

2024 election. People who vote will never separate.

In fact, even among the people who claim to want to secede, they constantly insist the Fed.gov "do something".

This is everything wrong with the country. The people who want to secede really just want another form of big government - one that makes the laws they want. They can’t fathom a world where the government isn’t shaping your life.

[jbnevin]

I could create a poll question that would elicit that response.

FU FRANK

[Occam's Banana]

The Economics of National Divorce

Lots of Americans now openly discuss the idea of National Divorce, focusing on the political, cultural, and social divisions in America. But what about the economics? How would issues like debt, entitlements, and defense be addressed if the US split into two or more new political entities?

Mises.org senior editor and economist Ryan McMaken joins Jeff Deist to discuss.

Listen to Hoppe on centralization and secession: https://mises.org/library/political-economy-centralization-and-secession



00:00
Introduction


02:16
Research on National Breakups


04:16
Are Bigger Nations Better?


07:20
Decentralization and Secession


10:25
What Happens to the National Debt?


14:34
The 1995 Quebec Referendum


27:19
Entitlements Under a Breakup


34:48
Breaking up the Cultural and Economic Divide


41:51
Will China Take Over the World if the USA Splits?


46:13
Global Trade with Divorced States


https://odysee.com/@mises:1/the-economics-of-national-divorce:5
the-economics-of-national-divorce/5f6a8380709b4ce14c75d19d858297ffa59bf451

The Economics of National Divorce, Part II

Tom Woods joins the show for a look at the hottest political topic of the day, namely national divorce. This is a spirited discussion of the politics, economics, and mechanics of how America might break up.



00:00
Introduction


01:00
The "National Divorce" Debate


14:11
Misinformation from the "Experts"


23:02
The Economic and Political Split


https://odysee.com/@mises:1/the-economics-of-national-divorce,-part:b
@mises:1/the-economics-of-national-divorce,-part:b

[Occam's Banana]

"Our nation's ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659094966671425536
to: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659100183282565124
https://i.imgur.com/PbCN1dW.png

[Anti Federalist]

This is everything wrong with the country. The people who want to secede really just want another form of big government - one that makes the laws they want. They can’t fathom a world where the government isn’t shaping your life.

I don't.

I'd be happy with seceding states adopting an updated Articles of Confederation for common defense and border control and that's about it

[69360]

In Florida a law was just passed that makes it a crime to provide hormones or transgender surgery to a minor. In Massachusetts it was just proposed to charge parents with child abuse if they do not provide these things. How do you justify such disparate laws in the same country based on an internal border? Something is probably going to give at some point.

[Anti Federalist]

In Florida a law was just passed that makes it a crime to provide hormones or transgender surgery to a minor. In Massachusetts it was just proposed to charge parents with child abuse if they do not provide these things. How do you justify such disparate laws in the same country based on an internal border? Something is probably going to give at some point.

That is exactly right.

Those positions cannot be reconciled.

Unless the fedgov were to greatly reduce its scope and authority so each state would be become a mostly independent republic, free to choose its own course.

Like the constitution says they are.

[Occam's Banana]

THREAD: "Travel advisories" issued for Florida by woke BIPOC & LGBTQ groups

[Occam's Banana]

"Our nation's growing ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/BullMooseProj/status/1668707131770515458
1668707131770515458

https://i.imgur.com/5Xc3QCj.gif

[devil21]

Considering how the banksters completely rejiggered the country's assets and the monetary system and the legal system, including subverting the Bill of Rights, in the Reconstruction period after the bankster created Civil War (slave trade was facilitated by banksters), I'm not convinced such a movement is advisable.

Change my mind?

[Occam's Banana]

Change my mind?

Why? :confused:

https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1357370873548853250
https://i.imgur.com/cIw0wq6.png

[Anti Federalist]

Considering how the banksters completely rejiggered the country's assets and the monetary system and the legal system, including subverting the Bill of Rights, in the Reconstruction period after the bankster created Civil War (slave trade was facilitated by banksters), I'm not convinced such a movement is advisable.

Change my mind?

I don't want to stick around for the genocide.

