- This is an update to a previous story, “Could California become its own independent country?”
- Marcus Ruiz Evans, president of CalExit, says they’ve distributed about 30,000 petitions to Californians interested in the initiative.
- To get more information on CalExit and their mission to turn California into its own country, Evans says to visit calexitnow.org.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
For the full story on the proposed initiative to turn California into its own independent country, click on this link here.
Since airing this story, we reached out to Marcus Ruiz Evans, who is the proponent for this initiative, to give his input.
President of CalExit, Evans not only leads this proposed initiative to turn California into its own independent country, but says he’s reaching out to Californians with another way to expedite this process.
“We’re also telling people that if you don’t wanna wait for the petition to play out, you can both sign the petition and call your legislator and demand the blue ribbon panel investigation and the non-binding legal vote. And we could be doing CalExit next month,” said Evans.
He also says, “If you lived here your whole life in California, you’ve heard people talk about the good old days in the Golden State era when everything seemed to work. That image, that daydream ends in the late 80s, early 90s, about the same time as our donor state payments to the federal government start.”
In 2016, CalExit also started a petition for California to become its own country.
While this motion was ultimately unsuccessful, Evans says CalExit has seen an influx of people reaching out recently.
“The numbers were huge then. And now the interest in CalExit has literally exploded within days. We’re not even talking months,” said Evans. “I can tell you that we’ve sent the petition out to about 30,000 people and all of them have instructions to fill it out and submit on their own. And that each initiative has six signature spaces. And almost all of the people who turned in said, ‘oh, it’s not just me. I know a bunch of people who are for this.”
23ABC neighborhood reporter Avery Elowitt asked Evans how he sees this attempt as being more successful than previous.
He said, “A lot of people have said, if you back CalExit, it is gonna lead to the dissolution of America. That’s not true at all.”
Evans says California is one of three states that could pull this off, since data shows California is the world’s fifth largest economy in the world– according to the governor’s office.
“Our economic impact already makes it possible for us, if you can say that, we would thrive and we would have a high first world European standard of living and be even richer than we are now,” said Evans.
To get more information on CalExit and their mission to turn California into its own country, Evans says to visit calexitnow.org.
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