[“The Biden family partners are often foreign governments, where the deals occur in the dark corners of international finance like Kazakhstan, China, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Ukraine, and Russia. Some deals have even involved U.S. taxpayer money. The cast of characters include sketchy companies, violent convicted felons, foreign oligarchs, and other people who typically expect favors in return. Joe’s public power positions Biden family members for highly lucrative deals they likely would not otherwise get. These deals also often occur with the appearance that Joe Biden has done favors for the partners who welcome such family members. These are not a few disparate enterprises, but rather moneymaking ventures that appear to be part of a well-organized family business” *].
The discovery of the many classified docs VP Joe Biden [now President] and his son Hunter Biden stored in various homes, garages, auto…and other locations [notably @ the University of Pennsylvania Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement funded by China] were most likely organized acts of espionage to provide the CCP/China [and possibly others] access to sensitive US government documents absconded in scheduled ‘drop points’. Joe Biden and Hunter Biden [add Jill Biden et al] apparent seditious conduct should be investigated by a team of non-partisan investigators vetted and selected by the pertinent House Committee. The $1.5B influence-peddling deal, Joe Biden’s ‘bagman’ [Hunter Biden] inked w/the Bank of China, has all the markings of an act of treason.
Undoubtedly, the leftwing Media, Biden’s DOJ, and DNC will interfere with the investigation of this sordid affair.
Nevertheless, the American people must not allow Joe Biden’s sordid historical conduct of bribes and scams to be covered-up neither by the Biden administration nor the Democrat party and its anti-American propagandists [including George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, and the Clinton Foundation].
Note: USAG Merrick Garland’s search [ordered by President Joe Biden] of Donald J. Trump’s [ex-President] Mar-a-Lago residence, was egregious and unconstitutional. Donald Trump has not committed treason.
The burden of treason is now on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. May justice prevail.
Warm regards to our dear Ghr, guardian of our blessed Constitution.
Is Arizona really becoming more purple? What the 2024 Senate race could tell us
Arit John …..Los Angeles Times: YAHOO NEWS
Wed, February 1, 2023 at 4:00 AM CS
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) says he’ll challenge independent U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona in 2024. (Tom Williams / Associated Press)
In 2018, when she was still a member of the Democratic Party, Kyrsten Sinema ran her Senate campaign as a self-described “Arizona Independent,” a distinction that helped her become the first Democrat to win the seat in three decades.
Five years later, progressives are betting that Arizona, a longtime Republican stronghold, has moved far enough to the left that Democrats don’t need to rely on an iconoclast like Sinema to win. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego launched his campaign for her seat last week, painting the race as a choice between an inaccessible incumbent beholden to special interests and a challenger who would be a lobbyist for working families.
There are several questions to be answered heading into next year’s election, chiefly whether Gallego cleared the field; how much former President Trump will influence the Republican primary, and what role, if any, Sinema will play in a potential three-person race. But the biggest question may be how purple is Arizona?
“I wish I could say that Arizona’s turning blue and all the good work we’ve done is convincing people that progressive ideas are right, but that’s not where the state is yet,” said Stacy Pearson, a Phoenix-based Democratic strategist and longtime Sinema ally. “Arizona is not any more progressive, but it continues to reject extremism.”
After decades of GOP dominance in the state, Democrats have scored a number of statewide victories in recent elections, including Joe Biden’s presidential win, Mark Kelly’s Senate wins in 2020 and 2022, and the Democratic sweep of the gubernatorial, Senate, secretary of state and attorney general races in November against Trump-backed candidates.
Arizona is critical for Democrats, who have a two-seat majority in the Senate and will be defending 23 out of 34 seats up for reelection next year. Three of those contests are in states Trump won in 2020 — Ohio, West Virginia and Montana.
Sinema has not announced whether she plans to run for reelection, and her office declined to comment. In her public comments, she’s pointed to the work left to do in this session of Congress and said it’s too early to talk about politics.
