Hundreds of thousands of disgruntled conservatives, still smarting from the re-election of President Obama last week, are signing petitions to allow more than 30 states to secede from the United States — and they are being joined by a motley collection of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Klan sympathizers.
As of midday today, eight of the petitions, which are being posted on a government website set up to encourage citizen participation, have crossed the threshold of 25,000 signatures required to prompt a guaranteed official reply from the White House. (The states are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, the state with the most signers.) But the petitions carry no legal weight at all, and almost no one anywhere on the political spectrum expects them to result in anything more than a collective blowing off of right-wing steam.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the denizens of Stormfront, a huge white nationalist Web forum run by a former Alabama Klan leader, from enthusiastically embracing the cause. Starting last Saturday, a large number of comment threads began appearing on the site that encouraged the radical right to join in on the fun.