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.

The word “Californication” is coined by Victor Davis Hanson to describe the nihilist antinomian revolutionary movement gathering pace in America, and already governing California, which he writes about in an article at American Greatness.

He speaks of the next election “becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism”.

He warns that “in 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it”. In two words, “Californication ahead!” – if it is not stopped.

He writes:

The Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.

When … a number of Democratic presidential candidates sympathize with the New York subway jumpers who openly threaten the police, then what or who exactly is the alternative to such chaos?

When the media proves 90 percent partisan according to its own liberal watchdog institutions, or reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?

When the violence of Antifa is quietly—or sometimes loudly—condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?

If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?

If the leading Democratic presidential candidates openly embrace the Green New Deal, reparations, abolishing the Electoral College, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, amnesties, wealth taxes, a 70-90 percent income tax code, Medicare for all, and legal infanticide—what is the alternative vision and who stands between all that and a targeted traditional America?

In California, the nation’s largest utility preemptively shuts off power to multibillion-dollar industries and two-million customers, given its ossified grid and over-regulated operations, and the deliberate policy of the state not to clean up drought-stricken dead forests and underbrush that are ignited by wind and antiquated transmission cables. So, who or what then in 2020 would oppose all that?

In a state where half the nation’s homeless use the streets as open sewers and receptacles for refuse, incubating medieval diseases and public hazards, who exactly says that is unacceptable? The California attorney general openly boasts that he believes the state is the home for 10 million immigrants of undetermined legal status; is there any pushback to that agenda? If not, would 20 or 30 million immigrants be acceptable for Californians? Why not 50 to 60 million additional residing foreign nationals legal or otherwise?

Can even a leftwing Facebook, Google, or Apple operate within a landscape that cannot ensure reliable power to run its businesses? Do the progressive masters of the Silicon Valley want to hand over millions per year in wealth taxes on money that has already been taxed—but which is considered by the Warrenites and Sandersites as veritable public property given their own past use of state roads and infrastructure to build their businesses? Do these billionaires really think conservative state policies encouraged tens of thousands of homeless people to sleep in cars and streets near their businesses?

On the social front, we are bombarded with celebrities dreaming of various methods of assassinating the current president. Who speaks out against such incendiary smears? …

… Higher education is now controlled by a revolutionary clique. It institutionalizes racially segregated dorms and safe spaces, matter of factly promotes censorship, and either cannot or will not prevent students from disrupting lecturers with whom they disagree. What or who exactly say not to all that? Who would dare say that America in its third century is not going to change its use of English pronouns or decide that there are not three and more biological genders?

When a progressive mom takes her kids to walk and play in a California municipal park and, instead of relaxing comfortably with her fellow mom friends, finds blood-tainted needles sticking up out of the grass, what sort of policies does she imagine allowed that? When a small business owner in San Francisco finds vagrants defecating near his breezeway or mobs of shoplifters swarming his store, what sort of politics and ideologies will he consider led to that?

On the national level, what or who created a landscape in which the highest echelons of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department sought to surveil American citizens, undermine a presidential campaign, and abort a presidential transition and then a presidency? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, would anyone have objected? Do any object today that she hired a foreign national to work with foreign sources to discredit and smear her political opponent?

Who or what is behind the constant remonstrations that the American people are racist, sexist, homophobic, nativist, xenophobic, and oppressing the transgendered? Who lodges such charges? Who believes them to be true?

Who exactly wishes to pack the court, to repeal the Electoral College, to nix the difference between residency and citizenship, to promote identity-politics tribalism over collective affinities, to nullify federal immigration law, to hunt down and disrupt political opponents as they eat and sleep—and who not?

Whose ideologies logically lead to promoting iconoclasm and statue-toppling, the Orwellian renaming of streets and buildings, the defacing of public murals?

The new progressive party is Jacobin. It sees politics in all-inclusive French revolutionary terms—encompassing every aspect of American life from entertainment, sports, academia, religion, and family matters to politics, foreign policy, and individual rights.

Who fights back? “In his own way”, Professor Hanson writes, President Trump does.

The result is not just that there looms a choice between two different agendas, but two quite different American lifestyles and experiences—and histories.

Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well.

The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.

The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.

One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple.

That simple, that critical.

Americans must choose to live, thrive, and soar into an ever more prosperous and splendid future.

Or to sink, Californicated, into socialism, stagnation, ignorance, poverty, crime and disease.

 

Go here to see a video of California now. All America soon (minus the fine climate)?

Warning: It is disgusting.

The US Attorney General, William Barr, gave a formal talk at (Roman Catholic) Notre Dame Law School last week (Friday, October 11, 2019) which has come to our notice.

We respect Attorney General Barr for declaring, to questioners at a congressional hearing, that the admitted surveillance of President Trump by US intelligent agents was indeed spying. A statement that shocked the Democrats. Not because it wasn’t true, but because they didn’t want the truth to be spoken, and hated it to be spoken so bluntly.

We expect the Attorney General to shock them much more deeply and permanently by bringing all their criminal machinations to overthrow the duly elected president into open scrutiny, and charging all the guilty with their crimes. Our expectation and hope extend to seeing them jailed.

So we are reluctant to criticize Mr. Barr.

But his speech at the Law School raises an issue of importance to us.

Terry Jeffrey, editor in chief of CNSnews.com, reports the speech and comments on it at Townhall:

Barr simply explained what President John Adams meant by a statement he made in 1798 letter. He then showed the significance of that statement to American life today.

“We have no Government armed with Power which is capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by … morality and religion,” Barr quoted from Adams’s letter. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

Within this context, Barr accurately described the cultural war raging in America today.

