When Good Media Does Bad: VT and Texas Secessionist Equivalence

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As a new source, McClatchy is one of the best I read.  I like them a lot, and their facts are generally solid.  They, however, sometimes they kind of screw it up:

But to Texas separatists like Miller and Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Kilgore of Mansfield, secession is no laughing matter. Nor is it exclusive to the nation’s second-largest state.

Fanned by angry contempt for Washington, secession movements have sprouted up in perhaps more than a dozen states in recent years. In Vermont, retired economics professor Thomas Naylor leads the Second Vermont Republic, a self-styled citizens network dedicated to extracting the sparsely populated New England state from “the American Empire.”

A few things that McClatchy’s editors should know:

  1. the Second Vermont Republic has been widely discredited in Vermont, due to its ties to white supremacists;

  2. SVR is basically a waning group.  In its heyday, it had relatively small numbers, and these days, these its numbers are dwindling.

Texas has a fairly active secession movement.  It’s got over half the Republicans in the state supporting it.  It scary, disturbing, and kind of freaky.  But it, unlike the SVR, is kind of a real movement.  

There’s an old joke, which I’ve seen attributed to Larry King: “there’s a group called ‘Blacks and Jews for Pat Buchannan.’  They’re meeting in a phone booth in Wichita.”

At this point, I suspect they have a stronger active membership than the SVR.

2 thoughts on “When Good Media Does Bad: VT and Texas Secessionist Equivalence”

  1. The McClatchy piece grabbed only a small part of a much larger article by Dave Montgomery of the Star-Telegram in Austin, Texas.  The whole article is worth reading.

    Montgomery’s focus begins with discontent in Texas and expands to discuss discontent throughout the US with various aspects of big government from a federal standpoint vs state’s rights.


    Challenging Washington

    More commonplace are states’ rights movements to directly challenge federal laws, a citizen revolt that one scholar says is unparalleled in modern times. Among the actions in which states are thumbing their nose at Washington:

    Montana and Tennessee have enacted legislation declaring that firearms made and kept within those states are beyond the authority of the federal government. Similar versions of the law, known as the Firearms Freedom Act, have been introduced in at least four other states.

    Arizona lawmakers will let voters decide a proposed state constitutional amendment that would opt the state out of federal healthcare mandates under consideration in Congress. The amendment will be placed on the November 2010 ballot. State Rep. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix, said five other states considered similar versions of the amendment this year and at least nine others are expected to do so next year.

    Montgomery seems to have done a good job capturing the sentiment and breadth of many different states’ rights and secessionist movements.

    ‘Unprecedented’ defiance



    Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center in Los Angeles, a think tank that monitors states’ rights activity, said defiance of federal policy is “unprecedented” and cuts across the philosophical spectrum, ranging from staunch conservatives to anti-war activists to civil libertarians. Legislatures in 37 states, he said, have introduced state sovereignty resolutions and at least seven have passed.

    Montgomery shows that this so-called “movement” consists of many disparate groups itching to move their own issues forward.  Still almost a quarter of those surveyed advocated some type of succession.  

    In a poll of 1,209 respondents conducted by Zogby International last year, 22 percent said they believed that “any state or region” has the right to secede and become an independent republic, and 18 percent said they would support a secessionist movement in their state. Conversely, more than 70 percent expressed opposition to secession.

    Of course when homophobic racists couch their messages in terms that appear appealing to citizens facing a challenging economic downturn, a culturally appealing message like the one below may easily sucker people into a murky world of the very elitism they are trying to avoid.

    Naylor, who describes himself as “a professional troublemaker,” grew up in Mississippi and taught economics at Duke University in North Carolina for 30 years… “The empire has lost its moral authority. It’s unsustainable, ungovernable and unfixable,” he said. “We want out.“

    Montomery also points out that most of this movement pre-dates Obama.  I saw the unrest and anger at the unresponsiveness of our government begin during the Bush years… ironic that the anger fomenting since that time should begin to come to a head just as a new president must come to grips with a country saddled with two wars, corporate greed and graft, environmental debacles that are causing significant health issues all across the country, and the biggest economic challenge since the great depression.  

    Escapist thoughts, focusing on hatred, and fomenting unrest will not get any of us out of this mess.

    Read Montgomery’s whole story here:  http://www.star-telegram.com/8…

  2. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He – and our political system – are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09…

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