In spring 2016, 22 local Republican conventions in Texas expressed their support for a statewide referendum on whether or not Texas should leave the union.
The powers-that-be in the party struck the resolution from the convention agenda, but it was still an impressive showing, and perhaps a harbinger of things to come.
After all, Texas seceded from Mexico in 1835 and formed an independent republic. It was poorly governed and had a struggling economy, and was annexed by the United States in 1845.
But the precedent was set and secession sentiment in Texas seems to be alive and well nearly 175 years later.
And then, of course, there’s the small matter of the Civil War, which was started by the North after 11 pro-slavery Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America.
The North may have won the war, but its consequences continue to play out in our national politics, with the South being the most conservative region in the country, a hotbed of secessionist sentiment.
Indeed, threats to secede from the United States are woven into our country’s history. Partisans have long argued that secession should be a constitutional right.
The courts have disagreed and in 1869, in Texas v. White, the Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession unconstitutional. But that hasn’t stopped anyone.
Not surprisingly, the secession fervor in the nation has moved from the right to the left. Cascadia, a wished-for nation made up of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, has many thousands of supporters.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. President Trump’s ongoing political and legal challenges regarding the call to Ukraine’s President and the Democrat’s impeachment hearings are providing fuel for the fire.
Our nation is dangerously divided these days. Each side sits in its own stubborn corner.
We seem to have lost the ability to listen to each other, to understand that in politics no one gets everything he or she wants. Compromise has become a dirty word — and that’s a very dangerous development.
It seems to me the desire to secede, not Civil War is the logical next step in a country as deeply at odds with itself as today’s America.
What would happen if secessionist extremists took the next step and militarized their efforts? The premise is an intriguing, and perhaps not as far-fetched as it might seem. As red gets redder and blue bluer, are we headed toward the Divided States of America?
If you mention the word “secession” most people think of the South during the Civil War. But today, a new movement is gaining steam because of frustration over a growing, out-of-control federal government.
A number of conservative, rural Americans are taking about seceding and creating their own states, meaning a new map of the United States of America could include the following:
A 51st state called Jefferson, made up of Northern California and Southern Oregon
A new state called Western Maryland
A new state called North Colorado
These are real movements gaining traction with voters across the country. Jeffrey Hare runs the 51st State Initiative in Colorado, an effort to fight an out-of-control legislature trying to ram big government liberal policies down the throats of voters.
“We’re at this point of irreconcilable differences,” Hare stated.
Secessionist talk has filled town hall meetings and the divide discussed is not just ideological.
“It’s predominately left versus right, but it’s urban versus rural because you typically find more typical conservative values in rural America,” Hare said.
That’s the crux of the issue. Rural Americans across many states feel they’re not being heard. Their laundry list is long and at the top of that list are stricter gun control laws.
According to Weld County, Colo., Sheriff John Cooke, the state legislature is out of control.
“They are out of touch with rural Colorado,” he said. “There is an attack on rural Colorado and it’s not just on gun control laws. It’s on several of the other bills that they passed.”
Government mandates on renewable energy, environmental policies restricting oil and gas drilling, and controversial social issues like gay marriage have also led to this divide and talk of secession.
Organizers want to create “North Colorado,” an idea that went to voters in 11 counties this past fall. But not everyone in Colorado thinks secession is a great idea.
The so-called secession movement in Colorado had mixed results this past November. Some counties approved it. Others didn’t.
But the organizers of the 51st State Initiative are undaunted, saying this type of movement takes time.
That desire for something different can also be felt in Arizona, Michigan, and in Western Maryland where thousands have signed secession petitions.
One website reads, “We intend to exercise our right of self-determination and self-governance to better secure our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Scott Strzelczyk, the leader of the Western Maryland movement, is ready to get going.
“If they are not going to listen or take our needs into consideration and govern in a way that’s more in accordance with the way we want to be governed we are seeking an amicable divorce,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Northern California and Southern Oregon, activists want to come together in the state of “Jefferson.”
Their proposed state flag includes two “Xs,” representing their feeling of being double-crossed by the state capitals of Sacramento, Calif., and Salem, Ore.
Creating a new state isn’t easy. The last time a state actually gave up territory was in 1820, when Maine split from Massachusetts. Since then, additional efforts have been unsuccessful.
The first step is getting it passed by the state legislature and then the U.S. Congress.
“This is a valid constitutional process that our founding fathers specifically wrote into the Constitution,” Hare said. “Well, if they didn’t write this into the Constitution to be used, then why did they write it in?”
