The “Democrats” – which is to say Left fascists – who govern the state of California and most of its cities, see nothing wrong with the results of their policies. They like what they’ve wrought. They plan more of the same, and even to intensify their endeavors to create one vast plague-ridden criminal’s playground.

In pursuit of which, they have recently welcomed among them the son of two imprisoned terrorists, himself a devotee of their political faith.

Chesa Boudin has been elected District Attorney of San Francisco. When he was little more than a year old, his parents, both of them  members of the Weather Underground terrorist group, were found guilty of killing two police officers and a security guard in a robbery attack on an armored car in upstate New York. His mother, Kathy Boudin, served 22 years in prison, but was released when President Clinton pardoned her on his last day in office. His father, David Gilbert, is still serving a life sentence. Chesa was taken care of by the leaders of the Weather Underground: Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn (close friends of Barack Obama). As the child and foster-child of red revolutionary murderers, Chesa was warmly welcomed into Yale Law School. He went to work as a translator for Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela.

His winning policies include keeping as many black felons out of prison as he possibly can, and protecting illegal immigrants undocumented residents from deportation.

Why do we call the Far Left rulers of California fascists?

An article by Edward Ring at American Greatness explains:

Law and Order: … Thanks to Proposition 47, the Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative which voters approved in 2014, it is nearly impossible to arrest and hold anyone for possession of hard drugs, so long as they claim the drugs are for personal use. Prop. 47 also downgraded the punishment for property crimes if the value of the stolen goods are under $950 per offense.

The consequence of these laws is public drug use and rampant theft to support these drug habits. Other ridiculous laws include Assembly Bill 953, the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (2015), which requires police to fill out an extensive questionnaire after every encounter with a member of the public, even if it doesn’t result in an arrest. The purpose of this is to prevent disproportionate encounters with members of disadvantaged groups, and the consequence of it is fewer stops, fewer arrests, and more crime.

Environment: It’s hard to know where to begin when it comes to environmentalist extremism that tyrannizes ordinary Californians. At the heart of California’s central planning state is AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act (2006), and follow-on legislation. These laws aim to reduce California’s net “greenhouse gas” emissions to zero by 2045.

To accomplish this, it is becoming almost impossible to develop land outside of existing cities, which is driving the price of land and housing to unaffordable levels. Next on the “climate change” agenda is to charge Californians for “vehicle miles traveled”, wherein everywhere people go in their cars will be monitored and taxed.

Well before AB 32 came along, though, California had already gone overboard with environmentalism. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed by the state legislature in 1971 and turned into the monster it is today via numerous follow on legislation, requires environmental impact reports to accompany any building permit. Since a separate report is required for every permit application, and since major building projects require approval from dozens of agencies, in California the costs to file applications and pay fees often exceed the actual cost of construction.

Then there’s forestry management, taken over by environmentalist zealots who prohibited logging, suppressed controlled burns with byzantine application gauntlets and endless litigation, and turned California’s forests into tinderboxes.

Energy and Water: Californians pay among the highest prices for gasoline, electricity and natural gas in the United States, despite the fact that California has abundant reserves of oil and gas.

But instead of approving new refineries, more connecting pipelines, oil and gas drilling, and clean natural gas power plants, California’s policymakers are shutting down conventional energy in favor of “renewables”. Even clean, emissions-free nuclear power is forbidden, as California’s last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to be shut down by 2025.

Not only does this leave Californians without affordable energy, as they’re herded to the nearest retailer to purchase “demand response” appliances that don’t work very well, but utilities investing in renewables don’t have money left over to upgrade their power lines to better manage wildfires.

As for water, instead of storing more storm runoff behind dams and within aquifers, and investing in reuse and desalination, California has turned to rationing. Starting in 2020, Californians will be restricted to 55 gallons of indoor water use per person per day, with that amount being lowered in subsequent years.

Transportation: Freeways in California are among the most congested in the nation, but instead of widening roads and building new freeways, California’s policymakers have declared war on the car. Never mind that cars are the future of transportation, destined to be entirely clean, autonomous, capable of driving safely at high speeds while their occupants work, sleep, or entertain themselves.

