While every election results in threats to secede or claims from unhappy voters that they are going to leave the country, Michel wrote that the loss by Trump has hit some far-right supporters harder than usual.
According to the NBC report, “Following President Joe Biden’s victory in November, GOP officials from Wyoming to Florida to Mississippihave floated the idea, claiming that the time for a national fracturing may be near,” with the columnist writing that Texas has moved to the forefront of the secession movement after “a Texas state lawmaker — one who attended the Capitol rally on Jan. 6 and claimed it was ‘the most amazing day’ — recently filed the first serious secession bill the country has seen since the Civil War.”
According to the columnist, “Bright Line Watch, a group of researchers from places like Dartmouth College, the University of Rochester, and University of Chicago, noted in a study released earlier in February, one-third of Republicans said they support secession,” and that a Texas secession Facebook page is being “saturated” with suggestions.
“Just like so much of Trumpian America, secession in places like Texas is rooted in a combination of nativism, xenophobia and white racial grievance,” the report states adding the Facebook page contains, “fantasies of forcing Democrats to leave the state, seizing their property and forcing them to ‘convert’ (to what is unclear). Just like the Confederates before them, this modern secessionist ethos is rooted at least in large part in maintaining white supremacy and authoritarian governance, regardless of the costs.”