“A never-ending focus on campaign politics is why so many people hate politics,” Sinema told a Phoenix radio station the Friday before Gallego announced. “We just got through a really grueling election cycle, so I think most Arizonans want a break.”
Sinema allies say they expect her to run. She has about $8 million in campaign funds at her disposal.
John LaBombard, a Democratic strategist who has worked with Sinema and moderate Democratic candidates, said she would be able to contrast herself with “extremes” on either side of her politically.
“The things she’s said about the broken partisan political system, I really think that’s going to resonate with a lot of independents,” he said. “It could resonate with enough Democrats and Republicans as well to make this obviously a really close dogfight, but one in which Kyrsten is really well positioned.”
When Sinema announced last month that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent — framing the decision as an effort to remove herself from partisan politics — some were angry, but few were surprised.
“A growing number of Arizonans — people like me — just don’t feel like we fit neatly into one party’s box or the other,” she told CNN at the time.
Independents outnumber Democrats in Arizona. Out of nearly 4.2 million registered voters, 34.7% are Republicans, 34% are independents and 30.5% are Democrats.
Sinema’s favorability rating went up 13 percentage points with independents, to 42%, and 5 percentage points, to 43%, with Republicans after she announced she was leaving the party, according to a January Morning Consult poll. Her support with Democrats fell 12 percentage points, down to 30%.
While some Democrats are worried about splitting the vote in a three-way race, Gallego’s allies say Sinema doesn’t have enough support to spoil the race.
“Ruben Gallego can win this race with or without Sinema in it,” said Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist working for Gallego’s campaign. “Democrats are pretty united in their disappointment of Sen. Sinema, and the promises she’s broken.” Gallego’s campaign said that he raised more than $1 million in the 24 hours after he announced he was entering the race.
Sinema, a former progressive activist and Green Party member, has taken on a more moderate, independent streak throughout her five years in the Senate. She was one of eight Democrats who voted against adding a minimum wage increase to a 2021 pandemic aid package, and pledged, along with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.V.), to block efforts to end the filibuster, the rule that requires most bills clear a 60-vote hurdle before being considered.
In the last session of Congress, when Democrats regained control of the Senate, Sinema helped negotiate some of the most important pieces of legislation her party passed, including last year’s $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill, the bipartisan gun safety bill and a bill to boost semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.
At the same time, she’s used her influence as a moderate in an evenly split chamber to force painful concessions from her party. To secure her vote on last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, a tax reform, healthcare and climate change bill, Democrats scaled back a provision to allow Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices and protected the carried interest loophole, which private equity professionals use to tax their compensation at a lower rate.
As Sinema’s profile raised, so did Democratic ire against her. While she and Manchin sought to lower the cost of Build Back Better, Biden’s failed $3.5-trillion social safety net legislation, protesters from Living United for Change in Arizona followed her into a bathroom at Arizona State University, where she teaches at the School of Social Work.
Several of her former staffers and supporters launched the Change for Arizona 2024 political action committee in an effort to primary, and now replace, Sinema. Sacha Haworth, an advisor for the group who ran communications at the start of Sinema’s 2018 campaign, said donations spiked 600% the 24 hours after Gallego announced.
“There’s been a lot of energy to defeat her, whether in a primary or in a general, and now there is a face that they can put to her opponent,” Haworth said. “Up until now it’s been an abstract concept.”
In his announcement video, Gallego focused on his family’s financial struggles growing up and presented himself as an advocate for people living paycheck to paycheck. Sinema recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, a gathering of business and government elites in Switzerland.
“There is no lobbyist for working families,” Gallego said in his announcement video. “If you’re more likely to be meeting with the powerful than the powerless, you’re doing this job incorrectly.”
Katz, who helped Democrat John Fetterman win a Senate seat in Pennsylvania last year, said the lesson from the 2022 cycle was that voters want candidates who seem as though they understand what they’re going through.
“While Washington focuses on labels, voters seem to want candidates who actually look like they give a damn,” Katz said.
Meanwhile, Republicans have tried to frame Gallego’s entry into the race as chaotic for Democrats.