[devil21]

^^^^^^^Those aren't logical arguments. Occam's response is what a 20yo girl would say when challenged about why she's not a 10/10.

[Occam's Banana]

Change my mind?


^^^^^^^Those aren't logical arguments. Occam's response is what a 20yo girl would say when challenged about why she's not a 10/10.

Nice try - but my response was not an "argument" ("logical" or otherwise).

It was a rather clear and obvious statement that "I don't want to change your mind or argue with you".

Or at least, I thought it was. (Apparently, basic English escapes those who imagine that others are somehow accountable to their "challenges".)

[Anti Federalist]

^^^^^^^Those aren't logical arguments. Occam's response is what a 20yo girl would say when challenged about why she's not a 10/10.

No, they are not.

Your house is on fire.

You are trapped inside.

Saying, at that point, "I better not stay here" is not the result of careful logical analysis.

It's a simple statement of fact.

Assuming you want you and your posterity to live.

[Occam's Banana]

"Our nation's growing ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/kfor/status/1669543614039441408
https://i.imgur.com/3VYEE4k.png

[devil21]

No, they are not.

Your house is on fire.

You are trapped inside.

Saying, at that point, "I better not stay here" is not the result of careful logical analysis.

It's a simple statement of fact.

Assuming you want you and your posterity to live.

But what if by opening the door to exit, you then allow embers to fly out which ignite the rest of the neighborhood? My point is simply that we've (Americans) been here before, the history is documented and the results weren't great for the average person, as it gave the bankers carte blanche to change whatever they wanted, including the very founding documents of the republic. It's clearly being engineered once again in order to carry out the Great Reset that they want.

[Occam's Banana]

THREAD: Idaho GOP denounces FBI, calls for abolition if not "reformed"


https://twitter.com/remnantposting/status/1673446175947759616
https://i.imgur.com/GNiedp5.png

[Occam's Banana]

"Our nation's growing ideological self-segregation is proceeding nicely." -- Michael Malice

https://twitter.com/dcexaminer/status/1690652559369748480
https://i.imgur.com/vtHAC83.png

[Occam's Banana]

Local Secession Movements: From Staten Island to the South
https://odysee.com/@mises:1/local-secession-movements-from-staten:d
by Mises Media (https://odysee.com/@mises:1) | 07 September 2023

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at county and city-level secession movements and what it means for political self-determination. In a recent article, Ryan McMaken highlighted renewed calls for Staten Island to secede from New York City, but other recent examples include attempts by taxpayers in areas of Georgia and Alabama to break away from the control of mismanagement of local governments. Tho and Ryan look at the value these initiatives have, and the arguments used to try to stop them.

Recommended Reading:

"Let Staten Island Secede!" by Ryan McMaken: https://Mises.org/RR_150_A [see below - OB]


@mises:1/local-secession-movements-from-staten:d



Let Staten Island Secede!
https://mises.org/wire/let-staten-island-secede
by Ryan McMaken (https://mises.org/profile/ryan-mcmaken) | 04 September 2023

Homeless foreign nationals (i.e., "illegal aliens") began arriving last week at a makeshift shelter in a Staten Island neighborhood. The arrivals come after New York City Mayor Eric Adams decided that a shuttered Catholic school on Staten Island would be used to house some of the more than 100,000 migrants (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/two-migrants-describe-arrival-life-nyc-city-shelters-thousands-rcna102845) who have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022.

Staten Islanders, however, were given no veto and no role in determining the location of the shelter or what policies (https://nypost.com/2023/08/26/politicians-demand-curfew-at-staten-island-migrant-shelter/) might be implemented there. As a result, hundreds of protestors this week assembled to express their opposition to the plan which was apparently hatched in secret and only revealed to Staten Island residents when the plan was already fait accompli. As the New York Post reported this week (https://nypost.com/2023/08/28/angry-nyc-residents-plan-new-protest-of-migrant-shelter-at-former-catholic-school/), "Local GOP state Assemblyman Michael Tannousis told The Post the area was 'blindsided' by the new shelter, leading to stronger opposition. 'I found out about this location when it was already out in the newspaper,' he said, adding the city previously denied to him they were going to house migrants there."

