A U-Haul truck and other vehicles travel along Interstate 10 as wind turbines generate electricity at the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm near Palm Springs, Calif., February 27, 2019. (photo: Robert Alexander)
As if any more needs to be said: U-Haul ran out of rental moving trucks in California in 2021. In its annual report the company stated, “. . . U-Haul simply ran out of inventory to meet customer demand for outbound equipment.” That’s report-speak for, “We couldn’t keep up with the demand to get out.” (Read the report here)
“To help meet the demand of millions of people desperately trying to escape the dark, ravaged wasteland of California, U-Haul is introducing a new product in its moving van line-up: the War Rig. These weaponized, armored moving vehicles will ensure you and your belongings stay safe during the long and perilous journey out of the state.” (Source: Babylon Bee)
Where could the refugees be headed? Top of the list is Texas, followed by Florida, then by Tennessee, and then South Carolina and Arizona. Not a blue state in the bunch. The U-Hauls seem to be following Elon Musk and Zuckerberg’s Meta (parent company of Facebook, et al), who is filling a new office tower in downtown Austin.
I guess it’s true. Make life miserable for people and they leave. Throughout history, it’s the same story. A third of Cuba lives in south Florida. Some people are drawn to leave their homeland for a fatter paycheck; others are forced to flee. In the case of California, the migrants must feel compelled to jump ship. Wonderful weather and natural beauty are no compensation for filth, crime, unaffordable housing, blackouts, schools as Maoist indoctrination centers, and regulations, diktats, and taxes up the gazoo.
Check out this latest California outrage: a sea of trash from the looting of trains as they pass through Los Angeles.
And now the poor souls can’t lay their hands on a rental truck. That doesn’t mean that people won’t still flee. We might be viewing an updated version of the 1930’s Okie migration in reverse: eastbound roads and interstates clogged with Priuses with mattresses on top. What’s next, labor camps in U-Haul’s top 5 destinations?
California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an appearance after the polls close on the recall election at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., September 14, 2021. (Fred Greaves/Reuters)
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, what a hot mess. Extending it, what happens in California stays in California. Few things falser can be imagined. What happens in and for California invades the whole country without anyone’s consent. California’s manias have become our manias. It’s time to treat California as the pariah state that it is. Pariahs are isolated to quarantine their deadly influence.
Will Swaim of the California Policy Center provides sound reason to place California on the same list with North Korea (read about it here).
The Rocky Mountain states get to inhale the consequences of California’s desire to maintain combustible forests. Why? The state’s periodic droughts, normal in Mediterranean climates, blanket the golden state in a thick layer of matchsticks if not cleared. Guess what? The state’s wildlands aren’t cleared due to a glowing hatred of logging and prescribed burns. In addition, the spark, literally the spark, frequently comes from the state’s aging and neglected grid because of the state’s Public Utilities Commission fixation on the greenie fantasies of wind and solar. Anyone can see the results from their car window as they flee the flames: the ubiquitous forests of humongous windmills scarring the landscape, extensive seas of solar panels, and the costliest electricity rates with the greatest unreliability. The state’s folly now becomes our filthy air.
California wildfire smoke wafting over the skies in the Northwest and southern Canada.
What about the epidemic of “out of stock” online and off? A huge link in the supply chain lies parked off the Southern California coast. Controlling the docks in the most incompetent way possible is the ILWU, the longshoreman’s union, which fully exploits the generous powers granted to it by the state’s maniacally pro-Big Labor laws. If those containers finally get off the ship, there are few trucks to pick them up because of the state’s uniquely intense jihad against fossil fuels, half the available trucking fleet having been made illegal by state diktats. The state’s pathological obsessive/compulsiveness in regards to emissions is now a gross obstacle to interstate commerce. It’s unsettling to discover that Billings supermarkets are so heavily impacted by lunatics in Sacramento.
Container ships and oil tankers waiting in the ocean outside the Port of Long Beach in California in April 2021. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
The price of meat is rising. Well, expect it to go higher for the whole country as producers scramble to meet the commands of California’s Prop 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The state has ordered all producers from Fresno to Iowa to Canberra (Au.), wherever, to meet its demands if they want to peddle their goods in this asylum with an elected government. So, their meat products will be more expensive everywhere as producers scramble to cater to the state’s ninnies. Nobody voted for this outside this looney bin’s precincts.
The same tactic is at work in forcing the state’s climate change feverishness on all of us. First in the crosshairs are the carbon consuming and emitting conveyances in your garage, no matter the state. For years, California’s fastidious phobias on emissions shows up on all vehicles whether sold in Los Angeles or Lubbock. The Zanyland’s mammoth market share and the dictates of production efficiencies force all of us to share in the dementia. Call it the California premium that everyone has to pay. This is the second instance of California getting to set its psychotic agenda on all states with corporate America as a co-conspirator. More about this later.
A ubiquitous California smog test
Interstate commerce isn’t managed out of Congress according to the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, but effectively out of Sacramento. And, as it turns out, neither is immigration (Clause 4). The state’s official immigration policy – it’s been a sanctuary state since 2017 – routinely ignores federal law and its enforcement personnel, going so far as to make it a crime ($10,000 fine) for businesses in the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Further, the state subsidizes nonprofits assisting in the law-breaking while at the same time lavishing entitlements on the law-breakers. Clearly, the state is at war with the Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4)
Pro-illegal immigration protest, California 2019.