“The Democrat civil war is on in Arizona,” said Philip Letsou, the spokesman for Senate Republicans’ campaign arm. Senate Majority Leader “Chuck Schumer has a choice: Stand with open borders radical Ruben Gallego or back his incumbent, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.”
When asked if he’d support Sinema or the Democratic nominee, Schumer (D-New York) told reporters last week that she’s an excellent member of the Senate, “but it’s much too early to make a decision.”
Most Democratic senators have avoided saying whether they’ll endorse Sinema if she decides to run for reelection.
Republicans, meanwhile, could soon face their own internal struggles. Several Republicans who lost statewide races in 2022 are also considering running for Senate in 2024, according to news reports, including Kari Lake and Blake Masters, Trump-backed candidates for governor and Senate who lost in the general election; Karrin Taylor Robson, a former member of the state board of regents who lost the GOP gubernatorial primary to Lake; and solar energy executive Jim Lamon, who lost the Senate primary to Masters.
Other possible contenders include freshman Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani, whose southwest Arizona district voted for Biden in 2020 and Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb.
Daniel Scarpinato, a Republican strategist and past chief of staff to former GOP Gov. Doug Ducey, said Republicans need to run as if they need to win as much support as possible in the general election.
“You have to go into this race assuming that she doesn’t stay in, and that you need to win with 50[% of the vote] plus one,” he said. “If she does stay in, there’s a very good chance that she will take more Republican votes than Democratic votes in the general election, and that makes it all the more important that Republicans nominate a strong candidate.”
Trump still holds sway with Republican primary voters, but it’s unclear whether he’ll weigh in on primaries while he’s running his own campaign. Arizona was seen as a key test of the strength of Trump’s election misinformation — he endorsed candidates in top state races who questioned or denied the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden.
“If there’s something we’ve learned over the last three elections here in Arizona, [it’s that] Arizona is a conservative state, but we are not a Trump state,” said Barrett Marson, a Phoenix-based Republican strategist.
The media want you to believe that Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is acceptable because he’s ‘cooperating’ with the investigation — but it’s a transparently dishonest argument.
MARK HEMINGWAY
It’s hard to read the news and not keep coming to the conclusion that the media think you’re stupid.
Case in point: On Wednesday, it was reported that the FBI was at President Biden’s home in Rehoboth, Delaware, once again scouring the place as part of its investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. It is at least the third time the FBI has searched Biden’s effects as part of the investigation, and one of those searches was done so discreetly it wasn’t public knowledge until months after the fact.
In addition to his home, classified documents were also found at the Penn-Biden center, the president’s Chinese-funded think tank. The Justice Department has also graciously trusted Biden’s personal attorneys — who did not have security clearances — to sift through his papers and identify any potentially incriminating documents without DOJ supervision.
These searches of Biden’s home and private papers came just a few months after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago for the identical crime of mishandling classified documents. The Biden situation is arguably worse since he allegedly retained classified documents from his Senate tenure, which doesn’t have any declassification authority that comes with the presidency. But now after weeks of breathless speculation about how the Justice Department prosecution could be used to keep Trump from running for president again, the media are at pains to explain why Trump’s crimes are somehow worse than Biden’s.
And so the media haven’t coalesced so much as collapsed around a central narrative: Biden’s violations of the law are somehow excused because he’s fully cooperating with the FBI investigation. As Exhibit A, here’s The New York Times write-up on the latest FBI search of Biden’s home:
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. is conducting a search of President Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., the president’s personal lawyer said on Wednesday morning, as investigators continue looking into his possession of classified documents.
The search, like at least two others conducted at locations associated with Mr. Biden, was undertaken with the cooperation of the president and his legal team. It was not clear whether any documents were recovered at the beach house.
“Today, with the president’s full support and cooperation, the D.O.J. is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Del.,” Bob Bauer, Mr. Biden’s personal lawyer, said in statement.“Under D.O.J.’s standard procedures, in the interests of operational security and integrity, it sought to do this work without advance public notice, and we agreed to cooperate.”