It's easy to see why the policymakers who run New York City haven't bothered to ask neighborhood representatives if they want a migrant shelter in their neighborhood. The residents of Staten Island, who tend to lean more politically conservative than other in other regions of the city, are easily outnumbered by hardline social-democrat residents of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and other boroughs. When it comes to city-wide politics, in other words, Staten Islanders don't matter, so the city government in Manhattan does what it wants with Staten Island's resources, and to Staten Island's residents.

How one feels about migrants, however, is irrelevant in answering the question of whether or not the half-million residents of Staten Island ought to be allowed self-determination in matters that clearly and deeply affect matters in their own neighborhoods and businesses. The New York Post reports (https://nypost.com/2023/08/30/malliotakis-renews-calls-for-staten-island-to-secede-from-nyc-over-migrants/):

Staten Islanders are renewing calls for a breakaway from the Big Apple — with Mayor Eric Adams’ controversial call to bus migrants to a local shuttered Catholic school proving to be the latest breaking point.

One local pol even has an idea for the independent borough’s new slogan: “Nonsicut tu quoque,” City Councilman Joe Borelli told The Post.

It roughly translates to, “We don’t like you either.”

Staten Island has always been an odd fit within the five boroughs, sitting on the outskirts of New York City with a predominantly conservative Republican population that butts heads with the rest of the city.


Unfortunately, the borough faces many uphill challenges in seceding. Both the NYC City Council and the state legislature would need to approve the move.

The Post continues:

According to locals, now is the time.

“Let’s do it!” said resident Joseph Milkie, 41. “We should get a bigger percentage of the Verrazano tolls to subsidize what it costs us to break away. What the city is doing to our neighborhood stinks.”

Anthony Antico, a 56-year-old contractor and lifelong Staten Islander, said he’s behind secession “100%.”

“Our values do not line up with the other boroughs,” Antico said Wednesday. “We do not believe in woke politics. Right is right, and wrong is wrong.”


This isn't the first time Staten Islanders have seriously talked about secession. As (Queens resident) Gregory Bresiger reminded mises.org readers in 2021, Staten Islanders in 1993 voted to secede from the city (https://mises.org/wire/decentralize-new-york-city):

In 1993, they voted about two-to-one in a nonbinding referendum to secede and become the independent city of Staten Island. The measure was sent to the state legislature. But the referendum was later invalidated. Staten Island advocates hadn’t received “a home rule” approval message from the New York City Council.


In other words, the democracy-loving overlords of New York City decided that the lopsided vote in favor of separation would not be honored because of a technicality. It turns out majority-rule, which we're so often told is the cornerstone of government legitimacy, doesn't matter at all when the majority doesn't agree with the elites.

The outcome, of course, should surprise no one. As with so many cities, the more suburban, more crime-free parts of the city serve as low-maintenance areas of the city that also generate tax revenue that are useful to the ruling class in Manhattan. If we add to this the typical control-freakism harbored by most policymakers, it is easy to see why few in New York City's government have any intention of ever letting Staten Islanders rule themselves. There is also the contempt with which the urban elite generally regards their "constituents." Bresiger continues:

Ultimately, Staten Island and some other overtaxed New Yorkers in this mismanaged sprawling city hate being governed by a Manhattan ruling class that often scorns and misunderstands “outer borough” residents. (i.e., those not living in Manhattan). This Manhattan ruling class quietly regards most of us as bunch of Guidos, Archie Bunkers, or local Babbitts. We are the New York City version of “deplorables.”


For reasonable people not committed to exploiting the business owners and residents of Staten Island, the right to secession in this case should be abundantly clear. There is absolutely no respectable political "principle" which tells us that Staten Islanders must remain part of New York City, or even New York State. With nearly 500,000 residents, there is no reason why that's "too small." It's hard to imagine what criteria renders this population insufficiently large for statehood when numerous US states in the mid-twentieth century (i.e., Vermont, New Hampshire, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah Nevada) had populations below 500,000. We might also note that Staten Island has a relatively high median household income. Were Staten Island to become its own state, it would have a population about 100,000 people smaller than the next smallest state, Wyoming. Yet, Staten Island's median household income (about $80,000) is 30 percent higher than that of Wyoming—which is itself a middle-income US state. Nor would newly erected state borders mean much of anything to commuters. Hundreds of thousands of people (https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/housing-economy/nyc-ins-and-out-of-commuting.pdf) currently commute into New York City across state lines every day.