The state is one huge affront to the rule of law: the US Constitution. The use of the state’s police powers to block interstate and international commerce should be no more tolerated than its zany regulations be allowed to affect consumers who had no voice in their creation. The state must be brought to heel. The situation has aggravated beyond a mere irritant. It’s getting close to being an existential threat to the nation.
A corrective begins with the recognition of the state as a pariah, one that habitually operates outside the bounds of our Constitution. Quarantine the madness to make certain that Californios bear the full freight of their lunacy. Take the management of their ports away from them. Institute forest management practices by sidelining the state’s powerful eco-crazed lobbies. State interference in the enforcement of federal immigration law should be treated as acts of secession. Federal legislation should prevent interstate producers from imposing costs of meeting California’s frenzies on the entire national market. What happens in California should be made to stay in California.
Over time, the need for explicit action may wane as people continue to do what they have been doing: flee the asylum run by the inmates. The state’s overbearing market share is fading as the number of outbounded moving trucks continues to mount. The problem is taking care of itself, but a little legal protection for the rest of the nation is needed along the way.
The lower house, the House of Representatives, of the Montana legislature in Helena in 2019.
A measure before the Montana legislature (LC 1551) would add Montana to the list of states calling for a Convention of the States to write and approve a Balanced Budget Amendment to the US Constitution. Once again, if the legislature approves the resolution, and two-thirds of the other states agree, we’ll put our faith in ink on paper to resolve our fiscal ills. If successful, watch the whole endeavor not change things a twit.
The principal problem with our federal government isn’t some structural defect in our Constitution. It’s the people that we elect. It would be true with or without the constitutional addition. Right now, littered throughout our federal behemoth are progressives who are dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists when it comes to words. Look at what they’ve done to the commerce clause and due process/equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. Limited and enumerated powers nearly became unlimited, with any enforceable restrictions hanging by the narrow thread of a black-robed jurist’s opinion. Ink on paper hasn’t stopped these people.
The fact of the matter is, if you want a better government, elect better people. Ink won’t correct for incompetent electoral choices.
Many jurisdictions have elected hordes of these linguistic gymnasts (progressives). When a convention is called, guess who’ll attend? It won’t be only people like you or me. Included will be people from AOC’s Twitter feed and all those from the many deep blue satraps. Any amendment will be massaged by this crowd’s fingers. Watch a balanced budget become a warrant to raise taxes. It’s the only reason that they’ll agree to the thing. Remember, a conservative’s goal is to restrain the federal government. Their ambition is to inflate it. The middle will be a license to increase taxes. In the end, we’ll be back to where we started. Depending on who is in power, we’ll still have either a bloated or restrained government. Nothing will have changed.
Structural gimmicks never work! California is a prime example. Reading parts of the California Constitution reads like a conservative’s dream. They’ve got a state balanced budget amendment, approved as Prop 58 in 2004 by a hefty 71% of the vote. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. Just reclassify legacy costs and debt out of the equation, along with a few other pricey tidbits, and a powerful progressive is home free. The highest taxed state became also the most fiscally incontinent.
They’ve got a “bi-partisan” redistricting commission that rubber stamps Democratic Party hegemony in the state for perpetuity. Prop 13 didn’t curtail the tax burden. They just inflated all the others. The state has terms limits written into their framework. It only replaced simple progressives with the zealous and foolish kind. Bad was made worse.
Conservatives won’t gain anything from adding more words to the Constitution. We’ll have wasted immense political capital on a wrong-headed endeavor, instead of increasing our presence in those blue enclaves to change their hue. Chasing mirages won’t change a thing. The facts on the ground remain the same. If you want a better government, elect better people.
Our new god, The State, speaks: “Thou shalt drive an electric car.” When this god-imposter speaks, run!
Something normally left to individual choice, along with vacation destinations, is now the province of The State. Combine a neurotic over-reaction to unprovable threats (climate change hysterics) with a growing State impulse to engineer the person along the lines of the neurosis and the result will be a pure, unadulterated mess. The State is a hammer-for-everything when a shed full of tools is the actual necessity. Our lives will begin to look like the incessant and crude pummeling of a hammer. Translation: live less well.
And, God almighty, are they out to get the internal combustion engine. Gavin Newsom, governor of the looney bin formerly known as the State of California, and emboldened by his survival of the recall, signed the death warrant for the gasoline car in the state, the lethal injection to be performed by 2035. From DC, Biden’s Build Back Better – errrr Worse – has $13.5 billion for scarring the roads and interstates hither and yon with plug-ins for the things. To make sure that you use those plug-ins, the feds will bribe you with other people’s money – to the tune of $12,500 per purchase – to buy the contraption and junk your quite functional family sedan. That’s right, replace something that works for a will-‘o-the-wisp.
*Read about the EV and its heart and soul, the battery, here.
I equate the EV craze to gender reassignment surgery. Surgeons jettison the Hippocratic Oath by destroying perfectly healthy organs to align a person’s physique to their imagination. Ditto for Build Back so-called Better: mutilate the transportation grid to better fit the fancies of the half-witted representative from NY’s 14th congressional district.