“The challenge we face is precisely what the founding fathers foresaw would be the supreme test of a free society,” Barr told the Notre Dame law students.

“They never thought that the main danger to the republic would come from an external foe,” he said. “The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.”

“And this is really what they meant by self-government,” said Barr. “It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislature. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.”

A notion with which we have no quarrel.

Mr. Barr went on to say:

But what was the source of this internal controlling power? In a free republic, those restraints could not be handed down from above by philosopher kings. Instead, social order must flow up from the people themselves freely obeying the dictates of inwardly possessed and commonly shared moral values.

Certainly they must.

But then he said:

And to control willful human beings with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on an authority independent of men’s wills. They must flow from the transcendent Supreme Being. In short, in the framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people, a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and to manmade laws and had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.

Why must they, how could they, “flow” from a “transcendent Supreme Being”? How is such a “transcendent moral order” made known to human beings? By the “Supreme Being” implanting the knowledge as instinct? Or through ancient assertions by ignorant men?

We state apodictically that no superhuman being ever spoke to a human being. Though both St. Paul and Muhammad say they were spoken to by “Jesus” and “the Archangel Gabriel” respectively.

We laugh off all such claims. Can we then accept that it is by instinct the religious have knowledge of a “transcendent moral order”? Moral knowledge planted deep in their souls?

But which “transcendent moral order”? Not only did Jesus and Gabriel give quite different moral commandments according to the human conduits of their messages, but instinct too has conveyed a variety of convictions as to what is morally right and wrong. They often contradict one another. While (for instance) some religions teach that a woman who commits adultery must be stoned to death by a crowd of righteously outraged citizens, another maintains that only one who is without sin may cast the first stone, and insists that all mortals are tainted with the sin of their first ancestors, so no one may start stoning.

We atheists want – as we thought the Founding Fathers all wanted – a state that has nothing to do with religion; steers clear of making any laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. But William Barr, and Terry Jeffrey  insist – and remind us John Adams insisted – that “our constitution was made only for a moral and religious People”. And they tell us the Constitution, and America itself as the free country founded on the Constitution, are chiefly under threat not – as we observe – from Congressional socialists, revolutionaries in the schools and universities, violent anarchists in the streets, but from “secularists”.

Barr argued that “secularists” are now attacking the moral order that is the foundation of our liberty and threatening religious freedom in pursuit of their cause.

First is the force, fervor and comprehensiveness of the assault on organized religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry and academia, in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

The threat is not that the government will establish a state religion; the threat is that the state will attack people for conscientiously practicing their own.

“The problem is not that religion is being forced on others,” Barr said. “The problem is that irreligion is being forced; secular values are being forced on people of faith.

What secular values? What secularists are fervently and comprehensively assaulting organized religion?

It may be that secularists and atheists on the Left are doing so. But are they doing it to force secularist values, or Leftist values which are secular?

We atheist conservatives are doing nothing like that. And we don’t know any secularists or atheists on the political Right who are actively trying to stop people worshiping this or that god or sets of gods. Most of us just think it is absurd to do so. (And we certainly don’t want a theocracy. If we saw any danger of that coming up we would attempt, fervently and comprehensively, to stop it.)

Mr. Barr cites an example which is typical of the intolerance of the Left. Not of atheists and secularists generally – though it affected a religious organization – but essentially of the Left:

One example he cites is the crusade the Obama administration fought all the way to the Supreme Court to force Americans – including the Little Sisters of the Poor – to act against their conscience by mandating that they buy insurance coverage for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs and devices.

But Barr recognizes that the ultimate battle is for the hearts and minds of America’s children.

“Ground zero for these attacks on religion are the schools,” he said.

He cited as one example an opinion issued by the Orange County Board of Education in California that said, “Parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation may not excuse their children from this instruction.”

In other words, if you cannot afford to liberate your child from the government school, you must allow that government agency to teach your child that a boy can become a girl.

We share his indignation. That is not an atheist or a secularist reaction. It is common sense to repudiate such nonsense.

But the excellent Mr. Barr thinks that only Christian teaching – not science – can make the conclusive argument against the proposition that there are or can be more than two sexes.

Education is not vocational training. It is leading our children to the recognition that there is truth and helping them develop the facilities to discern and love the truth and the discipline to live by it.

Sounds good, but by “truth” he means the Christian religion.

We cannot have a moral renaissance unless we succeed in passing to the next generation our faith and values in full vigor.

“Our values” certainly.

“Our faith”? No. The less religion is taught to new generations, decidedly the better!

Wherever wars are being fought or threatened now, this month, this year, anywhere in our world, the cause in almost every case arises, burning hot and lethal, out of one or another religion’s “truth”.

To follow the post The climate lies immediately below, here’s a video (issued September 20, 2019, when the “children’s climate strike” was on) demonstrating: there is no climate crisis; the claim that there is such a crisis is a scam; the motive behind the scam is to promote a Leftist political agenda world-wide:

Today (Friday, September 20, 2019), children are staying out of school in 150 countries to gather in the streets by which gesture their elders tell them they will help save the world from burning up.

Heralding this great salvationist event, kids were first sent to yap about man-made global warming to the US Congress.

James Delingpole wrote on September 18 at Breitbart about the Congressional climate hearings:

“I want you to unite behind the science,” said Greta Thunberg to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

Finally, something on which the pig-tailed 16-year-old Swedish climate activist and I can agree. I too believe passionately that if the world’s governments are going to spend upwards of $1.5 trillion of our money a year on ‘combating climate change’ then at least they ought to have some credible evidence that this expenditure is necessary.

