When the CalExit folks announced their signature drive to separate California from the United States of America earlier this year, we said it was a colossally stupid idea.

And that was before we knew the founder of the movement, Louis Marinelli, has been living most of the time in Russia. He’d even set up a sort of embassy for California there, in space contributed by the Russian government.

This is not Fake News. Really. We couldn’t make this stuff up.

The whole thing, apparently, was a con. Marinelli played on Californians’ distaste for Donald Trump — but that distaste was partly based on Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who, among other things, finds common cause with Bashar al Assad and is fanatically anti-gay, at least in public. Sound like California?

Marinelli is reported to have raised money for CalExit from right wing groups in this country. It appears he’s all-in on the Russian ideal of diminishing the influence of the United States, which removing California would do. If his fellow-travelers in the secession movement try to revive it later, they’re going to have a tough time overcoming its origins.

In announcing his permanent move to Russia, Marinelli said he would not return to California to “struggle for her independence from the United States.” He went on, “… I have found in Russia a new happiness, a life without the albatross of frustration and resentment towards ones’ homeland, and a future detached from the partisan divisions and animosity that has thus far engulfed my entire adult life.”

Ah yes, an oligarchy/kleptocrasy is a great government model for ending end partisan divisions and quash animosity. Often by killing people. Sometimes that’s easier than gathering signatures.

When the going gets tough, the tough, apparently, move to Siberia.