Leadership

Marcus Ruiz Evans

President & Spokesman

Marcus Ruiz Evans is President and Spokesman of CalExitNow.com. He has led the public case for California sovereignty for more than a decade and serves as the movement's principal representative to the press.

Evans came to the question through government service rather than activism. A native of Fresno, he attended the University of Southern California as a Dean's Scholar and graduated magna cum laude in 1999 with a Bachelor of Science in Urban and Regional Planning. He then spent more than ten years as a liaison between the government of California and the federal government, working on the distribution of federal transportation grants against the infrastructure needs of regions throughout the state.

That work was based in state offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley, the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire. It gave him a working command of California's infrastructure and transportation systems, its statewide goods movement, and its position in the international freight system. He has argued since that these are the terms on which the sovereignty question should be assessed, and his public case rests on them.

Evans is the author of four books on California's economic and political standing, beginning with California's Next Century in 2012. The most recent, Calexit: Golden Guide to Independence, is assembled largely from mainstream reporting and published data, so that its conclusions can be tested against their sources.

He has represented the movement across national and international press, including outlets editorially opposed to it. Under his direction the movement has carried an independence measure further through California's own initiative process than any previous effort, obtaining clearance from the California Secretary of State to circulate a petition for signature.

J.J. Ames

Political Director

J.J. Ames is Political Director of CalExitNow.com. He is responsible for the movement's legislative strategy and is the author of the Joint Resolution it is asking the California Legislature to take up.

Ames spent forty years in Washington politics and has worked on sixty-seven campaigns. His experience runs to presidential campaign and cabinet level, and he has served as an executive speechwriter. He has taught American Federal Government at the University of Oklahoma, leading discussion sections of the course. The movement's path to a public decision runs through legislative procedure, and the design of that path is his responsibility.

He drafted the Joint Resolution authorizing formal legislative inquiry into California sovereignty. He also prepared the movement's assessment of which legislators are best positioned to support a Blue Ribbon Panel on the question, and wrote the constituent email and telephone scripts through which supporters contact their representatives. Legislators asked to consider the resolution are not being asked to draft it.

As Political Director, Ames speaks for the movement on federal policy. He has been quoted on its positions in Newsweek and in California political press, where he has argued that revenue generated in California subsidizes policy implementation in more than thirty-five states, and that Californians are entitled to considered input into how that revenue is spent.