Perhaps, I thought, some of this credible evidence might be presented at today’s Climate Crisis Hearing, subtitled ‘Voices Leading the Next Generation on the Global Climate Crisis.’

Instead, all that I heard was the usual junk science, fake statistics, left-wing agitprop, and scaremongering nonsense regurgitated by kids — some claiming to have mental health issues — who’d been brainwashed at school by their left-wing, know-nothing teachers.

Here are just a few of the lies I spotted. My comments are italicised.

Committee Chairman Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA)

“We’re witnessing the effects of climate change daily, whether it’s storms, forest fires, floods, and other disasters occurring…”

These are weather events, not climate events. They have happened since time immemorial.

“…with increasing frequency and intensity.”

There is no evidence of this. On the contrary, we know, for example, that hurricane activity is currently at a historic low.

“Increased migration due to sea level rise.”

Not a single person, anywhere in the world, has migrated anywhere due to sea level rise.

“Threats to food and water.”

Increased CO2 levels are greening the planet. The misuse of agricultural land to grow biofuels poses a far bigger threat to global food supplies than climate change. There is no evidence that climate change has affected water supplies.

“This is the reality we are facing right now because of climate change.”

This is a reality which exists only in the parallel universe occupied by Democrats and RINO Republicans.

“I see it every time I go home.”

Parti-pris anecdote is not evidence, let alone science.

America knows how to lead in a crisis.

There IS no climate crisis.

Our witnesses would be happily and safer in school pursuing their dreams — not protesting and pushing their governments to act — if everyone were doing their part.

Your witnesses certainly SHOULD be in school. The fact that they are sitting here today and being encouraged to emotionally blackmail Congress into taking action, which will almost certainly make life worse, not better, for future generations, is little short of disgraceful.

It’s high time we picked up this fight and took the rest of the world with us. Waiting for other countries to do the right thing is making a bad bet on our future.

Unilateral disarmament was a bad idea during the Cold War arms race. It’s just as bad an idea with regards to CO2 emissions. China and India are rapidly expanding their economies regardless of CO2. Why should America hamstring its own economy when others are growing? This, essentially, is why President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord.

The IPCC report warns us that without cuts in carbon emissions the world could see an average sea level rise of 62 centimetres over the course of the lifetime of people born today. That’s over two feet. Scientists are gravely concerned that sea level rise could be even faster.

Sea levels rose by around 1.9 mm per year during the 20th century and have risen by around 1.8 mm per year since 1970. That’s 18 mm per decade, so 180 mm per century — or just 18 cm. You’d need a pretty massive increase in current trends to get anything close to a two-foot rise — and there is no evidence that this is happening or likely to happen.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)

Climate change is real, and the best way to combat it is reducing our nation’s carbon emissions and that of the rest of the world.

Climate has been changing for the last 4.5 billion years; it’s true. There is no convincing evidence to suggest that man-made CO2 — ‘carbon’ — is significantly responsible. CO2 is not some magical control knob.

“Diversification,” “Market-driven technologies,” “Put the United States at the forefront of environmental technology.”

This is just the specious, faux-market language lawmakers use to try to persuade you that there’s nothing sinister about redirecting the entire economy towards the green decarbonisation scam.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) 

“Burning fossil fuels warms the planet and alters the earth’s climate. Scientists tell us that more than half of the carbon pollution that has been emitted into the atmosphere has occurred since that [first Congress] hearing [on Climate Change] in 1988.”

Carbon dioxide is a beneficial trace gas that greens the planet. Rebranding it ‘pollution’ is a lie. Since there is no evidence that anthropogenic CO2 is significantly warming the planet, there is no reason to worry about increases in atmospheric CO2.

Jamie Margolin, 17-year-old climate justice activist from Seattle

“Lobbyists from corporations that make billions of dollars off the destruction of my generation’s future.”

Leftist bullshit. The most dangerous lobbyists are those for the expensive, ineffective, environmentally damaging renewables industry. It’s much-scorned fossil fuels, which power the economy, keep hospital machinery working, get kids get to school, provide the synthetic material for the anoraks worn by idiot kids at climate protests…

“I want the entirety of Congress to remember the fear and despair that my generation lives with every day and I want you to hold on to it.”

Jamie is a tragic and pitiful indictment of the climate propaganda, which has deprived impressionable kids of their happy carefree childhoods by filling their heads with complete nonsense.

“Within my lifetime the destruction we have seen from the climate crisis will only get worse.”

Citations needed.

“The reality is my generation has been committed to a planet that is collapsing.”

Kids who think this should lay off the weed.

“The shellfish, orcas, salmon, and all the beautiful wildlife of my Pacific Northwest home is dying due to ocean acidification caused by the climate crisis”

Absolute nonsense, no matter how much of a stroppy, sulky teenager look you wear when you say this stuff. Ocean acidification is a green propaganda lie. [See this article for details] The oceans remain resolutely alkaline. There is no evidence that this non-existent phenomenon is killing shellfish, let alone killer whales. Why is Congress wasting its time listening to this second-hand propaganda?

Vic Barrett, 21 years old, Honduras

“Despite overwhelming adversity we organised our community and emancipated ourselves to protect our future. However the struggle continues for me and my people. As temperatures increase, sea levels rise, storms become more intense and frequent, and the coral reefs and fisheries on which we depend disappear, the oceanfront land that my family has inhabited for generations and that I’m supposed to inherit will be underwater if the U.S. federal government continues to promote a fossil fuel-based energy system.”

