“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” – George Orwell
The January 6, 2021, Capitol riots will be remembered as a watershed moment in American history, with two vastly different impressions. The left sees this manufactured insurrection as the turning point when America’s institutions finally aligned to their ideology and flipped the country blue. The media began by creating a disinformation narrative for four straight years about Trump and his voters as racist and white supremacists. Academia had ready an army of preprogrammed automatons primed to repeat the media’s narrative. Big business fell to cancel culture and began funding left-wing organizations to prove their bona fides. The courts united to deny Trump and his supports their due process rights when the majority of over 80 lawsuits were refused to be heard. And finally, Big Tech, by deplatforming a conservative social media site and its followers, stifled their efforts to publicly challenging the democrat party's talking points. The right, on the other hand, will view this moment as the day their own sleeping giant finally woke.
Election 2020 had all the elements for fraudulent voting. Unsolicited ballots sent and resent in many jurisdictions and states. Reduced standards for absentee ballots that no longer required proof of verification. Democrats voted against legislation that would have made postal worker’s falsification of ballots a crime; called the removal of dead voters from voting rolls Jim Crow and voter suppression; and continued to refuse national measures to eliminate double voting and other forms of voter fraud. Then, with the help of the media, blocked every effort to have irregularities challenged.
The dubious results have proven to be the last straw for many Americans. The melting pot that once united disparate groups, has turned to oil and vinegar. And calls for secession are now being met with cheers and relief.
The America that flourished to become the envy of the world has grown too big. With just 4 million people at its birth in 1790, the population now sits at 330 million. The escalating size of the state now requires more uniformity and adherence to majority rules, with centralization consolidating more and more power into the hands of a few.
The early history of our country began with settlements that were vastly incompatible, with our ancestors opting to live far from one another. This preference for independence lasted up until the time of the Revolution. After the establishment of the Constitution, the new nation’s first stab at secession occurred in 1861 and resulted in the Civil War between the Union and the Confederates, causing the death of nearly 750,000 people. The debate still rages over whether the war was fought over slavery or states’ rights. Either way, slavery was not exclusive to secession efforts as we found in more recent attempts. The 2016 Trump victory sent California (Calexit) and Oregon into a tailspin with one in three Californians ready to divorce themselves from the rest. Although claims of treason are often asserted, secession is not about the betrayal of one’s country. The Constitution allows a clear path under Article V, which details the process for the revising of the law, via an amendment from either Congress or the States.
In Richard Kreitner’s 2020 book, “Break It Up”, Kreitner provides a comprehensive history of the separatist movements in the United States, that began before our official union and continue to the present day. Kreitner shows that there were rare times when the country was united, without grievances of one kind or another. In fact, when faced with the option of union or death, the colonists opted to take their chances with the latter. And while there may be many downsides to keeping the country together, breaking up will be harder than most imagine.
The United States not only boasts the largest GDP in the world, but several states are also economically larger than many countries. For instance, based on information from the IMF and the Bureau of Economic Analysis for 2019, California has a larger GDP than India, Texas has a higher GDP than Brazil, and New York has a larger GDP than Canada, increasing the plausibility that one of these states could become their own country. Smaller states are naturally more agile than larger ones and tend to have more diversity and freedom, not less. Decentralization, of one kind or another, may be the only way to recapture our lost independence.
While the topic of secession quickly turns toxic for some, secession is simply about moving borders. The Founders openly talked about the possibility of states leaving the new union, as they earnestly defended their sovereignty over the federal government. The size and scope of the national bureaucracy, however, will make a clean split difficult. States would need to consider the loss of federal money and federal jobs, which are significant in some areas. Others would have to come to terms with their loss of status as Americans. Unfortunately, the statutory government laid out in the Constitution is long gone, having been replaced with a grifters paradise that benefits some at the expense of others.
As we ponder our options, time will tell which interpretation of the January 6 incident prevails. Either way, the unfortunate event is certain to have a lasting impact on America’s future.
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