In the wake of the election, the helplessness and indignation of many Californians found an outlet in a fledgling separatist movement that was hell-bent on the impossible: bringing California secession to a real-deal vote. Then, just as things were picking up steam, that’s when the scandal hit.

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Though they came in all shapes and political persuasions, the dream was the same: That the Independent Republic of California would be everything their beloved state already was, only more so—and all theirs, no one else’s.

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More than any other sentiment, the one that stuck with me most was articulated by Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber, who’s also a scholar of the antebellum and Civil War periods. The mere invocation of secession, she said, was gravely serious business and a tremendous danger. “Actually, the time we’re in,” she said, meaning that radically destabilizing period in the wake of the inauguration (we spoke about a week after the first travel ban), “is very similar to 1860 and 1861, where the reaction to Lincoln in the South is similar to the reaction to Trump in California and other deep-blue states. Horror, revulsion, rage, feelings of not wanting to be part of any country that would make this person president. The view that this person is a tyrant or a dictator. The heated rhetoric over whether the president is legitimate because he didn’t win the popular majority but, rather, only the plurality,” Dauber said. “People say the California secession talk is just symbolic, meant to send a message, but people thought South Carolina’s actions were symbolic. That South Carolina was just blowing off steam. Before it led to 2 percent of the population dead and a war that we now think of as inevitable, even though it wasn’t…. Both history in our own country and the breakup of the Soviet Union indicate that sometimes these things are trivial but sometimes they turn into bloodbaths in which millions of people die. So I don’t think it’s something to toy with…. If you start down the road of splintering, where is the end point?”