Just in case you ever doubted that green is the new red. This Marxist revolutionary language gives the game away.

“These frontline communities around the world are already feeling the effects disproportionately. These are made up of people like me: young, black and brown, LGBTQ, indigenous communities that place them at significantly higher risk than the general populace.”

Identity politics, too. This kid has been listening to too much leftist agitprop.

“I myself have felt the consequences of climate change directly. Growing up in New York I was impacted by the climate change-fueled Hurricane Sandy, which left my family and school without power.”

Sandy was not caused or exacerbated by ‘global warming.’ This is a leftist urban myth.

“I still experience grave anxiety about experiencing another climate driven disaster. As someone who already struggles with anxiety and depression…”

Sorry kid but your modish mental health issues are not a reason to hamstring the U.S. economy with pointless green regulation.

Benji Backer, 21 years old, American Conservation Coalition

“Markets and competition reduce emissions far more than heavy-handed regulation.”

The first sense talked by any of the kids addressing Congress today.

Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA)

“This whole thing is a charade. When you look at science, Miss Thunberg, when you look at facts, the facts are it wasn’t Waxman-Markey legislation that led to the U.S. leading the world in emissions reduction. It was actually folks doing the right thing. Through innovation, through energy efficiency, through conservation.”

Amen, bro.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA)

“We are facing an existential threat…an exacerbation of conflicts abroad are a threat to us all.”

The ‘climate change causes wars’ meme is another greenie/leftist urban myth. See, for example, my piece called “For The Last Time, No, The Syrian Crisis Was Not Caused By Climate Change.”

Greta Thunberg, 16 years old, Swedish climate activist

“People don’t seem to be very aware of the actual science.”

And guess which pig-tailed 16-year-old climate activist and school dropout is one of the worst offenders in this regard…?

And today John Nolte writes, also at Breitbart:

For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 predictions wrong.

In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent … and it never happened.

And not once — not even once! — have these alarmists had one of their predictions come true.

Think about that… the so-called experts are 0-41 with their predictions, but those of us who are skeptical of “expert” prediction number 42, the one that says that if we don’t immediately convert to socialism and allow Alexandria Ocasio-Crazy to control and organize our lives, the planet will become uninhabitable.

Why would any sane person listen to someone with a 0-41 record?

Why would we completely restructure our economy and sacrifice our personal freedom for “experts” who are 0-41, who have never once gotten it right?

If you had an investment counselor who steered you wrong 41times, would you hang in there for number 42?

Of course not. You’d fire him after failed prediction two or three.

And if that’s not crazy enough, the latest ploy is to trot out a 16-year-old girt to spread prediction number 42, because it is so much more credible that way.

Sometimes you just have to sit back and laugh.

Anyway, I want you to have the data, so go ahead and print this out in advance of Thanksgiving dinner with your obnoxious Millennial nephew.

LIST OF DOOMSDAY PREDICTIONS CLIMATE ALARMIST GOT RIGHT

NONE

ZIP

ZERO

NADA

BLANK

DONUT HOLE

NIL

NOTHING

VOID

ZILCH

LIST OF DOOMSDAY PREDICTIONS THE CLIMATE ALARMIST GOT WRONG

Here is the source for numbers 1-27. As you will see, the individual sources are not crackpots, but scientific studies and media reports on “expert” predictions. The sources for numbers 28-41 are linked individually.

1. 1. 1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
   2. 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)
   3. 1970: Ice Age By 2000
   4. 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
   5. 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
   6. 1972: New Ice Age By 2070
   7. 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
   8. 1974: Another Ice Age?
   9. 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life
   10. 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
   11. 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes
   12. 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend
   13. 1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s
   14. 1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
   15. 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not)
   16. 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
   17. 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not)
   18. 2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is
   19. 2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
   20. 2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
   21. 2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018
   22. 2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
   23. 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
   24. 2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe’
   25. 2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014
   26. 2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015
   27. 2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’
   28. 1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide
   29. 1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources
   30. 1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
   31. 1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
   32. 1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 90s
   33. 1980: Peak Oil In 2000
   34. 1996: Peak Oil in 2020
   35. 2002: Peak Oil in 2010
   36. 2006: Super Hurricanes!
   37. 2005 : Manhattan Underwater by 2015
   38. 1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985
   39. 1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
   40. 1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
   41. 1970s: Killer Bees!

THEY – the power-hungry Community Organizers of theLeft – want a pretext for establishing a permanent dictatorship over us.

That is what it’s about, and that is all that it’s about.

Time to look again at the Cloward-Piven strategy to wreck the lives of all Americans. It is becoming more popular than ever on the Left.

We repeat part of our earlier (November 18, 2012) post explaining what the strategy is.

This comes from Family Security Matters, by Frank Salvato:

In 1966, two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, collaborated on a theory  … referred to as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”. People who are familiar with the likes of Saul Alinsky and William Ayers are familiar with the strategy, as are the full complement of the Progressive Movement.

In a nutshell, the underlying principle of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to so overload the entitlement system – to add so many to the entitlement rolls, that the country’s economic system collapses, unleashing chaos and violence in the streets, thus effecting radical Leftist political change in government. … To facilitate the fall of Capitalism by “overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse”.  …

In a 1970 New York Times interview, Cloward is quoted as saying that poor people can only advance when “the rest of society is afraid of them”. He then theorized that activists should refrain from demanding that government provide more for the poverty stricken and, instead, should strive to pack as many people on the welfare (read: entitlement) rolls as possible, creating a demand that could not be met, facilitating the destruction of the welfare system and massive financial crisis. As a byproduct, rebellion would be ignited amongst the people; chaos would rule the streets and governments would be damaged beyond repair, many falling to history making it possible for new radicals to assume the roles of oligarchs, ushering in new systems of government and the dismantling of the Capitalist system in particular.