So yes, they are downplaying that a sitting president is at the center of a months-long FBI investigation. This mere fact was routinely cited as disqualifying when Trump was president, regardless of how meritless the FBI’s Russia-collusion investigation proved to be. But you almost have to admire the chutzpah of framing the entire story around Biden’s exculpatory excuses, replete with a generous quote from Biden’s lawyer explaining as much.
Do note the sophistry of declaring that this was all done “under D.O.J.’s standard procedures” as if the FBI repeatedly, albeit reluctantly, digging through a sitting president’s house for evidence of crimes is just another day at the office.
Then there’s the declaration that “it sought to do this work without advance public notice, and we agreed to cooperate.” There’s a big difference between “without advance public notice” and being given no notice at all when armed federal agents show up over the same crime and start going through your wife’s underwear drawer. Similarly, you can detect a subtle difference between the way The New York Times runs ostensible press releases from Biden’s lawyer in the third paragraph, versus media outlets running with grossly misleading and possibly illegal leaks from the feds about what they found in their surprise raid of Trump.
Prior to Mar-a-Lago being raided, Trump’s attorneys had been communicating with the DOJ about their concerns that Trump might be illegally retaining classified documents. Were Trump and his legal team uncooperative? If Biden is allegedly cooperating more than Trump in parallel investigations of mishandling classified documents, how would we know? “Cooperation” in this context appears to be solely defined by Biden’s mouthpieces: a largely unaccountable federal agency that previously investigated Trump on demonstrably false charges and the credulous media.
Suffice to say, if you’re not a sitting Democratic president, don’t expect such deference — cooperation with the feds often doesn’t end well for ordinary citizens seeking justice. Earlier this week, pro-life activist Mark Houck was acquitted in one hour by a jury after being prosecuted for violating an obscure federal law — one with troubling First Amendment implications — that makes it a crime to “injure, intimidate or interfere with anyone providing abortion services.” Houck frequently protested in front of abortion facilities, as is his constitutional right, and got involved in a physical altercation with a volunteer Planned Parenthood escort.
Rather than blocking access to the facility, however, Houck says the altercation occurred because the volunteer was harassing his young son. Local authorities in Philadelphia declined to charge Houck with assault. Eventually, Planned Parenthood officials admitted the volunteer Houck said was going after his son had been spoken to “numerous times” about violating their “non-engagement policy.” A federal judge eventually said the application of federal law appeared “to be stretched a little thin here.”
Anyway, after being strung up on federal charges, a handful of Republican senators looked into the egregious prosecution of Houck. It’s quite clear that he did everything he reasonably could to cooperate with the federal investigation, in spite of the fact that the charges against him were vindictive and baseless from the start. And this is what that cooperation got him:
Mr. Houck retained an attorney, Matt Heffron, who is a former federal prosecutor.
In response to pressure from Ron DeSantis, the College Board has removed Critical Race Theory from its proposed AP African American Studies curriculum. This move has meant deleting Amiri Baraka, a virulent anti-White and antisemitic racist, from the curriculum—but he’s still popular in colleges and universities.
For roughly a century, the core purpose of American education was to uplift people. The 1883 The Fifth Reader, part of a series by Appletons’ School Readers, provides some insight into this approach.
The reader offers Shakespearean orations, poems (including Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, celebrating a doomed battle), science, Psalms, and history. It also includes essays entitled “How to render Noble Ideas,” “How to render Joyous Ideas,” along with George Washington’s “Rules of Behavior,” Benjamin Franklin’s “The Necessity of Government” and “The Way to Wealth,” and Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech. Everything in the book is designed to improve young minds by exposing them to noble ideas and the principles of republican government and liberty.
Likewise, David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman reveals that one of the most important gifts Truman, who was born in 1884, received as a child was a book about the lives of Great Men. Each was included as an example of a person who made a positive change in the world, with many having risen from humble beginnings.
