MCMA: Making California Mexico Again

 Why do Californians continue to vote for destructive Democrats like Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, and their political clones despite their incompetence at basic duties like fighting fires and facilitating post-disaster reconstruction?  As Victor Davis Hanson notes in devastating commentaries, the state has a third of the nation’s welfare recipients, half its homeless, crumbling infrastructure, staggering home and rent prices, massive social service expenditures for illegals, shocking electricity rates, aging power lines that spark wildfires, and (until a voter initiative last November reversed it) legalized looting.  That’s a short list.   

 Recently the overwhelmingly Democrat state legislature passed a bill that enabled a sixty-five cent increase in energy prices based on the climate hysteria that infects the state’s coastal elites and journalists.  That tax will doubtless fall primarily on gasoline and other utilities.  Predictably, a group called California Environmental Voters Education Fund began running a commercial for the state’s voters who sport an illiteracy rate near 25% among persons 15 and over.  It blamed California’s high gas and electricity prices on “dirty energy greed.” 

 It’s a slick 30-second spot that begins with a printed warning: “Dirty energy companies are costing Californians” then shows a lady sweating an electricity bill of $277. Next comes a gas pump reading that spikes from $83 to $101. A final scene features oil company reps clapping happily at Wall Street’s closing bell as superimposed profit figures rise from 166- to over 200-billion dollars.  A final plea reads, “Don’t make Californians pay for dirty energy’s greed,” followed by the website: “FightTheGreed.org.”

 It’s a message designed to appeal to semi-literates, stoners, Hollywood groupies, and coastal elites who may know better but also know which party butters their bread by providing a massive influx of illegal and H-1B labor.  The spot isn’t meant for anyone sharp enough to discuss California’s highest-in-the-nation 61 cent-per-gallon gas tax or to ask why oil companies aren’t so greedy in other states, much less for anyone who ponders the price to be paid for progressively eliminating California’s oil production and refinery capacity. 

 You can be sure the Silicon Valley gang will fund similar propaganda pieces for any legislation that threatens their stranglehold on the 60/19 (House), 30/10 (Senate) Democrat majorities in Sacramento.  But you can also count on local news programs to function as lapdogs for Democrat politicians.  A Karen Bass press secretary could hardly formulate more sympathetic and uncritical coverage for the mayor who partied in Africa while her city burned, fired her DEI fire chief when the latter criticized department budget cuts, and pretends that cleaning up rubble after seven months constitutes lightning progress. 

 The same local news almost never identifies criminal “migrants” as illegal, and needless to say, employs a consistent anti-ICE narrative.  ACLU lawyers are featured who denounce the racist “targeting” and “kidnapping” of anyone who’s “brown.”  And despite unavoidable coverage of the real or attempted gunshot during ICE’s marijuana field raid last month, the news slant was clear: “protestors” are defenders of “the community” and ICE is getting what it deserves.  Little or no mention is made of the fact that the farm used hundreds of illegal aliens as laborers including, according to government sources,  fourteen minors.

When I moved to the San Diego area in 1984, Ronald Reagan was about to win the state’s presidential vote overwhelmingly (57%) and for the second time.  Those POTUS elections followed two terms served by The Gipper as governor (’67-’74).  For sixteen straight years, from 1983 to 1998, California had GOP Governors (Deukmejian and Wilson).  Today no Republican has occupied any statewide office since 2011 and, as noted above, Democrats possess supermajorities in both state houses.  So what accounts for this radical shift?  Primarily, demographics.

In 2012 Ann Coulter noted that California’s non-Hispanic white population over the prior half-century fell from 80% to half that number.  By 2022 the percentage was pegged at 33.7%. Meanwhile the Latino population grew from less than 10% to over 40%, a number that includes 2.6 million “undocumented immigrants” according to a 2022 estimate by Mayorkas’s Department of Homeland Security—a  figure that doubtless grew over the final two years of Autopen’s open border.

So it wasn’t necessary to change the minds of Californians.  Just change the population residing in the state and keep a large percentage of them poor and uneducated—much like the pyramidal  population of Mexico.  The Democrat plan was to do the same with Texas.  So far that plan has backfired as traditional Latinos along the Rio Grande rebelled against the invasion that upended their lives via crime, drugs, and the sheer number of strangers who ignored their property rights just like they ignored the American border.  Barring a catastrophe that makes the L.A. fires look like a weenie roast or some dramatic and unexpected political about-face by the state’s Latinos, it’s likely the poor, ill-informed, 27% foreign-born population of California will continue voting to Make California Mexico Again.   

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

 

ANN COULTER: EXPOSING THE LEFT'S MOB MENTALITY

Many moons ago ABC’s Sam Donaldson compared the French and American Revolutions—implying that the two events were historical twins. Even then I knew enough history to conclude that this simplistic equation was bogus.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know just how wrongheaded the comparison was until I read Ann Coulter’s recent book “Demonic”—in particular the chapters about the slaughter of over half a million souls that occurred in France from 1789 to 1794. (By comparison, the religion-steeped American Revolution had about 20,000 casualties—half disease-related—and none of the mob-inspired butchery that was common in France.)

Coulter contends that the details and philosophical motivation for this bestial continental bloodbath aren’t more widely known because France’s statist revolution was compatible with the beliefs and propaganda methods of modern leftists. American universities, of course, are seminaries for such ideas, and attachment to these dogmas is so fervent that prominent conservatives on campus are often, in mob-like fashion, shouted down or even, on occasion, assaulted.

Coulter notes that neither Cornell (in 2010-2011) nor UCLA had courses specifically on the French Revolution. I can add that none of my numerous graduate courses in intellectual history came close to presenting the depths of atheistic depravity exhibited in Coulter’s chapters on the revolution and Terror.

I perused UCSD’s offerings on the topic and found a single course taught by a professor whose primary interests are gender and labor relations. The absence of student reviews on the web suggests that the course (buried deep in the university’s multicultural offerings) didn’t light anyone’s fire.

Coulter also observes (as David Horowitz did earlier in his book, “The Professors”) that many violent radicals from the 60s ensconced themselves in positions in higher education —among them Obama associates and former “Weathermen” Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

In California Coulter mentions former Black Panther Angela Davis (long time Professor at UC Santa Cruz) and Ron (Maulana) Karenga. Karenga, a former 60s radical and inventor of Kwanzaa, was able to go from prison for physically assaulting two women to Chairman of Black Studies at Cal State Long Beach in a mere fourteen years. That’s quite a tenure track.

Throw in the fact that UC-system employees were candidate Obama’s number one source of funds in 2008 (contributing $1.64 million or 50 times the amount given to McCain) and you have several exhibits favoring Coulter’s thesis that modern leftists often try to achieve their goals not by rational argument but by the exclusion of opposing views.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ recent “go to hell” condemnation of Tea Party Americans further reinforces Coulter’s point about the left’s mob-baiting mentality.