But supporters have an uphill battle since the media will not be their friend.
“The danger is once the national media starts to grab hold of it, the attention is on the difficulty, the almost impossibility of it happening,” professor Derek Everett, with Metropolitan State University in Denver, explained.
State secession proponents, like Roni Bell Sylvester of Colorado, say they will keep fighting because the dismissive attitude of state legislative bodies must end.
Movements like the one in Colorado and other states could be just the beginning — at least that’s the talk at town hall meetings in places like Colorado and elsewhere.
It’s obvious that the central theme of the Democrat Party platform is now hatred and contempt for Normal Americans.
Taking their cue from the elites in Europe and Canada who are stripping dissenters of their free speech rights and religious freedoms, the leftist elite is moving to solidify its hold on power here.
In California, the leftist government is out of control. Nationally, these aspiring fascists and socialists are especially eager to disarm Normal Americans – doing so would be an object lesson in who’s the boss, as well as solving that frustrating problem of the Normals having the ability to resist.
Many people ask me whether I think this turmoil will all end in a Second Civil War. They are seriously concerned, and not without cause – the left’s hatred for Normal Americans and its dedication to totally stripping the people who are the backbone of this country of their ability to participate in their own governance is threatening to rip the country apart.
Do I think there will be a civil war? No, I think secession will be the next step. But, anything is possible – we could easily see the country split into red and blue.
As I said Civil War is unlikely, but never underestimate Democrat stupidity and hatred.
Democrats are 0-1 in Civil Wars, and if they went for another round, they would be 0-2. It’s a matter of terrain, numbers, and morale.
Democrats don’t understand the dangerous game they are playing when they talk about how they want to impose their brown shirt vision upon red America.
The keyboard commandos of the left think they can simply ignore the massive strategic challenge of imposing control by force upon a well-armed, decentralized citizenry occupying the vast majority of the country, so they babble about drones and tanks as counterinsurgency trump cards.
But there are no trump cards in war. There are men, with rifles, standing on patches of dirt, killing the people trying to push them off.
That’s the ugly reality of war. And multiply the usual brutality of war by ten when it’s a civil war.
There are two Civil War II scenarios, and the left is poorly positioned to win in either one.
The first scenario is that the Democrats take power and violate the Constitution in order to use the apparatus of the federal government to suppress and oppress Normal Americans.
In that scenario, red Americans are the rebels.
In the second scenario, which we can even now see the stirrings of in California’s campaign to nullify federal immigration law and pass gun confiscation laws, it is the blue states that are the rebels.
The Democrats lose both wars. Big time.
Let’s talk terrain and numbers. Remember the famous red v. blue voting map?
There is a lot of red, and in the interior the few blue splotches are all cities like Las Vegas or Denver.
That is a lot of territory for a counter-insurgent force to control, and this is critical.
Conservative territory is where the food is grown, the oil pumped, and through which everything is transported. And that red space is filled with millions of American citizens with small arms, a fairly large percentage of whom have military training.
Remember what two untrained idiots did in Boston with a couple of pistols? They shut a city down. Now multiply that by several million, with better weapons and training.
Let’s look at the counter-insurgent forces in the Democrat oppression scenario should they attempt to misuse our law enforcement and military in an unconstitutional manner to take the rights of American citizens.
There are a lot of civilian law enforcement officers, but the vast majority of the agencies are local – sheriffs, small town police departments.
They will not be reliable allies in supporting unlawful oppression of their friends and neighbors.
The major cities’ police departments are run by Democrat appointees, so the commands would be loyal. But the rank-and-file? A small percentage would be ideologically loyal.
However, others would be actively sympathetic to the conservative rebels. This is true of federal law enforcement agencies as well.
And the military? Well, wouldn’t the military just crush any resistance? Not so fast.
The military would have the combat power to win any major engagement, but rebels don’t get into major engagements with forces that have more combat power.
They instead use their decentralized ability to strike at the counter-insurgents’ weak points to eliminate the government’s firepower advantage. In other words, hit and run, and no stand-up fights.
It worked for Quantrill, the Younger brothers and the James boys in the Civil war, it would work again.
Let me give you an example. How do a bunch of hunters in Wisconsin defeat a company of M1A2 Abrams tanks?
They ambush the fuel and ammo trucks. Oh, and they wait until the gunner pops the hatch to take a leak and put a .30-06 round in his back from 300 yards. Then they disappear.
