Remember the Supreme Court’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo in November of last year. It slapped down Cuomo’s near lockdown of church in his state. The Court ruled that he couldn’t have more severe restrictions on places of worship than for other organizations. Soon after, Harvest Rock Church and Ministry in California filed suit to challenge Newsom’s assault on faith. Their case reached the Court and it referred the matter back to the 9th Circuit with the stipulation to follow the decision in Brooklyn. Meaning, California was slapped down again.
Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, Ca.
But wait, there’s more. The governor will be forced to pay the $1.35 million legal tab in a settlement on file with the 9th Circuit. But wait, there’s more. Newsom will be the first governor in history to be under a federal injunction to protect houses of worship. According to one source, “the state of California is now under a permanent injunction from imposing restrictions on churches and houses of worship that are not equally applied to other critical infrastructure or essential services.”
The Court has had enough of California’s extremist state government. But what of the state’s electorate who keeps sending these Maduro-loving clowns to Sacramento in super majorities? Recent opinion polls indicate that Newsom is set to survive the recall. Maybe it’s not surprising. The guy is buying votes by flooding the state with millions of checks. Apparently, that’s all it takes to keep the state in its current morass of blackouts, punishing taxes, rampaging wildfires, bad roads, cities that look like homeless Woodstocks, water shortages, empty prisons/rising crime, and a permanent condition of lockdown.
California voters, after all, it was always up to you.
The booking photos of, L to R, pf Rowan Dalbey, Kristen Aumoithe and Amber Lucas.
California gave to the nation mind-boggling aerospace, movies, the wonderful cornucopia of the Central Valley, and the high tech universe. Now, we must add half-literate loons to the list of exports. Weeks after the testimony of Barry Brodd, a former Santa Rosa police officer and current use-of-force expert, in support of Derek Chauvin’s defense, three women, maybe others, descended on a home in Santa Rosa thinking it was still occupied by Brodd. They vandalized the house in pig’s blood and left a pig’s head on the front porch. The only problem: the acts are felony vandalism and Brodd, like many of the retired California men and women in blue, no longer live in the state. The halfwits only ruined the sleep and property of quite innocent people.
The Santa Rosa home vandalized by the three “social justice warriors”.
The fact that Brodd no longer lives in the state says volumes. Not to say that he lives there but there is a reason for the existence of “blue Idaho”. In fact, huge colonies of Californian refugees are littered throughout the country, mostly west of the Mississippi. One reason for the exodus is the fact that the state is in the grip of people like Rowan Dalbey (20), Kristen Aumoithe (34), and Amber Lucas (34) – now charged felons. If you watch the video, you’ll get a brief backgrounder of at least one of the culprits, Lucas. She’s a “social justice warrior” and something of a wine connoisseur. The other two look like her sisters.
Take a look and you’ll get a glimpse into the mind of California’s ruling class.
A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
It’s in, the 2020 Census Report, that is. California is set to lose its first House seat since . . . ever. Each census has resulted in California gaining seats since it entered the union in 1850. It’s a momentum that is slowly beginning to recede, as all shifts in population tend to be. Big shifts don’t happen overnight but start with a gradual decline in the advance and eventually end in a grudging reversal. It’s happening to California as it happened in prior decades to New York and the upper Midwest.
In the prior demographic momentum that accelerated in the 1950’s, it was opportunity and climate that propelled California’s growth. California benefitted from the post-war economy and its pleasant coastal climate. It grew, grew, and grew. Then it all came to a grinding halt.
The astonishing aspect of the state’s current decline in status is its conscious decision to squander its inheritance. People aren’t leaving the state because the climate is better elsewhere. They leave because of willful decisions by its electorate to choose people to run the state into the ground.
The state’s leaders in the 1950’s to 1960’s bequeathed an infrastructure of cheap power, water projects, and roads that worked to make life easier for its residents and businesses.
Then-Governor Ronald Reagan at the 1972 opening ceremony of the Edmonston Pumping Plant, a key feature of the California Water Project.
Then, off the rails it went. It became a one-party state run by lefty nincompoops. Term limits only intensified the lunacy by adding “inexperienced” to “lefty” and “nincompoop” to the résumé of state legislator.
Taxes and regulations went through the roof. It seemed as if there was an umbilical cord between the crazies in the faculty lounges and the legislative chamber and governor’s mansion. Nearly every crackpot fantasy generated from the minds of people in tenure-secured positions was turned into law and policy. Resources shifted from the simple and necessary things to trendy and lefty fascinations such as trying to make solar and wind work and drives to see how fast they can go in destroying western civilization, the nuclear family, and the state’s economy. All that the state’s people got for it was raging wildfires, power rates through the roof, regulations that turned business activity into Sisyphean torture, urban environments littered with needles/feces/homeless encampments, and the privilege of paying the highest taxes in the nation. If there is such a thing as anthropocentric climate change, California invented anthropocentric social and economic ruination.
