Yep, Californios, it is worsening. The troubling trends continue. Here’s the latest.
Tomorrow, July 1, the cost of getting from point A to point B in California will increase. The state’s gas tax rises from 59.6 cents per gallon to 61.2. More is in the offing each year for the foreseeable future. Also, the state’s latest tightening of its low-carbon fuel standard will be slamming drivers on the same day adding up to 15 cents to each gallon. Coupled with the garroting of California’s domestic oil production and the loss of oil refineries (Valero, Philips 66 in Benicia by next year), Californios could be looking at sticker shock at the pump – $8-per-gallon in 18 months is a real possibility.
Keep in mind that this is a popularly elected government in veto-proof numbers. Ruin is quite popular in the state.
Like Stalin’s prosecutor at the show trials, the state’s apparatchiks are impervious to the pain they are causing. They are zealots to the revolution. According to the San Joaquin Valley Sun, California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph said in recent testimony before the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, “’We don’t analyze a retail cost …. [CARB’s analysis] does not identify specific costs to specific consumers ….’” (see #1)
Through what can only be described as Soviet-style central planning, the one-party state is constructing environmentalism’s utopia – like Lenin, or Mao, or Castro did Marx’s – no matter the impracticality or the economic bleeding of its people. Gas prices are just one canary in the mine. There’s a whole slew of other symptoms of the rotting corpse. Some are toxic policies and some are pure stats.
In US News and World Report’s state rankings, California is last in affordability, “47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education.” (see #2) The ruling party is running the state into the ground.
This is a high-tax state, dahhhh! The Tax Foundation places the state near the bottom (48th) in its State Tax Competitiveness Index (see #3). My gosh, how can anyone afford to live there?! This is a financially and personally deadly utopia.
If you’re looking for a place to retire, don’t make it California. According to BankRate’s annual analysis, only three other states are worse than the “golden state” (47th), while, adding insult to injury, you are still spry enough not to have your kids take away your car keys and occasionally have to roll up to a gas pump in the state.
Indeed, driving is increasingly a perilous adventure in the state. It is at the bottom in the quality of its roads, fifth-worst (see #4). While on those washboards, you will be facing collectively some of the worst drivers, the third-worst, and the second-worst accident and drunk driving rates in the country. No wonder its donkey-party insurance market is in tatters.
Putting up with all that will leave you and your kids exposed to some of the worst cultural influences on the planet. The ruling party’s theoreticians have embedded transgenderism and the mission statement of the LGBTQ+ Human Rights Campaign into elementary school instruction. Identity politics, rooted in neo-Marxist theory, was getting set to become a high school graduation requirement in a new “ethnic studies” course, till Donald Trump and AG Pam Bondi began to enforce recent Supreme Court decisions banning the noxious bunkum of “racism to fight racism”. With state encouragement, and the heightened potential of social contagion of too many kids on too many “smart” phones, you might find your kid transitioning without you even knowing about it, all under the protective wing of your kid’s guidance counselor.
For your daughters, highly sexualized boys could be sharing a bathroom, locker room, or competing with them. The whole scene is turning into a monstrous social sewer. No wonder the state’s only growth industry is the outward-bounded moving trade. So says U-Haul (see #6).
People aren’t stupid, except possibly for a critical mass of the state’s electorate, or so it seems. It can’t last. Even for the most die-hard California new age Democrat neo-socialist, civilizational decline can’t be a pleasant experience. Till that realization becomes a reality, you-the-sane have two options: get out like so many others or just continue to swim around in the septic tank. Simple.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Bains calls for CARB chief to step down”, Daniel Gligich, San Joaquin Valley Sun, 5/30/2025, at https://sjvsun.com/news/politics/bains-calls-for-carb-chief-to-step-down/
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the summary at “‘No One Is Incredibly Pumped’ About Kamala Harris Running for Governor”, National Review, 6/30/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-one-is-incredibly-pumped-about-kamala-harris-running-for-governor/. I pirated many of the stats from him. For the USNWR report, “California” at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california.
3. “Taxes in California: California Tax Rates, Collections, and Burdens” at https://taxfoundation.org/location/california/
4. See “U.S. States With the Worst Roads”, Jonathan Jones, Construction Coverage, 4/30/2025, at https://constructioncoverage.com/research/states-with-the-worst-roads. Also “California has some of the worst roads in the nation, new study says. Where does it rank?”, Jaqueline Pinedo, Sacramento Bee, 4/10/2024, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article287533375.html.
5. “The Numbers Don’t Lie: California Ranks Among the Worst Drivers in the U.S.”, Eugene Bruno, Eugene Bruno and Associates, 12/13/2024, at https://sdlawyers.com/the-numbers-dont-lie-california-ranks-among-the-worst-drivers-in-the-u-s/.
6. “California ranks last in growth for fifth consecutive year, U-Haul says”, 1/7/2025, at https://www.kdrv.com/news/regional/california-ranks-last-in-growth-for-fifth-consecutive-year-u-haul-says/article_31927000-6e72-5e25-b994-5951a1b1adf1.html.
Major elements of the Right and Left are completely unhinged. Crazy has been institutionalized. In Freud-speak, the superego and ego have been short-circuited and it’s a clear path to the raw id.
On the Right, something happened in the time frame from the 2008 Tea Party to the MAGA of today. It actually took a short seven years (2008-2015). What had started out as a call for a smaller government of lower taxes and less regulation, an advocacy of a return to our governmental roots, had somehow morphed into a cathartic cry, a demand for a rhetorical middle finger, an enthusiasm for stick-it-to-the-libs political theater. Thus, we get a continual stream of owning-the-libs YouTube videos; we get Donald Trump and his MAGA in all its bombast and incoherence. It feels good to watch and hear Trump crudely insult anybody not-Trump or Charlie Kirk in his well-choreographed, rapid-fire schtick verbally dismantling a mental adolescent without the public practice. It’s Lebron James against the weekend warrior. It’s fun, it feels good, but how healthy is it?
MAGA
The Right “wins”, but what have they won? A trade war against the world? A cuddling with anti-American thugs? A fusillade of verbal tirades against our friends and allies? The cavorting with union thugs? A silly nibbling at our spending habits (DOGE, a banal assault on “waste, fraud, and abuse”) while ignoring the drunken sailors of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid who are pell-mell driving us over the cliff? Does any of this make any sense? Of course not.
On the Left, they’ve got all the political theater of Donald Trump at his worst, and more, much more. They’ve got Antifa, antisemitism, racism as “anti-racism” (DEI, CRT, etc.), campus mayhem, a summer of riots, keffiyeh-clad street goons armed with guns and Molotov cocktails, LGBTQAI+ gangsters, Bernie bros, the neo-Marxism of neo-Marxist professors, The Squad, AOC’s babblings, and a monopoly on the cultural commanding heights to propagate the cognitive filth. I could go on, but your eyes would glaze over.
Antifa in uniform
For them, something happened from the time of Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, George Kennan, and JFK to The 1619 Project, to Trayvon Martin/Michael Brown/George Floyd, to maybe 2014, maybe 60 years. “The long march through the institutions” of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (google it) took a little longer to fully dominate the synapses of the stewards of the Democratic Party. After that, it didn’t take long for them to replicate MAGA – a middle finger but only on the left hand – and take it to Spinal Tap’s “11”, their preferred behavioral stance.
When the Left resorts to political theater, it’s often of the lethal variety. Talk to store owners across the country in 2020 and the Holocaust survivors of today marching for mercy for the Hamas-held hostages. Many of the innocent end up walking on rubble, maimed, dead, or being treated in burn wards. “Free Palestine” has replaced “Allahu Akbar”.