In the early days of the Black history movement (1960s/70s), American children learned about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Phyllis Wheatley, Louis Armstrong, and a host of other Black Americans who overcame tremendous adversity to succeed within or change for the better the American system. The message was that we are all one American family and that people of all races, colors, and creeds contributed to America’s greatness.
American education has changed, and nothing more clearly illustrates that than the continued focus on the poetry of Leroy Jones, who rechristened himself Amiri Baraka. Jones was born in 1934 in New Jersey, not the Jim Crow south, and came from a middle-class home. He won a scholarship to Rutgers but went, instead, to Howard University, studying philosophy and religion. H was a sergeant in the US Air Force, where he was subject to crude racism and accusations (probably true) that he was a communist.
By the 1960s, Baraka’s affinity was openly supporting Fidel Castro. He embraced Black nationalism and espoused crude racism against White people and Jews. When Black nationalism failed to sustain him, he went for full Marxism. In honor of Islam, he named his publishing business “Jihad Press.”
Daniel Greenfield has compiled just a small sample of Baraka’s vile anti-White rants: “We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of s**t).” “Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” He wrote about the original White person as “a beast” who is “white with a red, lizard-devil mask.” There’s much more, but the bottom line is that Baraka’s racial hatred is indistinguishable from what the Nazis offered. Since he shares Nazi antisemitism, the only difference is that he hates Whites too.
What’s galling is that, as Greenfield explains, the same institutions that would never dream of incorporating Nazi writings in their instruction are fine with elevating Baraka’s writing—and that includes the people behind the first draft of the AP African American Studies curriculum:
Amiri Baraka, arguably the country’s most racist poet, who frequently fantasized about the mass murder of white people and Jews, is widely taught in colleges across America. And he’s at the center of the controversy over Florida’s rejection of an AP Black Studies course.
The AP course had included BLM, domestic terrorist Angela Davis, and Amiri Baraka.
The Biden administration called Florida’s decision to reject this vile hatred “incomprehensible”.
Racemonger lawyer Ben Crump, who made his bones extracting millions from the deaths of violent criminals like George Floyd and Michael Brown, has announced that he’s ready to sue.
Karen Attiah of the Washington Post falsely claimed that it was an “advanced lesson in anti-blackness” and tweeted, “Florida and DeSantis are showing us what was under their *ahem* hoods this entire time.”
The AP course includes any number of materials banned by Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, but the most remarkable of them all may be Topic 4.10 which recommends an examination of “an example of the writings of Amiri Baraka.” Topic 4.27 also recommends reading Baraka.
Fortunately, Governor DeSantis’s rejected the Critical Race Theory within the program. The College Board has revised the curriculum, which has included removing Baraka’s hate-filled screeds. Greenfield details, however, how Baraka remains popular across American college and University campuses.
In other words, the College Board beat a strategic retreat. The war against breaking America apart through Black-centered anti-White racism continues unabated. Conservatives must resist the temptation to which they inevitably yield, which is to view leftists’ strategic retreat as a full rout, allowing conservatives to retire from the field of battle. The battle is still on, and one of its objectives must be to remove Baraka from all classrooms, just as any other racist would be.
California-style social radicalism, which pretends to advance “freedom,” is a distraction intended to obscure the coming economic slavery its advocates support.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” — George Orwell, 1984
With his eyes firmly set on the Democratic nomination for president, Gavin Newsom on January 6 was sworn into the California governor’s office for another four-year term. In his second inaugural speech, Newsom highlighted the theme he evidently believes will carry him into the White House, “freedom.” But his perverse definition of freedom is as extreme as the right-wing caricatures he claims he’s protecting us from—and far more likely to be realized.
One of the centerpieces of Newsom’s “freedom” agenda is the right to an abortion. But Newsom isn’t merely defending the principles of Roe v. Wade, which tied the legality of abortion to the viability of the fetus. Nor is Newsom advocating the abortion policies enforced in almost every European nation, where abortion is illegal after 12 weeks.