The Camp Fire rages through Paradise, California, in 2018. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
The Census report paints a dire picture for the state. It gained population but not as fast as other states added. Rarely do states lose population unless the Black Death returns with a vengeance or left-wing monsters ascend the throne like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. If nothing else, people still procreate.
California did the trick by pushing people out. People started leaving the state long before but the numbers were obscured by the influx of the foreign-born, legal and illegal. Even that has started to wane. The fertility rate cratered and domestic out-migration accelerated. 1.3 million more people left for other states than entered. The most precipitous decline occurred in the category of native Californian.
A group of migrants arrested crossing the border near El Centro, Calif. in August 2005. (photo: SANDY HUFFAKER/GETTY IMAGES)
The heavy train of demography has ground to a halt for California and is beginning to back up. How far will it go in reverse? That’s hard to say. It all depends on how long the crazies remain in power. After all, the devastation was man-caused, so the solution will have to be man-caused. I’m not betting the bank on the lunatics in Sacramento suddenly experiencing a road-to-Damascus moment.
As for me – a native Californian – I’m not going back to that asylum.
The California Department of Education building in Sacramento.
In case you missed my post below, in the “comment” section, I posted this in light of the California State Board of Education’s recent approval of pure left wing indoctrination in the curriculum:
“Oh, and one more thing, and I thought that I’d never have to say this: Parents, get your kids out of the government-controlled schools, for the sanctity of their own mental state. Use part of Pelosi’s $2-trillion bailout – the kid and personal money in the monstrosity – and head to a good private school with classical curriculum and instruction. Go to acescholarships.org if you need further assistance.
The government schools are fully immersed in the Left’s revolution. As a public school teacher for 30 years, I’m loath to advise parents to get their kids out the public schools. There used to be individual schools and districts who avoided the worst of it. Not today. There’s nowhere to hide.
Get your kids out them. Now! Use the part of the Pelosi bailout money that comes to you and your kids and if necessary turn to Ace Scholarships, above, or other sources like them.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
A caveat to begin with: I refuse to paint with a broad brush. I had the pleasure of working with some of the most wonderful and dedicated people on the planet in my 30 years as a public high school and community college teacher. Yet, over those many years, I also became aware of the cancerous rot that has penetrated almost every square inch of the system. It’s amazing that some teachers succeed in spite of the decay. Lately, their task has been made worse by the intensification of the putrefaction. I worry for the kids and many of my colleagues still in the system.
One of the most dreadful notions to fly under the radar is the idea that human relations can be tuned like an old-style carburetor with a turn of a screw. A carburetor is childishly simple when compared to the ultrafine mesh of a civilization. The attempt to adjust one set of connections unravels and distorts others. To the over-confident and over-credentialed “expert”, unknowingly wearing blinders, and many a government officeholder who began their rise to prominence in the same manner as the degreed master – with a college degree – the temptation for busybody interference is too great to resist. The schools are the principal purveyors of this facetiousness.
To be honest, the idea of a small and centralized group of henchmen running national affairs has been around for centuries. As a case in point, the notion was crystalized in economic terms in the 17th century by the equivalent of France’s Commerce/Treasury Secretary under King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and called mercantilism. Mercantilism is so simplistically alluring: sell more than you buy as a nation and your nation will get rich. The fact is, any benefits are concentrated on a few while the costs are many and more broadly distributed. For any politician and most others in our ill-educated media, the glorious ribbon-cutting ceremony is more glamorous than the many other people up and down the economic food chain who gradually find their lives made more difficult. It’s a fool’s errand but one perpetuated by the belief in the omniscience of the degreed or credentialed “expert” to manage things. We’d be far better off if our culture and schools did more to esteem humility than mass-produce framed paper affixed to office or home walls.
Trump swallowed the idea of societal manipulator hook, line, and sinker in his affection for tariffs, but don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are off the hook. The foolishness is the heart of their progressivism. They believe in “industrial policy”, an idea that is akin to a people’s life being best managed by a class of social and economic technicians. Of course, the technocrats will be churned out by our degree mills, the colleges, and not surprisingly it has led to wisdom dilution, inflated tuitions, and soaring college debt. Amazingly, our grasping for societal betterment became a disaster to be “solved” by more national debt.
