It's no surprise that the most heavily supported petitions being posted to the White House's We the People web site are coming from the "red states." though there are smatterings from all states and more than 60,000 signatories on the Texas secession petition. What is surprising is that there is little evidence of the drive for these signatures arising from a specific source online. This would give the secession petition trend the appearance of being a grass roots phenomenon.
But I wonder if it's really such a spontaneous movement. Let's turn back the hands of time to when Barack Obama was first elected President. Seemingly out of nowhere the Tea Party movement came into being, with enormous coverage by mainstream media and the meme being spread that it was a genuine "grass roots" movement. Afterwards, of course, it became clear that the Tea Party phenomenon was a carefully crafted propaganda effort orchestrated by the usual billionaires and corporate lobbyists to direct populist sentiment towards their one percenters' agenda.
If you search Google for "secession petition," you get pages and pages of mainstream coverage - but no blog coverage to speak of and no portals that seem to be instigating this stream of petition signers. But what we're probably not seeing are the email inboxes of millions of people who have signed up over the past several years for Tea Party mailing lists. It's a fair bet that the same plutocrats and lobbyists who orchestrated the Tea Party movement wanted to keep fomenting the energy from the Tea Party movement in the wake of election results that largely repudiated the Tea Party agenda. But with the Tea Party brand damaged, they had to come up with a new meme to keep the ball rolling.
So why not appeal to that same "Don't Tread on Me" quasi-Confederate sentiment that fed the Tea Party movement and position it even more blatantly and radically as an anti-government secession movement? They need not keep the secessionist theme going forever - just long enough to give the disgruntled, misinformed voters that they attract with this nonsense a lightning rod for their energies that keeps them stirred up against the government, so that they can continue to divide and conquer the media's fly-like attention span and support the "some people" pseudo-controversies that fill Fox News' air time.
Soon enough this will die out and the plutocrats and lobbyists will come up with a new pseudo-movement to give these anti-government voters an agenda to follow. The non-agenda of the secession movement itself will lead nowhere, unless the companies and rich folk controlling natural resources in Texas, Wyoming and elsewhere and the corrupt banks laundering drug money in Florida really do want to saw themselves off from Federal control. That's their ultimate goal one way or another, but it would take a sadly deranged person to think that this would really work in the long run.
Then again, who would have thought that the Civil War would have come to be. Crazy dies hard.
My sense is that we should let the secession meme die a nice and quiet death - but to keep on the lookout for actual organized activities that may spring from it. If this turns out to be the militia-ization of the Tea Party movement or another effort to create a media meme that distracts voters from the real debates needed to advance America, then there will indeed be some swift and unconditional responses required. Let's hope that it dies a quick death on its own.