That Staten Island secession is even controversial at all should strike us as curious. Granting the people of Staten Island their own city or state presents no "problematic" issues related to human rights, international relations, or basic justice. Even if there were reason for "concern" in these areas, that still would not invalidate the right of self-determination (https://mises.org/wire/right-self-determination#:~:text=To%20call%20this%20right%20o f,which%20they%20wish%20to%20belong.) long denied to Staten Islanders.

[Read More: "The Right of Self-Determination (https://mises.org/wire/right-self-determination)" by Ludwig von Mises]

Yet, we groan under the boot of an American ruling class that reflexively favors centralization and rule by a technocratic, national elite. If Staten Island is allowed secede, it is feared that might open up countless similar demands for self-determination across the nation. Clearly, that does not fit into the current regime's plan, and they aim to make sure the idea of secession doesn't go anywhere, ever. For the elites, the current status quo works quite well and they want to keep it that way.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1701666099031597453
https://i.imgur.com/DTRWsMK.png

https://twitter.com/TenthAmendment/status/1701971602613629206
https://i.imgur.com/EnUALs3.png

[TheTexan]

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1701666099031597453
https://i.imgur.com/DTRWsMK.png

Good for MTG, bringing this up again! :up: (ahem, Massie... Rand... ??)

[Anti Federalist]

https://twitter.com/AntiFeder1776/status/1702023056594518398

1702023056594518398

[Occam's Banana]

Separation 101 | Mark Thornton
https://odysee.com/@mises:1/separation-101-mark-thornton:c
{Mises Media (https://odysee.com/@mises:1) | 14 October 2023}

Mark contemplates the political divide in America, the lack of a middle ground, the political divisions in DC, and the turmoil over the Speaker of the House. Looking around the world, similar problems exist in many places; but, there is a tried and true solution, which Mark explains.

Be sure to follow Minor Issues at: https://Mises.org/MinorIssues
.
@mises:1/separation-101-mark-thornton:c

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/mises_media/status/1754588872359526624
https://i.imgur.com/oGykorH.png

https://i.imgur.com/efpExr3.jpg

Will a National Divorce Lead to More Individual Liberty?
https://odysee.com/@mises:1/will-a-national-divorce-lead-to-more:4
{Mises Media (https://odysee.com/@mises:1) | 05 February 2024}

Ryan McMaken debates Jonathan Casey at LibertyCon. Recorded in Washington, DC, on 4 February 2024.

Ryan McMaken (https://Mises.org/McMaken) is executive editor at the Mises Institute and co-hosts the Radio Rothbard podcast (https://Mises.org/RothPod) and War, Economy, and State podcast (https://Mises.org/WES).

Jonathan Casey is a small business owner based in Dallas, Texas. He is the Chair of the Libertarian Party Classical Liberal Caucus, and founder of Project Liberal.

Students For Liberty’s LibertyCon is the largest international pro-liberty gathering in the world. For more information, visit https://LibertyCon.com

@mises:1/will-a-national-divorce-lead-to-more:4

[Occam's Banana]

Responding to James Lindsay's Critique of "National Divorce"
https://odysee.com/@mises:1/responding-to-james-lindsay's-critique:6
{Mises Media (https://odysee.com/@mises:1) | 09 February 2024}

Bob goes solo to give a point-by-point rebuttal to James Lindsay's recent essay arguing that "national divorce means national suicide." Bob argues that James employs inconsistent claims and ignores the tremendous economic boon to an independent Texas.