The fringes of the political continuum are an unholy mess. I don’t expect darlings of the Right like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk (sometimes), a chunk of the Right’s podcast world, et al, to rush out and praise Ukraine’s amazing drone strike against Russia’s strategic airfields (see #1) or Israel’s sudden decapitation of Hezbollah with exploding pagers and airstrikes. Such imaginative gutsiness on the part of the Ukrainians and Israelis is hardly applauded in such circles. The fact that Ukraine and Israel occupy the front lines in the defense of western civilization scarcely crosses their radar screen.
Tucker Carlson with Marjorie Taylor Greene and former President Donald J. Trump summer 2020. “I hate him passionately,” the Fox host texted in January 2021, referring to Mr. Trump. (photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Their tunnel vision is America First, which really is America Alone, and America Weaker. In their myopic minds, we are not to have a foreign policy till every American problem, real or imagined, addressable by government or not, has been eradicated. Till then, our oceans will protect us, they assume . . . despite the fact that illiterate jihadists wielding box cutters, strategic bombers, missiles, high-altitude surveillance ballons, nuclear subs, drones, and satellites have shown them to be irrelevant or just another conduit, not a barrier, for those who wish to do us harm. Faith in geographical features is not a substitute for strategy.
I also don’t expect the elders of the donkey party to turn over a new leaf from the neo-Marxist infestation in their midst since Barack Obama ushered it into the party’s inner sanctum. They are just as fearful of their fanatics as the GOP is of the MAGA horde lurking in their venues. Both cohorts at the fringes cause the parties’ “adults in the room” to cower in fear.
For donkey party loyalists, their notion of reform after their defeat at the hands of the orange man is to be shriller about what got them booted in the first place: boys now girls/girls now boys, border erasure, a state-sponsored onslaught on the people’s quality of life in pursuit of environmentalist fairy tales, a morbidly obese government that only promises the déjà vu of 1980s Argentina, etc. – the same stuff that drives average people nuts. They don’t get it, and probably won’t till a few more debacles finally detox them.
For a GOP still hitched to an impulsive and bullheaded chieftain, they are left to be dragged along in whatever direction his impulses take them. They are left to stunningly embrace Big Labor’s robber barons after spending a career condemning them. No “right to work” for these sycophants. Former free traders are sounding like zealous converts to the cult of Smoot-Hawley. If Regan were alive today, he’d have to leave the Republican Party as the Democratic Party left him in the 1950s.
Watch Trump castigate the Courts, his courts, since many of these judges were appointed by him, including the current 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. They were chosen for their adherence to the rule of law – original intent – not the rule of Trump. The Rule of Trump is strict obedience to his every wish. In a few upcoming cases, he may come to understand that the rule of law is not the rule of Trump. He may well learn that “emergencies” are not construed to be a carte blanche takeover of Congress’s trade powers in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (Trump, it’s in Article I, not Article II.). The vast body of immigration law has some due process provisions in limited circumstances; the whole thing does not fall under Trump caprice. The presidency does not have temples with altars waiting to receive sacrifices to them.
As for the Democratic Party, their temples have in their inner sanctums, not open to the prying eyes of the general public, altars to Karl Marx and his apostles. He goes unmentioned but is the guiding light for the party beliefs and actions. Little that they propose escapes the ideological straitjacket of his junk thought. Their Don Quixote revolution against imaginary oppressors has little room for reality, culture, restraint, law and constitutions. The crusade ends up where it always has: a disaster for all concerned. Look at California. Look at North Korea. Look at post-Soviet Russia.
So, here we are, buffeted by fringe crazies. MAGA follows their guru in lockstep and the donkey party can’t escape the neo-Marxist mind-fog of its shrillest members. Interesting times.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Ukraine stages audacious attack on airfields deep in Russian territory”, Christopher Miller, et al, Financial Times, 6/1/2025, at https://archive.is/dVnxk#selection-1571.0-1571.70
* Please watch the interview with Jennifer Hernandez, environmental law and land use expert and former chair of Holland & Knight’s West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group, for insights into the California housing crisis. You’ll be captivated by what she has to say.
*************
I am a native Californian and was a resident until retirement (2015). Why did I leave? Yes, I did not like the now entrenched and hard-core collectivism of the state. The lurch to the left, and in many cases the far Left, and the one-party monopoly on power, were serious problems for me. But then it dawned on me that all of it was popularly chosen. I was actually fleeing the state’s electorate.
These electoral choices had real world, smack-you-in-the-face repercussions. On many subsequent trips to the coast in the course of my long life in the state (mostly raised in Santa Maria), I noticed something that is really evident to some extent across the country, but is hyper-visible in California. The $70,000 sports car, homes, and the trails on the bluffs above the crashing waves are occupied by the grey-haired. Far more recuperations from hip surgery are evident than the paddle of little feet and strollers. Much of the area is a retirement home writ large.
The ritzy enclaves have a few scattered elementary schools, but I don’t know why. Grey hairs have declining fertility. The young ones are a rarity. Then it dawned on me. The state has chosen, through long-established popular consent, feudalism and its manorialism. Governance is feudal with a ruling and privileged generational “nobility” in a one-party state, and socially and geographically it is markedly divided into exclusive zones protected by gates and walls in some cases and a bevy of law, red tape, regulations, and a labyrinth of agencies in most others – the manorialism. The upshot is a favoritism for those who already have theirs – the Ins – and a suppression of the dreams of the striving – the Outs. Age wise, on the ground, it shows as the grey-haired in their seaside villas and in the driver’s seat of the $70,000 Corvette, while crumbs are left for blue-collars and the young with families.
Frankly, I couldn’t stomach it any longer. It’s more than political. It’s immoral. Each election was an episode of bashing my head against the wall. Nothing changed, and only got worse. Self-harm is not part of my psyche; so, I fled the state’s electorate.
“Socialism is the feudalism of the 19th century”, a quote loosely attributed to thinkers far afield as Adam Smith and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (see #1). A modern reformulation of the quote would read, “Socialism is the feudalism of California of the 21st century.” A heavily socialized economy, and oriented political system, produce a few winners (Ins) who have constructed the means to protect what they have acquired and enjoy at the expense of the Outs, the young seeking upward mobility.
At the top of the list of causes is the infatuation with environmentalism, a freezing in amber of the natural setting, with its continual invention of new eco-crusades such as climate change. Agencies, regulations, laws and lawsuits are exploited to preserve their playground by targeting the biggest threat, new housing. It’s been happening for decades.
The Boomers went from the Summer of Love and Dead Heads to nest eggs, great hiking opportunities, and fireplaces beside bay windows overlooking the ocean. The fallout was a housing shortage for the most vulnerable, the young who need the economy to grow to make room for them. That’s not compatible with the vision of the good life as defined by the eco-fatuations of the one-party state’s political constituencies: white-collar public sector unions; the keyboard demography (in Hernandez’s words) of entertainment, the education establishment, financial services, administration of all kinds, and Silicon Valley; and the litany of government-loving and ever-evolving transgressive victims’ groups who are closely allied to the above. Mom and dad and kids, and people who make things in the trades, have no place in this world. They are an afterthought.
A civilizational legacy is similarly an afterthought. No realistic consideration is given to the needs of future generations. The kids are ignored. The way that life is constructed in the state resembles a looting expedition. Use it up; let it crumble; I won’t be around anyway. Sucking it up so the young have opportunity and the simple necessities like shelter is inconceivable for those who already have theirs.