And what are we going to get out of it, besides the will-‘o-the-wisp? A mess, a big mess. How much of a mess? Just think it through. Those holiday trips to grandma’s house will be measured in battery capacity. Don’t take too many long trips, commutes, or otherwise because the trip’s mandatory half-hour quick charges degrade the batteries. Don’t expect 100,000 miles out of the thing. And just think, you were forced to give up something that works very well for . . . God only knows what. Wait for this to percolate through the economy and into higher unemployment figures and higher grocery bills and poorer diets.
That’s a ticket for a return journey to the Middle Ages.
And what of those now-common California blackouts? After all, the greenie grid functions like the greenie car. The physics of the substitution of high-density energy with low-density doesn’t add up. The trillions spent on trying to make it work is an attempt to bend the laws of nature to the half-literate musings of The Squad. What will you do with an EV with no juice to its umbilical cord and plug? Commutes will be made more formidable, the suburbs will atrophy, and its back to cramped apartment life at the mercy of Lori Lightfoot’s or Bill de Blasio’s defund-the-police rantings. Is raising kids in decrepit schools and on streets filled with gangs, the homeless, needles, and feces supposed to be “Build Back Better”?
Homelessness in LA.
Remember, the trillions and trillions going into this bottomless pit is money not spent on other things. An adult, not the eco-fanatics in Congress, would recognize this as trade-offs. Our decaying military will make it possible for the Pacific to become a CCP lake. Try a supply chain under that regime. Reliance on more expensive and unstable energy and less functional vehicles means less productivity, and productivity is the name of the game for prosperity. More money going into greenie infatuations is less money for R&D for the next wave of world-impacting innovation. Add it up . . . and cringe.
Have we lost our minds? Our car fleet is more efficient and less polluting than nearly any outside the Anglosphere and Europe. We are now expected to dispense with the great strides in the use of fossil fuels and jump headlong into electricity-everything, just at the time when they plan to make the production of it more unstable and vulnerable. It’s crazy, absolutely crazy
What’s in store for us in the not-too-distant future? The tea leaves before us aren’t so encouraging.
Most of the threats to our well-being emanate from our imagination running wild, but the resulting anxiety seriously alters our behaviors. Among the troubling trends is the possibility of hysterics routinely finding a home in government policy. The corresponding shocks to our workaday lives promise an endemic decline in the standard of living. The disruptions in our economic lives foretells disorder in our social, cultural, and religious spheres. Psychologically, we’ll forever be scarred by a gripping fear of contagions and hypothetical health crises. Crises, mostly imaginary, won’t be limited to the next virus. An accelerant for a mindset of terror is seen in the steady drumbeat of more speculative dooms. Our progeny will be swept up in it. In addition, progressive authoritarianism is waiting in the wings which will play havoc with our settled legal and political arrangements. The list may not be long enough, but it’s sufficient to present a vision that should keep you awake at night.
And, just think, we’re doing it to ourselves. No external enemy need apply as agent.
The response to corona pointed the way. A population now inured to mandatory isolations will find it easier to fall in line in regards to more mundane contagions to follow. The flu vaccine is taking on the rhetorical trappings of the COVID vaccine in popular media and public health bureaucracies. Reality could easily follow the rhetoric. Soon, masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and business and school closures could be a recurring feature of life. A society in the perpetual grip of fear is one on the cusp of disintegration . . . or conquest.
Don’t expect an economy to thrive in this condition of instability. Investing for the long term will be replaced by retrenchment – the focus on the protection of life, immediate family, and assets. Hunkering down will be the order of the day, not the rambunctious risk-taking that makes for the economic expansion that is necessary to absorb the coming generations. The uncertainty could set the stage for a revival of medievalism, its increasing isolation, and a corresponding decline in the quality of life.
Look around you. Our quality of life is under stress. Shortages abound either due to hording, a lack of labor, or government’s infatuation with environmentalism’s inbred prejudice against commerce and its energy needs. COVID is the excuse to retard business activity while at the same time bribing much of the workforce to stay home with inflated government benefits.
What happens to the social maturation of children in this atmosphere of isolation? What happens to young adults when dating customs becomes more cumbersome? What then happens to marriage and the birthrate? What happens to family and friends when the holidays are zoomed? And, indeed, for adolescents and young adults, when education is zoomed? Graduating high school seniors at the junior high educational level does not bode well for upward mobility or social peace. Feudal-sized gaps in educational attainment will appear as the richer demographic cohorts utilize their willingness and means to break free of the straitjacketed and zoomed public schools.
Of course, that education will be increasingly festooned with the hysterias-of-the-moment. “Climate change” is at the top of the list. Evidence strongly suggests that “climate change” is happening and man has a role, with the pollution-belching power plants of China and India as the chief suspects: 2.8 billion in combined population, 35% of the world’s total humanity, and developing an affection for air conditioning and upwardly-mobile jobs.
The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.
But how much of a role? The widely parroted eco-apocalypse is a stretch to say the least, and any benefits – longer growing season, CO2 as fertilizer – largely ignored. Off-the-shelf mitigations – sun screen, more efficient housing design, natural gas/nuclear/hydro power – are readily available. And all this riding on a projected 1.1° C increase by the end of the century. Even this prognostication is more of a WAG (wild a** guess) or SWAG (affix numbers to the wild a** guess) than anything else. The extent of man’s role, the intensity of impact of GHG (greenhouse gases), and longevity of the temp spike is more up in the air (no pun intended) than is admitted. Yet, it’s hair-on-fire time. And off we go to a mutilation of our way of life, all made more palatable by the opinionated lab coats in the CDC or the University of East Anglia.
The craziness extends beyond a politicized science. The politicized lab is an indicator of the reign of progressive authoritarianism throughout the high status, elite sectors of our society. Much has been written on this. Muscular progressivism has become a status marker and overwhelmingly dominant in top drawer institutions. Society’s upper echelons are an ideological and social monoculture maintained through intermarriage (homogamy) and discrimination. It shows up everywhere from the Ivy League to the campus of Google to the boardrooms of the multinationals to the faculty senate to the newsroom to the people around the broadcast camera and movie studio. It’s ubiquitous and exceedingly stifling.
Prejudice abounds. Surveys from 2019 and 2020 show rising ideological intolerance among the self-designated “better” people; the most perfidious bigotry comes from the much larger progressive-left cohort. Dating sites such as eHarmony show a greater prevalence for partisan affiliations as filters: the left refusing to have romantic relationships with the right in much greater percentages than the other way around.
Not only are student bodies increasingly radical-left but they’ll easily jettison “free speech” for something tyrannically defined as “safety”. The “safety” is a euphemism for the abstracted threats to fashionable and recently-minted victim groups. The threat to that “safety” is the feeling of rejection by the alleged victim from someone simply expressing disbelief for their claim of victimhood and self-description. At this point, “safety” is cover for thought control when it’s translated into speech codes, “safe spaces”, and into curriculum. And today’s twenty-somethings and younger are four-square behind it.
The thinking muddles institutional autonomy and individual autonomy. Popularly elected legislatures and governors are castigated for trying to restrict an institution’s power to trample individual rights at the insistence of a radical student clique. Ironies of all ironies: institutional academic freedom is transmuted into a prohibition of basic individual rights.
The prejudice and bigotry of the young will be carried into their adult lives. Whether it be the classroom, tenure, boardroom, government, or employment, power positions will be the province of the progressive-left. If you want an example of the Kendi’s marriage of prejudice and power, here it is, albeit without the race-obsession. Here’s systemic bigotry staring back at them in the mirror. They have met the enemy and it is them.
What does this mean for our constitutional order? It means a simultaneous mixture of “expert” authoritarianism (meaning more power for people like them) and the dismantlement of hesitant Constitutional institutions such as a conservative Court, the Senate, and Electoral College. Anything is laid waste if it stands athwart the left’s path to the holy land of self-defined “equity”.
NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: People march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on October 25, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
To make the revolution permanent, unchecked and unassimilated immigration and control of the schools is essential for guaranteeing a pliable electorate. Empowered by a socially engineered electorate, the country’s traditional principles and ideals will end up on the trash heap for this permanent governing class. No more is justice to be fair – i.e., blind and neutral. Lady Justice must peek under her blindfold to grant favorable rulings to people of the right race, genitalia, gender self-designation, or intersectionality (combination) of any of the previous. No more is there to be fealty to equal protection of the laws. Far from it. Awards and penalties are to be assigned by race, et al. Paying heed to the geographical and cultural diversity (real diversity) of the country through federalism or other governing institutions will be discarded for the imposition of a left-wing conformity from an administrative center (DC). Consensual government is transformed into the North Korean kind. Elections will be of the perfunctory type.
Others, many more than I, have raised the alarm. Our world is changing before our eyes, and not in a wholesome way. At root, many of our young people are proving that an education can make you stupid as well as wise. The breadth and depth of understanding of past generations is lacking. In the end, many college graduates manifest the traits of a cult. They have beliefs that are, in essence, unexamined assumptions, unprovable and highly questionable. And to think that this is the generation that threatens to sweep way the legacy of a thousand of years.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
And so, many of you might still say that we have nothing to fear. Really?
Sometimes idiocy gets so entrenched that it’s mistaken for wisdom. For the rest of us, we should start to shake our elites’ false aura of authority and easily recognize some of their chic passions for what they are – nonsense. In this, I refer to our the corporate suits’ enthusiasm for woke ideology. How could adults embrace something so ludicrous? The farce would be apparent to a child.
I’m reminded of the old gag of a tractor-trailer hauling a tall earth mover but at a standstill at a bridge. Stumped as to how to get it under the bridge, a kid in a mini-van rolls by with the window down and yells, “Let some air out of the tires!” Staunching the drivel, before they mutilate our livelihoods and retirement systems, is as obvious as letting some air out of the tires.
It might take a kid to cut through the overwrought bunk to help return us to sanity. Right now, overwrought lefty foolishness is piloting the ship of our retirements. Pay attention those of you at the mercy of CalSTRS and CalPERS and the rest of the public employee pension gang. Lefty ideologues control your pension checks. One such lefty avatar is Kirsty Jenkinson, Investment Director, Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). Whew, what a mouthful, but a title that can be simply translated as “useful idiot in selling the rope that eco-totalitarians will use to hang us”.
Kirsty Jenkinson
Lenin was famous for his characterizations of supportive capitalists as “rope sellers” and “useful idiots”.
Taking a closer look at Kirsty shows the scope of the threat. This girl has an illustrious leftist pedigree, albeit one in carefully coiffed hair and suit (see below). She went from a four-year stint at Edinburgh University with a MA in “International History” to six years as an executive director at Goldman Sachs, innocuous enough till we find her as Director of “Governance & Sustainable Investment” at BMO Global Asset Management. What’s that obtuse title mean? Well, it’s a rephrasing of the leftist tag “ESG”, or Environment, Social, and Governance.
Whose Environment? Not ours, but the greenie utopia that people like Kirsty, schooled in all the lefty jargon, want to impose on us.
Whose Social? Not ours, but the “social” of the lefty faculty lounge and their legions of acolytes. Yep, that’s the stuff fed to your child through their curriculum and shows as Critical Race Theory and hides under the acronym EID – Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity. All of this lingo boils down to perpetual victimhood of the “other” which is defined by a laundry list of immutable characteristics and a host of mental dispositions (“My genitalia doesn’t define my sex.”). Of course, the “social” encompasses an explosion of so-called remedies in government commands, rewards, and punishments. It’s a complete omni-competent state, as in the one contemplated by Karl Marx.
Whose Governance? Yes, ours. Meaning, they want to control us in every possible way. This political disposition leads to the reflex to funnel campaign cash to eco-socialist parties, like today’s Democratic Party. It also seeks to rope the Fortune 500 into the revolution. That gets us back to Kirsty Jenkinson.
From BMO, she ends up at the World Resources Institute as Director of Markets & Enterprise Program. Media Bias/Fact Check rates them “left-center”. It’s an eco-group with the same eco-mantras.
The BMO and WRI stints uncovered her as a lefty political activist in the corporate suite. She continued her march through the boardrooms as the Managing Director & Sustainable Investment Strategist at Wespath Institutional Investments. Are you getting the picture? This lady is into funds that have millions of dollars of other people’s money at their disposal which can be turned into seats on corporate boards. The sheer weight of shares counts for a lot. All the better to foist ESG, EID, CRT, and the rest of the lefty litany on the nation from the classroom to the workplace. What doesn’t get through in the Green New Deal will be swept up by the Fortune 500.
Racial Equity indoctrination – CRT is foundational – in a North Carolina Episcopal Diocese in 2017.
That’s not the end of Kirsty’s sojourn. She’s now the Investment Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies at CalSTRS, the second largest pension fund with $275 billion in assets. Thus, this eco-activist has an outsized influence over the financial well-being of 949,000 teachers and staff. She can wield the fund’s $300 million stake in Exxon/Mobil like a Swiss halberd and force them to renounce any effort at producing affordable energy, their core business.
Bear in mind, that greenie stuff – “sustainable” – is expensive and unreliable, and that’s before we start the slide in our and our kids’ quality of life. And that’s before pensioners begin noticing the stories of CalSTRS’s difficulties in cutting the checks. At the end of the day, eco-fantasies don’t make for corporate health, and corporate ill-health becomes the basis for a bad portfolio, and a bad portfolio equals a bankrupt pension. Get it?
People like Kirsty Jenkinson, with her lefty fairy tales, have no business using my pension to advance their ideological crusade. The fiduciary rule requires the fund managers to work on behalf of the best financial interests of their clients. A totalitarian eco-utopia is not in the best interests of the beneficiaries. If individual beneficiaries want to send a little cash to the eco-blob, more power to them. But Kirsty should have another job, other than political activist. In fact, a proper functioning fiduciary rule would demand an end to titles such as Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies.
Either she finds another role or send her packing.
The Ramirez cartoon below is a better assessment of the Newsom recall election result than much of it coming out of the so-called wise punditry, some of it from the center-right. Some of the center-right make much of Larry Elder’s August comments throwing aspersions on the November 2020 election. In their scenario, he made it easy for the ruling one-party apparatchiks to paint MAGA all over the recall effort. It’s true, but only goes so far.
The state is deep, deep blue for a reason. The ridge of the Coast Range is a philosophical and ideological firewall. Those living west of it on the elongated coastal plain from San Diego to San Francisco can easily outvote into irrelevancy those east of it. The lefty ideological smog is suffocating there. Boat loads of left-wing unexamined assumptions dominate. If I was talking about mining, it’s California’s Comstock Lode of lefty votes, leaving Republicans to scantier fields elsewhere. Challenges to the ruling coastal orthodoxy are really up against it.
Challengers must be Jesus-like in their absence of lefty sin, or near perfect in avoiding the smear of any association with Trump or SNL depictions of the people in flyover country. That would inflame the left’s hyper-prejudices. Perfection isn’t in our natural makeup, though. People slip up. Any sin to the ruling dogmas, no matter how minor, can be inflated into a threat to life and limb with the huge infusions of lefty cash from brazen rent seekers and half-wit lefty gazillionaires.
It’s easy to remain in power for the lefty ruling class with such a huge repository of votes and cash at their disposal. I’ve experienced it as a local teacher union president attending CTA confabs. Remember the voucher initiative from way back? They, the CTA big cheeses, crowed about spending $14 million to convince minorities and others that it was in their interests to remain chained to their inner-city educational anarchy. It worked.
Newsom can preside over the state’s wildlands conflagration, a third-world grid, Marxist levels of taxation and regulation, a cost of living unaffordable to anyone not able to buy lunch at the French Laundry, and social chaos, and all he has to do is mention Trump and the prospect of toothless rednecks to escape accountability. P.T. Barnum may be right about the birth rate of suckers (there’s one born every minute).
People not so disposed to the lunacy are really up against it. Try as you might, the electoral math won’t add up. Money and a horde of lefty sycophants will thwart your bravest efforts. Your only recourse is to do what homo sapiens have done since the discovery of bipedalism. Move!
Gov. Gavin Newsom at his victory bash after surviving the recall.Gen Mark Milley at his June 2020 commencement address to the National Defense University.
Cosseted: adj.; cared for and protected in an overindulgent way; pampered.
David Mamet:
“We’ve often heard, ‘I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal’; but everyone is a ‘fiscal conservative.’ So the phrase can be most usefully translated: ‘I’m perfectly capable of controlling my own finances. Now I intend to control yours.’”
*From Mamet’s essay “The School Dream” in National Review, May 17, 2021, in a footnote.
Two events erupted recently: Governor Gavin Newsom survived a recall and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was reported to have subverted the authority of the President in communications with subordinates in the chain of command, the military leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and the President’s political opposition. Obviously, both are, or can be, deeply disturbing. Which is worse? You choose.
Yet, both instances are evidence of a troubling trend among the citizenry (and uncitizenry since certain places have effectively erased the distinction). In the one, California clung to its current class of baneful leaders. In the other, according to reports coming out of Bob Woodward/Robert Costa’s new book, a member of an elite class of administrators – these happen to be military – may have attempted to supplant the Constitutional authority of the duly-elected President with his own, even possibly going so far as to cooperate with an acknowledged and powerful foreign adversary. It’s what happens when an increasingly cosseted people surrender personal sovereignty to elected or unelected lords and oligarchs in an administrative state. It’s a horrible deal for rulers and ruled. It comes down to a people who longingly desire to be ruled and a group chomping at the bit to do it.
California has frequently asserted the mantle of being on the cutting edge. From Prop 13 to high tech to the counterculture, California expanded on its reputation by justifiably being the first to go from Ronald Reagan to the embrace of the Fabian socialist dream of a cradle-to-grave nanny state in the span of less than 20 years.
I suspect that demographics had a monumental role to play in the transition. It’s much more than immigration. The state changed social complexion by changing its economic complexion (and I don’t mean skin pigment) after the end of the Cold War. Defense industries and the kinds of people attracted them faded as their numbers were replaced by elements drawn to the burgeoning workplaces of entertainment, the college campus, unionized public-sector employment, and the pampered, climate-controlled world of computer screens on the elongated coastal plain west of the Coast Range – the denizens east electorally less consequential. The newly burgeoning cohort demand a different form of governance as opposed to those inspired by Chuck Yeager, and can be rightfully called subjects and not citizens. This new class of subjects is all-in for anything and anyone who’ll promise to build, extend, and maintain the public romper room. The state’s Democratic Party is the breeding ground for this claque of wet nurses and hall monitors.
That distinction between a subject and citizen is critical. A subject accepts a role of inferiority in the status ladder and looks to their “betters” for guidance and restraint. A society of citizens is a society of peers.
For the state’s segment still considering themselves citizens who find this state of affairs repugnant, you still have the right to travel . . . if Biden hasn’t repealed it for the unvaccinated. So, move, leave the place to the emotional midgets in desperate need of a helicopter-parent state.
The dependency demographic, or subjects, is always in search of a mommy or daddy who’ll protect them from the vagaries of life. When the real mommy and daddy go into chronic care or the rest home, the urgency for a cloying adult stand-in becomes paramount. Stepping into the breech is the vaunted, credentialed public-sector “expert” and administrative functionary. The subjects’ hopes and affections goes to the head of the those exalted with power. The laureled class morphs into a law unto themselves to rule over the subjects. Enter General Mark Milley, showing in a more martial manner the symmetry between the Pentagon and the nanny state.
In California, the elected leadership and the massive, unionized administrative state that they birthed are unsurprisingly on the same page. Nationally, the situation is quite different. Many states aren’t as affectionate of rule by credentialed autocrat. That’s where you find the greatest concentration of citizens. Since there is a whole other expanse to the country between the coasts, sometimes elected federal leadership doesn’t correspond to the wishes of the Google and Harvard campuses. Yet, the specific ethos of the minions of DC and its environs is more at home on those campuses than Texas-to-North Dakota.
The Pentagon is an administrative state par excellence. Think of it as a microcosm of Sacramento, and Sacramento is solely a microcosm of LA to San Francisco. Milley sounds like he stepped out of CRT/Faculty Lounge central casting, or the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, only in uniform. For instance, why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff weighing in on an ongoing criminal matter – the Derek Chauvin case – imitating Rev. Al Sharpton? If your eyes were closed, you’d mistake his June 2020 National Defense University commencement address for a Jeremiah Wright sermon. Here’s a snippet:
“I am outraged by the senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd. His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. The protests that have ensued, not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice towards African Americans. What we are seeing is the long shadow of original sin in Jamestown, 401 years ago.”
Mind you, Chauvin’s trial hadn’t begun but that didn’t stop Milley from declaring his guilt with as much caution and reserve as Maxine Waters at a BLM rally. Little did we know back then that we were experiencing our first woke, safe-space, four-star general who functions at the frontier between a racialist neo-Marxism and treason.
Who can forget his following year’s comments before Congress? He sounded less like a mature adult and more like the infantile statue topplers of the previous summer of manufactured “rage”. In response to a question on the teaching of CRT in the military academies, he said, “I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” The answer assumes the existence of “white rage” and is not a call for the academic study of its legitimacy.
Milley – and Austin – subsequently tried to backtrack on their “white rage” and “white supremacy” remarks. He later said, “I want America to know that the United States military is an apolitical institution.” It’s pure hokum. Of course Austin and Milley are politicizing the military in their ideologically-laced purges and neo-Marxist indoctrination.
Austin and Milley being questioned on CRT in the military in June 2021 testimony before Congress.
To better understand, let’s turn to an instructive hypothetical. Let’s say that the concern is about the teaching of Marxism in the academies. Suppose Milley had said, “I want to understand capitalist exploitation of the working class and I’m a capitalist, and I want to understand it.” Already he’s gone more than halfway to accepting the premises of communism. Marxism and CRT are claptrap. “Understanding” claptrap is a mealy-mouthed way of accepting many of its fundamentals. Who’s he trying to fool? The cadets are being indoctrinated in a form of ideological self-loathing.
And I haven’t gotten to the most disturbing charge against Milley. Most frightening is his alleged usurpation of civilian control of the military and his pre- and post-election cooperative assurances to the head of the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army. The latter behavior comes very close to the Article III, Section 3, clause 1’s definition of treason. A portion of which says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Milley certainly may have given the Communist Chinese “aid and comfort”, even though technically and legally Red China isn’t a formally declared enemy. But Congress never declared war on the USSR and there is many rotting in prison for giving “aid and comfort” through espionage to the Kremlin.
That’s how Milley gets off: he didn’t commit espionage. He allegedly just picked up the phone to openly declare the “aid and comfort”. No sneaking around . . . apparently. But that puts him in the same category as O.J. Simpson. Everybody knows they’re guilty but the technicalities of jury nullification and legal jargon saved them from the chair and Leavenworth.
California is a sickening role model. Don’t expect citizens to emerge from the cosseting of perpetual adolescence in a nanny state. The best hope for citizen-Californians was made familiar by Cubans braving the waters of the Florida Strait on rickety rafts to flee Bernie’s workers’ paradise in the land of Castro. Just like them, Californios, rent yourself a box truck before the fee eats up your 401k and flee east across the border. To reformulate Horace Greeley, “Go east, young man.”
More tools are available to cage the federal Leviathan. At least the rest of the country can bring to heel the federal administrative state and prevent it from being a cheap imitation of the California nightmare.
I forgot who said it – I think it was William F. Buckley – but I paraphrase, “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” Seriously means to have acquaintance with the issues, nominally or otherwise. Today, the mantra is to vote, vote, vote; never mind that you might have the issue-awareness of a comatose patient on life support.
September 14 is decision day on Gavin Newsom’s political career, and California is scattering ballots to the wind like our Fed at Democrat insistence is papering the world in dollars. The dollar as the word’s reserve currency, with Weimar Germany integrity, isn’t likely to survive as such any more than California’s election integrity will. Out the window goes the secret ballot. What’s secret – meaning, one voter is alone with one ballot – when 4 ballots land in a mail box, go behind the door, and are “harvested” a week later? And, even more troubling, everyone alive, dead, sentient, vegetative, moved, unmoved, caring, and uncaring gets one (maybe two). The state has a vote system that can’t help but rope in a lot of morons.
Vote by mail in South Carolina
Nothing is expected of the human being, not even breathing. You don’t have to break away from the Cheetos and the Xbox. You’re registered automatically under motor-voter. A ballot will come with the junk mail. Don’t bother with getting presentable and hunting down the car keys. Somebody will come by and pick it up, and maybe offer a little advice on how to fill it out.
It’s a system designed for the likes of Stacy Abrams, the goddess-avatar against “voter suppression”. Never mind that the Georgia race hustler doesn’t make a lick of sense. In her latest published screed, Our Time Is Now, she doubles down on stupid, or stupefying self-negation (Is there a difference?). Take a look at this glaring insult to logic from her book: “I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression — and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia’s history.” Large turnouts of “voters of color” aren’t evidence of racist voter suppression any more than victory is defined by the enemy holding the ground and your troops are wiped out.
Stacy Abrams
It boggles the mind for what passes for “elite” opinion, or willful malpractice on the part of Holt & Reinhart editors. The mind is also left spinning when examining the latest turnout numbers in places like Georgia. The normally low-turnout 2018 midterms surpassed the 2016 presidential election. And 2020 exceeded Obama’s 2008. And proof of some kind of voter-ID is Jim Crow 2.0, something on the books in 35 states? The fact is, nobody – alive or dead – is impeded, especially when you’ve got a pandemic excuse at your disposal. Our elections are open sieves for votes from God-knows-where.
With that great vote sucking sound at open throttle in California, Newsom’s prospects look brighter than what they should be in a state with most of the nation’s homeless, eco-crazed forest management policies that reduced the woods to an open-air match factory, public schools geared for failure, COVID-panic as routine government policy, a cost of living that strangles the middle class and forces mass out-migration (and the loss of one House seat), tax rates that make the Socialist International glow in envy, and a neglected and obsolete water storage and delivery system as the state pursues trains-to-nowhere and inter-urban transit boondoggles suitable for Tokyo. What’s there to complain about?
Here’s my pet theory: As the number of registered voters approaches the number of human beings above room temperature, the proportion of morons in the vote totals increases exponentially. Newsom and Abrams are on the same wave length. Stacy’s prattle provides cover for a California election system that promises one-party control into the foreseeable future, like the one in North Korea that keeps the Kims in power with 95% approvals. The other 5% won’t be around next year.
Advantage Newsom, unless the Republicans become as adept as the Dems at improving their standing among the growing moron demographic. Believe me when I say that there are rich veins to be mined left, right, and center.
While thinking about the return of Trump – he’s already conducting campaign rallies – I ran into Peter Robinson’s essay of vignettes on the political, social, and economic morass that is California. Robinson was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is currently the Murdoch Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. No RHINO this guy.
His story of the predicament of Mike Garcia (R) in California’s 25th Congressional District is illuminating.
Rep. Mike Garcia (R) of California’s 25th congressional district.
Garcia is the son of Mexican immigrants, an Annapolis grad, flew two dozen missions in the Iraq War, and is overflowing in charisma and oratory skills. The 25th is tailored for Republicans to be legitimately competitive (D 38%, R 32%, NPP 25%). It like much of the state has been trending increasingly Democrat but is an easier get than most of the other districts on the coastal plain. The district centers on Simi Valley, the home of the Reagan Library for good reason. Yet, a Democrat, Katie Hill, took the seat in 2018 but had to resign in scandal in 2019. In a special election, Garcia took the seat back for Republicans, and barely won reelection in 2020 by 333 votes out of 339,000 cast. Why so tough, after all, in a competitive district with a great candidate?
As I’ve said repeatedly, I voted for Trump twice and would do it a third time if he is the 2024 nominee. The Democrats are too wretched. But campaigns like economics are decided in the margin, that space where voters or consumers could go either way, or simply leave a line on the ballot unmarked. Looking at the 2020 result, I can only conclude that Garcia was running with the Trump anchor chained to his ankle in a Republican-competitive district that Biden won by 10%. Trump is wildly popular among the rabid 24% of the electorate, but he’s highly toxic to a good chunk of the rest, especially in California. For any candidate like Hillary, Biden, or Trump, how many of the getables are willing to engage in hold-the-nose? For Garcia, thank the Almighty that enough were willing to ticket-split.
Holding the nose is an epidemic when the choices were Hillary, Biden, or Trump. Just looking at Trump, his ribald, brutal verbal ticks appeal to crowds not offended in bars and locker rooms. His approach is as Gutfeld would say, “direct”. But depth of understanding is shallow to such as extent that he ran the executive branch in a naively “direct” manner in, for instance, personal overtures to the world’s pariahs like Kim Jong-un. If you agree with Trump that foreigners are screwing us, Trump scraps the Trans-Pacific Partnership whose purpose was to create the commercial foundation for an alignment of Asian and Pacific countries against a resurgent and hegemonic Red China. Don’t like the “forever wars”? He’ll negotiate a pull out. Direct and understandable, yes. Effective in the long run . . . ?
He began his most recent rally in Alabama with Patton’s speech at the beginning of the movie “Patton”. How ironic. Scott’s Patton regales the crowd with Americans “staying out of the war as a bunch of horse dung”; “Americans love the sting of battle”; and “. . . making the other poor bastard die for his country”. It was lost on the rally-goers that Patton’s call to arms and martial virtue doesn’t comport with Trump’s pull-out fixation – essentially a negotiated runaway – and his drumbeat against “forever wars”.
Bar-room bouncers having to deal with roadhouse fights aren’t likely to deal with nuance, and the bouncer Trump wouldn’t practice it anyway. As president and politician on the stomp, he plays checkers as the CCP is immersed in chess.
Playing checkers gave us the Doha Agreement. Biden doesn’t play checkers since he doesn’t understand the colors of the pieces. Translating, Trump was getting to the king line on the checkerboard with his Doha pact; Biden is in the sand box; and the CCP is in the chess room with the rest of the geeks.
Pompeo and Taliban leaders in Doha, early 2020.
Trump got his withdrawal agreement which would have produced the loss of an operating base on China’s western flank and key on-the-ground assets in a strategic location to counter Islamofascism, protect our allies (read Israel and the Gulf Arabs), and kill those who have killed so many of us. To borrow from Patton, long distance, over-the-horizon diligence is “horse dung”. Once you’re out, you’re out, and you’re not going back in . . . unless we lose another 3,000 in the American heartland.
Biden achieved Trump’s endgame with a whole lot of chaos while destroying US credibility for a generation or more. Trump would have done a better withdrawal but still manufacture a vacuum in Afghanistan. All the rhetoric about “forever wars”, lack of fighting willingness of the Afghan forces, and Afghan government corruption is beside the point if the Islamo-crazies flock to the feudal Hindu-Kush, as they did before under the watchful eyes of the Taliban, to have the tranquility to coordinate mass-casualty events among the Kaffir (an insulting term used by some Muslims for non-Muslims).
That’s what is so amazing about Trump’s use of the Patton speech. Patton was calling men to arms. Trump was calling the nation to get out. Biden couldn’t get either right and gave us a cluster-f@#*. Get prepared for a perpetually heightened terror threat level to go with the non-stop COVID hysteria. Can a civilization withstand such a water-boarding? I guess that we’ll see.
