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Secession: For Modern Americans, Red States Are Now Uninhabitable
@LucianKTruscott
September 20 | 2023
Abortion billboard in Atlanta, Georgia
I walked past the TV in the living room just now, and the chryron on the screen read, “Election deniers in charge of elections in 17 states.” It came to me that we’ve entered a period when the political polarization of the country has become physical, because a huge section of our nation is uninhabitable by increasing numbers of citizens.
It's in the headlines, and it’s not just about voting rights and the problem of election deniers and the millions of our fellow citizens who continue to think that their substitute god, Donald Trump, lost the election of 2020 because it was “rigged” somehow. Here’s a headline for you, from The Guardian: “‘It’s demoralizing’: Idaho abortion ban takes toll on medical providers.” The story is about “an exodus of OB-GYNs and other medical providers” from Idaho because of the conservative state’s strict abortion ban.
One obstetrician, Dr. Stacy Seyb, whose specialty is high-risk pregnancies, has seen a steep increase in the number of patients he sees because doctors like him have already left the state. Multiple hospitals in Idaho have closed their maternity wards. Doctors don’t want to deal with the kinds of patients Seyb sees every day because they might face criminal penalties for giving care that they gave as a matter of course only 11 months ago. Seyb has seen so many colleagues leave the state, he mourns the loss of their friendship. “It feels like a step backward in improving the health of women and children in the state,” Seyb told The Guardian. He believes that soon in Idaho, “we’ll see a collapse in women’s healthcare.”
Here’s another headline for you, this one from ABC News: “Doctors face tough decision to leave states with abortion bans.” In the article, a doctor from North Carolina is moving to California because North Carolina’s 12 week abortion ban makes it impossible for her to care for patients who show signs of fetal abnormalities that often don’t occur or can’t be detected until 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. “It's really put me in a position of moral distress on more than one occasion,” the doctor told ABC.
It isn’t just North Carolina and Idaho. ABC News interviewed doctors in Texas, Ohio, and Florida who said they were leaving their states because of “the impact abortion bans have had on their ability to practice medicine and provide the best care possible for patients.” And it isn’t just doctors. Citizens of states with abortion bans of one kind or another are moving to states with no abortion bans, especially young women. Students applying for colleges are taking into consideration whether the college they want to attend is in a state that will make it illegal for them to have an abortion if that becomes necessary for them. The same is true for college graduates looking for jobs.
States with restrictions on voting, many of them race-based, are causing people to think about leaving their states, and in many cases, hometowns they’ve lived in since birth. They feel as if their states have seceded from them personally, if not from the United States as a whole. We’re in the early months and days after the Dobbs decision, but if I were to guess, the next census is going to show a reversal of a decades long trend of population growth in the so-called Sun Belt, which includes states with abortion bans and restricted voting like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Northern states with strict laws against abortion like North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska – states with populations that are already low and really can’t afford to lose citizens – may see a brain-drain associated with their restrictive laws.
In states that had abortion referendums on the ballot in 2022 -- California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Montana – voters upheld maintaining access to abortion. A measure to amend the constitution in Ohio to allow a right to abortion will be on the ballot next year, as will a constitutional amendment in Maryland. The way Republicans have reacted to the spate of recent wins by abortion rights supporters in state referendums is to attempt put restrictions on ballot measures or to ban them altogether. If that starts to happen in red states, it is likely we’ll see more population shifts away from those states, because not only do people not like their rights taken away, such as the right to vote and the right to have an abortion, they absolutely don’t like having their right to put measures to the vote of the populace of a state taken away.
And of course abortion will be on the ballot in every state in the Union in 2024 when it comes to voting for president, Congress, and other positions of power and authority. It is possible that there will be a significant defection from Republican candidates across the board, especially by independent and moderate voters.
Red states are seceding from the Union in every way without outright declarations of secession, but more importantly, citizens are seceding from states they no longer feel comfortable living in. It’s not a Civil War, but it’s the next thing to it, it’s going to change this country for decades to come, and not in ways that will favor the political party that is pushing authoritarian laws on citizens unwilling to live under them.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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Matt Hall
The Michigan legislature is currently considering bills designed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals. Records provided to the American Independent Foundation show that one of the leading opponents of gun safety legislation in the Michigan House has a history of threatening others with gun violence.
