Calexit is awful and I hate it. Long post but if you live in California and you are flirting with the idea please read this. If you know a Californian who is interested in this idea, please read this. Like, OK. Let's pretend for a second that this is... possible. Here's the process in six easy peasy steps. 1. A proposition to amend the CA constitution generates enough signatures to be on the ballot for the midterm elections, somehow. 2. Fifty+ percent of Californians vote yes on the proposition in 2018, somehow. 3. The CA constitution gets amended by essentially deleting the clause saying we recognize the authority of the US government. For argument's sake, let's assume this doesn't provoke an immediate response from the federal government / the military / the Supreme Court / our own judiciary, somehow. 4. Then, in 2019, TWO YEARS FROM NOW, Californians go to the polls AGAIN to vote in an independence referendum. I think it needs a two-thirds majority and a voter turnout of something like sixty percent (we get about 40% in your average midterm, less sometimes in special elections). But let's say they get that turnout and votes, somehow. 5a. The United States is now in a constitutional crisis. Either two-thirds of Congress AND three-fourths of the states just shrug and say, "Yeah, sure" OR California somehow convenes the first Constitutional Convention since the 1700s AND gets everyone else in the room to let us go. Somehow 5b. Alternatively, California says, "fuck it we're out" and breaks away without the consent of the rest of the country (if you're wondering how that went the last time an economically vital part of the United States tried to do that, please see: The Civil War). If that happens and we DO get invaded, let's assume that our non existent California military beats the might and power of the United States military, which is already present in our borders. Somehow 5c. But for argument's sake again, let's assume that the U.S. government lets us flaunt international and national law and allows us to leave peacefully, somehow. 6. California then magically... creates a functioning government structure, holds special elections to fill that structure, prints its own currency, issues its entire citizenry with passports and new identification, creates and funds its own military and border security, creates a foreign service to facilitate international relations overnight, reaches trade agreements to bring in raw materials from other nations AND the U.S. that fund our economy, gets recognized by international governing bodies controlled by our former country the United States (bodies which already look down on and legislate against breakaway states). SOMEHOW. and then what happens after we get all this fuckery done? NOTHING. NOTHING THE FUCK AT ALL. By the time all of this rolls around, we will be a year away from the presidential re-election - which we will now have no say in. We will also have ruined the midterms by removing the single biggest block of blue from both Houses of Congress. The United States will take a sudden and more extreme lurch to the right, MORE EXTREME THAN IT IS NOW. If you sign the petition getting this horse shit on the ballot, I have no patience for you. If you vote for it in 2018, I have no patience for you. And more importantly? If you spend your days campaigning for this, spending all of your time trying to get California to be """free""" then I have less than no patience for you. I am disgusted by you. You would spend time, money, resources on a pipe dream that will help NO ONE instead of fighting against a regime that stands in opposition to everything I believe in and everything I am. A regime that is doing violence to its own citizens, that will continue to enact that violence if California magically peaces out in two years. If California seceeds, I will fucking move, because you fuckers will have doomed BOTH our countries to a slow and painful death. So fuck right off with this bullshit.