James Lindsay's Article "National Divorce is National Suicide": https://Mises.org/HAP434a

Bob's Book "Common Sense: The Case for an Independent Texas": https://Mises.org/HAP434b

AntiWar.com Article on Gaza: https://Mises.org/HAP434c

Scott Horton's Interview with Arnon Soffer: https://Mises.org/HAP434d

@mises:1/responding-to-james-lindsay's-critique:6

[Occam's Banana]

Map Shows States Most Likely to Secede
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-most-likely-secede-1870679
{James Bickerton | 16 February 2024}

Twenty-three percent of Americans would support the state they live in seceding from the United States and becoming an independent country, according to a new survey of 35,000 U.S. adults conducted by YouGov.

The poll found sharp divides in support for independence by state, from 36 percent in Alaska [see this post - OB] and 31 percent in Texas to just 13 percent for Minnesota. In general, it was the larger and/or more populated states that were the most likely to support secession, along with those possessing a particularly strong regional identity.

The idea of states leaving the American union has attracted substantial attention in recent months amid near unprecedented tensions between Democrats and Republicans, which surged following the 2020 presidential election. In February 2023, House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia sparked controversy and debate by calling for a "national divorce" between "red states and blue states."

The YouGov survey found that 23 percent of adults want their state to become independent, with 51 percent opposed and 27 percent unsure. The poll was conducted between February 2 and 5.

https://i.imgur.com/UIAqR1o.png


After Alaska and Texas the state most inclined toward secession was California, where it was backed by 29 percent of the adult population.

That was followed by New York and Oklahoma, each at 28 percent, then Nebraska, West Virginia and Georgia which each had 25 percent support for independence. In Florida, Indiana, Montana and Washington, 24 percent of the population would back secession.

Following Minnesota the most pro-Union states were Ohio, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which each had just 14 percent of the adult population backing independence. These were followed by New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin and Maryland with 15 percent each, then New Jersey, Missouri, Iowa and Utah at 16 percent.

Results for Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota and South Dakota and the District of Columbia were excluded as they received less than 100 responses each, which YouGov judged too low to be of use.

On a national level, there was a noticeable difference between self-identifying Republicans and Democrats in support for their state leaving the Union, with support from 29 percent of Republicans and 21 percent of Democrats. By contrast, 60 percent of Democrats said they would oppose their state becoming independent along with 46 percent of Republicans.

Among U.S. adults, 26 percent believe the Constitution gives states "a right to secede," with 35 percent disagreeing and 39 percent unsure. Among Republicans, support for the statement rises to 33 percent while it falls to 26 percent for Democrats.

In December, the pro-independence Texas Nationalist Movement handed a nearly 140,000-strong petition (https://www.newsweek.com/texas-independence-republican-party-court-1856413) to the state's Republican party, calling for a referendum on secession, though it was rejected by the GOP, which concluded that many of the signatures were invalid.

A Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll of 814 eligible Texan voters, conducted between February 1 and 3 for Newsweek, found that 23 percent would vote for independence (https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-texas-would-vote-if-independence-referendum-held-today-1867488) if asked "should Texas be a state within the United States or should Texas be an independent country?" with 67 percent actively opposed.

"In independence referendums, you often see that those who want to secede win over the campaign," Matt Qvortrup, a political scientist who specializes in independence movements and wrote I Want to Break Free: A Practical Guide to Making a New Country, told Newsweek. In Scotland, the SNP (the Scottish National Party) came from 29 percent at the beginning of the campaign and ended at 45 percent.

"In Catalonia, Quebec, and in Scotland, support for independence was in the 20s when the issue was first discussed. This has in all cases moved within touching distance of independence."

Separately a Republican representative in New Hampshire introduced a bill to the state Legislature calling on the state to declare independence (https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-want-new-hampshire-leave-united-states-1866130) if U.S. national debt exceeds $40 trillion, with it currently standing at $34 trillion.

[Occam's Banana]

Alaska Secession Calls Grow as More Than a Third Want State to Leave US
https://www.newsweek.com/alaska-secession-calls-grow-leave-us-1870746
{James Bickerton | 16 February 2024}

Some 36 percent of Alaska residents would support the state breaking away from the United States and becoming a fully independent nation, according to a new poll.

The result made Alaskans the most likely to support their state seceding from the Union, with the result substantially above the national average of 23 percent. The survey of 35,307 U.S. adults was conducted by YouGov between February 2 and 5. Those questioned were asked whether they would "support your state seceding from the U.S.?"