House Minority Leader Matt Hall, a Republican who represents a southwest Michigan district around Kalamazoo, is a graduate of Western Michigan University. During his time there, according to police records obtained through a public records request, he admitted to sending death threats to a student at a college in Maryland, where his girlfriend was studying.
In a signed statement, Hall wrote:
“On December 3, 2001 I sent two separate e-mails to [redacted] at Washington College. The e-mails were threatening to kill him. I thought he had sent me threatening instant messages, but discovered he didn’t.”
In one email, Hall wrote:
YOU BETTER NOT GO TO THE CHRISTMAS PARTY TOMORROW NIGHT! JUST A WORD OF ADVICE!! THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN AND WE DON’T LIKE YOUR KIND TREATING LADIES LIKE [redacted] WITHOUT DIGNITY. SHE IS A FINE LADY YOU DON’T NEED TO BE SAYING SHIT ABOUT HER! WE ARE GOING TO IMPOSE OUR SOUTHERN WAYS ON YOU! I’VE GOT A SHOTGUN RIFLE AND I JUST PUT A BULLET IN IT WITH YOUR NAME ON IT!
In another, he told the student: “YOU HAD BETTER WATCH OUT!! WE DON’T LIKE YOUR KIND HERE IN WC! YOU WON’T FEEL VERY CROMBIE WHEN WE ARE DONE WITH YOU! BY YOU BLOCKING US ON IM WE ARE JUST MORE ANGRY!!! CLOSING TIME IS COMING SOON! BETTER SAY YOUR PRAYERS!!! STAY AWAY FROM [redacted]”
In his statement to the police, Hall wrote: “I don’t have a shotgun or have a bullet with his name on it. I wasn’t going to harm him. I had no intention to hurt him. I realize it was unacceptable and inappropriate. I am sorry for causing him stress. I will not threaten anyone else.”
The file indicates that the case was sent to the Western Michigan University Office of Student Judicial Affairs to be handled within the university. It does not indicate how or whether Hall was punished, but his campaign bio notes that he graduated from Western Michigan University and its affiliated law school.
Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the American Independent Foundation.
In the aftermath of a mass shooting in February at Michigan State University that left three students dead and more injured, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Democratic-led Michigan Legislature enacted a series of bills to combat gun violence.
These included stronger background checks, safe storage requirements, and extreme risk protection orders, commonly known as red flag laws, to temporarily disarm those judged to be a danger to themselves or others.
Bills that would prevent anyone convicted of domestic abuse from owning or possessing firearms and ammunition for eight years after completing their sentences are working their way through the Legislature.
“This is about preventing domestic violence survivors from experiencing further domestic violence and making sure people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence can’t have a gun for a period of years,” Democratic Sen. Stephanie Chang, who sponsored the proposals, told the Michigan Advance in July.
The Republican minority has opposed these gun safety efforts. In an Aug. 9 press release, since deleted from the Michigan House Republicans’ website, Hall framed himself as “a Leading Defender of our Second Amendment Rights”:
It’s no secret that many left-wing activists are pushing radical infringements on constitutional freedoms. You may have heard of extreme ideas such as banning so-called “assault weapons” or holding local gun shops liable if someone else commits a crime. I’ll always stand against these radical proposals to interfere with your right to bear arms, and if Democrats bring up any of them for a vote in the Michigan House of Representatives, I will proudly vote “NO.”
Earlier this year, I voted “NO” on “red flag” laws — which would take away law-abiding Michiganders’ constitutionally protected firearms and their ability to defend themselves, while violating citizens’ right to a fair legal process. I also voted “NO” on burdensome mandates requiring universal background checks and registration for private gun sales.
In a post in March 2022, Hall touted legislation to lower the penalties for those carrying concealed pistols with expired licenses.
Ryan Bates, the executive director of End Gun Violence Michigan, said in a statement: “This year, the legislature has made historic progress on gun safety measures. It’s concerning to learn that a legislative leader who opposed some of those initiatives has made violent threats in the past. Now is the time when all our leaders in Lansing need to unite around protecting our communities from gun violence.”
Reprinted with permission from American Independent.
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