This I awakened to read an explanation by the Attorney General of our "more perfect Union" as to why his policy of concentrating "unacceptable" children in camps was different from that of Nazi Germany. You can click on the image below to learn more:"This is the United States of America. It isn't Nazi Germany, and there's a difference. And we don't take children from their parents, until now and I think it's such a sad day. "
- U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.)
Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday played footage of former CIA director Michael Hayden and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) comparing the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant families with the practices of Nazi Germany. “Well, it's a real exaggeration, because in Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions replied adding "Fundamentally, we are enforcing the law. Hopefully people will get the message and not break across the border unlawfully."
The U.S. Attorney General just explained actions taken as "ok" according to the law because he wasn't working for the German government in 1938 trying to solve the Jewish problem, he is working for the U.S. government in 2018 trying solve the brown people problem. That's an explanation he could use for building concentration camps with gas chambers and ovens.
After all, he is just following orders.
Unfortunately, earlier that day Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a meeting of the National Sheriffs’ Association in New Orleans: "“This department will no longer stand by and watch you attack law enforcement for enforcing the laws passed by Congress. We will not apologize for the job we do, or the job law enforcement does, or the job the American people expect us to do.”
This is what is known as the "Nuremberg defense" where in Nazi Germany genocide was the law and people were given orders pursuant to duly passed law. And much like in Nazi Germany, there is no immediate threat to the health and safety of the American public that would justify that defense.
Enough is enough. It is time for a non-violent civil war to reestablish states' rights. We can't protect people in Alabama, but we can protect them in California.
Back in 2005, I created a website Three Californias dedicated to dividing California into three states. It soon was used as a reference by others on the web because there is a surprising dearth of focused information on my state. And this November California voters will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure to create three California's.
A discussion of what today is known as a #Calexit was included. I knew then that obtaining Congressional approval to allow California to become a separate nation-state was likely to be laughingly referred to as "tilting at windmills" task.
Even seeking approval to create three states out of California would be an uphill battle at best. And it would only slightly improve for Californians a grossly unfair situation that the inherently undemocratic U.S. Constitution gives each voter in Wyoming, Alaska, and North Dakota three votes for President for every vote cast by a California voter. The cost would be a serious disruption in the economy.
In 2005 it was clear to this writer an effort to reorient those living in the other 49 states had to be made. What happened in the 2015-16 Presidential election cycle, seemed to add urgency to that goal. And on June 17 in my other blog I was still trying, with a very long post An American 21st Century Kaleidoscope versus a Civil War? Saving the Union is a struggle against pots, bowls, and mosaics, between individuality, identity, and assimilation, amid unprecedented wealth disparity.
But with this new "discussion" it is clear. Americans east of the Sierra Nevada range have a worldview, even the establishment class, one which could not be changed without a revolt.
Yes, in April of last year in the post here The Chilling Blurt-Blats of Trumpists: Jeff Sessions' Hawaii Incident reminds us to heed Sun Tzu's The Art of War I expressed a strong concern about the Attorney General of our "more perfect Union" known as these United States:
But Sessions is just an obvious symbol of a system gone bad.But as a fellow American whose frame of reference is Californian, I must consider Jeff Sessions' frame of reference in the context of his childhood and adolescence from the facts....
It isn't just that Sessions was born and raised in, and lived most of his life in, Alabama, a geographic region historically different from California, though that might give a hint. It isn't just that since the early 1700's no male in his paternal lineage ever called home a place outside the southernmost part These United States.
Rather it's all that plus the fact that his great-grandfather died at the Battle of Antietam fighting for the South in the Civil War, and that his grandfather, his father, and he are all named "Jefferson Beauregard" Sessions...
Now I know those names were commonly used among white families in the South after the Civil War. And I know that Jeff Sessions didn't name himself. But most other people likely will not share a perspective, a way of looking at things, with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III - including most any American whose lineage includes no one from the Slave States
- as in Jefferson Davis was selected as President of the Confederacy at the constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama.
- as in Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard.
By 2005 I had concerns about the Bush Administration versus California. But at no time did Bush, in order to win an election, attack trade, migration, or California's history, culture, and largest ethnic group. In fact Bush in speeches after 9/11 took great pains to protect Muslim-Americans from discrimination.
The 2016 election discourse set off loud alarms and the second minority-vote-elected President in the 21st Century was disconcerting.
In popular culture we have made caricatures of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. That is foolish. Hitler, for example, was a struggling veteran of WWI who decided to become a politician, ultimately running for national leadership. In free and open elections at his peak he won 43.91% of the vote in March 1933. By most estimates he had a 40% core popular support and, by 1938 when the economy was going well, only had about a 20% fearful residual opposition. Using today's polling methods, the other 40% were "independents" meaning they had no idea what was going on.
This old Native Californian thinks it is time to recognize just how different California is from Ohio and North Carolina and why California needs to insist on a traditional view of citizenship based on the Constitution and states' rights. California needs to build a mythology around individuality and achievement.