Both Cloward and Piven understood that it would take pushing the American citizenry to the point of anarchy, to the point of the populace effecting violent chaos in the streets, for there to emerge an opportunity to damage our Republican form of government and our Capitalist system to the point where people would accept radical political as well as economic change. Cloward and Piven, using the philosophy of Saul Alinsky (who, by-the-by, was their inspiration in fomenting their “strategy”), knew that they would have to achieve chaos, so as to introduce the Progressive political ideology – the ideology of Democratic Socialism – to the masses as a saving grace. 

We’d say, “as a saving system” – but in fact, a doom.

“Democratic Socialism” – remember – is a cover name for Communism.

Is the triumph of Saul Alinsky, Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Barack Obama now near at hand?

Barack Obama did what he could to promote the plan during his two disastrous terms as president.

California is planning to extend entitlements such as health care to the illegal aliens who are pouring into the state. They are encouraged by the state to enter the country illegally and are protected from deportation in its sanctuary cities.

All the Democratic Party candidates for the 2020 presidential election support government provided health care for everyone living in the country legally or illegally.

None of them condemns Antifa violence in the streets.

So is the terrible triumph of Saul Alinsky, Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Barack Obama now near at hand?

Most probably – if the Democrats win Congress and the presidency in the 2020 elections. 

(We do not think they will. We predict the re-election of President Trump, quite possibly with a landslide victory.)

The Left is now a political pantomime donkey. It has a Social Justice Warrior in the front and a Muslim in the back, and they  are starting to pull in opposite directions.

For one thing, the Left and its SJWs say that men can become women. Muslims say they can not.

AP reports:

Valentina Sampaio has become the first openly transgender model hired by Victoria’s Secret …

Here “she” is modeling their underwear

The Left also believes it is “liberating” for women to wear a hijab.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

When Banana Republic faced a 3% decline in sales, it decided to go all the way back to the 7^th century. Hoping to tap into the lucrative market of concealing bruises and strangulation marks, Banana Republic rolled out a line of hijabs for the discerning woman who knows better than to leave home without the permission of a male guardian.

While women in Iran were being beaten and imprisoned for taking off their hijabs, Banana Republic decided to celebrate the courageous spirit of those women who want to live as second class citizens.

But if the Gap brand thought that displaying some garments of female subjugation between its ugly purple purses and its eighteen-dollar scrunchies would win over Islamists, it had another think coming.

Modern lefties iconize hijabs without having the faintest idea of what they mean or what they’re for. All they know is that to properly display diversity, you need to add a woman in a hijab between the gay guy, the Black Lives Matter guy, and the militant #resistance member ready to storm Starbucks; even though a hijab is as much a symbol of human liberation as a case of female genital mutilation.

But since Banana Republic couldn’t figure out how to market female genital mutilation to sophisticated urban consumers, it had to settle for trying to sell them hijabs. A hijab, BR execs thought, is just a 72×26 shmata  [piece of cloth]. Our Vietnamese slave laborers can make one a minute before passing out from the toxic fumes. And we can sell them for 20 bucks while getting a diversity award from CAIR for our wokeness. …

But the plan was not a success.

Instead of being cheered from Algeria to Afghanistan, Banana Republic was accused of cultural appropriation and insensitivity. The failing retailer had made an obvious and tragic error. Their model may have had every lock of hair encompassed by the fashion forward follicular prison, but she was showing off her elbows in a short-sleeved shirt. What’s the point of locking up the hair after the elbows are already out there? Does Banana Republic, despite its name, understand nothing about Islam?

“There are guidelines to hijab outside of just covering hair,” the founder of Haute Hijab warned.

The guidelines of Islam cover women’s hair, elbows, sometimes faces and even one eye. The hijab is the most distinctive sign of subjugation, because hair is even more offensive than elbows.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, warned that women’s exposed hair emits rays that drive men mad. It’s unknown if women’s elbows also emit rays, but Islam approves of women’s elbows no more than it approves of their hair.

And Banana Republic soon repented.

The model in the black rectangular hijab print and the short sleeves vanished from Banana Republic the way she had from the republics of Afghanistan, Iran and ISIS. The very woke company replaced her provocative elbows with a cropped shot in which she no longer has elbows, arms or hair.

Just the way Allah intended.

But Muslim critics pointed out that the model in the blue soft satin square hijab has an exposed neck. And Allah is no more fond of the sight of women’s necks than he is of their hair and their elbows. Meanwhile the model in the unconvincing leopard print hijab is not only showing her neck, but has the first two buttons of her shirt open. The only thing more offensive would be is if she were also driving. …

An American brand that claims to tap into the liberating power of fashion bet big on subjugation and discovered that no amount of subjugation is ever enough. …

The question is where do the loyalties of the huge corporations which collude in the oppression of women lie? Is it with the women risking their lives to defy oppression or those who collude with it?

Banana Republic tried to collude with a theocracy of rape and discovered that no amount of erasing women is ever enough. And that’s a tough lesson for an American clothing retailer to absorb.

But when BR next relaunches its line of oppressive headgear, it’ll bring in CAIR advisers who will make sure that none of the models are showing any ankle, elbow, neck, or hair. And then the media will cheer. And there will be awards and an ad campaign. Because we all live in a banana republic now.

When Victoria’s Secret sells nothing but burkas, and Banana Republic has transgender models wearing nothing but lacy underwear and hijabs, we’ll believe that Islam and the Left can rule the world in amicable partnership.