Instead, California’s political leadership remains committed to a high-speed train that will never pay for itself, light rail when light rail ridership is in decline, and zoning that will make it impossible for people to park their cars where they live. California’s transportation policy is misanthropic and misguided. Meanwhile, ordinary Californians cope with super commutes on neglected roads.

Housing: Despite the fact that most young married couples, given a choice, would prefer to raise their children in a single-family home with a yard, California’s elite has decided that single-family homes and suburbs are “unsustainable”. Never mind that California spans over 160,000 square miles, of which only around 5 percent is urbanized.

Californians instead are expected to construct all new housing via high density “infill”, where there is minimal open space, parking is unavailable, and prices are sky-high thanks to the artificially created shortage.

Again, the costs to prepare permit applications and pay fees often exceed the construction costs, notwithstanding the fact that high rise and mid-rise construction always costs far more per square foot than what it costs to construct one or two-story wood-frame homes.

Homeless: In a state where you can’t build anything without paying fees that cost more than the construction costs, and where utility bills and other hidden taxes make the cost-of-living the highest in the nation, it should be no surprise that California has a homeless crisis.

Add to that the best weather on earth, and laws that permit public consumption of hard drugs and prevent detention of petty thieves, and you have a recipe for a homeless population explosion. Moreover, court rulings make it impossible to remove homeless encampments unless you can offer them “permanent supportive housing”, and rampant (totally legal) public sector and nonprofit corruption have driven the costs for such housing to exceed on average $500,000 per unit.

To top it off, state laws make it, for all practical purposes, impossible to incarcerate the mentally ill. If these laws and court settlements were overturned, overnight, half of California’s homeless would find shelter with relatives and friends, and the rest would get cost-effective help. But it’s a meal ticket for the corrupt public sector.

Education: To save the worst for last, this is perhaps the most unforgivable sin of all in California. Instead of teaching children to read and write, the public schools excel at indoctrination. Instead of being held accountable, incompetent teachers are protected by union labor laws. Disruptive students are kept in classes to fulfill quotas designed to prevent “discrimination”.

The University of California, which—under threat of lawsuits—is about to abandon using SAT scores entirely, has already engineered its admissions policies to circumvent state and federal prohibitions on affirmative action. From higher education down through the K-12 public schools, leftist propaganda and identity politics are the goal of California’s unionized public education system, instead of teaching children the skills they will need to become more productive graduates.

The last section of the article  is headed A Soft Fascism:

This is the future that awaits America. It is a future abetted by a complicit media, an activist entertainment industry, a unionized public bureaucracy and public education system, and nearly every significant corporate and financial player. The political model it embraces is often labeled as socialist, but might more accurately be described as economic fascism—a merging of public and private, a partnership of corporations, oligarchs, and the public sector.

While people typically cringe at the use of the term “fascist,” the fascism we’re seeing in California is … a soft fascism as envisioned by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World. California’s citizens are being channeled into high-density apartments, forced to use mass transit, and increasingly made dependent on government subsidies, in exchange for the illusory freedoms of legal drugs and anything-goes gender exploration. …

This 21st-century fascism being pioneered in California touts itself as “anti-fascist” at every opportunity, but the system nonetheless fits the definition of fascism. It is corporate, collectivist, centralized, and autocratic. With an equally unhealthy and excessive fervor, it exalts the planet instead of the nation, and celebrates “diversity” instead of one culture. It punishes dissent, protects the oligarchy, and deludes the overtaxed, over-regulated, overpaying majority.

The state could be saved if this sensible advice were to be taken (which it will not be, of course, as long as the Democrats are in unrestrained, almost unchallenged power – and to that there is no foreseeable end):

Enforce common sense drug laws and punish thieves. Quit using environmentalism as a punitive religious faith and start logging the forests, building roads, drilling for oil and gas, and approving nuclear power plants instead of shutting them down. Stop extorting more money in permitting costs than it costs to construct homes, and start building them again on open land. Get vagrants off the streets, build cost-effective shelter for the truly needy, and put the mentally ill back into institutions. Fire incompetent teachers and hold our students to immutable, objective academic standards instead of filling their heads with divisive nonsense.