It’s not that this generational California aristocracy doesn’t care; it’s that they don’t know how to care. Their beloved command society which created the mess, and is geared to preserving their assets, is now directed to solve the housing crisis by of course . . . command. They actually think that more commands, diktats, will grant to the serfs what they need and not threaten their loot and position. Stack the plebes in “five-over-ones” (five floors above the parking) in $1 million units at a cost of $8,500 in monthly rent, all made “affordable” by subsidies, in a few plots limited to “transit corridors”. Commanding “affordable housing” doesn’t mean that it happens. No one can afford it, not the taxpayers nor the beneficiaries. It’s a joke. Don’t think for a moment about pruning the eco-zealotry or the NIMBY access to the Leviathan and their supportive nest of eco-vipers.
The return of a housing free market would be a godsend. Standing athwart is the enemy of free markets, big government. In an all-expansive state government, such as in California, the rats scurry about exploiting cracks and openings in the mammoth governmental maze to halt development, forever on the lookout to quash their hated “sprawl”, or anything that can endanger their property values or vistas. This is popular sovereignty, of a sort, but one with an open hostility to property rights. Their notion of property rights is their property and their “right” to extend a sphere of control that encompasses miles beyond their deed.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and it shows in ungodly housing prices, which is great for them but an impenetrable iron curtain for anyone stretching to reach for the next rungs to the good life, usually the young or anyone with insufficient funds to break into the exclusive club. Besides being a boon for U-Haul, this colossal regulatory contrivance is symptomatic of a solipsistic personality (very self-centered or selfish), a character flaw, written into the mode of governance. Imagine that, a character flaw as a governing principle.
The maiming of the housing supply is only one avenue for solipsism to sprout. It’s no secret that the huge majorities in the state are elated about not giving the young the slightest chance for a slice of the American dream by preventing them from exiting the womb in the first place. Abortion is wildly popular. But honestly, post Dobbs, the inner abortionist has been unleashed almost everywhere, even in red states (Montana, Ohio, etc.). However, a special ecstasy for it thrives in California. They’ve proudly legislated themselves as a “sanctuary” for ending unborn life.
Not only that, they are an official “sanctuary” for the young who managed to avoid the suction tube at the start of their life to mutilate themselves in “sex transition”. Those governing super majorities actually believe that they can outlaw chromosomes, or at least by law declare them subordinate to an adolescent’s erratic emotional state. It’s breathtaking, and shocking, shocking for parents made powerless in the face of government functionaries who are empowered to nurse and coddle the vulnerable and impressionable behind the backs of those who brought them into the world.
The whole state appears to be in an open state of war against the young, or anyone in those family-formation years clawing a path to the good life. The state is a bloody gauntlet for the young and blue collars, the Outs. And guess who is holding the clubs? Why, of course, it is the Ins. It’s more than a collectivistic state. It’s a solipsistic one. The two go hand in hand.
RGraf
Sources:
1. A general history of the statement is explored in Britannica at “Feudalism: Development in the 19th and 20th centuries” at https://www.britannica.com/topic/feudalism/Development-in-the-19th-and-20th-centuries
I am starting to be convinced that DOGE should investigate public education, and many of the private schools to boot. Results are abysmal. We rank at the bottom of international educational measures for developed countries.
Falsehoods originating long before our birth are allowed to persist uncorrected. If education is enlightenment, then what we do is far from it. Misconceptions are understandable regarding policies and programs whose history is only weakly discerned. At this point, the falsehoods take on a life of their own and stretches into folklore.
No better example can be found than the folklore surrounding Social Security. It is assumed to be like a regular pension with contributions, investments, later payouts, and a cash-out option. I follow on social media “The Other 98%” page and found this rip-roaring delusion:
“Repeat after me: Social Security is our money, that we earned by working and paying into the fund – EACH paycheck and not an ‘entitlement’!”
But repeat after me: No, it is not treated as your money, and it is an “entitlement”. Fact.
Try this experiment: go into your local Social Security office and request the return of your contributions. It is an option with any other pension, like a teacher’s pension. After initial puzzlement, the clerk will inform you that it is impossible. Why? Your contributions have already passed into the checks of current retirees. The only way for you to receive any money from the program is to qualify and then wait for your monthly allotment to arrive in your bank account like any recipient.
The requirement of qualifying is what makes it an “entitlement”. You collect benefits when you meet the law’s qualifications. In other words, you are “entitled”, entitled by law.
Now, what about the claim that it is your money? Yes, it once was, till your employer, as required by law, took it away to be combined with his in the form of FICA, in like manner as income tax withholding. It is recorded by the Social Security Administration and then shipped off to a retiree. See, a Social Security pension operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. Yes, pay-as-you-go. Money goes in, money goes out. Like any tax, money that was once yours is now owned by the government (the Social Security Administration) and delivered into the possession of a qualifying recipient.
Pay-as-you-go explains the befuddlement of the government employee and the reason that it was once your money but not now. A retiree during your work life can now pay rent. The same opportunity will present itself to you when you qualify for the entitlement. Current workers pay for current retirees.
That was the nature of the program from the beginning. The Social Security Act passed in 1935, the collection of taxes began in 1937, and the receipt of benefits started in 1940. The first generation of recipients paid at most 3 years of taxes before qualifying, which is too little time for them to be just “getting their money back”. The pattern was set from this point on. Nobody is getting their money back. They are getting somebody else’s money.
Harsh but true. The whole scheme relies on a generational imbalance of many more contributing workers than recipients. The number of contributing workers per recipient may have been as high as 100 in 1940. By 1945, it was down to around 40 and has fallen ever since (see attached graph). Today, it hovers between 2 and 3. The burden to support one retiree falls on 3 people instead of 40. In other words, taxes must skyrocket or the national debt balloons. One has happened (tax increases) and the other is happening (inflation of the national debt).
Just looking at one year, 2020, Social Security ran up a deficit of $65 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to be $300 billion in arrears (see attached graph). The number is much bigger than a matter of waste, fraud, abuse, and illegals. We have a birth dearth. A fertility rate of 1.7 will not cut it. And people live longer to receive benefits. A generational pay-as-you-go gambit is only sacrificing the opportunities of your grandchildren as the growing national debt absorbs the capital for their future.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and nutritional assistance account for 65% of the federal budget. Defense garners 13%. Since 65% of the federal budget are entitlements – qualify and you get – there is no set amount for them. Payments on the national debt add another 16%. Their spending is on autopilot.
Defense is discretionary and requires a limit. Work this out in your head. So, what is essential to government’s reason for existence is constrained by a limit, and what is not is on autopilot with no limit.
Since people will holler bloody murder if there is talk of reforming the entitlements, that will leave only two options to avoid a 1970’s Argentina-style repudiation of debt. One is to not avoid it and let the debt balloon by wallowing in folklore. The other is to gut defense and ask government employees to work for free.
The thinking of “The Other 98%” is a national suicide pact.
RogerG
Sources:
1. A great primer on the federal budget can be found in “CATO Handbook for Policymakers: Social Security”, Michael Tanner, CATO, 2022, at https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policymakers-9th-edition-2022/social-security
Pres. Trump at his 2025 State of the Union Address with VP Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson behind
I watched President Trump’s State of the Union speech last night (3/4/2025) on the Fox News feed. After came the commentary. Brit Hume, the dean of the Fox News commentariat, normally incisive and spot-on, said the speech was one of the best, in so many words. I do not know what he was watching, but I saw a classroom nearly out of control. We have a coming together of a provocative and prickly president and an extremist, disruptive, and disrespectful opposition party. This outcome should be expected when both parties fear and are driven by the mercurial activists in their midst. The result is a scene that comes close to anarchy.
