Red Land, Blue Flame: Secession and Leftist Paper Tigers (5)
This week, we are back to our wonderful maps, along with a dissection of yet another grossly misleading article from the Independent California Institute.
Are you new to my “Red Land, Blue Flame” series?
In it each week over the next 51 weeks, I’ll examine the growing political, geographic, and cultural fractures unfolding and developing across the United States—between cities and countryside, blue and red, left and right.
SUBSCRIBE right here and now to follow the full series.
And, be sure you learn all you can about “The Second Bill of Rights” here on my Substack channel and on the SBOR website! Join the SBOR mailing list today!
Eight months have elapsed since the 2024 presidential election, yet the political vocabulary of separation has unsurprisingly advanced with energy! Pollsters now ask straight-faced questions about whether Californians or Texans would vote to leave the Union; state legislators file constitutional amendments that would once have been dismissed as eccentric performance; party platforms discuss independence in prose only half removed from a declaration. Against that backdrop, the absence of any serious interrogation of the role that force, coercion, or deterrence inevitably play when consent is refused stands out like a missing limb.
A Poll That Glides Over the Hard Question
At the end of June, the Independent California Institute released a YouGov survey showing forty-four percent of respondents ready to endorse a peaceful ballot measure that would authorize negotiators to pursue independence for California. The report is at pains, almost comically so, to stress the word “peaceful,” and it offers no scenario in which Washington says “no” and Sacramento (read Los Angeles and San Francisco though) proceeds anyway. Equally striking, the institute published no urban–rural or county-level crosstabs, a choice that rolls Silicon Valley and Siskiyou County into one statistical smoothie, obscuring the very geography on which any contest would hinge.
Why the Crosstabs Matter
California’s electoral cartography—visible in the precinct-by-precinct map that starts this article—reveals a coastal archipelago of blue running from Humboldt through Los Angeles, surrounded by an interior sea of red that stretches to the Nevada and Oregon lines. RAND studies indicate that firearm ownership percentages are markedly higher in the state’s non-urban counties, as are National Guard enlistments and per-capita veteran populations. When those variables are arrayed against the precinct-by-precinct map, the unspoken implication is that enthusiasm for resisting federal intervention would rise as population density falls—precisely the pattern invisible in the poll’s topline figures.
Paper Tigers and Partisan Cycles
Experience over many years now suggests a rhythm: progressive demands for Calexit crescendo when a Republican occupies the White House and subside the moment a Democrat returns; conservative talk of TEXIT follows the same inverse cadence. Yet rhetoric alone does not equal coercive potential. Firearms, logistics networks, and Guard command structures have not moved from Bakersfield to Berkeley, nor from Austin to Dallas, just because hashtags trended on X. Much of the loudest “resistance,” in other words, issues from quarters least prepared to enforce it.
Texas: A Different Register of Seriousness
Contrast California’s polling exercises with Texas, where the state Republican platform adopted in 2024 endorses a referendum on independence and where the Texas Nationalist Movement opened its first county branch this past February, claiming organizers in jurisdictions that account for more than three-quarters of the state’s electorate. However sketchy some of the strategic documents may be, they speak openly of commanding the Texas Military Department, denying export terminals to Washington, and leveraging upstream energy as a negotiating chip—concepts notably absent from California’s ballot literature.
Calexit 3.0: The Legal Mirage
California’s Secretary of State cleared a 2028 independence referendum petition for circulation in January. The initiative statute itself concedes that any final severance would require congressional blessing—a hurdle no credible analyst expects the US House and Senate to grant—so from the outset the campaign carries within it the seed of confrontation. Once that hurdle is reached, advocates will face a fateful choice: abandon the project or cross the line from plebiscitary politics into defiance.
New Hampshire’s Libertarian Thought-Experiment
Across the country, New Hampshire’s CACR 32 re-appeared in 2022, a constitutional amendment that would peaceably declare the Granite State a sovereign nation. It had no chance of passage in Concord, but its repeated introduction confirms that the centrifugal impulse is not confined to the Sunbelt or the Pacific Rim.