And let water flow amply to farms and houses.

And keep felons of all ethnicities in prison for their full term, and deport illegal aliens.

Americans would do well to look to California today, and whatever they’re doing, do the opposite. Before it’s too late.

Many of the richest people in the world live in California. The “tech giants” of Silicon Valley have not only made billions of dollars for themselves, the wealth they have created has benefited billions of other people in their state, their country, the world.

Had they been living under socialism, they could not have become rich and could not have created wealth.

Yet almost to a man and woman they vote for their state to be governed by socialists.

So do most Californians.

Under the socialist state government and city councils, great cities – most notoriously Los Angeles and San Francisco – have become filthy stinking disease-ridden high-crime shitholes.

San Francisco in 2019

Productive citizens are heavily taxed to provide the means to support the unproductive street-dwellers; so thousands of tax-payers are leaving the state to escape from the government most of them voted for, while more and more vagabonds, drug-addicts, lunatics, illegal aliens and criminals pour in from everywhere.

You can see what the result must be. Only the rulers, led by Nicolás Maduro Gavin Newsom, cannot see it. Or perhaps it’s what they passionately desire.

Now the governing socialists, to make sure that new generations will continue to vote for a life-style characterized by filth, disease, ignorance, dependence, misery and death, are planning their indoctrination with ever more outrageous dogma.

Parents beware!

Dr. Susan Berry writes at Breitbart:

The California Education Department’s model Ethnic Studies Curriculum plans to teach children capitalism is a “system of power” and “oppression”, equal to “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, and “racism”. 

The model curriculum … defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States”. …

It relies on language the radical left now considers essential to achieve its political goals.

Get ready for spadesful of gobbledygook.

For example, the introduction of the document uses the term “hxrstory”, instead of “history”, in keeping with the gender ideology that states “womxn” must not be defined in terms of their relation to men.

According to the model curriculum, “Ethnic studies is xdisciplinary”, and its writers add:

Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations, even within and beyond the various names and categories associated with our identities. People do not fit neatly into boxes, and identity is complex.

Complex, eh? So it seems, and getting more so by the minute!

One of the recommended methods of teaching the Ethnic Studies model curriculum to K-12 students is through “democratizing the classroom”.

“Ethnic Studies educators democratize their classrooms by creating a learning environment where both students and teachers are equal active participants in the co-constructing knowledge,” the writers state, enabling “students to be recognized and valued as knowledge producers alongside their educators, while simultaneously placing an emphasis on the development of democratic values and collegiality.”

The writers of the Ethnic Studies model curriculum say their goal is to:

… equip all students with the skills and knowledge to think critically about the world around them and to tell their own stories, empower students to be engaged socially and politically, enable students to develop a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion, and aids in the eradication of bigotry, hate, and racism.

Williamson Evers, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, writes in an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal that the California document –

… includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy” that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California’s public schools.

And –

It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do.

Most of the role models are murderers and terrorists:

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever”. Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform”. The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

This goes to a hell deeper than Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, Maduroism.

This is revolutionary anarchism. 

Is it likely or unlikely that the Democratic Party, if it were to gain full federal legislative and executive power with both houses of Congress and the presidency, would follow where California leads?

*

The proposed Californian curriculum is also blatantly and unashamedly anti-Semitic.

We summarize part of an article by Jonathan Tobin:

The model ethnic-studies curriculum by the Californian board of education proposes a course of study about Arabs that views the Palestinian war on Israel from the point of view of those who wish to destroy it. Jews are depicted as bloodthirsty villains victimizing Palestinians. The curriculum does not soft-pedal its bias against Jews. Israel is depicted as a colonial settler state whose creation was a “disaster”, and those who fight against it, including figures who are open about their anti-Semitism, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), activist Linda Sarsour and the late academic Edward Said, as heroes and role models to be emulated. The curriculum is a product not merely of the successful efforts of a handful of influential anti-Israel academics, but of the “intersectional” – ie. racist – ideology of the Left that spawned them.

The Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, has decided not to let her state become impoverished in order to save the earth from getting a mite warmer. Or cooler. Or  whatever it is the environmentalists are currently panicking about.

The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow?

Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Leading the charge for the pact was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who insisted, “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment.” At the time he said the regional agreement “sets the stage for a regional cap-and-trade program which will provide a powerful framework for developing a national cap-and-trade program.”

Since then, the nation has slid into a recession, and the only thing man-made about climate change has been the manipulated and manufactured claims that we are doomed if we don’t act to fight it.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seeing which way the snow is blowing, has issued an executive order saying her state will suspend its participation in the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for businesses and consumers.

Arizona joined the climate initiative under its previous governor, Janet Napolitano, now secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

All 50 states agreed to the cap-and-trade pact, but left implementation up to each state. Only California is ready to start its program in 2012.

Brewer also ordered Arizona’s Environmental Quality Department to take another look at stricter vehicle emission rules, based on California’s standards, set to take effect in 2012, fearing they would significantly raise new car costs. Slowly but surely, economic reality is trumping climate fantasy.

Rumblings of discontent are also being heard in California. Assemblyman Dan Logue is sponsoring an initiative for the November ballot that would halt implementation of the state’s global-warming law, Assembly Bill 32, until the state unemployment rate drops to 5.5% from the current 12.4%.

“The state’s greenhouse reduction program is not a freebie,” Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, said last month. “Large costs foisted on an unemployment-riddled state economy and increased electricity rates … are not affordable at this time, if ever.”

A 2009 study by economists at California State University, Sacramento, and commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable found implementation costs … “could easily exceed $100 billion” and that by 2020 the program would raise the cost of living by $7,857 per household per year.

Even the most optimistic assessments of global pacts such as Copenhagen and Kyoto would have moderated at great cost the earth’s temperature by an amount too small to measure. The impact of a regional pact by a handful of states would be futile, especially when they are downwind from the world’s biggest polluter, the “developing” nation of China, which is exempt from such global pacts. … The pact also envisions strict emission limits on American cars at a time China has passed the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market. …  But the political climate is about to change.

– So says Investor’s Business Daily, who published this report. We think and hope it’s right. Economic necessity is a fairly reliable antidote to irrational belief.

How much longer will  people tolerate the Green dictatorship?  How much longer will we permit human sacrifice on the altar of Environmentalism, one of the most sentimental and stupid cults of all time?

Among their many cruel ukases,  the Green pontiffs ordain that corn be turned into an expensive fuel called Ethanol rather than let cheap fuel be pumped out of the earth and sea, because the pumping process might harm some beast of the field,  fowl of the air, or monster of the deep. The result? Multitudes in Africa go hungry.

And now the destruction of food in America, as explained in this report by Ben Shapiro at Townhall:

In December 2008, the federal government decided that Fresno County, a farming-rich area which provides half of America’s vegetables, no longer needed water. The farmers whose ancestors built the canals to irrigate the Central Valley have been totally cut off from their water supply, even though they’re still paying bills for it. Hundreds of acres of prime farming land lie fallow, crops withered and dead. All because the federal government thinks that smelt — tiny 5- to 7-centimeter fish — are more important than human beings. It seems that these annoying little creatures have been filleted by the water pumping systems necessary to make irrigation possible. They are now endangered. As the Fish and Wildlife Service put it, “it is the Service’s biological opinion [! an intelligent opinion would serve far better – JB] that the coordinated operations of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project … are likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the delta smelt.” In other words, all water supply must be shut down, lest the world lose the incomparably valuable smelt… The prices of staple foods will rise all over the country as farmers plow the sun-scorched crops into the ground.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s take on this tyrannous economic outrage:

California has a new endangered species on its hands in the San Joaquin Valley—farmers. Thanks to environmental regulations designed to protect the likes of the three-inch long delta smelt, one of America’s premier agricultural regions is suffering in a drought made worse by federal regulations.