The solemnity of the event is gone. Trump’s speech, inspiring at moments, quickly descended into a MAGA rally with his usual personal invective. Frankly, I think that he was incensed by Democrat behavior in the audience with their interruptions, jargonized protest placards held aloft, and the necessary removal of one among their ranks for defiance of simple adult norms. All of it was reminiscent of the radical-Left, antisemitic student disruptions of guest lecturers on college campuses. How did we get to this state of affairs, even among the governing class, people who should know better?
Democrat representatives hold protest placard aloft in disruption of the State of the Union address
The scene is a sign of the powerful influence of high-strung activists in the bases of both parties. For Republicans, their activist base was in search of a walking middle finger. Policy matters less than a demonstrative display of striking back at so-called “elites”, an in-your-face approach to politics and governance.
Thus, you get a guy who will take you down avenues that you might not want to go. Did people who pulled the lever for Trump vote for tariffs, the ritual humiliation of friends and allies, a foreign and trade policy of America Alone? Or was it an electoral majority gathering around a reversal of the chaos of gender confusion, prices gone amok, crowds of foreigners jumping the border and flooding the interior of the country, crime and nasty public spaces, extremist eco-crusades that are turning people’s lives upside down, identity-mongering at the expense of merit, and humiliations abroad? Trump promises to end the worst of it, but brings in tow a penchant for isolationism, protectionism, gaudy exhibitionism in matters of minor import like the renaming of places, territorial expansion, and schoolyard bullying. Did voters call for the hooking of this caboose to their train?
The flashy replaces practical policy. For the excitable, Trump is the ticket.
If this was poker, the Democrats see you and raise ten-fold. Their activist base is crazy. Their base’s prescription for the country is national suicide. Maybe that is because they have bought into the basic Marxist premise of a systemically corrupted society that can only be cleansed root and branch. They are in a revolutionary mood to overturn all relations between the sexes, between buyers and sellers, workers and employers, the person and his or her hopes for their spouses and children, and the control of individual choices in the minutest detail. The revolution is a disaster and people can see it, and are revolted by it. But this is what the donkey party’s activist base demands. The excessive and shrill overtake moderation and feet firmly planted on the ground.
The parties’ leadership, confronting the task of governance, cringe in fear of the strident in their midst. The party leadership is either weak in the face of this mob or panders to it for power, fame, and fortune. Do not be surprised that a deafening, raucous activism produces activistic leaders, people who are habituated to the superficial, irrelevant, and operationally dopey. Trump certainly presents that peril. Democrats have actually delivered the horror.
California’s Los Angeles is a classic in activist-driven misgovernance. Its mayor Karen Bass won the mayoral brass ring for reasons unrelated to an understanding of the practical aspects of managing a city. Her résumé is limited to “community activism” and time in the state legislature and Congress, places where activism prospers. While in Congress, she authored in 2020 the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It reified in law the Democrat groundswell to defund the police, or reshape public safety into therapy. So, not surprisingly, she gallivants to Accra, Ghana, without a thought devoted to the forecasted 80-mph Santa Ana winds coursing down an environmentalist-protected and overgrown fire-climax watershed waiting for a spark. Down-to-earth experience in dealing with running large-scale enterprises would have come in handy.
View of the January 2025 LA fires
The superficial attributes flow down to her appointments on the city’s fire commission, all known for their union activism and DEI qualities. Kristen Crowley, Bass’s appointed fire chief due to her gender and sexuality, ignored standard fire practice and ceased the monitoring of an earlier fire that was probably the origin of the cataclysm (see #3). Bass chose Janisse Quinones to run the Dept. of Water and Power to “prioritize” “vulnerable communities” and swear to “the goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2035” (see #3). And a reservoir above Pacific Palisades remained empty to fight the fire. There is no room for more incompetence. Bass exhausted the supply.
The apex of the city’s cultural pyramid is equally dismissive of practicalities. The Los Angeles Times’s endorsement of Bass lauds her “holistic vision” as they pan her opponent, Rick Caruso, for his “luxury malls” and the millions that he contributed to his campaign. After the incineration of parts of the city, a poll conducted in late January shows Caruso besting Bass by 7%, 43% to 36%. As for Bass’s handling of the fires, she is underwater by 17%, 54% to 37% (see #1).
The poll is interesting but still mystifying. For a significant chunk of the LA electorate, apocalyptic fires, intensified by colossal incompetence, still cannot bring them to vote center-right or center anywhere. I suspect that it is because, in the California/LA context, center-Left actually means Left, hard Left anywhere else. And the extremism is not limited to “elites”. It is a populist thing seeping into huge demographies in the state and its urban centers. The shock of the fires will wear off as media come to her defense by catering to the leftist prejudices of this governing supermajority.
Already, streaming platforms are airing stories of the greedy rich, like the Resnicks, seizing water for themselves and leaving LA high and dry (see #2). False, but it appeals. You see, so they say, the hydrants went dry in Pacific Palisades due to the scheming water robber barons of their imagination. California has a deep preference for activists who check the right identity boxes instead of somebody who has a history of successfully making the trains run on time. Give it time and LA and California will revert to its preferred mean of incompetence.
On the activist Right, Trump bashes Zelenskyy and mouths moral equivalence platitudes that would be met with jeers if expressed by Obama, while many in the party lather themselves in hypocrisy as their prior hawkishness evaporates into appeasement. It is “peace through strength” so long as it accords with Trump’s latest outburst. Whatever he says and does, they nod in agreement and rush to the microphones to grovel in worship. It is disgusting.
For many on both sides, the chief motivator appears to be fear of their base. Talk radio hosts craft issues and messages to the talk radio audience under a cloud of anxieties about losing their Trump-crazed listeners. It would be commercial suicide to counter the insanity. Leftist politicians refuse to condemn the worst barbarity, or they divert attention away from the murder of babies, children, men and woman, young and old, the healthy and infirmed, to generate sympathy for those who aided and abetted the savagery. It is stupefyingly breathtaking.
Activism and its activists are making a shambles of our republic. This is what populism looks like. It is the “populism” of the most vocal. In ancient Rome, tyrants and other degenerates in purple were of the populares (Caesar, Caligula, Commodus), the party of the common people (plebes) and in opposition to “elites” (patricians). Populism guaranteed their power. Caligula did all he could to humiliate “elites” such as Senators because it was entertaining to the street. For instance, he commanded the attendance of Senators and their wives to a bacchanalia so he could eye the prettiest women, have his way with them, return to the drinkfest, and boast of the conquests in front of their husbands (according to Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars). Populism elevates the most popular, not the most fit.
Today’s populists can be traced back to them. The rise to the top rung of power was through pandering, demagoguery, and feeding the mob’s desires. In today’s context, the bread and circuses are delivered in the form of DEI favoritism, looting the rich, tariffs that protect my job at the expense of everybody else’s, hosing benefits to your constituents through bankrupting entitlements, eco-extremism to cater to the passions of white-collar urban professionals, unrestrained abortion and a lavish child-care public infrastructure to indulge the lifestyle of single college-educated women, expanding the civil rights state to advance teenage genital mutilation and public school indoctrination and the destruction of the family, etc., etc.
