When people speak of Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote, they are really speaking about California.  In that state, Hillary Clinton won 6,621,346 votes to Donald Trump's 3,549,576 as of this writing.  This margin of over three million votes alone accounts for any claim that Clinton exceeded Trump in popular support. 

Consider some numbers.  In New York, Trump won 37.5% of the vote; in New Jersey, Trump won over 40%; and in Illinois, Trump won 39.4%.  Among sizably populated states that lean "overwhelmingly" Democrat, California is in a class by itself.  Trump struggled to get even a third of Californian votes.

Moreover, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois differ markedly from California because their tilt toward the Democrats happens on a very different landscape.  New York and Illinois are pushed into deep blue territory by singular metro areas (NYC and Chicago), which overpower small-town areas ("upstate" or "downstate") where Republicans gather in strong numbers.  New Jersey is wedged between the Democratic machine cities of Philadelphia and New York City and has a smattering of medium-sized urban centers with large black populations.

Only in California does one find a vast state with a huge population (nearly 40 million people) with multiple sprawling metro areas that all lean strongly Democratic or, at best (in the case of San Diego), just libertarian enough to be less than completely left wing.  The San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Palm Springs, Long Beach, etc. stretch across miles and miles of a complex and diverse landscape, hosting a stunning multiplicity of races and ethnicities.  Yet everywhere you go in the state, you seem to find Democrats or Republicans who just don't strike you as all that conservative.

California is a different country.  They know it, we know it, and the Lord has certainly noticed.  The other 49 states are far worse for being burdened with this swollen modern-day mess.

Pretend the USA got to dump this state.  Rather than Hillary Clinton leading in the popular vote at all, Donald J. Trump would claim 57,284,861 votes over Clinton's 55,160,670, making Trump the winner by 306 electoral votes to 177, sporting a comfy buffer of 2,124,191 votes.

Californians seem to understand that despite their huge numbers, they are an ideologically foreign parasite at war with the antibodies of their host country.  It was a miracle that Proposition 8 once passed in California, but that was eight years ago, and we have seen no signs since then that California will be anything less than an over-the-top left wing disaster zone of vice, identity politics, and sexual chaos.

New York could raise up a Donald Trump in the blue-collar outer boroughs that still have a little of that American grit, but California will never raise up another Reagan, and it is doubtful that the state can raise anything other than sex-obsessed lunatics.  Every race and culture that sets down roots in California suddenly has to be dominated by its LGBT members -- just see how Latino politics at the state level has been taken over by Jimmy Gomez, who introduced a bill to abolish mothers and fathers on birth certificates, and Ricardo Lara, who introduced a bill that would allow LGBT students to sue Christian colleges for standing by biblical sexuality.

"Civil rights" in California means the right to genetically engineer children for couples in sterile same sex pairs.  "Women's rights" in California means the right to abort babies, sell baby parts, and raid David Daleiden's home with the approval of the state attorney general.

There are some anti-Trump forces in California so horrified at the 2016 election that they have suggested a "Calexit," a secessionist movement.  People who scoff at this idea seem to forget that Donald Trump just became the president-elect and that in this day and age, anything's possible.

I say, let California go.  It is true that the state has a great deal of money and natural resources, but the rest of the country has more of each.  The last time a state seceded, there was a civil war, but this time there wouldn't be one.  Californians want to smoke pot and hold wild orgies next to shimmering swimming pools; they won't feel the need to coax Oregon or Nevada to join them.  Non-Californians would have no interest in physically entering California to bring them back, since nobody wants to contract some kind of airborne herpes just to engage in close combat with rebels in West Hollywood or Santa Cruz.

California has the largest K-12 and university systems, but these schools, even Stanford, wouldn't be a terrible loss.  In my years at California State University-Northridge, dropping my daughter off to local public schools, I saw everything that California has to offer in terms of intellectual life.  How can I put this nicely?  The state's dumb.

Californians do not find common values with any state outside their own.  They have no ideological principle that causes them to be so repugnant to the rest of their country.  Non-Californians would see little to save by forcing the state to be American.  Unlike the situation with African slavery, Californians choose to get high on reefer, buy breast implants, attempt to surgically reassign their genders, and hand off their children to be raised by undocumented nannies who do not speak English.  This is a secession we can have without bloodshed, trauma, or Walt Whitman.