What do the tanks do then? Go level the nearest town? Great. Now they just moved the needle in favor of the rebels among the population.
That is exactly what happened in Missouri during the Civil War as Union forces raided and burned town after town in an effort to hunt the rebels and quell citizen support for the rebel cause.
Just like in the previous Civil War, pretty soon, military forces wouldn’t be able to be outside of their armored vehicles in public. Their forces would be spending 90% of their efforts not on actual counter-insurgency operations but on force protection.
Sure, they own their forward operating bases, and they own a few hundred meters around them wherever they happen to be standing at the moment, but the rest of the territory is bright red.
American guerillas with small arms are a deadly threat to the forces of a dictatorship.
But the military is so big it would overwhelm any rebels, right? Well, how big do you think the military is? And, more importantly, how many actual boots on the ground can it deploy?
Let’s put it in terms of brigade combat teams, which total about 4,500 troops each. There are about 60 brigades in the Army, active and reserve, here and abroad, and let’s give the Marines another 10 brigades, for about 70 brigades. Sounds impressive. But that’s deceptive.
Let’s put aside a big consideration – the existence of red states that would provide for a rebel government structure and possibly attract the loyalty of some National Guard and even federal brigades.
For example, if Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats signed a ban on privately owned guns, it’s not unreasonable to expect the governor of Texas to reject federal authority – after all, California just taught us that this is totally cool.
But in this case, look for several brigades located there to hoist the Lone Star flag.
So, now the blue states are facing unconventional and conventional forces.
Let’s ignore that problem and focus on a different challenge. Even a normal unit has about 10% non-deployable members. Now, if these troops were assigned to combat operations against other Americans, you would have significant additional losses through desertion.
Many of the senior leaders would participate and there is a certain type of junior officer only too happy to curry favor by sucking up in defiance of their oath (which is to the Constitution, not to some leftist president).
But a lot of key, capable officers and NCO leaders, and enlisted troops, would vanish. That is proper. It is a violation of their oath to unconstitutionally oppress fellow Americans; their duty would be to refuse such unlawful orders.
So, you have significantly understrength units going in. Now, how many of the troops in a brigade are actually even front line combat troops? About a third – the rest are support.
So a brigade is really about 1500 riflemen tops before you count losses. Cut those in half for sleep, training, and refitting at any one time (which is very generous) and your brigade is really 750 troops on your best day with everyone showing up.
That holds one mid-sized town. And there are hundreds of mid-sized towns. Plus there are millions of Normal Americans who would fight back. Nothing would move without their permission – a few guys shooting up big rigs along the interstate would shut down the entire trucking industry. (Bloody Bill Anderson and his men did this in the Civil War by firing on riverboats, shutting down all transportation on the Missouri River between St. Louis and Kansas City).
Bottom line: there simply are not enough military forces to clear and hold red America.
What about drones and bombers? Both are useful. But the minute a bombing strike kills some red civilians the families of counter-insurgent drone operators and pilots, they will desert and join the rebels.
Civil wars are harsh. That’s why you avoid them.
How about the blue rebel scenario? That goes even worse for the Democrats.
You have the federal government apparatus in the hands of conservative America, and the insurgents are the opposite of decentralized and armed.
They are conveniently centered in gun-free blue cities dependent on rural America for supplies. In other words, the blue civilian population is much less of a threat.
San Francisco is a hotbed of treason, but the populace is largely unarmed and is trapped in a confined area. You put a brigade on securing the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, then put a brigade on the San Francisco Peninsula to cut off the I-280 and US-101 corridors.
Next you go to the Crystal Springs Dam and cut off the water. Then you watch and wait as the tech hipsters run out of sushi, rice and kale.
After about a week, they surrender. LA is just bigger in scope – more corridors to cut off, but in the end the population concentrations in large liberal urban areas that are their strength also make them extremely vulnerable to logistical pressure.
Then there’s another factor, an intangible but a crucial one. It’s commitment. The Democrat threat to peace is based on its policies designed to deprive Normal Americans of their right to speak freely, to worship freely, and to defend themselves and their rights with firearms.
Make no mistake – millions of Normal Americans are willing to risk death to defend those rights. In fact, many swore to do so when they entered our military and law enforcement.
But is the leftist big talker willing to die to impose the fascist dream of socialism, censorship, religious oppression, and disarmament on Normal American citizens?
No. They would run to their safe space.
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