Left populism, Right populism, and activists of both stripes are producing mediocrities, the ineffectual, and failures in public office. We suffer, but we had a hand in choosing them. Where are the adults? There are not any because they cannot survive the activist gauntlet. We are living the consequences of activism gone mad. Enjoy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Poll: Bass Flops Handling of Wildfires; Caruso Should Be mayor”, Isegura, 810 KSFO, 1/24/2025, at https://www.ksfo.com/2025/01/24/poll-bass-flops-handling-of-wildfires-caruso-should-be-mayor/
2. There’s a host of class warfare videos on YouTube, such as “California’s Water Mismanagement: Billionaire Resnicks Plunder California’s Precious Water! Fire!”, at https://youtu.be/2ryi893yIP8?si=YvDE5a9Nun7JgQ8Y
3. “Wildfire of the Vanities”, Will Swaim of the California Policy Center, National Review Magazine, March 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/03/wildfire-of-the-vanities-californias-political-model-has-failed/
Our president is not a grand thinker. He is, however, the head of a movement dominating the Republican Party. Its platform is grievance. Ironically, now, grievance has become the core of both the Right and the Left. For Trump and his MAGA, the rest of the world is screwing us. The outlook is mixed with some truths, a slew of exaggerations and falsehoods, and absent self-examination. The unintended aftershocks of this political rush could be an America increasingly without partners on our continent, in our hemisphere, and in Europe and Asia. Adjustments will be made by our former partners in the face of an increasingly erratic, unreliable, and at times hostile America, an America that cares a whole lot less about common interests with other nations. Do not expect this to end well.
Trump’s chief complaint is that America is not “Great” because we are patsies. Just Monday (2/24/2025), he stood before the press and announced his tariffs in a verbal cascade of victimhood (see #1),
“We’ve been mistreated badly by many countries . . . . We were taken advantage of. We were led by, in some cases, fools, because anybody that would sign documents like they signed, where they were able to take advantage of the American people, which happened over the last long period of time, except for a little four-year period that took place four years ago. But anybody that would agree to allow this to happen to our country should be ashamed of themselves.”
Per Trump, shame on you, Americans, for preferring Toyotas to Chevies.
His incoherence is glaring when he talks about the glories of tariffs. But what is foreign trade, the thing to be tariffed, taxed? It is an exchange of a foreign producer’s goods and services for a country’s currency (paper). So, a U.S. trade deficit is our possession of their valuable things, and their accumulation of our paper. Conversely, as Trump seems to prefer, a surplus is our reverse accumulation of their paper in return for our valuable things. At root, Trump’s talk is nonsense, but it is soothing syrup to a crowd addled by a sense of victimhood.
Though, his tariffs – for Trump, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” – will torpedo his campaign promise to reduce inflation. Any tax hikes, like tariffs on business, any business, foreign and domestic, passes through to the consumer. It works like this: raise taxes (like tariffs), increase business costs, raise prices, reduce consumption and production. A bad deal all around. The price floor rises for all goods and services, both foreign and domestic. So much for “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. So much for ending inflation.
A better understanding of trade would be helpful. The flow of goods and currencies passes through a foreign trade infrastructure. GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), currency foreign exchange agreements (FEA), and the adjudication of FEA disputes in the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (New York Convention) work to ease the flow of trade so the foreign paper (currency) can be made valuable to its possessor. In other words, a trade deficit (more goods, less paper) or surplus (more paper, less goods) or “balance” (the value of the paper and goods in equal measure) is not as important as Trump thinks. But the superficial language of trade, absent clarifications, lends itself to demagoguery.
Admittedly, the trade numbers are relevant for national security, social, and political reasons. By themselves, they are more than sufficient to support more domestic production of physical goods. But why aren’t we more of a manufacturing powerhouse? Certainly, we came to face renewed competition from our formerly WWII-ravaged economic rivals.
The resulting challenge exposed our self-inflicted inefficiencies, thus the need for some self-examination; something buried in the rhetoric. Our appetite for New Deal tax and regulatory schemes, and bloated business bureaucracies, proved to be a hindrance under competitive pressures. Furthermore, we exposed our manufacturing to the vast expansion of the regulatory straitjacket in the 1970s due to manufacturing’s many impacts on the natural environment. Land use controls, the expansion of the eco-superstate, their spread and expansion at all levels of government, and a labyrinth of empowered NIMBYs, mandates, permits, and hearings wreaked carnage on the sector.
(Image credit: Rick Gershon/Getty Images)
The air in the LA basin is cleaner due to the subsequent flight of physical production. They continue to flee. California declared war on affordable energy and the Philips/Conoco refinery in Wilmington is closing, the latest manufacturer to skedaddle the hyper eco-state. Much of the Chevron complex now resides in Houston. Adjacently, the regulatory war on housing will make the rebuild of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena a nightmare. Cleaner air (except for the fires), combustible landscapes, Hiroshima devastation, and bankrupting energy are the new realities of the eco-Leviathan.
Manufacturing – the physical production of any kind – began a slide into the snake pit of our predatory unions, litigious culture, voracious “civil rights” lobbies, and taxes, more taxes, regulation, and more regulation. The split between the permission economy (physical production, manufacturing, construction, timber harvesting, et al) vs. permissionless economy (initially small-scale innovation that becomes capitalized into Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Nividia, et al) is the main feature of this new hyper-regulated economy (see #2). Traditional manufacturing is relegated to being the red-headed stepchild.
Jones and Laughlin Steel Pittsburgh, 1950sThe Googleplex, Mountain View, Ca.Climate activists protest the Richmond refinery in California, 2017
Without addressing this problem, Trump’s tariffs are foolhardy. They will jack up prices, raise the cost of business inputs, threaten employment, and pull the only available ladder out of the snake pit that America has made of itself. American economic activity, and particularly manufacturing, cries out to be something other than survival in a snake pit.
DJT should address the pit before he tries to sell the narcotic of tariffs to the public. If not, trade relations will be disrupted as our friends scramble to protect themselves and their nascent industries. New trade arrangements will arise with America seen as just another economic belligerent.
To make the tariff scheme palatable to the public, the jargon of “reciprocity” is employed to hide the real purpose of tariffs. The prime directive of tariffs is to punish domestic consumers for preferring a foreign-made product. I am skeptical of their use as a bargaining chip since the tariff prime directive remains, even if reciprocity agreements are temporarily achieved. The political pressure by the snakes in our pit will make a hash of the “reciprocity”.
What Trump is doing to international trade, he promises for our foreign policy. Already, an undertow of cynicism infects our relationship with our allies (see #4). Trump sees our national security as another arena to apply the same approach as he would with a supplier of pipe. For instance, Trump has introduced a cushy deal for rare earths as a part of a survival package for Ukraine. To him, it is like demanding from the supplier the free gratis addition of brass fittings to the order. Trump has made extortion an element for a relationship with the United States.
For Trump, it is not enough to stand athwart a thug’s subjugation of another country on a continent already made jittery by two previous 20th-century world wars totaling over 100 million deaths and the USSR enslavement over half of it. Not surprisingly, eyebrows are raised in European capitals by Trump’s Belgian Congo-style treatment of Ukraine. Trump’s America comes close to being the reincarnation of the British East India Company.
It is not as if Ukraine has a realistic alternative to Trump’s USA. The situation has a key role to play in Trump’s Art of the Deal for international affairs. If you are dependent on him, you are at his mercy. It results in the odd abuse of friends with whom he can control, and odd praise of enemies with whom he does not. Trump recently declared that Putin is smart and strong and Zelensky is a dictator (I kid you not) and stands accused of starting the war (I kid you not). He gets away with it because he has leverage on Zelensky that he does not have on Putin, thus the pandering to a thug and the defamation of Zelensky. It is negotiations by shakedown in threats, insults, and extortion. For Trump, it must be like extracting concessions out of his favorite pipe supplier. The unrestrained nature of international affairs presents a playground for Trump’s baser instincts.