The Democrats want to manipulate the system for the benefit of anyone not white and male, no matter how you define the sexual divide. Genitalia and melanin matter much to them. If truth be told, though, a history of lefty activism would have to be added to their list of preferred traits. So, clearly, it’s lefty women and men in dark pigments who are the objects of their sympathies and cares.
The intersectionality of the superficial, and having little to do with character.
In contrast, Trump’s darlings are blue collar workers. If I had to choose, my sympathies lie with the working stiffs who keep things humming along. Regardless, though, such targeted sympathies do not ensure good policy for a nation.
No better example can be found than Trump’s tariff escapades on aluminum (see here). The on-again, off-again exactions wreaked havoc for aluminum users such as beer and soft drink producers. Given the peculiarities of the beer and soft drink markets – the industry’s consumers are highly sensitive to price changes – the tariffs made precarious the livelihoods of thousands beyond the few hundred who have an increased lock on job security among the few remaining domestic producers of aluminum sheet metal. Trump had more zeal for ribbon-cutting while others were left seething at Budweiser, Coca-Cola, etc. Many in the bigger economy might be able to connect the dots. The possibility may have been missed, or simply ignored, by Trump and his advisers.
Where were the schools in teaching basic economics to the millions who pass through their doors? Where were the “experts” in educating your sons and daughters? Either the lessons didn’t stick or were never taught. Maybe people were never held accountable for either learning the lessons or teaching them. Either way, there’s a vacant spot in many minds to be filled with socialist nonsense or the belief that a puppet master or grand vizier will manipulate our lives to paradise. Actually, both possibilities are mirror images of each other.
We’ve seen this picture before. The vacuous thinking was resplendent in the streets of ancient Athens to those of Weimar Germany to the avenues of today’s Seattle, Portland, LA, Chicago, New York City, and any place in America beyond a threshold of population density. The “science” and “experts” haven’t freed us from the turmoil and ignorance. In fact, they may be contributing to it.
Take for instance, our “experts” in epidemiology – especially those that fill government posts – a field of understandable media attention during a pandemic. They have set us on the road to lockdowns, mandatory and universal mask wearing, abolition of Christian fellowship, the end of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the destruction of much of our economy, and putting the kibosh to real education for our kids. Has our educational system given us the same breed of “expert” who foisted on us the 1960’s-and-beyond War on Poverty?
They came right out of college knowing a lot about microscopic organisms and very little about the Laffer Curve, creative destruction, supply and demand curves, or crowd-induced hysteria. It’s easy for them to say, “If it saves one life, it’s worth it.” In their isolated world of labs and microscopes, it might make sense. As a governing philosophy, it’s a disaster. Just think of all the salutary advances from the rule of law to artificial power (steam, natural gas, nuclear, et al) that came from someone somewhere gambling. We’d still be in tribes in constant war with each other or huddled in caves next to open fires if we decided all matters by “If it saves one life …”.
And we are slowly reverting back to that prehistory with the lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, mandates for donning semi-burkas at all times in all places, and everyone treating everyone else as an alien species with the unceasing entreaties for social distancing. The crazy orders are depriving people of producing sustenance – i.e., boundless business closings and zooming (no pun intended) unemployment.
You know, sustenance, the kind of thing that’s been around since hunting and gathering. Many in our ruling class have made a conscious decision to replicate primordial existence, or at least the Great Depression. Once you take a meat axe to capital – thank you, Gavin Newsom and the other would-be Napoleons – it’s hard to bring it back. According to the National Restaurant Association, 40 to 50 percent of eateries won’t, if ever.
An empty downtown street amid the Covid-19 lockdown in Chicago, March 21. (photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)
Guess who’ll suffer the most? To find the susceptible, you’ll have to move down the social status and income pyramid: small businesses and the social rungs below those in exclusive zip codes. Without a doubt, the not-so-privileged, in the lingo of the day, will be the most vulnerable, not just to get the virus but also to lose their livelihoods (see here). Guess what happens to the woke crowd’s much-esteemed goal of “equity” as Newsom and company smother their economies? Guess who’ll cry the loudest for a “bailout” for their draconian measures? Mensa membership isn’t necessary for an answer.
The service industry is decimated, and much of the 15 million middle-income jobs with it. What do you think happens to your average barista? Hello, AOC. The president of a leftist activist group, Diane Yentel of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, proclaimed, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.” The lockdowns are an assault on the much-ballyhooed “equity”.
