Are These the Last Days of California?

Lemme outta here!

That’s what a group calling themselves the “State of New California” is screaming as they watch the state they once loved slide deeper into a liberal canyon from which there may never be a proper recovery. According to CBS Sacramento and MSN.com, the group, led by founder Robert Paul Preston, is taking the first steps towards what they envision as complete independence from California as it is now defined.

“It’s been ungovernable for a long time,” Preston said. “High taxes, education, you name it, and we’re rated around 48^th or 50^th from a business climate and standpoint in California.”

Preston wants to create a New California out of a coalition of rural counties while leaving the urban areas on the coast to the current Sacramento government.

“There’s something wrong when you have a rural county such as this one, and you go down to Orange County which is mostly urban, and it has the same set of problems, and it happens because of how the state is being governed and taxed,” Preston said.

This isn’t necessarily akin to the secession movements we’ve seen in motion over the past year, where a group of liberals want to break California away from the United States by way of a popular referendum. Instead, Preston and his group are using the Constitution and the state legislature to make their case.

“We have to demonstrate that we can govern ourselves before we are allowed to govern,” said co-founder Tom Reed in explaining the group’s legislative approach to secession.

It may seem like a long shot, but stranger things have happened in the history of our republic. And with the way California Democrats have been acting recently, we wouldn’t be surprised if – five, ten years down the line – we actually see something like this come to fruition. If the state’s Democrats are going to become entirely beholden to special interests groups, illegal immigrants, and a national war against Washington Republicans, it would actually be shocking if we DIDN’T see citizens clamoring for a major change. There are a lot of liberals in California, but not enough to just go blithely along with any insanity that comes down the Sacramento pike. Sanctuary state? Are you kidding??

Right now, Gov. Jerry Brown, the attorney general, and the Democratic legislature seem much more interested in fighting the Trump administration than they do actually running the state. In the absence of leadership, cries of “no confidence” are bound to swell. And if some of those cries turn into movements of independence, we could literally be living in the last days of California.