Boko: book – book learning = Western education.

Haram: not halal – unlawful – forbidden.

Gathering strength in the minds of Progressives is the idea that records of the past should be destroyed. The past was dominated by white men and everything they did was unjust, oppressive, bad.

All relics of their unjust world, archives, archaeological sites, statuary, murals, works of art in museums and galleries, above all libraries as collections of books open to everyone, must go.

(Yes, inventions of theirs that are useful to “minorities” can remain. If you are non-white – which is to say in the word à la mode, “diverse” – and Progressive, you have a right to those. A better claim, in fact, than whites do. Because.)

The idea has been made explicit, as Daniel Greenfield points out:

The Library Journal recently retweeted the accusation that, “Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence” and all the books by white people “are physically taking up space in our libraries”.  …

We can’t have that. Away with all books by white people!

And the schools must stop teaching literacy – even to the small extent that they do at present.

Why have libraries at all?

The obvious answer is that they employ librarians. And they provide internet access to homeless people and teach English to day laborers. They offer spaces for visitors to study the slogans on all their posters. That’s the anti-library future of the library. A space with few books and many screens. A community organizing hub that occasionally happens to have a few books tucked away somewhere. 

By “diverse” – ie. non-white – authors (with Progressive credentials) only.

Not too many though.

Well, there aren’t too many. And there’ll be lots of space for them when all books by whites have been removed. Anyway, reading is to be discouraged.

To put it simply, reading is racist.

The Left and Islam are at present in alliance against … the West, our civilization, the US, the rule of law, democracy, capitalism … in a word – liberty.

In that, the two ideologies are alike. And both are authoritarian, both demand strict obedience, both strive for domination.

But their prescriptions for government, laws, morals, life-styles are in direct opposition to each other. So the alliance cannot last.

When they clash, which they must, which of the two will prevail? Which is stronger?

A skirmish between them has broken out over a course of study in a school in Birmingham, England. The Leftists want the children to be taught that homosexuality is normal and good. But Muslim parents are angrily protesting that homosexuality is not normal, not good, really very bad, and the teaching – officially designated “LGBT awareness” and “relationship education” – is wrong and must be permanently abandoned. Right now there is a stand-off and neither side can be said to be winning.

However, a surprising event on the world stage indicates that the winner, the super-bully, is likely to be … Communism.

Daniel Greenfield reports and comments at Front Page:

The war of letters began when 22 countries penned a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s treatment of Uighurs and “other Muslim and minorities communities”. 

The letter in defense of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang was signed by France, Germany, Canada, Sweden and 18 other, mostly Western and European, countries.

The case of the missing Muslim signatories was solved when the People’s Republic of China fired back with its own letter signed by 37 countries.

This letter in defense of China’s crackdown on Islam was signed by 16 Muslim countries.

While some of the Muslim signatories were drawn from African countries, the letter was also signed by ambassadors for the leading Arab governments including Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Kuwait. Pakistan, the world’s second largest Muslim country, also signed on.

While Western governments wailed about Muslim human rights in China, the leading Sunni nations of the world signed off on a letter praising “China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights”.

(At which point Greenfield interjects with sardonic disgust: “Mandatory abortions, organ harvesting and the mass murder of millions are remarkable achievements.”)

… The world’s top Muslim governments … explicitly defended China’s crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang.

“Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers,” the letter reads. …

The People’s Republic of China’s idea of de-radicalization measures had allegedly included forcing Muslims to drink alcohol and eat pork, a ban on beards, hijabs and the name Mohammed.

Even Qatar, whose Al Jazeera propaganda outlet has broadcast claims of Islamist oppression in Xinjiang, was finally forced to sign on to a letter that effectively disavowed what its own media has been saying.

The Uyghur Muslims are a Turkic minority, its Islamists had sought to set up a separatist Turkic Islamic state, and the Islamist regime in Turkey had been vocal about their cause. Erdogan, the Islamist thug running Turkey, had in the past accused China of genocide. This year, the spokesman for Turkey’s foreign ministry had described China’s crackdown on Islamists as a “great cause of shame for humanity”. The spokesman had accused China of engaging in torture and brainwashing in concentration camps.

But then Erdogan, the most aggressive national exponent of Islamist causes in the region, visited China, and declared, “It is a fact that the peoples of China’s Xinjiang region live happily in China’s development and prosperity.” Then he told critics to keep quiet to avoid spoiling Turkey’s relationship with the PRC.

The People’s Republic of China had attained the complicity of the world’s most vocal Turkish nationalist in its crackdown on Turkic nationalism and won the support of the tyrant who had transformed Turkey from a secular democracy into an Islamist banana republic for its enforced secularization of Muslims.

It’s hard to imagine a greater diplomatic triumph.

Finally, the letters humiliated the United States, which had not signed on to either one, but, despite providing protection and billions of dollars in foreign aid to Muslim countries, has been repeatedly attacked for its limited counterterrorism efforts which fall far short of anything that the PRC has done.

Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have long been thorns in America’s side, backing Islamic terrorists abroad, funding subversion within the United States, and criticizing our counterterrorism.

What does China have that we don’t? …

China was able to get not only Muslim countries, but the worldwide sponsors of Islamism, to sign on to its letter because they understood that crossing the PRC would carry a serious economic price.