Taking a page from the Weimar Germany book of 1923, the response is to shower the country with paper money, with the same result, and non-expulsion edicts. Paper money being shoveled into the economy while euthanizing much production isn’t an expression of sanity in public policy.
It’s all due to “If it saves one life …”. Thank you, our schools, for giving us a powerful cadre of small-minded but powerful people.
Arising out of our colleges is much more than blinkered, busybody “experts”. Insanity dressed up in arcane academic rhetoric emanates out of these gilded hot houses. For example, take equality and turn it into equality of outcome, mash it into ruminations about our electoral system, and out comes “vote reparations”, and out goes “one man, one vote”. You’ve got that right: a black vote should count twice, or some similar formulation. Really? Brandon Hasbrouck, law professor at Washington and Lee University, hatched the idea to address the fact that there aren’t enough blacks in Wyoming and Nebraska, and too many in Chicago, Detroit, and the urban dots on the mid-Atlantic coast (see here). Yeah, African-Americans aren’t evenly distributed enough, he says, or in large enough numbers to protect their interests in a constitutional republic. So, he demands to jerry rig the system to the advantage of 13% of the population and end the constitutional republic that we’ve come to know.
Brandon Hasbrouck
The possibilities would be endless for advocates. For instance, divide LA’s Watts, Compton, and Southcentral neighborhoods into 20 congressional districts. Let’s put Eldridge Gerry’s salamander, the Gerrymander, on fertility drugs.
Printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was made in reaction to the newly drawn state senate election district of South Essex created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the Democratic-Republican Party. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of the district as a dragon-like “monster”, and Federalist newspaper editors and others at the time likened it to a salamander.
Crazy? You bet, but something that gets a serious hearing among those in padded cells and faculty lounges.
Our schools, now at all levels, are quickly becoming breeding grounds for the sort of deadly mental pathogens that spell doom to any healthy society. At the entrance to every school – grade school to college – the following caution should be required under the school’s name in an official font size: “Warning: The activity in this place is hazardous to your cognitive development and the health of your country”.
Solar panel array in Irwindale, California. (photo: Ringo Chiu/Zuma)
Here I am with another piece on the ongoing and grotesque burlesque show in my native state of California. This one is about the inevitability of oppressive central planning that grips the progressive mind in the state. There seems to be this fetish for the power to control everything and everyone to get to the ruling claque’s rapturous end state. They need a cataclysm to stampede the state’s hoi polloi into their arms. For them, nothing better fits the bill than their fixation on “climate change” and the companion thought that the Golden State and, if they capture DC, the US will lead the way to the nirvana of Sierra Club policy papers.
I was reading Kevin Williamson’s fairly balanced essay in National Review’s October issue, “The Heart of California’s Darkness”, and it dawned on me that the political power-hunger in the heart of every California progressive (or liberal, or leftist, or whatever) is, in some ways, more complete than anything that came out of the old Soviet Union. The USSR was a contraption that couldn’t run because it combined two incompatible things: complete equality in all things material and a prosperous life filled with conveniences. The former undercut the latter, and down it came after about 80 years. The crazies that run Sacramento are after something more sweeping.
Frankly, they don’t care so much about conveniences as they do about their religious-like adherence to an arbitrary sense of environmentalist purity best articulated by the immature utterances of people like 17-year-old Greta Thunberg and her ideological soulmate, Ocasio-Cortez. They won’t even make allowance for the desire for comfort in life. One of the greatest additions to comfort, alongside the automobile and balloon housing construction (makes the ‘burbs possible), was air conditioning. All of them are on the hit list for eventual elimination.
Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg
The only problem is that the peasants would be seeking their pitch forks if the zealots shocked them with a huge and immediate dose of their vision. So, the fanatics seek to slowly strangulate our conveniences under think layers of regulations and edicts emanating from a politburo of the ruling party’s elders and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
The Party has supportive cadres in affiliated institutions such as publicly-funded universities to help them invent new schemes to herd the masses in the desired direction. One such contributor in the achievement of the Party’s goal is comrade Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at the Haas Business School. He’s an enthusiast for tying electricity rates to the time of day when their most needed. If you don’t find ways to cut back on air conditioning, you’re deserving of bankruptcy in the fevered imaginations of people like Severin.
Severin Borenstein
And this comes at a time when the air is fouled by earlier escapades into environmentalist utopia that turned the forests into a blanket of matchsticks. So, if his wish comes to pass, you, my fair resident of the state, will have the privilege of coming home to a hot and stuffy house to sweat and bake in. That’s what you get for not desiring to live in a cramped and over-priced hovel in the narrow band of real estate hugging the coast. The abject inhumanity at the heart of the worldview is what’s so appalling.