The integrity of the U.S. has been the subject of intense debate amidst aggressive political partisanship, which saw the 2020 presidential election result contested by the losing candidate for the first time in modern American history.

In February 2023, House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested there could be a"national divorce" between Republican and Democratic states resulting in almost all powers stripped from the federal government and devolved to the state level.

The YouGov survey [see this post - OB] found that across the U.S., 23 percent of adult Americans would back their state leaving the American Union (https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-most-likely-secede-1870679), versus 51 percent who would be actively opposed and 27 percent unsure. Notably, the result differed substantially by party, with 29 percent of Republicans wanting the state they lived in to become independent against 46 percent opposed. For Democrats, just 21 percent said they would back their state leaving the U.S., with 51 percent actively opposed.

After Alaska, the states with the highest proportion of adults supporting independence were Texas at 31 percent, followed by California at 29 percent, and New York and Oklahoma each at 28 percent. By contrast, just 13 percent of those living in Minnesota wanted the state to secede from the U.S., along with 14 percent each of those living in Ohio, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

The Alaskan Independence Party (AIP) was founded in the 1970s to campaign for a referendum on the state becoming fully independent and became a recognized political party under state regulations in 1984. It received its strongest electoral performance in the 1994 Alaska gubernatorial election (https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1994&fips=2&f=0&off=5&elect=0), when it polled 13 percent of the vote coming a clear third behind the Republicans at 40.8 percent and the Democrats at 41.1 percent, though this was very much a high watermark and the party received less than one percent of the vote in the 2002 and 2006 gubernatorial elections.

Along with a referendum, the party advocates (https://www.akip.org/platform.html) the abolition of all property and income taxes, supports "all efforts to curtail or eradicate abortion, euthanasia and infanticide" and opposes "the borrowing of money by government for any purposes other than for capital improvements."

Earlier this month, Newsweek published an exclusive survey (https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-texas-would-vote-if-independence-referendum-held-today-1867488) of 814 eligible voters in Texas, conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies (https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/) online between February 1 and 3, which asked participants: "Should Texas be a state within the United States or should Texas be an independent country?"

In response, 23 percent opted for "an independent country," and 67 percent wanted to remain part of the U.S., with the remaining 10 percent unsure.

Secessionist campaigners have also been active in New Hampshire where a Republican legislature introduced a bill to the state House of Representatives calling on the state to become fully independent (https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-most-likely-secede-1870679) should U.S. debt reach $40 trillion, up from the current level of $34 trillion.

Speaking to Newsweek (https://www.newsweek.com/2024/02/09/texas-independence-texit-1863224.html), Carla Gericke, acting president of the Foundation for New Hampshire Independence, described secession from the United States as "an idea whose time has come and a reflection of the frustration everyone on the political spectrum is feeling."

[Anti Globalist]

Every red state should have 50% or more of their people wanting to secede.

[acptulsa]

Every red state should have 50% or more of their people wanting to secede.

Everyone thinks he or she is captain, and has to go down with the ship.

[Occam's Banana]

Ryan McMaken on the History and Benefits of Secession
https://odysee.com/@mises:1/ryan-mcmaken-on-the-history-and-benefits:c
{Mises Media (https://odysee.com/@mises:1) | 23 March 2024}

Ryan McMaken recently gave a talk at Oklahoma State outlining the history of secessions and making the case that they promote liberty and peace. He joins Bob to discuss his major themes and to address common objections.

Ryan's Talk at Oklahoma State: https://Mises.org/HAP440a [see below - OB]

Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities: https://Mises.org/HAP440b

Chapters:

00:00 - Free Book
00:28 - Introduction
03:30 - Secession and the Constitution
08:48 - Why do People Like Democracy so Much?
14:08 - Voting and Activism vs. Secession
23:43 - Human Action Conference Raffle
22:41 - Devil's Advocate: Colonialism is for your Own Good
28:51 - Ukrainian Independence
33:23 - Preventing Widespread Oppression
44:54 - Nuclear Weapons and Secession


@mises:1/ryan-mcmaken-on-the-history-and-benefits:c


The Case for Secession: How Breaking Away Maximizes Liberty | Ryan McMaken
https://odysee.com/@mises:1/the-case-for-secession-how-breaking-away:f
{Mises Media (https://odysee.com/@mises:1) | 19 March 2024}}

Presented to the Free Enterprise Society at Oklahoma State University on March 13, 2024.