The United States hands out foreign aid and trade agreements to countries no matter what they do. …

In the United States, cutting off foreign aid to a country, no matter how awful, is nearly impossible. The worse a country treats us, the harder we work to win that country over with extensive outreach. …

The People’s Republic of China doesn’t view insults and threats as an incentive for outreach. Instead it uses its economic clout to reward or punish countries based on how those countries treat it. …

American diplomacy has a fantastic track record of failure. The only thing it ever really seems to succeed at is giving away money and abandoning our national interests to pursue meaningless global goals. …

The PRC does not dedicate its diplomacy to saving the planet, ending all wars, or any of the delusional nonsense that occupies American diplomats in between expensive lunches and pointless conferences. Its diplomacy is a blunt instrument meant to achieve simple ends. And, that makes it far more effective.

The war of letters demonstrated that China could recruit 16 Muslim countries to endorse forcing Muslims to eat pork, while Western countries couldn’t get even one to sign on in opposition. …

America spends a great deal of time worrying about being loved. Our diplomacy is meant to convince the world to love us. China does not need to be loved. It never apologizes for its strength.

We should stop apologizing for our strength. And start putting our national interests first.

Which is the strongest principle and fixed goal of our president – and for that goal and principle (along with all his others) the Left furiously condemns him.

It is sober, serious, strict, stern, grim, hard, austere.

The great short-story writer Joseph Epstein wrote earlier this year at Claremont Review of Books (CRB) on The Menace of Political Correctness:

Political correctness started out as a minor project of the international firm known as the Good Intentions Paving Company. … But political correctness soon came to be about much more than social decorum. As with so many projects of the Good Intentions Paving Company, things haven’t worked out quite as planned.

It is a vast Company, centuries old. It was largely responsible for the sentimental policies that weakened Rome and spread Christianity.

Epstein sees plainly what devastation it is busybodying to bring about now, with its current “be nice” project.

We quote part of his article (and recommend the reading of all of it):

[W]ith the campaign for a misguided equalizing in all American institutions, political correctness took a large leap forward in its ambitions. Criticism of any action or attempt to bring equality soon became, ipso facto, politically incorrect. Affirmative action—the rigging of admissions requirements at the country’s most prestigious universities in favor of what were deemed oppressed minority groups—was an early gambit in the campaign for equal outcomes and a boost, too, for political correctness. Criticizing affirmative action carried with it the penalty of being thought racist.

How could one admit minority students, it was felt, without catering to their special interests? So an ample buffet of courses in African-American, Chicano, and other studies were offered at universities. These courses would, naturally, be taught by matching minority-group faculty. To denigrate these courses, to argue that they were largely victimology, and as such that they lowered the standard once in place for the liberal arts in higher education, would in itself of course be politically incorrect, and most people who knew better were hesitant to step forth and say so.

What became known as the women’s movement soon claimed oppressed status, since it could not claim actual minority status. Homosexuals, male and female, were next on board. Hispanic Americans surely qualified, and so others who could construe a history—or, in the cant phrase of the day, a narrative—of inequality forced upon them.

The United States began to seem a country of victims—and victimology, the study of victimhood from the point of view of the victims, became a dominant subject in high schools and especially in the social science and humanities departments of universities.

Political correctness meanwhile became the new national etiquette, at least among the self-acclaimed cognoscenti, or as they came to think of themselves, the “woke”—a word meaning those awake and responsive to the important social and political questions and issues of the day. In universities and in public life generally one violated this etiquette at one’s peril. A violation could be as trivial as telling the wrong joke, not being sufficiently inclusive (inclusivity, like diversity, would soon become one of the P.C. shibboleths) in one’s speech or writing, or being insensitive about observing the new dispensation on proper pronoun usage. …

Political correctness contravenes the US Consitution:

Under political correctness the First Amendment calling for free speech somehow didn’t apply, for lots of speech was now clearly out of bounds and entire subjects disallowed. Nor did political correctness have anything like a statute of limitations. One could be held responsible, and thereby punished, for what were deemed violations of the political correctness code committed half a century ago and longer—well before there was such a code. Aided by the internet’s social media, the surveillance exerted by political correctness became total, the impulse of political correctness itself totalitarian. …

If political correctness had stopped at the request for civil behavior, there would have been no difficulty in acceding to it. If homosexual men wish to be called “gay,” if blacks wish to be called “African-American,” if women prefer “Ms.” over “Mrs.” and “Miss,” there would be no problem whatsoever. But the program inherent in political correctness has evolved into something much more ambitious than that. In its current phase, it is revolutionary, seeking a utopia of complete fairness in all institutions—educational, cultural, political—which in its advocates’ interpretation means utter equality for all, excluding only those who violate political correctness’s underlying assumptions and well-known restrictions. …

The least perceived differences between individuals and groups, whether inherent or acquired through upbringing, are for now to be ignored in order that they may ultimately be eradicated. Political correctness doesn’t allow leeway for differences in intelligence, talent, or strength. Not equal opportunities but equal outcomes are its monomaniacal goal, and it is not overly concerned about the punishing means required to achieve it.

Under political correctness, righteous indignation and tender sensibilities must be protected. Hence the politically correct have no compunction in removing statues of figures from the Confederacy from their long inhabited public places. Nor must the young be put to undue stress in the classroom. So trigger warnings have been installed in universities alerting students to courses that may contain material painful to them. If minority students wished to remain exclusively among themselves—thus all but killing the once grand ideal of integration in American life—this, too, could be arranged by setting up separate dormitories and dining rooms, clubs and extracurricular activities for their use. A tenet of political correctness is that students must above all feel safe.