The fact is, California’s version of Lenin’s vanguard elite is trying to shoehorn reality into an unreality. It won’t work any more than the Five-Year Plans of Lenin and his descendants. See, the sun and wind don’t cooperate so you must be made to cooperate. According to the California Energy Commission (another Party affiliate), energy capacity has indeed increased in the past 20 years as the activists in power shifted to renewables. But not so fast. “Capacity” – which could be another one of those statistical fairy tales – must not be confused with “generation”. Generation of electricity has been flat, even declining slightly in the face of population growth. Accepting energy from hydrocarbons from inside or outside the state to make up the difference between demand and supply gives the ruling class the willies, and nuclear power conjures visions of old monster movies. What you end up with is blackouts and/or personal bankruptcy – not exactly an open-arms invitation to move to the state.
This is no way to live. Not surprisingly, 800 businesses have jumped ship in one year from 2018 to 2019 to join thousands of others in the diaspora. California is not the future, so long as its goofy vision is quarantined within its borders. That’s an open question given the fact that California acolytes of central planning are auditioning for national promotions in the new Biden administration.
If left alone, California will suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. One can only hope . . . and pray. The death of the hot mess is the only thing that’ll keep the rest of us safe and secure. Now that’s real herd immunity.
Gov. Whitmer of Michigan (D) announced the status of the lockdown order in March 2020. Gov. Newsom (D) of California extended his lockdown order in June 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gives his annual ‘State of the City’ speech at City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., on April 19, 2020. ( photo: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)Ibram X. KendiBlack Lives Matter organized protest in Washington DC on June 6, 2020.Black Lives Matter protest with the usual Marxits slogans.
The Totalitarian Temptation
In 1977, Jean-Francois Revel, a man of the French left at the time, came out with The Totalitarian Temptation. He was repulsed by the Euro-left’s unwillingness to shed their deeply embedded reflex for totalitarian control.
Jean-Francois Revel
In the vein of Rahm Immanuel’s (Pres. Obama’s Chief of Staff in 2010) famous maxim, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”, “progressives” and powerful Democrats have exploited COVID, riots, fires, and blackouts to express their inner totalitarian. Revel would not be surprised if he were alive today. It appears that once you cradle the left’s belief system, you develop affectations for centralized control down to the intimate details of a population’s lives.
I put progressives in quotes because it is the moniker of choice for a wide range of control freaks from Mayor Garcetti of LA to Gov. Newsom of California to Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University – though I’m a bit tentative about Kendi for a number of reasons. I shouldn’t be. He is a man of the left and the possessor of a powerful drive for power. They all do. It’s in their political DNA.
Control Freaks in California
Gov. Newsom (D) of Califonria delivers report on the status of the state’s fires on August 24, 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. (Photo: Kevin Sanders)
Right now, California is burning up. Of course, for the state’s overlords, it can’t be the outgrowth of the decades of environmentalist policies that are the favorite of the ruling party. And the Democratic Party is THE ruling party of California. The state has become such a Democrat Malta among the states that it can swing the national popular vote by millions in a presidential election to the loser, thereby giving the Party a tiresome talking point for at least the next four years.
Indubitably, with the tedious boast comes the incessant demands to rig the system to allow Big Urban to run the country. How would Big Urban run the country? Look at California. Mayor Garcetti tweeted, “Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead), turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you’re not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part.” The state’s energy system can’t deliver the goods – electricity that is – after Democrat politicos piloted the state to the “future”, the future of the Book of Eli (see the movie).
A map shows potential power outages by PG&E in California October 9, 2019.Scene from the The Book of Eli.
It turns out that greenie energy is expensive and unreliable energy. The decrees for solar panels on your roof, flim-flamming the rate structure to punish the dissenter from the Party line, the tomfoolery of net-metering, and Byzantine utility regulations that forcibly shift resources from the delivering of electricity to the construction of the greenie utopia have translated into blackouts, the grid becoming a force multiplier for firestorms, and rates running from 15₵ to 50₵ per kWh depending on a labyrinth of time-of-day, season, and “tiers”. Thus, a resident receives a bill that reads more like a grad school dissertation or one of those Big Tech privacy statements. They’re unreadable. So, just shut up and write the check.
Electricity is a classic copper-to-coffee commodity. It need not be priced by a Gordian knot of rules, unless your rulers are auditioning for the role of commissar. For example, my utility in northwest Montana charges a flat $30 monthly fee and 8.26₵ per kWh. What does that mean? It means, first, that I can calculate my bill by looking at my meter. Secondly, with air conditioning running full blast in the summer, I received a bill for $125 as opposed to $450 in California (as of 2015).
