My initial impression is that Wilkinson took what was probably a careless formulation by Newsom and treated it as the declaration of a new Confederacy.
But, no California hasn't adopted "Bonnie Blue Flag" as it's state song. This is another song from Elizabeth Knight and The Harvesters, this one being a popular Confederate song. From the liner notes to Songs of the Civil War (1960):
The two most important Rebel music-makers were an itinerant vaudevillian, Harry Macarthy, and a transplanted New Englander, John Hill Hewitt. Macarthy s best known work is "Bonnie Blue Flag" ...The Bonnie Blue flag was an informal but popular banner celebrating secession, the Confederacy, and treason against the United States.
This "parade of secession" song was the Confederacy's second most popular air, following close on the heels of "Dixie" in Southern affections. Macarthy was an English-born vaudevillian who is supposed to have written this stirring lyric early in 1861 while attending the Mississippi State Secession Convention.
Getting back to Newsom's comment, California's Jerry Brown was the most militant of the governors in confronting Trump during the Orange Clown's first two years in office, and he was open about using California's full legitimate federalist power to resist bad and abusive Trump policies.
But Newsom is more of a showboat than Brown. No one can detract from his bold move on same-sex marriage as San Francisco mayor in 2004. And he has done a genuinely good job on the COVID-19 crisis.
Jerry, despite his occasional techie-utopian talk, was grounded in the old pro-labor, social-democratic (although the Dems didn't call it that) New Deal tradition, and in leftie-Jesuit liberation theology. He was consistently a defenders of immigrant rights and very prominently supported the farmworkers union, for instance. Yes, his fracking policy, wasn't ideal. But he was grounded.
Newsom isn't. At least not to the degree Jerry Brown is.
When Newsom became Lieutenant Governor, Jerry appointed him to head a state economic development commission. When Newsom announced that he wanted to look to Texas (!?!) as a model for state economic development, Jerry took him off the commission. And, so far as I saw, kept Newsom at a distance politically. And although in this universe, spouses differ on some political issues, when Newsom was SF mayor and doing the same-sex marriages, he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who went on after their divorce to become a FOX News propagandist and, now, of course, Don Trump, Jr.'s., girlfriend. I’m just sayin’.
The Bloomberg Opinion piece obviously makes a big deal about Newsom’s "nation-state" comment and at the end even invokes John Calhoun, the patron saint of everything vile and evil in American politics since 1832, to make it sound like Newsom is going full neo-Confederate. I'm inclined to think that the "nation-state" comment was a careless formulation, one that Jerry Brown would not have made.
But Gavin Newsom as John Calhoun and Donald Trump as his arch-enemy Andrew Jackson? No, that's insane. For all his faults, on his deathbed Jackson said that his one regret in life was that he hadn't hanged Calhoun as a traitor over his secessionist stand in the Nullification Controversy.
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