They are stupid... But hey maybe they should all get in a space ship and go to Mars....

'This state is under tyranny': Scenes from California's latest secession movement

Eric Ting

Sharon Durst, leader of the secessionist El Dorado state movement, knows people don't take attempts like hers seriously. Past efforts to split rural California counties off from the rest of the state have accomplished little beyond inspiring ridicule — which the former rancher, now in her 80s, experienced directly as an early supporter of the infamous state of Jefferson.

But Durst also knows that something has to change, if rural counties like El Dorado are going to have a fair say in how they’re governed. On July 10, she and former county Supervisor Ray Nutting co-hosted a town hall to explain to their neighbors why the solution is peeling the county off from California and forming a new state.

It’s true that California has a unique problem of representation in state government. No state in the country has fewer state legislators per capita; the problem is especially stark in rural areas like El Dorado County, population 192,000. In the state Senate, El Dorado is represented by a legislator who also represents voters in 12 other counties; in the state Assembly, the county is split between two legislators, each responsible for voters across several counties, with widely diverging industries and demographics. Not one of the three legislators responsible for representing El Dorado County actually lives there.

“This has long been an ongoing problem in California politics,” said Isaac Hale, a professor of politics at Occidental College who specializes in electoral systems and representation. “There are nearly 500,000 Californians per assemblymember and a million Californians per state senator, and that’s pretty out of whack.”

“You could double the size of the Assembly, and we’d still have the highest number of people represented by district,” he added. “And there are serious consequences to this.”

One such consequence is that some rural Californians feel so disenfranchised that they’re willing to attend multihour town halls on secession. Twenty-five people showed up to Durst and Nutting’s July 10 gathering, held in the office space of a Raley’s supermarket in El Dorado Hills. Each person was handed a copy of the United States Constitution as they walked in.

The political leanings of those in attendance were on full display. One attendee wore a shirt that helpfully defined the word “patriot.” Another wore a shirt reading “Save the Children” on the front and “WE RIDE AT DAWN” in all caps on the back. Durst’s introduction was punctuated by audience member comments, including “California is red, we all know it,” and “Trump won.” When she mentioned that a reporter was in the audience, the room broke out into groans, like someone had just offered the restive crowd Bud Light from the supermarket outside the meeting room.

Durst and Nutting know the dream of statehood means going up against insurmountably steep odds; for a California county to secede and become its own state, both California’s Legislature and the United States Congress must sign off. Durst and Nutting concede California lawmakers would never go along with it, so Durst is gambling on what she described as a “backdoor” maneuver to go to Congress directly.

In a 7,000-word Substack post published in May, Durst argues that El Dorado County is technically not a legitimate piece of California and is instead “other property” of Congress (though she cites no legal scholars or historians who have promulgated this view). Therefore, she wrote, Congress alone could vote to turn El Dorado County into El Dorado state, without California’s approval.

At the town hall, Durst declined to discuss the procedural steps ahead.

“To try to speculate, ‘What if this? What if that? Blah blah blah?’ No,” she said. “You know what? We’re going to just move forward, do our thing, hope for the best and see where the people take it.”

She also was not interested in alternate routes to better rural representation, including those that experts like Hale believe have a greater chance of success, like organizing for a ballot measure to increase the size of the Legislature. With a proper education campaign, Hale told SFGATE, such a push could find bipartisan support across the state, not just in rural districts.

“Consider Mia Bonta’s East Bay Assembly district,” he said. “Why are wealthy homeowners in Piedmont linked with renters in east and west Oakland? They have wildly different interests, and you could make the argument that they each should have their own form of representation. This is a systemic problem.”

Nutting, whose time on the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors came to an abrupt end in 2014 when he was found guilty of six misdemeanor charges over an attempt to borrow bail money improperly, was more willing to discuss other, more realistic paths.

“It would help,” Nutting told SFGATE about increasing the size of the Legislature. Nutting, age 64, spends most of his time these days harvesting timber on his ranch. He dislikes many of the forest practice rules issued by the state and yearns for an El Dorado County-based legislator who could bring their shared concerns directly to state leaders. 

“You could go to your store, and people are going to know who your state senator is,” he said of a bigger Legislature. “It’s like county supervisors, people know who their county supervisors are because there are not as many constituents as there are for a state senator or assemblymember. The numbers are so huge, it’s hard for them to have a direct connection in a big way with their constituency.”

At the town hall, though, it was clear many attendees were dead set on secession. That included Durst, who opened the meeting by asking everyone to stand and pledge allegiance to the “American civil flag,” which has vertical stripes as opposed to horizontal ones. (The Arizona Republic has labeled the flag a “favorite of various conspiracy or anti-tax groups.”)

As Durst began walking attendees through her argument that California is failing to provide El Dorado County with a “republican form of government,” the man in the patriot-defining shirt yelled out from the back of the room, “California is not a republic!” 

“It’s lawlessness,” added another member of the crowd.

Later, during a discussion of the word “democracy,” the man in the patriot shirt again chimed in. “Democracy is an old word. We should wash it down the drain. It’s what the liberals say. We’re a constitutional republic and have been one since day one,” he said, earning nods from the crowd.

Not everyone was a cheerleader, however. One attendee, Greg Duncan, interrupted one of Durst’s legal arguments to say, “That’s a stretch.” He was also unimpressed with some of Nutting’s arguments about El Dorado County’s financial viability as a state, given the need for a substantial tax base. 

“So you don’t have any numbers at all?” Duncan asked Nutting, who responded that he didn’t have anything granular but was convinced it would work. (Duncan later told SFGATE he’d decided to stop being a Republican in 2020 because “Trump’s an ass.”)

After the meeting, most of the attendees milling around inside the room reacted positively to what they had heard from Durst and Nutting.

“It was very good,” said county resident Carol Martin, a gray-haired El Dorado resident who had nodded along emphatically to speakers throughout the evening. “It’s about freedom. I hate to say it, but this country, this state, is under tyranny. And right now, we have to free ourselves.”

“There’s definitely an interesting group of people here,” said her son, Kyle Martin, a fellow resident and family law attorney who came dressed in a white dress shirt and tie. “I know I certainly have my fair share of apprehensions about whether this group can be successful, but I’m sure it’s the same with every other group that was revolutionary throughout history, and so I think it would be unfair to characterize them in a way that precludes any level of success.”

As for the idea of increasing the size of the Legislature, reactions were mixed.

“That would go a considerable way to ease my current concerns,” Kyle Martin told SFGATE. “The fact that the vast majority of representatives come from the urbanized regions is not unexpected, but the fact that we in El Dorado County currently have no representatives on the statewide level living here is concerning to say the least.”

“I don’t think it would help,” countered Gary Dobler, who came decked out in a gun-clad Warrior XII shirt and told SFGATE he was helping Durst and Nutting distribute flyers and forms across the county. “This state is too corrupt. California is too corrupt. Representation is what we’re looking for but California will never get it unless there are major changes in the state.”

After most attendees had filtered out, save a few volunteers tidying up flyers and discarded copies of the Constitution, Nutting took a moment to reflect on how he would feel if this movement somehow, someday, led to greater representation for the people of California — without El Dorado County becoming its own state.

“I think that would be a solution, and that’s where Sharon and I might differ,” Nutting told SFGATE.

When asked a few minutes later, Durst confirmed his suspicions.

“I’m not going to petition anyone in California,” Durst said. “I’m going to absolutely ignore California, as if there’s a barrier between our border and California.”