Join Joe Hoft, Mel K, John Eastman, Esq, and Michael Jaco at the New California Event on Thursday and Friday in San Juan Obispo.
Get your tickets here.
The Crisis in California
California is the most dramatic illustration of the problem. It is the most populous state in the Union, with roughly 39 million people. A handful of coastal metropolitan regions — Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Sacramento — dominate its politics, culture, and policy. The result has been a generation of governance that many inland, northern, and rural Californians experience as tyranny.
High taxes and a hostile business climate have driven companies and families out. Open-border policies and sanctuary rules have strained public services and public safety. Destructive wildfires have been worsened by forest mismanagement. Homelessness remains a visible crisis on city streets even when official counts claim improvement. Elections have repeatedly returned the same leadership despite widespread dissatisfaction outside the urban cores. Rural counties find themselves governed by a legislature and executive whose priorities and values are alien to their communities.
The fundamental issue is structural. When one or two urban centers can permanently outvote the rest of a vast state, democratic accountability collapses for everyone outside those centers. The people who produce the food, the energy, the timber, and much of the practical work of the state are reduced to permanent political minorities in their own homes.
This is not a temporary policy disagreement. It is a constitutional and cultural mismatch that cannot be fixed by ordinary elections inside the existing state boundaries. The only peaceful, lawful, and American remedy is division.
The West Virginia Model: How a New State Was Actually Formed
Article IV, Section 3 of the United States Constitution provides the path: “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”[1]
The critical historical question is what happens when the existing state government refuses consent — or has itself rejected the authority of the United States. West Virginia answers that question.
When Virginia seceded and joined the Confederacy, the people of the northwestern counties refused to go along. Those counties wanted to remain loyal to the Union and free of slavery. Because the Confederate government of Virginia would never consent to their departure, the people of those counties did not wait for permission. They organized themselves.
Delegates from the loyal counties met, formed their own constitutional conventions, and created their own government. They established a new legislature (a Senate and a House of Delegates) based on the counties that wished to separate. They chose their own executive and began building the judicial institutions of a functioning state. In short, they did not rely on the existing Virginia government to “okay” their exit. They created a complete constitutional body themselves — a new legislature, executive, and framework of laws — resting on the consent of the people of those counties.
Congress then recognized that new government. In 1863 West Virginia was admitted to the Union as a new state. The United States accepted the legitimacy of the government the people of the region had formed. The hostile, seceded Virginia government was not allowed to veto the process. The people of the separating region, acting through their own representative institutions, and the Congress of the United States were sufficient.[2]
There is a precedent and a need. Join the courageous people of New California.
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