When it comes to abortion rights, Newsom is pandering to extremists—some would call them murderers—who won’t rest until abortion is legal right up until the moment of birth. As it is, California’s “pregnant people” have the freedom to abort up to 24 weeks. “Viable” or not, here’s a photo of a 24-week-old fetus. Killing this beautiful, obviously sentient human being is “freedom,” according to Gavin Newsom.
Also central to Newsom’s freedom agenda is making California a sanctuary for “transgender youth seeking medical care.” Newsom, again pandering to extremists, is willing to allow confused teens and preteens the “freedom” to permanently alter their bodies. Never mind that we’re talking about minors. Never mind if much of this horrific fad, these surging rates of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” can be shown to be the result of social contagion and nurturing pressures from biased psychotherapists. Bring out the surgeon’s scalpel. Sign up children for a lifetime of unhealthy and expensive “maintenance” pharmaceuticals. And if someone who has surgically “confirmed” their gender has crushing regrets once they’re grown up, too bad, and shut up.
Newsom’s “freedoms” also extend to state-sanctioned, public use of addictive drugs. Never mind that pretty much every person with experience working with addicts and the homeless acknowledges treatment must be imposed on addicts if they are ever to recover, that approach would not permit what writer Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the “addiction maintenance industry” to continue to prosper. And make no mistake, that’s what’s going on here. The only winners in this deadly charade are drug cartels and aid workers employed by nonprofits or by the government. This is how, as our cities turn into shitholes, and depraved addicts die by the thousands, Gavin Newsom claims to be standing up for “freedom.”
The story of Newsom’s “freedom” agenda, which he’s aggressively selling in every blue state in America, doesn’t end with late-term abortions, “gender affirming” surgery for minors, or the right to mainline heroin on a city sidewalk. These are just some of the ways in which Newsom pacifies extremists and rewards opportunists, despite being hideously offensive to anyone possessing a shred of common sense and decency.
Newsom’s Freedom Agenda Is a Distraction
More to the point, these “freedoms” Newsom peddles are distractions. In some respects, Newsom and others like him on the Left are merely trolling Red America with these endorsements of depravity. This is what they do to allow their economic agenda to advance quietly. As Newsom crows about protecting the “freedom of speech” for educators—translation: the right to teach five-year-old children that they can choose their “gender” and 10-year-old children how to have anal sex—critics of this filth can be forgiven for missing how Newsom and his ilk are presiding over the slow creep of economic enslavement.
This is where the inverted logic of Newsom’s rhetorical agenda of freedom is fully exposed. Californians are being herded into regimented lives, controlled by very large corporations, public-employee unions, and environmentalists, whose alliance and shared agenda is only inexplicable at first glance. A deeper examination shows how their interests align and blows away traditional stereotypes of Right and Left.
A troubling article published in December at National Review titled “California Destroys Its Independent Truckers,” describes what Newsom is enabling, and by extension, what Democrats have in store for the entire country.
The article begins by describing how Assembly Bill 5, a state law signed by Newsom in 2019, “compels independent drivers to surrender the companies they’ve built and seek employment in large firms that can hire them.” Having recently lost court appeals, 2023 will see the loss of California’s more than 70,000 owner-operators. They are either retiring or moving to other states. Very few will be willing to join major trucking companies, and even fewer will be able to comply with the conditions set forth by AB 5 that might allow them to continue to operate independently.
But if AB 5 doesn’t wipe out every independent trucker, California’s all-powerful regional air-quality boards have declared the state’s ports off-limits to trucks with engines over three years old. As Swaim notes, “It will likely further concentrate market share in large corporations that can afford newer trucks—a remarkable but predictable outcome in a state that protests corporate control of the economy.”
At the state level, California’s Air Resources Board has declared a ban on the sale of all trucks running on gasoline or diesel fuel after 2040. Imagine how this will impact not just any independent truckers that may be left standing but any company operating a small fleet of trucks. These regulations, designed by unions and environmentalists, will force the consolidation of California shipping into a handful of very large corporations.
