The populist roots of the CalExit movement and why that Pandora’s Box has to be closed once and for all
Contrary to public belief, the CalExit movement was not started as a response to the 2016 presidential election, and was actually founded by myself, a national populist and Trump supporter.
CalExit was founded during the height of the Tea Party movement and was rooted in the type of classical liberalism championed by our Founding Fathers. When making the case for California secession, CalExit first looked to the Declaration of Independence, which not only outlines the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also expresses the right of the people to alter or abolish government when it fails to protect those rights. CalExit did not seek to alter the federal government but to abolish its jurisdiction over the state of California.
Our country was founded on a republican form of government of, by, and for the people. When that government is undermined by unelected bureaucrats, you no longer have a republican form of government. Being the agents upon which Congress and the President depend to implement the programs and policies they enact into law, unelected bureaucrats in key positions in the federal bureaucracy wield tremendous power. They use this power to sabotage the programs and policies they do not support, thereby creating a sense of dysfunction or failure of government. Voters respond by electing new leaders. These unelected bureaucrats keep their cushy offices.
Eisenhower warned us in his Farewell Address to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the military industrial complex if we were to protect our liberties and democratic processes. Our country has failed to heed that warning, instead allowing a “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” as Eisenhower described it, to wield this unwarranted influence “in every city, every statehouse, every office in the federal government.” As a result, we do not have a republican form of government, we have a type of stratocracy where the so-called defense budget is king, and the defense industry spends tens of millions each year lobbying our elected representatives to keep their lucrative armaments contracts coming.
Meanwhile, corporations and banks spend untold millions each year electing candidates to federal office that serve their interests. When your elected representatives in government are beholden to corporations and banks on Wall Street, they can no longer be held accountable by the people on Main Street, and you no longer have a republican form of government. What you have is a plutocratic corporatocracy where CEOs write their own loopholes into our Nation’s laws and Big Business and Big Banking matter more than the big picture of what is in the Nation’s best interests. When the economy goes into recession as a result of the questionable business practices of these corporations and banks—as was the case during the Great Recession in 2008—these corporations and banks are suddenly “too big to fail” and are bailed out by the very same government officials they helped elect while the people are left to fend for themselves.
Today this plutocratic corporatocracy is married to Big Tech. From the corporations that make the computers and smartphones we rely on for work and pleasure to the social media platforms we rely on for communication, this marriage creates the pluto-technocratic corporatocracy. This fusion of Big Tech and the military industrial complex—the Military Big Tech Complex—together with Big Business and Big Banking and the Deep State diminish the power of the people and give persons outside the electoral system more power over our lives than our government has. When other people hold more power over your life than you do, you are not free. When those people are unelected and therefore unaccountable to you as a voter, you do not have a republic. What you have is a wolf in sheep’s clothing—a totalitarian state pretending to be a republic with the power to regulate the way you live, surveil the manner in which you live it, and censor those who refuse to comply or conform to the accepted culture.
The Declaration of Independence rejects the use of light and transient causes as justification to alter or abolish one’s government. CalExit was formed because the federal government has evolved into a monstrous threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as outlined earlier, and it did not transform into that monster overnight, during the course of any one president’s term in office, or by the election of Donald J. Trump to that office in 2016.
The second resource for justifying the CalExit campaign was the United States Constitution, which does not expressly prohibit secession from the Union. The Constitution is a beautiful document that brilliantly established a federal government with limited powers. In fact, the Constitution quite literally contains a list of powers the federal government has. The Tenth Amendment then clarifies that all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government—powers not specifically included in that list—are powers reserved to the states, or to the people.
Since the Constitution contains no language prohibiting a state from exiting the Union, it is impossible to say secession is unconstitutional, and frankly hard to believe that the delegates of the thirteen original colonies who unilaterally declared their independence from Great Britain and went on to draft our Constitution would have been opposed to the idea—they were America’s first secessionists. The only time this issue was addressed, from a legal standpoint, was in the 1869 ruling in Texas v. White, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot secede unilaterally, but it could “though revolution or through consent of the states.” What constitutes a revolution is up for interpretation, as is how consent of the states could be obtained.
But this is the lens through which I envisioned the CalExit movement—a movement based on the values of the Declaration of Independence, the principles of the Constitution, and centrally aimed at restoring America—at least in the sliver of land called California. When I left California to take a break from politics and go teach English overseas, I eventually became a kindergarten teacher and fully-embraced my new life abroad. In the meantime, the CalExit movement I created was left in the hands of others who allowed it to be hijacked by leftists and the woke mob.