Okay, some Golden State residents might say, “That’s not my bill.” You are fooling yourself. It may not be your bill; but if it isn’t your bill, it certainly is a classic example of the beggar-thy-neighbor approach to life. You benefit because somebody else is forced to pay what you don’t. And if they don’t pay, the utilities turn to beggar-thy-neighbor in having maintenance be the beggar. Thus, Paradise, Ca., burns down.
An aerial view of destruction from the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., off Clark Road in November 2018. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Democrat executives seem beset by all manner of catastrophes. Garcetti can’t keep the lights on and Newsom can’t either, plus keep the state from going up in flames. Blame-shifting is the usual response. The culprit is frequently some abstruse threat, a kind of politically useful bogeyman. Newsom’s favorite is “climate change”. He declared, “This [the fires] is a climate damn emergency.” To him, there’s nothing to debate, and he’ll brook no debate, dismissing those who disagree as “deniers”. It’s the typical attempt at public-shaming of people who won’t kowtow to the Party line.
There’s good reason not to bend a knee at the altar of the Sierra Club. Forest debris and dead trees have been piling up in the state’s forest for decades, as per the grand poohbahs of the greenie movement. If fires occur according to environmentalism’s vanguard elite, let ‘em burn because it is Gaia’s will. For those in the fire’s way, it’s their fault for being there. These powerful zealots are as calloused as the Bolshevik Grigori Zinoviev when he wrote in 1918 during the Red Terror:
“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”
“In the basements of the Cheka” by Ivan Vladimirov (1919)
Newsom would probably prefer (I hope) that opponents not be lined up against the wall, just muzzled till they die out. Soon, the alternative voices will be replaced by the indoctrinated young when they reach the age of consent. Thus, the imperative to politicize the k-through-college curriculum, exactly like Soviet schools.
Then it’ll be a clear path to … more fires, third world power reliability, and an existence typified in The Book of Eli. The mounting difficulties will lead to more controls, not less. The powers-that-be will need more regulators and Party discipline to address the errors from the previous batch of edicts. 100 million dead trees exploding into massive conflagrations will mean a de-kulakization of the foothills and mountains (reminiscent of Stalin’s 1930’s war on the peasant) by herding the outlying residents into the tight urban cores (the state’s current and future war on the ‘burbs and “exurbia”).
A panorama of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada.A fire as blow torch: The Big Creek fire consumes a home as it blows through the Sierra-Nevada and 1,000 acres in 30 seconds in CNN photo from Sept. 10, 2020.
The power disruptions won’t be addressed by greater investment in delivery and production. Instead, small-is-beautiful will be the mantra: smaller homes; fewer and smaller appliances; the reduction of personal conveyance to glorified golf carts and graffitied and filthy public transport; and an end to air conditioning. See, the environmentalist’s future is a self-anointed elites’ playground for directing everyone’s lifestyle, mind, and behavior. Their current penchant for semi-totalitarianism will blossom into the full-throated variety.
Will any of this address the alleged malefactor, climate change? It might, but only if we and California are impoverished. Then again, the warming might persist unabated. Our GDP is to be lowered, but the Sierra Club can’t control China’s CCP or India. It only seems to control California. Other countries are beginning to experience the joys of air conditioning and they won’t have any qualms about coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Other states similarly won’t view the disaster that is California as being a wholesome path to follow. The end result is a mutilated California and a climate change that continues its inexorable march.
Coal-fired power generation in China.
Is the goal a diminishment of climate change – which won’t be – or just a naked power grab to control all behavior and minds? Bet on the latter. Budding totalitarians can’t help themselves because they are, in their heart of hearts, little busybodies. As incessant buttinskies, mostly upset that the world didn’t conform to them, they seek power to make it so. Call it a form of therapy, one that comes at the expense of everybody else. And the rich go along because they can appear high-minded and, by the way, have the wealth to shield themselves from the many ill-consequences. It’s an alliance of the logically incontinent and the self-loathing/self-serving. As with the Russian peasants of the 1930’s, though, there will be no place to run for the average Joe and Josephina.
An Academic Control Freak
The surrender to this class of power-seeking busybodies began when late 19th-century academicians peddled the “expert” as the proper repository for governmental power. It’s progressivism’s greatest “contribution” to civilization. The accolade of “expert” was reserved for people like them, folks with degrees. A degree wrongly became a synonym for wisdom.