Trump’s Ukraine/Putin stage act reminds our friends and allies of the danger of getting too close to America. Post-WWII, South Vietnam’s existence was placed at the mercy of American domestic politics and resulted in the collapse of South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Leaping forward to 2020, American domestic politics reared its ugly head over Afghanistan with the rise of Trump and his subsequent Doha Accords with the Taliban. Trump and his people repeated the Nixon/Kissinger tactic of negotiating the future of our friend and ally without them being in the room. Timetables for an American withdrawal were set only to be inflamed by more American domestic politics with calamitous effects for Afghans. Afghanistan descended into a dark age at our bidding.
The fall of Saigon, 1975, and evacuations from the roof of the American embassy.Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s de facto political leader, in Doha, Qatar, in September 2020. (Photo: U.S. Department of State/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)Thousands of people are trying to flee Afghanistan as the Taliban strengthens its grip on the country. Some people chased a U.S. air force plane down the tarmac, while others tried to force their way onto planes at the Kabul airport. (photo: screen shot, Axios)
Can you blame any potential international partner for wariness in getting too close to the USA? They have alternatives. They could cut their own deals with our common enemies turning America First into America Alone. Appeasement might sound more appealing than laying yourself open to America First and an insane Democratic Party.
They could expand their defense capabilities and magnify their efforts in coalitions without a troublesome USA. Trump’s America First becomes America Problematic. Such arrangements will not have our interests at heart. America First, now known as America Alone, will be an unreliable, isolated nation with an expanded dependence on an even greater military buildup than is possible given our current domestic politics. Are you prepared to slash entitlements? Our crazy Democrats went bonkers over George W. Bush’s 2005 nibbling at Social Security’s edges (see #3). What makes you think that Democrats would not seek to ride the hysteria to more political fame and fortune this time around? Bottom line, America Alone becomes America Weaker.
This is our “master of 4-D chess” at work. We are not prepared for the consequences. The “most beautiful word in the dictionary” only disguises our deep-seated economic problems. America First will cause our friends to run for the exits. Any “peace” deal over Ukraine will come at the expense of more screw-tightening on the victim. America needs to address what we have done to ourselves before we scapegoat our friends and allies. Welcome to the world of America First.
The rabble-rousing has the advantage of feeding popular prejudices. Grievance has proven to be a political winner. The Right has discovered its inner victim in the same manner as the Left for over a century. The world should be leery of an America united in grievance.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Trump: ‘Tariffs Are Going Forward On Time, ‘We’ve Been ‘Led By Fools”, Tim Hains, Real Clear Politics, 2/24/2025, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/02/24/trump_tariffs_are_going_forward_on_time_weve_been_led_by_fools.html
2. “The Future of Innovation in the United States: Permissionless or Regulated?”, Mohamed Mutii, Econlib, 10/14/2023, at https://www.econlib.org/the-future-of-innovation-in-the-united-states-permissionless-or-regulated/
3. “How George W. Bush Lost Personal Accounts For Social Security”, Peter Ferrera, Forbes, 4/7/2011, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/04/07/how-george-w-bush-lost-personal-accounts-for-social-security/
4. For an American public uninterested in the foreign discussion about America, tune into this podcast, “Can German centrists keep ignoring the hard right AfD?”, The Daily Telegraph, 2/24/2025, at https://youtu.be/LiLEeFlbfHk?si=eOveyaQX98wuaumb . It covers more than the results of the German election. Toward the end of the interview, a major German parliamentary leader expresses major skepticism of a Trump-led America.
Pres. Trump and Maine Gov. Mills at the White House, 2/21/2025
Trump is our era’s Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who led the effort to desert Czechoslovakia in 1938. His impulsiveness and tendency to hitch national policy to personal grudges are deeply troubling.
But the Democrats are worse. They’re crazy. They are cultural revolutionaries on a mission to force us to conform to their conceptions of the “better man [or woman, or whatever] for the better world [?]”. They refuse to define “man” or “woman”, for instance, as one part of their goal to eliminate all distinctions (look up “nihilism”) so as to create new ones of their own fancy. Consequently, women are frozen out of award ceremonies to men who imagine themselves to be women. It’s kooky beyond belief.
It’s also not surprising that it doesn’t much work the other way: a XX man robbing XY men of their track and field medals. Trump, and anyone still rooted in reality, knows this, and he’s willing to say so. Yesterday, at a meeting of governors at the White House, he confronted Maine’s Governor Janet Mills (D). Watch the clip below.
Brutal, blunt, but not wholly undeserved. Gov. Mills’s feelings are of minor concern when compared to the dashed dreams of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls – real XX girls. Their ambitions are quashed by a XY girl who just yesterday was considered a boy. Go get ‘em Trump, and every blue-state satrap that has engaged in this grotesqueness.
Pres. Biden, son Hunter, and an inset photo of the Biden clan
Far removed from Plato’s dream of the “philosopher king”, and his notion of politics as an avocation for the wise and godly, is the harsher reality of self-dealing in politics. Biden finally did it: he pardoned his son. Are you surprised? If so, stay off the cable buying channels. Someone else should handle your finances.
Honestly, I expected Biden to do it, or arrange some deal with the incoming Trump. Did you really expect the son to spend a dime in penalties and serve a day in jail? The charade of high-mindedness from Biden and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was for the sycophants and the “unwashed masses”, which is how the party of the masses actually views their masses. My guess is that most of us aren’t shocked.
We’ve grown used to the truth of our politics: it’s long been a lucrative (as in “lucre”) career path, especially for long-in-the-tooth politicos like the Biden clan. FDR had a well-heeled aristocratic lineage, and thus his quasi-socialism was an act of condescending patronage for the plebes. But for LBJ, politics was his ticket out of the poverty of his Texas hill-country hardscrabble life. He sold himself by using other people’s money to purchase other people’s loyalty. Imagine it, using other people’s money to reward still other people, and all of it for fun and profit. Adjusted for inflation, upon his death, he was worth $100 million, quite a haul for a coarse back-slapping politician from Texas’s version of Appalachia at the time.
The “LBJ technique” of haranguing a person to get his way.
Self-interest and greed are alive and well, particularly among people whose public platform has long been a bellicose attack on self-interest and greed. Nancy Pelosi provides another case in point. A scion of Baltimore’s D’Alesandro political dynasty, her elevated social caste helped bring her into marital union with Paul Pelosi of the moneyed class. Elite colleges, prep schools, etc., you get the picture. It’s a form of social incest. Power and money have always had a potent attraction. You don’t need feudalism or capitalism to make it happen. Quasi-socialism, as well as the unadorned kind, works too.
So, Nancy can regale us with the glories of a totalitarian lockdown by pointing to her $15,000 fridge filled with exotic, expensive, chic ice cream. No run-of-the-mill Dreyer’s for this gal. She gets her hair professionally coiffed while everyone else is shut in dealing with their zoomed children. Like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, the old aristocracy was swept aside to make room for the Party aristocracy. La noblesse oblige thrives under new labels. The flotsam always floats to the top no matter the political scheme.
Nancy’s refrigerator and ice cream during the lockdowns.
These paragons of equity- and equality-mongering, of concern for the poor and “oppressed”, end up rolling in the dough. So much so that they can no longer ravage Republicans as the party of robber barons. For at least the last few election cycles, the Democrats have nationally outspent the GOP by around 100%, or more. The Harris campaign had raised $2.15 billion when you add Biden’s billion in the early part of the campaign season, and still ran a $20 million debt. Trump’s paltry $338 million, about half of it from donations $200 or less, seems like an embarrassment in comparison.