The state’s water emergency is unfolding thanks to the latest mishandling of the Endangered Species Act. Last December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what is known as a “biological opinion” imposing water reductions on the San Joaquin Valley and environs to safeguard the federally protected hypomesus transpacificus, a.k.a., the delta smelt. As a result, tens of billions of gallons of water from mountains east and north of Sacramento have been channelled away from farmers and into the ocean, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land fallow or scorched.

For this, Californians can thank the usual environmental suspects, er, lawyers. Last year’s government ruling was the result of a 2006 lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other outfits objecting to increased water pumping in the smelt vicinity. In June, things got even dustier when the National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that local salmon and steelhead also needed to be defended from the valley’s water pumps. Those additional restrictions will begin to effect pumping operations next year.

The result has already been devastating for the state’s farm economy. In the inland areas affected by the court-ordered water restrictions, the jobless rate has hit 14.3%, with some farming towns like Mendota seeing unemployment numbers near 40%. Statewide, the rate reached 11.6% in July, higher than it has been in 30 years…

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has said that he “doesn’t have the authority to turn on the pumps” that would supply the delta with water, or “otherwise, they would be on.” He did, however, have the ability to request intervention from the Department of Interior. Under a provision added to the Endangered Species Act in 1978 after the snail darter fiasco, a panel of seven cabinet officials known as a “God Squad” is able to intercede in economic emergencies, such as the one now parching California farmers. Despite a petition with more than 12,000 signers, Mr. Schwarzenegger has refused that remedy.

The issue now turns to the Obama Administration and the courts, though the farmers have so far found scant hope for relief from the White House. In June, the Administration denied the governor’s request to designate California a federal disaster area as a result of the drought conditions, which U.S. Drought Monitor currently lists as a “severe drought” in 43% of the state. Doing so would force the Administration to acknowledge awkward questions about the role its own environmental policies have played in scorching the Earth…

It’s like a bizarre story of some crazy nation that Gulliver happed upon in the course of his astonishing travels!

The high cost of sentimental philanthropy at public expense – the romantic silliness of the political left – is demonstrated by California’s bankruptcy. Absurd expenditure on illegal aliens is one of the causes of the Golden State’s economic collapse.  

Investors’ Business Daily provides some interesting statistics: 

Illegal aliens constitute about 7% of the state’s population, or about 2.7 million, according to an April report by the Pew Hispanic Center. State officials say that they add about $4 billion to $6 billion in costs, primarily in the area of schools, prisons and jails, and emergency rooms. This is money the slightly less Golden State can scarcely afford.

For fiscal 2009-10, it’s estimated that about $834 million will be spent to incarcerate 189,000 illegal immigrants in the state’s prison system. In Los Angeles County alone, Supervisor Mike Antonovich says, illegal aliens add up to $550 million annually in criminal justice costs.

Little note has been made that much of California’s prison crisis is due to crimes committed by illegal aliens invited in through the sanctuary policies of its major cities and their policies of not allowing local police to notify immigration authorities when suspected illegals are apprehended.

According to statistics released by the FBI, more than 95% of arrest warrants issued in Los Angeles for the crime of murder are for illegal aliens. Nearly 25% of the California prison population consists of illegal aliens. Increased border and interior enforcement, coupled with expedited deportation, could help immeasurably.

The state legislative analyst estimates, based on Pew data, that about 300,000 of the state’s 6.3 million public school students are illegal residents. They are educated by California taxpayers to the tune of $7,626 each for a total cost of nearly $2.3 billion.

At the college level, California is one of 10 states that grant the children of illegal aliens in-state tuition rates. The financial benefits of these programs to illegal aliens are as great as the penalty imposed on U.S. citizens and state treasuries. So if their parents sneak in from Guadalajara, they get a break that the children of an Iraq veteran from Nevada doesn’t.

In health care, the expected tab for 2009-10 is $703 million for as many as 700,000 illegals. Even Gov. Schwarzenegger was moved recently to propose limiting welfare and non-emergency health care for them.

