Many Californians are despondent and bitter over the result of the presidential election. This week, the Electoral College met in all 50 states (and the District of Columbia) and cast more than 270 electoral votes for President-elect Donald Trump. But none came from the Golden State, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points �" 61.5 percent to Trump's 31.5 percent; on Monday, all of the state's 55 electors voted for her.
Since the election, Democrats and others opposed to Trump have held protests, meetings, and strategy sessions to fashion responses to what is shaping up to be a very anti-California administration. In addition to his pledge to deport undocumented immigrants, Trump and the Republicans in Congress are moving ahead with their vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and possibly undo advances in fighting climate change. Given the anti-LGBT tendencies of the incoming administration, on a national level we expect to see progress for trans students reversed and benefits for federal LGBT workers curtailed. We're fortunate that California has some of the strongest LGBT laws on the books, but that doesn't mean we'll be immune from attempts to eliminate the gains we've achieved toward equality.
Resistance to the rightward shift in the country must be methodical and well-planned. We shouldn't fall for easy, knee-jerk reactions like the flawed and dangerous plan for California to secede from the United States. Dubbed Calexit, on paper the plan sounds intriguing, but KQED's California Report dug deeper last week and what it found was troublesome. For starters, the man behind Calexit does not live in the state, but on the outskirts of Siberia. Louis Marinelli heads the secessionist group Yes California and is a former right-wing activist from Buffalo, New York. He moved to Russia almost a decade ago. He then returned to the U.S. to campaign against LGBTQ rights with the homophobic National Organization for Marriage before returning to Russia.
Given that U.S. intelligence services and President Barack Obama have confirmed Russia's meddling in this year's presidential election �" with the knowledge of top officials, possibly including President Vladimir Putin �" the last thing California needs is a secessionist movement rooted in that country. Putin is also virulently anti-gay, and had rammed through his country's anti-LGBT propaganda law several years ago. Marinelli's movement, KQED reported, "was covered almost exclusively in outlets funded by the Russian government and Communist Party, before picking up more mainstream attention in the past few months."
"The ascendancy of his secessionist organization says just as much about the state of media as it does about the Russian government's ability to sway U.S. public opinion," the station reported.
Marinelli's Calexit plan has been brewing for awhile, but after Trump's stunning victory, it picked up renewed interest because several influential tech figures took to Twitter to "voice their desire for California to leave the union," reported KQED. "Among them was Shervin Pishevar, an investor and co-founder of Hyperloop One, a startup promoting a futuristic new transportation technology."
There's a distinct disinformation war spreading here. When searching for terms like "California sovereignty" or "Calexit," one finds Russian "news" coverage of Marinelli's fringe movement. There have long been fringe secessionist movements here; one, advocating the state of Jefferson, is based in northern California. But these campaigns are run by people out of the mainstream who advocate plans that are unrealistic. With the election of Trump, those movements are given new life by people who fall victim to their propaganda.
What Trump and many of his appointees fail to realize is just how dangerous Russia is. Trump thinks he has a buddy in Putin, when in reality the Russian president is using Trump's bellicose comments to further his country's interests at the expense of American ones. Putin would like nothing better than for the U.S. to abandon Syria, for example, and with Trump in charge, that might just happen. Russia's cyberattacks on the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign, and the U.S. government are just the latest examples of serious attempts to undermine the U.S.
And California isn't the only state that has the eye of the Kremlin. According to KQED's report, "Russia supports other secessionist efforts in the U.S., including the Free Vermont movement and the 'Texit' movement in Texas." (With Trump in office, Texans are less eager to entertain calls to leave the U.S., which is another possible reason secession advocates have turned their attention to California.) The leader of the Texas effort told the station that his group received a small grant from the Russian government. So the connections are in plain view for anyone who wants to see.
California is expected to challenge the Trump administration in a variety of areas, from climate change to immigration to health care. Governor Jerry Brown told a group of geophysicists meeting in San Francisco last week that the state will send its "own damn satellite" into space if Trump, who believes climate change is a hoax perpetrated by China, turns off NASA satellites researching climate change. What the state doesn't need is to become mired in a discussion about leaving the union, especially a plan spearheaded by an anti-gay man that has support in the Kremlin.