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‘New California’ Apparently Wants To Help Republican Lawmakers Change Election Results For Trump

Despite the election being over for a full month now, Donald Trump and his surrogates are still attempting to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s victory in various courts around the country. The latest flailing attempt is more than 100 Republican lawmakers insisting that the Supreme Court take up a challenge to legally cast votes by mail, or something of the sort.

Regardless, as the losses pile up and Trump supporters get more desperate, the lawsuits are getting weirder. Say what you will about whether demanding election results get overturned damages the fabric of democracy or is a coup and all that, but pretending to represent states that don’t exist certainly at least qualifies as bizarre.

Reporters on Friday noticed lawyers had filed briefs where they claimed to represent new states that “support” the filing that Republican lawmakers supporting Trump had previously filed. Those states, called “New California” and “New Texas,” immediately started trending on Twitter as people reacted to the wild news.

As Business Insider reported Friday, the states are actually “states in waiting” according to the lawyer who represents both of them, as they’re hoping to break away from existing states they feel are being unfair about upholding the results of a democratic election, among other things.

The amicus brief for the fake states was filed by Robert E. Thomas III, an attorney with an address listed in Nevada who is a member of the state bar in California, a state that is real.

Thomas told Insider in an interview that New Nevada and New California are “new states in waiting,” and that each is a registered 501(c)(4) organization attempting to form new states using the proper Constitutional process. He said states like Pennsylvania administered their elections in a way that’s “arbitrary and capricious.”

“The Supreme Court gives states in a case like this an absolute right to intervene,” Thomas said. “And we regard ourselves as one of those states with an absolute right.”

It’s a very real attempt to undermine the election for a very imaginary reason. But the name “New California” also had a lot of people thinking about something far more apocalyptic, mostly because it sounds a lot like something from the Fallout video game series, the New California Republic.

New California Republic shows up in basically every Fallout game, though the newest title, Fallout 76, has a setting firmly in post-apocalyptic West Virginia. But with the way this year has gone, it’s not a surprise that plenty of people thought about the end of the world when “New California” started trending on Twitter.