Our modern campuses of insulated little social cocoons are now a hotbed where certain whims are nurtured and fortified in ideologized academic departments and staffs. The graduates with those unexamined assumptions trickle out into the institutional centers of power and influence. The ridiculousness becomes the incontrovertible “truth” in the uncultivated mind of the rioters, BLM, Antifa, opening ceremonies of NFL and NBA games, corporate HR departments, and Democratic Party slogans. Within a fortnight, the miscreants who recently chanted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” were turned into beacons of light.
Ibram X. Kendi
One of the academic abettors of this philosophical tyranny is Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi, the occupant of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Professorship of the Humanities. The previous possessor of the title was philosopher and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. So, the position went from Wiesel’s classical liberalism to the racism of classical liberalism. It’s the crux of Kendi’s infantile explanation for all of human experience.
He wallows in the impatience of Marx, but replaced the proletariat with race, particularly blacks. Marx rejected previous norms and institutions – everything from family to constitutions, much of the corpus of classical liberalism and a good portion of western civilization to boot – because they inexorably exploited the masses of “wage slaves”, the working class. He was consumed with results, not the results of minor adjustments but with the apocalypse of existential revolution to overturn all of society. Take Marx’s general outline, replace a few nouns, recognize that both are obsessed with imposing fantastical complete equality in all its manifestations, and you have Kendi’s hectoring invective, How To Be An Antiracist.
This polemical diatribe is taken as the stuff of real scholarship. Au contraire, it’s a 284-page op-ed, a set of opinions wrapped up in biased verbiage. The quality of Kendi’s thinking can be seen in his clownish attempt to define the thing that he claims is the omni-explanation for nearly all of reality, racism. He writes, “Racism is a marriage of racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” In case you missed it, he sounds like an eighth-grader in repeating a form of the word and its surrogates in his definition of the word. The circular thinking resides alongside his opinions, which are one kind of conclusion, being used to reach other conclusions. There’s much in this polemic that is sand in the gears of logic.
He’s proof that ethnic studies departments do not broaden the mind but generate the next generation of radicalized activists. And they are pouring into the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Rochester, Kenosha, almost anywhere sympathizers hold the reins of power.
A riot against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Oregon, August 2, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
None of Kendi’s end-state of absolute equality can be achieved without the power to impose it. Inequality rears its head no matter what. Past attempts at equality-mongering (Remember the Iron and Bamboo Curtains?) only led to an aristocracy of overseers – people like Kendi – to patrol the jurisdictions of the equality-of-all-things. If the commissariat didn’t exist, life would revert back to its prior condition of an overclass of the powerful, talented, or most fortuitist. Unknowingly or knowingly, if Kendi and his followers get their bite at the golden apple of power, it’ll just be the powerful of the few with the guns.
The walls of absolute equality will have to be forever manned with incessant forays into people’s lives to enforce the multitude of decrees, sub-decrees, sub-sub-decrees, ad infinitum. Kendi and his initiates in the streets are actually control freaks par excellence.
Kendi is only one of the latest inductees into the rogue’s gallery. He’ll have to maneuver for floor space with the likes of Xi Jinping and Stalin. Much of the Democratic Party leadership is waiting in the wings to join him and them. As for the rest of us, we’ll have nowhere to run. The United States as the traditional haven from tyranny will have been eclipsed. Sad, really sad.
Protesters gather around after setting fire to the entrance of a police station as demonstrations continue after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., May 28, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
It’s everywhere. The story of America is reduced to “systemic racism” to such an extent that the chants of Black Lives Matter are made mainstream. Logging onto my Facebook page confronted me with “Act Against Racial Injustice: We stand with the Black community and against racism. Together we can support causes working towards racial justice and equality.” Going to the Bing search engine brought out the announcement, “We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those working toward racial equality. A message from our CEO.” At least the techies are all in for a campaign against the alleged pervasiveness of racism.
The headliner for an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
And then we have the New York Times weighing in with “The 1619 Project”. It’s an unadulterated attempt to boil the story of America down to racism. The tale is directed at the kiddies in K-12 curricula from the screed’s website. So, the kids get a bald-faced version ladled on top of what they receive daily from intellectually corrupted teachers, textbooks, and supplemental materials. The story is the same: Racism persists everywhere in an overt/covert and individual/institutional manner. To keep the story rolling, it’s better for the cause that the supposed threat be imprecise, vague, hidden, and forever true no matter what.