Anyone who thinks what happens in California stays in California is making a dangerous assumption. The wealth and influence of California’s high-tech and entertainment industry, combined with its oversized weight in the U.S. Congress, means that if Democrats win nationally, the political and economic model being imposed on Californians is going to be imposed across America.
Newsom’s “Freedom” Is Economic Slavery
The economic destruction of California’s middle class is a product of legislation and court rulings that have made it practically impossible for private developers to build affordable homes while still making a profit. They have been driven out of a hostile state, thanks to a protracted approval process, inevitable and endless environmentalist litigation, exorbitant municipal permit fees, ridiculously overwritten building codes, zoning restrictions that drive up the price of whatever raw land remains available for building, the lack of available water, overpriced and scarce building materials, a labor shortage, and the unwillingness of cities and counties—unlike throughout previous decades—to share the burden of enabling streets and utility infrastructure.
As a result, the average home in California, even in this downturn, stands north of $760,000. To make up for the shortage of private developers who can turn a profit and are therefore willing to develop housing without subsidies, an entire new class of developers and renters have emerged. The developer constructs low-income housing, taking advantage of tax incentives and government matching funds, which is then occupied by residents who have some or all of the rent paid for by the government.
This concept—creating scarcity by driving small private firms out of business through overregulation, and thereby enabling unionized and heavily subsidized large corporations to take control of a market where prices have been deliberately driven higher—is not restricted to housing. Does anyone think large energy companies don’t welcome regulations and restrictions that drive smaller competitors out of business at the same time it increases the prices they can charge and the profits they can earn? Is it far fetched to recognize that hedge funds buying up farmland for the water rights will prefer a state of perpetually worsening water scarcity, or that big agribusiness concerns with the financial resilience to withstand shortages don’t take every opportunity to buy up smaller farm operations that are driven out of business when every input, from water to fertilizer to tractor fuel, has been priced out of reach?
This is the economic slavery for which Newsom, and the state of California, is merely an instructive example. It’s happening all over the world.
These are the Lords of Scarcity, systematically imposing escalating economic hardship on every ordinary working household in America and beyond. They are imposing water shortages and calling for rationing; suppressing conventional energy and rationing during “peak” demand. At the same time they are decommissioning cheap sources of electricity and transportation fuel—from natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power—and similarly decommissioning the infrastructure to distribute them. This comes along with the imposition of all-electric cars (even though advanced hybrids are far more practical and sustainable) along with mileage taxes and “congestion” pricing that limits access by independently owned vehicles into urban cores. Add to these the suppression of new housing and the destruction of agriculture.
The collusion of big business, big government, and big labor to orchestrate this conquest throws every conventional ideological stereotype into the trash. The closest political economy that would define what is happening in California today—and by extension throughout the world – is fascism. It is economic fascism by virtue of governments and corporations working together while co-opting the labor movement. It is political and psychological fascism by virtue of the way it identifies convenient scapegoats, reminiscent of the scenes in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where citizens would perform a daily “two minutes of hatred for enemies of the party.” But the 2023 version of such a ritual is to scapegoat the racists, the sexists, the transphobes and homophobes, the climate deniers, the election deniers; all those bigots who would take away our “freedom” to murder the unborn, mutilate children, mainline heroin, or, to just preserve the freedom to earn a modest middle-class lifestyle in exchange for honest hard work.
This is how the social radicalism of the Left has been co-opted to become a useful distraction for our oppressors. It gives everyone something to hate, with the full endorsement of every corporation and government agency in the nation.
Such is the freedom Gavin Newsom is selling. Don’t be surprised, two years from now, if it carries him all the way to the Oval Office. On the other hand, every American who values genuine freedom should be encouraged by how precarious Newsom’s strategy is when exposed to the light of day.
Newsom, and the entire corporatist establishment for which he is merely a rising figurehead, are presuming that hundreds of millions of Americans being driven into poverty will never realize that divisive rhetoric on social issues is nothing but a diversion. Don’t bet on that. Be hopeful. Times will change.
About Edward Ring
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
MN Prager Discussion Group 