The party of government is also the party of the hyper-wealthy. Their complaints about “money in politics” and their serial attacks on Citizens United were dropped from the Party’s talking points. It couldn’t be sustained when the Brahmins of wealth lined up behind them. So, the ritual excuses for the loss shifted to “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In other words, they want to censor views and information that they don’t like. It’s scandalous, but it’ll still has currency in Big Media. They demand censorship and an ongoing alliance with Big Money and Big Media. Why don’t they just come out and say it? They want Orwell’s Ministry of Truth [propaganda] and Ministry of Love [persecution] (from Orwell’s “1984”).
They don’t realize that many of their beliefs are revolting to a large swath of the public. There’s too much out there to turn your stomach. Transgenderism – the idea that you can feel and think your way into another sex – is to be assisted by taxpayer dollars and forced into anything designated “woman/girl”. The Leviathan is the strong arm for gender confusion and porn to adolescents.
They wrecked the economy, which everybody has experienced at the gas pump, utility bill, and supermarket. As for crime, they only seek ways to facilitate it, not combat it. People look around themselves and see disorder, filth, and violence. Who wants to raise their kids in that?
The fact is, they suffer the disadvantage of their own minds. Fewer want what they’re selling. It doesn’t take a genius to roll out the videotape. And they gaslight us by calling it “disinformation” and “misinformation”. They demand that campaigns keep it airy, abstract, filled with generalities. “Joy”, joy about what? Trump is Hitler, and it’s the end of “our democracy”. When you confront them with their own statements and actions, they demand a Ministry of Truth. Who’s the real danger to democracy?
Here’s the truth: big government breeds big money in politics which breeds more big government. More big government breeds more lucrative avenues for the unproductive, people who produce nothing but the myriads of ways to take money and opportunity from one group and give it to their voting blocks. Now that’s the real scandal.
In all of this self-dealing, is there any wonder that they save their own from the hoosegow? That’s a minor matter compared to what they have in store for the rest of us.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Charles C.W. Cooke’s piece in National Review provides some insight into the scam that is our politics: “The Misinformation Racket”, 11/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/the-misinformation-racket/
The child sexual abuse mania that began in 1984 but would stretch into the 1990s
“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved -indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be brushed aside as trivial exceptions.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“All one’s neighbours [sic] are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.” — Carl Jung
Was there something in the water during the 1990s? Episodes of mania abounded. Looking for causes, Bonhoeffer emphasizes a stubborn belief in things that aren’t true, a kind of stupidity. Jung looked to the role of fear in animating a broad sense of hysteria.
Either way, certain periods of history seem susceptible to a kind of mass psychosis. The 17th-century Salem Witch Trials were but one example. Throughout the Reformation period, executions by burning at the stake were frequent except in the 16th-century Dutch Republic and northern Poland-Lithuania, so much so that one historian referred to the two as “state[s] without stakes”. The climate-change frenzy of today is only the latest episode in the recurring epidemics of madness. Though, the 1990s, for whatever reason, exhibited multiple occurrences.
From the 1980s into the 1990s, across the country from California to Florida, child day-care was allegedly and suddenly plagued with the most fantastical charges of child sexual abuse. Janet Reno rose to fame from Florida DA to Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, and then her oversight of the Branch Davidian siege and inferno in Waco, riding her “Reno method” to secure many false child-abuse convictions, alongside ruined lives, numerous lawsuits, and subsequent legal judgments that nearly bankrupted many guilty local jurisdictions (see #1). It was a disaster all around.
he PBS website for “The Child Terror” which chronicled the frenzy about child sexual abuse at day care centersJanet Reno, Florida DA and US Attorney General, a key figure in child-abuse mania and the Waco infernoThe inferno at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco in 1993
Then in 1996 during the Atlanta Summer Olympics came the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. Security guard Richard Jewell was turned from hero to goat by the FBI’s fixation on him as the culprit, all recounted in Clint Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell” (see #2, #3). In this case, a powerful institution fell under the spell of the “somebody within” trope to single-mindedly focus on Jewell, going so far as claim that he was afflicted with a mysterious “hero syndrome” (or complex), hounding him and placing his life under a microscope only to discover the real offender a couple of years later. Organizations can suffer from a self-imposed group myopia among its “professionals”.
Credentials and training don’t immunize a person from half-baked notions taken as truth. Today, we see entire professional associations oblivious to the necessity of a block-chain of evidence that ties it to a relevant conclusion, the essence of science. Instead, we’ll see them endorse the fashionable ideas of many of their broader demographic peers and stubbornly persist in logical quicksand.
Then we have the JonBenet Ramsey murder case from 1996. The phenomenon repeats itself. Netflix has brought the incident to light in “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”. Watching all three episodes makes clear that the treatment of the case by law enforcement has much in common with the 1990s’ day-care child abuse mania and the Jewell persecution. The case had gone cold because of the time wasted by Boulder PD detectives on a preoccupation with the parents, one or both, as the killers. If that wasn’t enough, the media played along in wild speculations about the family as they were fed derogatory leaks in order to intimidate the Ramseys into confessions. Delinked from empirical evidence, CBS’s “60 Minutes” went on a wild ride to blame JonBenét’s older brother only to suffer at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
On Netflix
Similarly, after a few years, the Boulder PD’s lead detective on the case tried to make another kind of killing by writing a book that tried to accomplish what the Boulder DA and PD couldn’t in a court of law: pin blame on the parents. Like the 60 Minutes’ smearing of the brother, this too ended in a lawsuit with the author and publisher penalized with a sizeable award for the Ramseys.
Don’t think for a moment that we have progressed beyond these barbarities of a few decades ago. Remember the 2020 summer of riots fueled by a noxious, mysterious, hidden, and unconscious racism? What of transgenderism and the assertion that one can feel or think themselves into another sex, all assisted by the rhetorical hocus-pocus of “sex-at-birth” and the invention of a separation of gender from sex? It’s hard to imagine a greater child abuse than placing our children under its spell and sanctioning chemical and surgical interventions and transgender mind manipulation. Welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau (see H.G. Wells’s story)
The 2020 George Floyd riots in Portland, Ore.Protest in Washington, D.C., June 2020, against “racism”
MAGA has its own fancies. Tariffs are seen as a ticket to national prosperity. They want America to be great again while abandoning Eastern Europe to Putin. Reunionizing the workforce to gain the political allegiance of union bosses and boasting of a return to fiscal sanity while avoiding the trainwrecks of the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, half the federal budget) is proof that Alice isn’t alone in her Wonderland. They like armies and navies so long as we don’t do anything with them. It doesn’t get much more insane than this.
There’s more. Climate change has the same popular pull as were charges of heresy for the Spanish Inquisition. Think about it. To get from a gradual increase in atmospheric temperatures to herding everyone into electric vehicles and the experiences of blackouts and bankrupting utility bills requires the hasty conclusion that humans are bringing an end to Gaia. The empirical relationship between the apocalyptic hucksterism and warmer weather is, to put it kindly, shaky.
Will any of the so-called remedies do any good? For every 100 electric cars sold in California, China is building a new coal-fired electricity plant. Ditto for India. Any estimates of climate improvement from the bankrupting of the California population are nothing but proof that 17th-century witchcraft is alive and well. Yet here we go with Biden bringing California absurdities to the nation.
Three decades on, we’re still as foolish as ever. Don’t go around holding your head high. Mass psychosis might be in our social DNA. Higher ed, more college degrees, greater “professionalization”, more credentials, and exuberant education spending is hardly a cure. It’s proven to be an accelerant. The country’s next mass mania is just around the corner.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An excellent rendition of this gross prosecutorial misconduct during the time can be found at “The Child Terror”, Frontline, PBS, at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
2. The Wikipedia page on “Ricard Jewell” affords a description of the basic facts.
3. “THE ‘HERO SYNDROME’”, Sergeant Ben D. Cross, Arkansas State Police, 11/1/2014, at https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/the_hero_syndrome.pdf
4. “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”, now showing on Netflix; website at https://www.netflix.com/title/81705443
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough called “the scope and scale” of Trump’s victory “sweeping.”