Let's begin with a statement of historical facts. Migrants created the California we know today while white illegal aliens from the United States made California a part of the Union. What 96%+ of Americans don't recognize is the United States government run by the ancestors/predecessors of the current Deplorables and the establishment who...
- from 1880-1943 prevented the families of one group of Californians - the U.S. citizen children of Chinese immigrants - from bringing their family members into California, targeting only this ethnic group of Asians,
- from 1930-1946 in the Mexican "Repatriation" rounded up and deported one group of Californians - American citizens of Hispanic heritage
- from 1942-1945 rounded up another group of Californians - American citizens of Japanese heritage - and put them into concentration camps, and
- in began 1954 Operation Wetback which resulted in 1,078,168 arrests and deportations by the U.S. Border Patrol resulting in several hundred United States citizens being illegally deported without being given a chance to prove their citizenship.
These are signs that what few elements of a democratic society exist in the United States are endangered, a fact which has been confirmed repeatedly.
As noted in How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’: "Americans who say that army rule would be a 'good' or 'very good' thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995" and offers this disturbing chart:
"I think we know what we're up against. We do, don't we? Donald Trump has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn marriage equality, and if you have read about the ones he says he's likely to support, he's not kidding. In fact, if you look at his running mate, his running mate signed a law that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT Americans. And there's so much more that I find deplorable in his campaign: the way that he cozies up to white supremacists, makes racist attacks, calls women pigs, mocks people with disabilities -- you can't make this up. He wants to round up and deport 16 million people, calls our military a disaster. And every day he says something else which I find so personally offensive, but also dangerous....Perhaps verbalizing that observation was a foolish mistake for a Presidential candidate. But now because over 50% of Americans under age 50 apparently cannot bring themselves to say that it is essential to live in a democratic country and 1-in-6 Americans think they would be better off under a military dictatorship, I have to go where many Americans don't like to go in their political debate.
"...You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."
Clinton is a policy wonk who understands what the difference was in Germany from 1934-1939 between (a) those who were were in political power, (b) those who were members of unacceptable minorities, and (c) those who were neither. Most of those who were neither, which was most of the populous, saw a slight improvement in their economic status and were quietly accepting-to-supportive. Those who were in power flourished. Those who were members of the unacceptable minorities were sent to concentration camps where most were murdered by the state.
And Clinton knows that the ancestors/predecessors of the current Deplorables of her parents generation offered up the same attitudes as their Deplorable descendants towards refugees as demonstrated in this survey done just before WWII:
Oh, we're not that bad now - we wouldn't let them get slaughtered, you might say. Here are the Gallup poll historical results that show the numbers haven't changed much:
By political party we see just how the results skew with Democrats favoring allowing refugees while 84% of the Deplorables prefer to allow the children of Syria to be slaughtered just like their grandparents did the German children in 1938:
California in the 21st Century is, of course, the Bluest of the Blue states. In the era of Trump bigotry, Democrats gained a super-majority in both houses of the Legislature, it has seven partisan state executives offices all filled by Democrats, two Democratic U.S. Senators, and 39 of 53 (almost 75%) of its House members are Democrats.
And, of course, California Leads The Nation In Resettlement Of Syrian Refugees.
We cannot participate in a nation that is dominated by a political party which has 84% of its members advocating allowing innocent children, women and men to die in a war for which that party's previous President is responsible for inciting.
We cannot accept Trump, supported by the Deplorables, ordering a defacto reinstatement the 1929-1936 Mexican Repatriation carried out by American authorities which forcibly sent 1.2 million U.S. citizens into Mexico, most of whom didn't even speak Spanish but just had "the physical distinctiveness of mestizos."
And, as a Pacific Rim economy, we cannot risk Trump destroying the value of our trade and migration reality.
Trade, migration, and the economy are not the only issues Californians need to evaluate. California's social and cultural policy orientation was broadly attacked with Trump supporters threatening violence.
Though we Californian's have struggled at times with social and cultural policy issues, the fact is since the Gold Rush California has been a leader in creating equal opportunities and a safe community for any migrant from any place - Ohio, China, Chile, Samoa, India, Oklahoma, Japan, Honduras. We have generally tried to provide a fair approach to what we know as civil rights issues.
Today, whether the civil rights issue is abortion, same sex marriage, legalization of marijuana, gun safety regulation, workers' rights, climate change, expression of religion, minimum wage, higher education, use of technology, etc., Californians seek fair answers and work to implement fair solutions. Settling for the status quo has never been a comfort zone in California.
Consider the abortion issue. On June 14, 1967, then California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the groundbreaking Therapeutic Abortion Act. If a "Trump Supreme Court" simply nullifies Roe v Wade, as the Washington Post article What abortion could look like in America under Donald Trump notes only a few states have Pro-Choice laws following California's example while many more have Pro-Life laws:
It is time to protect all those living in California. We need to push hard to wrench back as much of California's sovereignty as we can.
Or we could just sit back and continue to watch an old, white Alabaman determine what civil rights people have and a rich, super-religious, anti-gay-marriage white Michigan suburbanite privatize our school systems.
And we could allow government officials to abuse children because it is the law. Though it really isn't.
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