As California goes, so goes the nation?

John Lillpop writes in Canada Free Press today: 

Despite the threat of being dismissed as right wing extremists by left wing extremists, California voters staged a massive “tea party” at the polls on Tuesday to protest proposals by Gov.Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state Legislature (mostly Democrats) to raise taxes without derailing runaway spending. 

As reported, in part: 

“California voters on Tuesday soundly rejected a package of ballot measures that would have reduced the state’s projected budget deficit of $21.3 billion to something slightly less overwhelming: $15.4 billion

“The defeat of the measures means that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state Legislature will have to consider deeper cuts to education, public safety, and health and human services, officials have said.

“Propositions 1A through 1E – which would have changed the state’s budgeting system, ensured money to schools in future years and generated billions of dollars of revenue for the state’s general fund – fell well behind in early returns and never recovered.

“The only measure that voters approved was Proposition 1F, which will freeze salaries of top state officials including lawmakers and the governor during tough budget years.”

This bitter pill should be enough to convince Schwarzenegger along with a couple of RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] and all Democrats in the Assembly that the people of California are fed up with incompetent politicians who continue to spend taxpayer money recklessly and foolishly.

Proposition 1F, the lone measure that passed, will freeze politicians salaries in years in which a budget deficit exists. This is a good thing and should have been done years ago.

President Obama and his gang of spend and tax socialists in the U.S. Congress would do well to take note of the special election in California.

There IS a message here that could swell into a national movement against mindless spending and higher taxes, and culminate with a rousing defeat of Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Yes, of course, Schwarzenegger is a Republican. Yet it is widely recognized that the governor is not really a conservative, one of the hazards of sleeping with a Kennedy clan member.

Keep your tea bags at the ready, conservatives. This worm is starting to turn in favor of common sense and fiscal restraint! 