In the 1992 political war room of Bill Clinton, James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid!” It became a cliché. To a certain extent, it’s a key factor this year. But more lies underneath the public’s fixation with the economy. A troubled economy can be the product of the wrong sort of beliefs. Furthermore, a constellation of beliefs underlies a whole range of issues as a person addresses their ballot. At this point, it’s gone way beyond the economy. It’s the beliefs, stupid!
While blaming the other side for economic problems can catapult a party to victory, as it did for Clinton in 1992, it can also hide disturbing party ideas that’ll only appear once in office. It didn’t take long for Bill Clinton to uncloak the Democrats’ fetish for government control of almost everything – in this case, healthcare, 17% of the economy. Remember Hillary Care? People didn’t vote for this in 1992. It brought to an end the nearly 40-year Democrat reign of the House in 1995. Welcome to Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Forward to 2024, in the attempted postmortem of Democrat losses, donkey party enthusiasts can’t come to grips with the reality that this radical Left version of the party isn’t popular. For instance, transgenderism swiftly took corporeal form under their tutelage and began wrecking girls’ sports, their bathrooms and locker rooms, and in tandem with the propagation of gender ideology in the schools, adolescents were exposed to porn and gender “transition”. Gender confusion for children and Hustler-grade picture books aren’t winners. Duh!
What were they thinking? The Democrats chided Republicans for bringing it up as if the issue was concocted out of thin air by the GOP and Democrats have nothing to do with it. Really? Rachel Levine (born Richard) as Asst. Health Secretary, Biden’s “God bless you” to Dylan Mulvaney after his endorsement decimated Bud Light, a transgender celebration at the White House, and the manipulation of Title IX to sanction XY “girls” in every place with a Girl/Woman identifier are but a few eyebrow-raisers while parents watched their daughters losing to girls of the XY variety in women’s sports. A hard volleyball smash to the face by an XY “girl” changed a real girl’s life forever. Women’s track and swimming were distorted beyond recognition. Women’s Olympic boxing was nearly turned into a murder scene.
Transwoman Rose Montoya, who bared her/his breast implants at the June 2023 White House pride event.
The muddle of broad American sentiment on transgenderism began to crystalize into general opposition, particularly when asked about specifics. The view hardened as we approached the November 5 election. In 2024, after discussion intensified and baleful stories of the ill-effects of transgenderism accumulated, support for the reality of sex at birth increased to sizeable majorities (65%) (see #1). In 2023, almost 70% of respondents to a Gallup poll viewed biological sex to be the determinant of athletic participation (see #2). YouGov in February 2024 chronicled large majorities opposing the “transition” (“gender affirming care”: psyche control, chemical and surgical interventions) of their children by authorities.
Not only were their daughters threatened by the donkey party but government was herding them into cars that they didn’t want and delivering bankrupting energy costs all around. It seemed that the worst of California had come to their neighborhood, their garage, their schools, the intimate spaces of their homes, in many more ways than the price of eggs. The border was erased and the illegal immigrants were rewarded with plane and bus rides to the interior. Towns and cities and schools and housing and streets were flooded with foreign nationals who simply walked across without our approval (violating our laws). Crime spiked. Who voted for this in 2020?
But somehow, much of the after-election analysis skips all of this and wonders into incoherence. Typical of the foolishness was AP’s Matthew Brown in his “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph” of 11/22/024 (see #4). He essentially blames newcomers and outside money for Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester’s loss and the state turning red. In fact, as of October of 2024, the Tester campaign had outspent Sheehy $69.6 million to $19.7 million. Groups external to the candidates’ campaigns, all of it outside money, broke roughly even between the two. Adding it up, Tester had the money advantage (see #5).
Supporters cheer at election night watch party for Republican Tim SheehySheehy delivers his victory speech
It showed. Sitting on my perch in northwest Montana, I watched 4-5 Tester ads for every Sheehy one, whether streaming or broadcast.
And what of those “newcomers”? “Newcomers” don’t automatically turn a state red. “Newcomers” attracted to Santa Fe/Taos ambience and the “Rocky Mountain High” turned New Mexico and Colorado reliably blue. It’s also quite possible that the migrations of the 1990’s and the early 2,000’s (to NM and Colorado for example) are politically and philosophically different from those of the last decade and a half. The bulk of recent relocators could be classified as “refugees” fleeing the shift to the radical Left on the west coast, myself included, to outposts in Idaho and Montana. Once again, it comes down to beliefs.
The west coast shifted hard Left after the end of the Cold War. The state of Governor Ronald Reagan began to resemble today’s Venezuela more than the Beach Boys. The counterculture rose to prominence as the governing philosophy. The phenomena spread to Oregon and Washington State.
What was true of the west coast simultaneously occurred in metropolitan areas and college campuses across the country. Our cities became hotbeds of grime and violence. Blue states became infatuated with climate-change ideology and its attendant central planning. Taxes, regulation, and misgovernance spread like wildfire, including the literal wildfires.
Colleges morphed into satraps of the Frankfurt School. What’s that? Marxist academics in the 1920s and 1930s coalesced in Frankfurt, Germany, and formed a “School”, a Marxist think tank hewing to the reformulated Marxism of the Italian Antonio Gramsci. It came to the U.S. as its advocates fled Hitler and took positions in America’s elite colleges such as the University of California, Harvard, NYU, etc. Thus, “woke”/critical theory/CRT/DEI arose as a rigid orthodoxy throughout academia. It’s everywhere, unquestioned, inescapable. It passed down the social digestive tract from faculty to student to K-12 to the commanding heights of the culture. You can’t watch an ad, or most anything from Disney, without exposure to it. The c-suite is consumed by it which explains why, for instance, Wells Fargo ads are filled with their various ways to reinflate the housing bubble of 2007-8, and Big Sports’ infatuation with the oppressor/oppressed schtick.
This Leftist groupthink is manifest in urban nodes where we also find the training schools – the colleges – and corporate headquarters. When put into practice, the orthodoxy drives people away. The consequences overwhelm any initial surface appeal. Local economies are warped as sensitive groups like the middle class, the skilled trades, and manufacturing flee to more hospitable states.
Media people such as the AP’s Matthew Brown, infected as they are with the orthodoxy, don’t get it. The dynamic of push/pull is as evident in politics as it is in economics. People are pushed every bit as much as pulled in a particular direction. Maybe “pushed” is more powerful this time around. Could it be that voters were more repelled by the what the Democrats have become than any great affection for Trump? In other words, has the Democratic Party become repugnant?
If so, well, we’re back to, “It’s the beliefs, stupid!”
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election: 5. Gender identity, sexual orientation and the 2024 election”, Pew Research Center, 6/6/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/gender-identity-sexual-orientation-and-the-2024-election/
2. “More Say Birth Gender Should Dictate Sports Participation”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 6/12/2023, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate-sports-participation.aspx
3. “Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issues”, Taylor Orth, YouGov, 2/16/2024, at https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48685-where-americans-stand-on-20-transgender-policy-issues
4. “An influx of outsiders and money turns Montana Republican, culminating in a Senate triumph”, Matthew Brown, AP, 11/22/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/montana-republicans-wealth-democrats-8a1fdd90ef328701127d8a21ebb82dd3
5. “Montana Senate race shatters spending records at $309 per registered voter”, Aubrie Spady, Fox News, 10/24/2024, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/montana-senate-race-shatters-spending-records-309-spent-per-registered-voter?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee