*Below is my preface to John Papola’s podcast, “California Was Doomed in the 1960s”. It begins with the state’s latest effort to diminish the role of parents in their children’s education. After reading my introduction, please grab a cup of coffee and watch Papola’s depiction of California’s journey into the abyss.
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* transgressive: adj.; involving a violation of moral or social boundaries; relating to art or literature in which orthodox moral, social, and artistic boundaries are challenged.
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No better example of California’s descent into the transgressive countercultural abyss can be found than the state-orchestrated construction of a wall to separate parents from their child’s emotional health, specifically gender anxieties, in the state’s schools. But standing in the state’s way is the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974, the federal law that confirms the right of the parent to govern the upbringing of their children, even while in the schools, by requiring parental access to their child’s school records (see #1). The state and its counterculture need to be reminded of the little matter of federal supremacy in The U.S. Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2).
And, now, we must add the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal District Court for the Southern District of California to FERPA. SCOTUS this month removed the stay (order to temporarily halt) issued by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on District Court Judge Roger Benitez’s ruling against California AG Rob Bonta and the State of California in Mirabelli v. Bonta. The upshot of SCOTUS’s ruling is the likelihood that Mirabelli will prevail in the case (see #2 and #3).
The court drama erose when the state and its deeply imbedded counterculture in the state’s political fabric and huge mass of the electorate, as part of their protracted war against traditional institutions like the family, passed AB1955 in 2024, pseudonymously calling it the “The Safety Act”. It mandated the erection of a wall of secrecy for the schools against parents about their child’s gender anxieties and any school “transitioning” efforts. The title, “Safety”, egregiously conceals the real intent, much like the language-mangling in the 1930s Reich’s pathway to the death camps in “The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” or “The Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities”, or Stalin’s war on the peasants in his euphemistically titled “land reforms” and “dekulakization”. It’s stupefyingly Orwellian. It’s a political landscape that Orwell would immediately recognize.
A full SCOTUS ruling against the state and its pervasive counterculture would validate the Trump administration’s decision to withhold $811 million of federal aid to the state for this heinous behaviour. It’s another battle in the counterculture’s fight against established norms and institutions. The State of California is the counterculture’s command-and-control center in pursuit of its cultural revolution.
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I have often pondered the “root causes” of California’s predicament. Something drove this native Californian of 63 years, like millions of others over the past couple of decades, into becoming a resident of somewhere not governed in the manner of the not-so-Golden State.
Is there a “root cause” for the repellant nature of the state? Rhetorically, Democrats have tried to claim a copyright on the “root causes” talk, which is nothing but their tactic of avoiding the obvious: send Vice-President Harris around the world to hector poor countries for not magically raising their per capita GDP, but avoid the glaringly self-evident necessity of enforcing the border and removing the border-crashers. Something catastrophic has been happening to California. What’s the possible “root cause”? Look into it long enough and you’ll discover that the counterculture became the culture more powerfully there than anywhere else. It’s a popular mindset that overwhelms the nicer and more populous swaths of the state. It shows in elections over the past two or three decades.
Woe be to you if you live outside these beautiful places where the beautiful people live. You are forced to pay for their poorly understood ideo-philosophical fixations. Do you doubt it? Look at your utilities bill or the price at the pump. Look at the paltry gallons-per-minute rating (gpm) of your toilets and shower heads, and your home’s two water meters which function as triggers for punishing fines and extra charges. You run into taxes, taxes everywhere, hidden and open. If you’re a young family, watch as your kids develop gender anxiety and other radical thought-fads in their classrooms. The kids are cognitively corrupted. Don’t think for a moment that most private school alternatives are entirely free of the mind virus. Don’t be surprised that your kids end up at Harvard or State U in a frenzy over the patriarchy or rushing to Minneapolis to obstruct federal law enforcement.
We were warned at the beginning. When a republic of popular sovereignty was laid before our feet in 1789, George Washington was adamant about the absolute necessity of an enlightened populace. He wrote, “As the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” Is public opinion equally enlightened everywhere? No, a thousand times No! The moral and mental crippling is no more evident than in the populous coastal strip between San Diego and San Francisco, and these people vote like it.
So, what’s in the heads of the state’s electoral super-majority who have continually endorsed this hideous transformation from young innocence to angry chants of “Free Palestine” and “River to the Sea” and “I am She”. In that space between the ears lies the counterculture. The counterculture’s foundation is rebellion, a rejection of western civilization, our inheritance of faith, family, marriage, the rest of civil society, private property, the work ethic, the basics of our way of life. It is nihilism (the denial of an ontological natural order of things) combined with narcissism (a fervent self-love, solipsism). Yet, it also carried with it the seeds of totalitarianism – the desire to control not only what people do but also what they think (hence “totalitarian”). It’s a uniquely all-controlling, all-embracing, if incoherent, mode of governance nestled on the west coast and urban nodes.
Not so surprisingly, nowhere is the rule of this outlook more complete than in the birthplace of the Summer of Love. But as with most things cultural, this goose was cooking for decades, if not centuries, before Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out”. Turn back the pages of time to a strain of thought in the Enlightenment: the table rosa – the mind and personality as a “blank slate”. It’s the dawn of the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate. Are people made (nurture) or born (nature) better or worse, lesser or greater? The question needed to be raised to remove aristocratic rule. It was believed that “born” led to feudalism, “made” led to equality and popular sovereignty and the sunny uplands of the better world.
Fine distinctions such as “equality” of opportunity and “equality” of outcome were not fully grasped at the time, leaving “equality” of outcome to gestate into Marxism, and into today’s DEI, CRT, state-sponsored identity favoritism (affirmative action for “protective classes”), etc. To pave the way, a new class of social engineer, the credentialed “best and brightest”, was believed to hold the sacred keys to mold a better person for a better world. They were granted the power in the administrative state and the schools to shape the mental table rosa, to shove out the old and insert the ruminations of this emerging class of pedants. It’s the “progressivism” in TR (Yes, TR had this impulse.), Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Obama, and Biden, and today’s Democratic Party. Today, the Party’s base takes it to 11 (the famous “11” of Nigel Tufnel in “This is Spinal Tap”).
Progressives unleashed the malady of hubris (overweening pride) in one’s abilities to manage others. It’s the dawn of the administrative state outside democratic accountability and constitutional restraints. Key to their claim of authority is their alleged possession of the “science”, the “science” of all things from factory floor management to combatting poverty, the beginning of the “follow the science” mantra. Of course, the “science” was no real science. It is the science of activists with little actual understanding of science. It led to eugenics and forced sterilizations, lobotomies, hierarchies of race, miscegenation laws, a robust income tax to fund the Progressives’ ambitions, Jim Crow, the New Deal’s extension of the Depression into a Great one, the Great Society’s grotesque anti-poverty programs that maligned life throughout the 1960s to the present, and their current climate-change jihad, etc.
Confidence flowing into arrogance is the byproduct of the hubris. Closed-mindedness is not far behind. Try to convince the cognitively infected that chromosomes matter. Go ahead, try. A subsequent birth dearth – after the pervasive women-can-have-it-all and pregnancy-as-disease messaging, chemical abortions and castrations, the permanent sterility of sex-change surgeries, the normalization of novel “marriages” which by definition cannot procreate, and the profusion of “incels” (male involuntary celebrates) – is praised . . . until someone enlightens them of the fact that there won’t be anyone around to change their bed pans. We’ll have to import the fertility of foreigners, and everything that comes in tow with them.
First came progressivism and its “science” of everything; next came its extension into speculations on the human mind. The 1950s were rife in conjectures masquerading as absolute truth. People in lab coats replaced the minister and mom and dad. The “science” of psychotherapy – actually a philosophy, not a science – broke down something as complicated as the human mind into a few grossly simplistic and adolescent toy blocks. Mom and dad, the family, norms, and faith came under clouds of suspicion. Now, all that is needed is the demographic heft of the Boomers and their youth rebellion on meth.
The cultural revolt would blossom into hippies, communal families (hello, Charlie Manson), “flower power”, socialism, and a rejection of much that came before. Fueling the tumult, and anticipating the Boomers, was the neo-Marxist chattering classes in academia such as Foucault and Marcuse, whose acolytes would eventually penetrate nearly everywhere in the culture, from kindergarten to grad school to the c-suite. Nowhere is this truer than San Diego-to-San Francisco.
The schema doesn’t work today any better than it did in the heyday of Haight-Ashbury. The counterculture’s attack on standards of sanity and the extension of “lifestyle” to cover public displays of filth and anti-social behavior only led to the blight of 30% of the country’s homelessness residing in the “Golden State”. Poop maps and vigilance are requirements to enjoy the state’s urban amenities.
The counterculture became the culture of California with all its hairbrained inconsistencies, but united by a rejection of the old and established. The narcissism and nihilism of the prior decades and into the present gradually removed the older guidelines only to leave a void to be filled with social decay and an increasingly emaciated economy, the state’s current condition.
The 1960s counterculture absorbed the latent neo-Marxism and the prevailing pseudo-science of its most ardent academic practitioners. It came out from the shadows as the state faced the social and economic repercussions of the peace dividend (decline of defense and defense-adjacent industries), massive foreign in-migration (much of it illegal), the rise of the new faith of environmentalism, and the teeming hordes of the mental and drug-addled turning our urban public spaces into open sewers. The state is becoming increasingly unlivable. It’s as if the trendy denizens of Laurel Canyon and Haight-Ashbury moved out of their haunts, coiffed their hair and dawned tweed, and moved into the Democratic Party and right into the state legislature and governor’s mansion.
Yes, indeed, the counterculture became the culture in “blue America”, with California as its epicenter.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)”, CDC: Public Health Law, 7/10/2024, at https://www.cdc.gov/…/family-educational-rights-and…
2. “Court sides with parents in dispute over California policies on transgender students”, Amy Howe, SCOTUSblog, 3/2/2026, at https://www.scotusblog.com/…/divided-court-sides-with…/.
3. Federal District Court Judge Roger Benitez’s ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta: “Federal Judge Issues Permanent Injunction Against Parental Exclusion Policies in California Schools”, California Policy Center, 12/23/2025, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/mirabelli-olson…/.