As I write this on the ultimate day of campaigning, the mainstream media has already decided the outcome of the US elections. Obama is everywhere – he is deemed a harbinger of hope and change to not just many Americans, but to a large proportion of the global populace as well. One young Palestinian in the Gaza strip was cold calling American households last week, persuading them to vote for this deity.
It is an old story, especially in the United States, that the media fails to correctly predict the election performance of conservative politicians. It is fair to say that the majority of the American media is fairly liberal; the noticeable exception is Fox News. These left wing media outlets spout ideas and opinions that are often adopted as ideals by society, An important and misleading consequence of the political position of the mainstream news services is the fallacious polls that the same media and the public love to exhibit and evaluate respectively. There is one theory proposed by the political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, called the ‘Spiral of Silence’, which is the idea that one is less likely to publicly support an idea that is carried by the minority for fear of isolation and requital from society. As a result, a particular motion is likely to receive less and less public support, thus exposing said idea to fewer and fewer people.
In England, one phenomenon of unexpected success is called the ‘Shy Tory Factor’. This term was coined in the 1990s by British opinion polling companies in response to the 1992 General Election. Despite the Conservative Party trailing 1% behind Labour, the former won the election with a lead of about 7.6%.
This discrepancy can be explained by a number of theories. The first is the fact I just previously mentioned – that the greater representation of the political left by the media gives rise to false hope and perhaps even can provide a dangerous sense of complacency to left wing politicians. The second theory is what I believe to be the narcissistic individual’s public need for society’s deference, an egotistical façade that hides the individual’s private whim – thus exists a covert growth of idiosyncratic sentiments. If a government at the end of its second or third term is unpopular with the mainstream left, then while publicly the virtuous middle class may denounce the ‘failing government’, those same ‘principled’ men and women will rush to vote for them when the polls open – perhaps because of a private admiration or quiet understanding of the abhorrent government’s policies, or perhaps just because of a lack of alternative acceptable politicians standing.
The third possibility for the inconsistency between predictions and realities is a word that has governed the concept of equality in the last hundred years: race. It seems apparent to me that race is a defining factor in the human consciousness, and however much equality is sought, there is a part of each single soul that craves identity. For example, in a completely different context, most Muslims will support a Palestinian state whereas more Jews will support the Jewish Israeli state. The concept of identity is prevalent in the quest for independent opinion, and for this reason Obama has bastions of support among some communities but not others. A recent YouGov poll found that Obama has an 82% lead among black voters, whereas Obama is trailing by 5% among white voters. In some states Obama appears to have almost 97% of the black vote.
Obama has a huge amount of support from the black vote, but this is not enough to win the election alone. Obama’s election team knows this and that is why they have campaigned so heavily amongst the white middle class America. These efforts appear to have worked and the polls are in Obama’s favour. Many newspaper columnists are speaking of Obama’s victory as if there need be no contest at all.
This could be a huge mistake. There is a phenomenon in elections, similar to the ‘Shy Tory Factor’, called the ‘Bradley Factor’. This is named after Tom Bradley, the candidate for the governor of California election. Despite enjoying a position far ahead in the polls, Bradley lost to his Republican rival. It was attributed to white voters privately voting differently from their public declaration to pollsters. This theory is similar to my previously mentioned suggestions for the ‘Shy Tory Factor’. There are many other examples of black politicians experiencing the effect of the Bradley factor: Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson, David Dinkins and Wilson Goode. In fact David Duke, the Nazi sympathizer and KKK member, experienced an inverted Bradley factor when he received a much larger proportion of the votes than polls had shown. The same happens in Britain: the BNP regularly does much better than expected, and no one is ever more surprised than the liberal media.
Juxtaposed against the Bradley factor is a suggested reverse Bradley factor and a concept known as the ‘Fishtown effect’. Douglas Wilder, the first black state governor has suggested that many Republicans will secretly vote for Obama while publicly declaring otherwise. The ‘Fishtown Effect’ however is the suggestion that usually bigoted white voters will vote for a black candidate because of economic concerns; in the present financial climate this theory could have a significant influence on the election.
But is the Bradley factor truly an example of cold, calculated racism? I would suggest that it is not the wish of one race to dismiss another, but rather a quest for identity and fraternalism. The uncertainties and confusion results from the furious denunciations from the media, who vilify individual figures, cultures and ideas. And regardless of the results of Tuesday’s election, sections of the World’s media, from Bangkok to San Francisco, will condemn the discriminatory minds of the American public. From the hoi polloi to the richest mansion dwellers, the inhabitants will be branded racists. If Obama loses the election, the voters will be accused of anachronistic racism; if Obama wins, some will be accused of lacking integrity and letting fear of inequality dictate their vote. Stanford University has worked hard to be ahead of the game. Christian Science Monitor: “Stanford University suggests that racial prejudice is eroding as much as 6 percentage points from Senator Obama’s support. One commentator has even suggested that white racism would be the only explanation for an Obama loss this November.”
And the true villain is actually the media – their shameless selective reporting, their composition of supercilious ideals and their lack of objectivity have irrevocably destroyed the continuation of a nonpartisan candid and free press. Although keen to malign other Democrats and the Republicans, the media has been hesitant to report news and rumours about Obama: from the incongruous gap between the discovery and the media report of the villainy of Reverend Wright’s speeches, to the bizarre association with Bill Ayers, and now the LA Times is overrun with requests that they persistently ignore, to release videotape they possess of Obama with a suspected PLO terrorist named Rashid Khalidi. Why would a very large newspaper not release a sensational news story so pivotal as this?
So do I believe the associations with Obama uncovered by the right and McCain’s camp are as serious as some would paint them? – Not really. I do believe though, that the burnt soul of the unscrupulously bias media is poisoning the democracy of the Western countries. I believe the same media is to blame for the misinformation and intolerance in politics that breeds bountifully during times of wanton ideals. However, I do know there is always independent thought, which leaves the opinionated editors and columnists shouting at deaf ears. And certainly the hurly burly media world can no longer explain a truth or encourage an honest purpose; it is an impotent force, multiplying in presence but with a fading influence; useless in a world of disobedient readers.