Ryan McMaken (https://mises.org/McMaken) is executive editor at the Mises Institute. He is a cohost of the Radio Rothbard podcast (https://mises.org/RothPod) and the War, Economy, and State podcast (https://mises.org/WES), and is the author of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

The Free Enterprise Society (FES) is sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise at Oklahoma State University: https://fe.okstate.edu/fes

@mises:1/the-case-for-secession-how-breaking-away:f

[acptulsa]

https://i0.wp.com/clownuniverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IMG_6939.jpeg?w=757&ssl=1

[Anti Federalist]

Our current situation is intolerable.

There must be a separation of some sort.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1770070151188111441
https://i.imgur.com/777RGzX.png

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1773704664803856862
https://i.imgur.com/nyNoFgo.png

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1773708485349310634
& https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1773711797087817859
https://i.imgur.com/e5PSAP4.png

//

[Matt Collins]

//
Thomas comes to the same conclusion that I have... the federal government is not reformable. As long as the money printer exists it is impossible to significantly change the federal government's course.

[Anti Federalist]

I agree with Thomas, 3 is most likely.

Freedom is not popular, it never has been with most of humanity.

It is only very rarely defended and protected.

It is certainly not a motivating factor or prime directive in the minds of the millions of invaders swamping the republic in an unwholesome flood.

[Matt Collins]

I agree with Thomas, 3 is most likely.

Freedom is not popular, it never has been with most of humanity.

It is only very rarely defended and protected.

It is certainly not a motivating factor or prime directive in the minds of the millions of invaders swamping the republic in an unwholesome flood.I dunno. The fact there are more guns in the hands of civilians than there are civilians is a very comforting thought.

[Anti Federalist]

I dunno. The fact there are more guns in the hands of civilians than there are civilians is a very comforting thought.

Most of them are expensive paperweights.

We have the manpower, we have the arms, we have the moral and legal high ground to take action to defend this republic, or form a new one.

We lack the will and the courage to do so.

[Matt Collins]

Most of them are expensive paperweights.

We have the manpower, we have the arms, we have the moral and legal high ground to take action to defend this republic, or form a new one.

We lack the will and the courage to do so.Currently, yes. But that is subject to change, things aren't static. If the government goes too far you'll see pushback. Especially if they do it in a short amount of time or in an extreme manner.

[Matt Collins]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IDJKevdnMY


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IDJKevdnMY

[Brian4Liberty]

A small victory:



Related:


BREAKING: Louisiana Supreme Court has voted to allow residents to secede from Democrat-run Baton Rouge and create their own city.

The new city, St. George, will have nearly 100,000 people, making it one of the state’s largest cities in population.

“This is the culmination of citizens exercising their constitutional rights,” Andrew Murrell, a leader of the effort to create the city, said in a statement, adding, “Now we begin the process of delivering on our promises of a better city.”
...
https://twitter.com/LeadingReport/status/1785390375344947340

[Occam's Banana]

A small victory:

THREAD: LA - city of St. George secedes from Baton Rouge

[fisharmor]

A small victory:

https://orthodoxwiki.org/George_the_Trophy-bearer


In 303, Diocletian issued an edict authorising the systematic persecution of Christians across the Empire. His caesar, Galerius, was supposedly responsible for this decision and would continue the persecution during his own reign (305–311). It is believed that George was ordered to take part in the persecution but instead confessed to being a Christian himself and criticised the imperial decision. An enraged Diocletian proceeded in ordering the torture of this apparent traitor and his execution.Then, after innumerable forms of torture, George was executed by decapitation in front of Nicomedia's defensive wall on April 23, 303.

Yeah. Great name for a newly seceded city. :rolleyes:

[Occam's Banana]

THREAD: Rasmussen poll: 41 percent think civil war in US likely within 5 years