The National Pulse—And an Unasked Question
The University of Virginia’s Project Home Fire survey (September 2023) found forty-one percent of Trump voters and nearly one-third of Biden voters at least “somewhat” open to red- or blue-state separation. A February 2024 YouGov mega-sample, meanwhile, placed support for state independence at twenty-nine percent in California, thirty-one in Texas, and thirty-six in Alaska. Millions thus endorse a possibility that, if it materializes, would pit federal authority against local force. When the question is framed politely, respondents acquiesce to “peaceful” divorce; yet no pollster asks what happens if Congress refuses.
Keep asking the real question though: When and where will the first shots be fired?
Debunking—or Perpetuating—“Myths” About Force
C.C. Marin’s essay Texas v. What? (also from the Independent California Institute) dismisses “Myth #1” (“Secession = Civil War”) by citing the Philippines and Palau—non-contiguous territories whose departures imposed no land-border, garrison, or infrastructure dilemma on the continental United States. California, welded to the interstate highway grid and anchoring the western end of the national power network, is in no way analogous. To treat it as the Philippines redux is less rebuttal than refusal to engage reality. The same casual treatment applies, in lesser degree, to Myth #2 (no precedent) and Myth #3 (no mechanism): both may be moot points if a state announces independence and dares Washington to enforce union at rifle-point.
Three Practical Paths
Negotiated Divorce—requiring an act of Congress and presidential concurrence, the least likely option.
Incremental Nullification—withholding enforcement of federal statutes, repatriating federal lands, and daring the center to impose compliance.
Unilateral Declaration—a collision course that turns on National Guard loyalty, control of ports, and capital flight.
Every pathway ultimately reverts to who commands electricity grids, fuel depots, and battalions once consultation breaks down.
Rural Leverage, Metropolitan Vulnerability
California’s food, timber, and a large share of its fresh water rise in counties unlikely to vote for blue independence; yet the Bay Area and Los Angeles dominate the finance, media, and deep-water ports without which inland producers cannot reach the world. Each side therefore possesses a critical dependency the other lacks, but I’d place my “who wins” bets on the food and water producing areas always. Analysts who invoke “paper tigers” should not lose sight of that reciprocity nor the practical realities that food and water bring to the “negotiations.”
Flash-Points to Watch in California, 2025 – 2035
Federal court decisions voiding state firearms or environmental statutes
Treasury-imposed capital controls during a debt crisis
National Guard call-ups that the governor refuses (and sticks to, if possible)
High-profile future blue federal administration ATF or DHS enforcement actions in non-urban areas resisted by local county sheriffs and the People
None alone guarantees conflict; together they erode the perception that federal supremacy is irrevocable.
A Word from Professor David Betz
Readers seeking a disciplined treatment of escalation, insurgency, and what Professor Betz terms the virtualisation of war can find his lectures easily on YouTube; their sobriety offers a welcome antidote to both apocalyptic enthusiasm and complacent dismissal.
Closing Reflection
Secession talk has moved, in remarkably short order, from internet spectacle to legislative docket. Pollsters, legislators, and activists alike continue to cushion the subject in the language of peaceful procedure, yet the evidence they themselves publish hints at a geography, a resource distribution, and a balance of arms that make coercion—whether exercised or merely threatened—the unavoidable variable. Red land and blue flame may still share the same constitutional house, but the firebreaks continue to thin, and history records little patience for fantasies of cost-free divorce. The question, therefore, is not whether talk will turn to shots, but whose county, whose port, whose battalion will furnish the proof.
SUBSCRIBE to get the next installment of “Red Land, Blue Flame” delivered straight to your inbox. And, please tell me your thoughts, as well as SHARE this post with someone you believe needs to read it!
READ more about The Second Bill of Rights on its website.
JOIN its mailing list.
SPREAD its message everywhere.