There's a lot of money in California, but why should we want their accounting to be logged on the same ledgers as the rest of the country?  California money is earned by producing things that we're forced to consume through monopolies, degrading of our souls, or market manipulation, such as pornography (now liberated from any epidemiological responsibility by California's defeat of Prop 60), endless media apps with escalating levels of pointless addictiveness, and increasingly banal and depraved entertainment (have you seen the latest X-Men film?).  Their shady overseas financiers bring in money from mafias in every outpost from Russia to China to the Caspian Republics, while a large chunk of their employment goes to illegal immigrants, ranging from the most menial to even middle-management jobs.

Consider these lines from Jeffrey Katzenberg's open letter in the Hollywood Reporter:

The Founding Fathers provided tools to combat the demagogues they knew might come along. We merely need to steadfastly take advantage of these tools, by making our 61 million-plus voices forcefully heard in the Congress, in the Senate, in the courts and peacefully on the streets.

And no one should be more motivated to utilize these tools than we who work in the creative industries that stretch from Hollywood to Silicon Valley and beyond. Ours is a community that prizes openness, respect and tolerance. The basis of our industries is freedom of expression. We must make clear to President-elect Trump that it is vitally important he support these values.

It is hilarious to hear this Fieldston School alumnus who made The Little Mermaid and Kung Fu Panda lecture us about Donald Trump's detachment from reality and the importance of the Founding Fathers.  It is even more amusing to hear Mr. Katzenberg describe DreamWorks' endless stream of cookie-cutter movies as a "creative industry," which he places in a map of "openness, respect and tolerance" that seems to stretch only from Culver City to Marin County.

But there is something profoundly depressing and futile about Katzenberg's "open letter to Hollywood."  There are unexamined assumptions and unacknowledged realities in this reaction to Donald Trump.

First, why do we need to worry about California's voices being heard?  The Congress and Senate just came off elections of their own, and maybe Katzenberg hasn't noticed that the country as a whole has resoundingly rejected liberal Democratic policies.  And Mr. Katzenberg is speaking to Hollywood, the people who have churned out copious garbage that contributed to the country's sense that the greatness of a truly decent culture has been lost beneath the annoying sarcasm, plastic surgery, and cheap profanity of Los Angeles's soulless films, television, and music.  We've heard those voices and don't want to hear them anymore.

Even sadder is Katzenberg's delusion that he speaks for open-mindedness, tolerance, and freedom of expression.  The scripts that Hollywood has vomited out for decades have been mercilessly restricted to a narrow liberal mindset and easy-to-market platitudes.  Anyone who strays from the multicultural party line gets boycotted, blacklisted, and mobbed.  I've been hearing about the "Friends of Abe" for years; they are a group of secret conservatives working in Hollywood's inner circles.  They haven't come forward and brought about mass improvements to pop culture by now, so I assume that waiting for them is a hopeless waste of our time.  California conservatives can be repaid for their epic cowardice and moderate positioning by being the collateral damage of a Calexit.  They've hidden their true colors for years, so I don't see how it helps them or conservatives in the rest of the country to keep them tied to us.

Mr. Katzenberg stresses how open-minded he is. How open-minded are a man and town that react with horror to find out what the rest of the country is really thinking?

This is a California thing.  Self-enclosed, spoiled, and yet emotionally frail, the state is utterly at odds with the rest of the country.  They are literally not "who we are as a country."  They are something else entirely.

Maybe they would be wildly successful on their own, with their mishmash of porn impresarios, cosmetologists, libertarians, film school hacks, prosperity preachers, illegal aliens, left-wing loudmouths, and oversexed homosexuals.  They would be a massively wealthy independent nation charting a course through new historical grounds. Maybe they would collapse under their own dysfunctional decadence and be horribly embarrassed about ever having condescended to the 283 million normal and self-sufficient Americans who don't live in their state.  Honestly, as a refugee from California State University-Northridge, I don't give a d---.

Let them go.

Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif, Twitter, or CogWatch.