Sen. Tom Cotton penned an op-ed to the New York Times on the entirely reasonable option to use federal troops to quell our current wave of riots. The Constitution, The Insurrection Act, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Rock during Eisenhower’s White House residency are testament to its feasibility and legality. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether this is the time for it. In my view, we are getting there. Still, the reaction in the Times’s newsroom was open rebellion. The woke crowd in their work stalls had their sensitivities enflamed and threatened mass resignation.
But is the story of endemic racism true? Color me skeptical. Maybe you too.
Andrew C. McCarthy’s article in National Review Online, “The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard”, puts lie to the charge. His case is strong. Quoting Heather McDonald, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
Andrew C. McCarthy
There’s more. A quarter of unarmed suspects killed by police are black, even though blacks make up 13% of the population. An argument for the Left? No. The lawlessness of many of our urban neighborhoods is illustrative of the fact that blacks compose 53% of murders and 60% of robberies. They have many more run-ins with the cops and a much higher potential to fall into the killed-by-police category. And the victims are overwhelmingly black and so are the ones reporting the crimes. It’s amazing that the number is “only” – but still sad – 9 unarmed blacks killed in contrast to 19 whites in 2019. The whole story that the marchers and rioters are bull-horning is manufactured.
Why does the story have resonance? In military parlance, the ground has been prepared. Decades of K-18 victimhood is extracting a price in combustible cities and hijacked minds. The matriculants filter into Fortune 500 boardrooms, cultural institutions, journalism, the arts, and everywhere people occupy positions of influence.
Undeniably, most impactful factor is the philosophical bias in the schools.
One person (David Bahnsen) even speculated on the role of colleges and universities in making California left wing from top to bottom and in and out. The more pervasive the campuses, the more pervasive the ideology. This circumstance might partially explain the uncompromising leftward tilt of the state.
Other blue states may periodically vote a split ballot: an occasional Republican for governor or mayor and Dems down-ballot (Mass., N.Y., N.J., Maryland for instance). Colleges are present in these states but not so wall-to-wall as in the Golden State. 115 community colleges exist in the state with 1 out of 4 community college pupils in the U.S. attending one in California. 119 4-year colleges and universities of a variety of shapes and sizes exist in the state, including the massive 33 public ones of over 670,000 full-time enrollees. No state has the capacity to disseminate leftist thinking as does California. There’s no corner of the state to escape the culture-smog. It penetrates everywhere and a super-majority of the electorate.
Students of UC Berkeley.
All kinds of nonsense and maliciousness sprouts in the pervasive academically-influenced soil of California. New and novel ways to repeal the Second Amendment in the state; outlawing separate boy/girl toy isles in a store; attempts to ban any alternative to the government schools; ham-handed efforts to force abortion and the LGBTQ agenda onto religious organizations and their social mission; environmental central planning; declaring war on preexisting and longstanding industries in favor of a destructive utopia; the nullification of federal immigration law; and the scare story of racism, racism everywhere, are taken seriously in this peculiar hothouse.
Do we need any more proof of the damage caused by the deformation of learning in our schools? Build more colleges in your state in this day and age and watch your politics go to hell. Real reform that moves us away from the precipice of perpetual victimhood, riots, falsehoods, and malignant crusades begins with the real reform of our schools. An unchallenged and malicious ideology shouldn’t be allowed to take root and then undermine the state and nation. This is no demand for the rule of another monolithic ideology, but rather a call for balance. Now that’s real reform.
The cry of “throw the bums out” begins with a focus on those in critical public agencies in education and the teacher-training colleges. Stop the madness by going to the source.
I wish that we could delist California Conservative from the list of endangered species but their numbers keep falling. While listening to National Review’s Radio Free California podcast with Will Swaim, (President of California Policy Center, a center/right think tank and legal organization in Tustin, Ca.) and John Eastman (former Dean of Chapman University School of Law and Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence in Ca.), I learned that Eastman flew the Southern California coop for Santa Fe, New Mexico. Furthermore, in a prior podcast, in a quick off-handed remark between Swaim and co-host David Bahnsen (Managing Director of the Bahnsen Group), both admitted to the fact that they didn’t know of anyone who didn’t have a plan to leave the state.
Speaking of caravans, Eastman has apparently joined the 4-decade-long crowd of middle-class refugees who have fled to points beyond the reach of Sacramento.
It’s more than a footnote in the sorry tale of the decline of the once-Golden State. The state increasingly resembles a feudal rat’s nest of masses of the poor and the super-rich protected behind the walls of their gated enclaves, as all of it sits atop a decaying infrastructure.
For many decades now, the majority of the people of the state have politically chosen rot … and the creation of millions wishing to escape. Sounds like Venezuela.