During my absence, the movement swung radically to the left. The California National Party, of which I was the founding chairman and author of its original platform, began purging members who refused to conform to their new leaders’ leftist ideology and autocratic tactics. In fact, even I was “removed” from the party. In doing so, their new leaders denied me due process by failing to inform me of meetings taking place concerning my removal, and later refusing me the opportunity to speak in my own defense when I learned of their vote after the fact, including the right to an appeal. Leftists, however, have no need for the rule of law or judicial process. Nowadays, they block everyone who disagrees with them from interacting with the party on social media.
Meanwhile, YesCalifornia, the umbrella organization I created to represent the CalExit movement as a whole, took its own jump off the deep end. Its new president, Marcus Ruiz Evans, plotted to file a ballot initiative on behalf of the Iranian government in exchange for them hosting a CalExit ‘Embassy’ in Tehran. You can find the details about that in my previous post (attached below).
Throughout the course of a year, he maintained and developed ties with Iranian agents working as journalists in the United States for Al Jazeera TV, as well as an Iranian-American lawyer in Los Angeles. He relished in the opportunity they arranged for him to be interviewed on Channel 5 in Iran, and he was very pleased with the recognition he received on social media from policymakers in that country, causing CalExit to return as a trending topic on Twitter. The Sacramento Bee had it right when they published an editorial at that time that Californians had already rejected CalExit despite Iran’s enthusiasm.
In addition to his Iranian outreach effort, Mr. Evans openly sought recognition of California independence from the communist Chinese government. This of course, at the expense of the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. He once publicly agreed with the Chinese press that American intentions in Hong Kong were sinister and were only aimed at hurting China, he encouraged China to recognize California independence as a form of retribution for America supporting the independence of Hong King, and on other occasions publicly requested that China recognize California independence.
Besides the terrorists in Iran and the communists in China, Mr. Evans’ questionable partners also included a domestic terrorist in California. Time and time again and against my strenuous objections, Evans insisted being associated with one Hannah Miyamoto, a California-based lawyer who calls the U.S. Constitution the “Slaveowners Charter” and who spewed some of the most violent and hateful rhetoric I have ever seen on Twitter. They even opened a so-called California Liberation Movement together and history has shown us how peaceful liberation movements are. If she were a Republican speaking in such a way about Democrats, Twitter most certainly would have suspended her account and might have even reported her to the Secret Service.
In one tweet, Miyamoto said she wanted to “open rivers of blood across the land” in order to protect abortion rights. On another occasion, she proposed making it a criminal offense to support Donald Trump and went on saying that his supporters—whom she refers to as trash—should be wiped out. However, the award for the most profound example of her eloquence goes to a statement she made expressing that she was open to Trump supporters being slaughtered by the thousands and for Donald Trump himself to be publicly executed like Louis XVI of France unless certain conditions of hers were met. King Louis XVI was beheaded.
Marcus Ruiz Evans resigned from YesCalifornia last fall for unrelated reasons. In short, he resigned because YesCalifornia took a public stance in support of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. That public stance was of my doing, as I had watched every minute of that trial and came to the same conclusion the jury had—that Kyle Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense. By the way, that is a mainstream position supported by the Americans on both sides of the political spectrum from Donald Trump to Tulsi Gabbard. Mr. Evans, however, wanted to use the verdict as a wedge issue between California and the rest of the country, arguing that Californians wanted to see the teenager jailed for life regardless of the evidence presented in court.
In response to this mainstream public stance, Jason Wright, a campaign volunteer who stood by Mr. Evans through all his dealings with the Iranians, through his attempts to court the Chinese, and worked with him alongside Hannah the domestic terrorist, in total disregard for judicial norms, publicly stated that the judge in the Rittenhouse trial should be imprisoned because Rittenhouse was found not guilty.
Sound familiar? Radical leftist minds think alike, and Mr. Wright, who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, is no exception. In addition, Jason Wright frequently retweets Mr. Sayed Yasser Jebraily, an Iranian official who often tweets about the collapse of the United States and whose tweets helped make CalExit a trending topic in 2020 in the midst of Evans’ effort to secure a CalExit ‘Embassy’ in Tehran.
A campaign fraternizing with communists and terrorists—both foreign and domestic—was not the principled campaign I founded and modeled off our Founding Fathers. The radical leftists hijacked the movement and used it to roleplay authoritarians in the case of the California National Party, and to build relationships with communists and terrorist regimes in the case of YesCalifornia.
That is why I ended the CalExit movement, and it is why I continue to feel a personal obligation to write about and expose that movement today—so that sometime down the road nobody ever remembers ‘CalExit’ and considers opening that Pandora’s Box again.