Note sull'episodio
Sean and Charles are joined by Hal Lohr — a California independence veteran since 2014, founder of the Red Star Report, and a producer on Working Voices at KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles — for an episode about why working within the system keeps failing, and what acting like a nation would actually look like.
Hal traces the movement back to its 2014 splintering, explains how yelling at his television turned into organizing, and makes the case that neither major party, nor any third party, has ever made a dent. Along the way he coins a phrase for what the Greens, Peace and Freedom and the DSA are doing instead: revolutionary cosplay.
The second half gets practical. Gavin Newsom once said the thing out loud almost by accident: stop sending California's money to Washington. Hal and Sean work through what follows from that — reclaiming the 43–45% of California that the federal government holds, defending coastal waters, building trade missions the way Scotland is quietly doing, selling agriculture into the Pacific Rim, and landing affordable Chinese and Indian EVs at the Port of Long Beach. The precedent they keep coming back to is cannabis: California simply stopped complying, and Washington turned out to have "all the power of a mall security cop."
In this episode
00:47 — Hal's road in: the movement since 2014, the Red Star Report, KPFK
01:37 — 2014 and the great splintering: Sovereign California, Yes California, the CNP
03:26 — Dinner-table independence in the 1970s, and three sons of draft age
07:20 — Why not just join the Greens, Peace and Freedom or the DSA?
13:22 — "Revolutionary cosplay"
15:37 — Why an independence advocate is the only rebel in the room
24:03 — Legality, the civil-war argument, and the abusive-spouse analogy
25:49 — Scotland, the SNP, and asking permission to leave
30:13 — No Kings: motion without direction
38:35 — Newsom's accidental answer: keep California's tax money here
39:49 — The Soviet parallel, and what the IRS figures show
45:09 — Reclaiming land, coastal waters, and acting like a nation
48:19 — Agriculture, the Pacific Rim, and electric cars at the port
52:04 — The cannabis precedent: what Washington can actually stop
Guest: Hal Lohr — the Red Star Report; Working Voices, Mondays at 5am on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles (and in the archives, for the reasonable among us).
We speak for ourselves. Sean Forbes chairs the California National Party and Charles McGuinness is its Secretary for IT, but opinions here are our own and are not official CNP positions. Guests speak for themselves, and appearing here is not an endorsement in either direction. We reject violence without qualification: we seek greater autonomy for California only through elections, ballot measures, legislation, litigation and negotiation. Corrections to corrections@checkpointcalifornia.com. More at votecnp.org.