Along with rewriting the past and protecting the young from the harsh realities of life, the political correctness program emphasizes diversity, which has become one of the great desiderata of the contemporary university, itself the hearth and home of political correctness. … Admissions offices are instructed to accept fixed percentages of incoming students on the bases of race, national origin, and gender, replacing the old quotas once in place against Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Provosts and deans are hired to ensure this diversity is enacted. Schools without such staff or without the right ethnic mix are in danger of having federal funds denied them, for by now, such has been the spread of political correctness through the culture, that the federal bureaucracy is in on the game.

But President Trump has has threatened to cut off funding from colleges that stifle free speech.

In the contest for scholarships, prizes, and honorary awards, political correctness holds the cards, and deals from an unapologetically stacked deck. A good gauge of this is the list of any recent year’s honorary degrees bestowed by universities. The roster of recipients is sure to include at least one African American and more than one woman. Not to do so is to risk being called racist, misogynist, and to have one’s school judged egregiously behind the times. White male commencement speakers, no matter how impressive their scientific, artistic, or scholarly accomplishments, are rarer than honest politicians. Under the reign of political correctness, all other things being equal, which they rarely are, African Americans, women, and other presumably oppressed minority group members are naturally chosen over drab white males for professorships, administrative posts, scholarships, and other university appointments.

As for literary prizes, from the Nobel Prize on down, juries for such awards now feel that the time has come to give their prizes to women, or African Americans, or poets from Greenland, for one rarely any longer has the sense that the truly best writers are being honored. I once remarked in print, in the Times Literary Supplement, that the Pulitzer Prize usually goes to one of two types: those who don’t need it and those who don’t deserve it. When some years ago Katharine Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for her rather weepy poor-little-rich-girl autobiography, the critic Hilton Kramer remarked that she was awarded it on both grounds. …

The university has long been the institution where utopias go to die. After World War I, socialism’s chief home was the university. (Dig round a university’s History or an English Department today and you might still discover a Marxist napping in his office.) Of course the youth rebellion of the 1960s found its home in the university. All these may now seem passing fancies, but political correctness figures to have a longer, and more significant, life than any of them, for it has affected not merely the institution of the university but the wider culture of the country.

The goal of political correctness is to level American culture, to reduce the role of elite culture, slowly eliminating merit and intellectual authority as the main standards in the country’s culture. If one were to argue that the result of applying the criteria of political correctness is a general dumbing down of learning, or choosing to value artistic productions on a political rather than an aesthetic basis, an advocate of political correctness would likely respond that this isn’t necessarily true, but even if it were, it would be worth it. A great flattening equality is the goal of political correctness. This is what makes it revolutionary.

What’s in it for the more strident advocates, or at least for those who are not themselves members of victim groups? Nothing so mercenary as profit, nor so obvious as direct power, but something perhaps grander than money or power—the assurance of their own splendid virtue.

The role of virtue in politics or any social movement ought never to be underestimated. Outside the corridors of power, the feeling of righteousness, both on the Left and on the Right, is behind much political sentiment. The word “virtucrat” describes those whose sense of themselves is motivated by the feeling of their own superior public morality. Those who subscribe wholeheartedly to political correctness, especially those who have no direct stake in the game, do so because they feel doing so is right and just—and expressing these feelings makes them feel damned fine about themselves.

What they may not realize is the deep cultural implications of political correctness. The New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books currently review an overwhelming number of novels by women and African-American writers. In recent years much of the fiction published by the New Yorker also seems to be by women or by Asian writers. By publishing him extensively in its pages the Atlantic has made a prominent figure of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writings—asking for reparations for slavery days, worrying about his young son’s growing up in what he assumes to be an obviously and thoroughly racist country—are heavy contributions to the victimology of our time. The market for writing of this kind, by turns angry and sad, appealing above all to the guilt of its readers, is there, one imagines, because it makes those who publish it feel they are on the side of social justice, decency, righteousness—and thereby feel good about themselves. Virtue rides high again.

Consider the movies. Roughly half the movies up for Oscars this past year were, essentially, political correctness movies. …

Political correctness comes at no direct cost to those who endorse it. The cost is ultimately to the culture, which in so many ways is sadly diminished.

Political correctness meshes nicely, too, with the phenomenon known as identity politics, which has dominated the Democratic Party in recent decades. Identity politics entails groupings of people—chiefly minorities—by their victim status, whether race, sex, sexual orientation, or religion. Behind identity politics is the demand for equal rights, always with the supposition that they do not already exist and the added presumption that no progress toward this goal has genuinely been made, so that it is assumed that vast numbers of whites stand implacably opposed to black equality and men to equality for women, while homophobes are everywhere blocking acceptance for gays, and on and on. Under identity politics, sides are chosen up as in a sandlot baseball game: Victims versus Victimizers, the Woke versus the Deplorables. No one has to be told on whose side in this game virtue lies. …

As for humor, while one might have thought political correctness itself supplies an ample target, comedians have tended to shy away from it, lest they, too, be put out of business by public censure. Under the reign of political correctness, one is allowed not a single mistake. … One of the hallmarks of the politically correct, of course, is a grave and abiding humorlessness.

The role of political correctness in politics has also greatly expanded. … The hearings over the Supreme Court candidacy of Brett Kavanaugh were little more than trial by political correctness. …

One can only hope that political correctness will go so far as to make evident its absurdity … Until then there is nothing to do but to wait things out, in the hope that the deep illogic of political correctness and its widespread perniciousness, like that of Prohibition and other programs of enforced virtue that have gone before, will indubitably reveal itself for the grievous mistake it is.

Will it? And will it then be abandoned?

If so, you can bet on its immediate replacement with some other enforced oppressive virtue to sadden human hearts and in the dark to bind us.