Rule of lawlessness 18

Even Californian Democrats – or at least a fair number of them – cannot stomach the abuse of power committed in their state by Governor Gavin Newsom, San Franciso’s district attorney Chese Boudin, and George Gascon the district attorney of Los Angeles. All three are likely to be recalled.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page:

The campaign to recall California governor Gavin Newsom has now gathered, 2,060,000 signatures, the California Globe reports, exceeding its goal of 2 million by March 10 and far outpacing the 1.495 million needed to authorize a recall election. Even with a rejection rate of 25 percent, the recall will have enough signatures to be on the ballot this year. …

Also last week, the San Francisco department of elections authorized a recall campaign against district attorney Chesa Boudin, who prior to election in 2019 had never prosecuted a case. Boudin has eliminated entire categories of crime, now surging across the city. …

His mother, Weather Underground alum Kathy Boudin, served 22 years in prison for her role in an armored car assault in Nyack, N.Y. that claimed the lives of police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady along with security guard Peter Paige. Chesa was only 14 months old when the $1.6 million Nyack robbery went down. Radical father David Gilbert drove the getaway car and Chesa was duly adopted by Weather Underground royalty Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Kathy Boudin named her son after Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army, which assassinated at least six police officers in the early 1970s. Kathy Boudin assisted in the armed robbery that funded Chesimard’s jail break in 1979. Chesimard changed her name to Assata Shakur and fled to Cuba, which refuses to extradite the cop-killer. True to form, Chesa touts “restorative justice” and “decarceration”. …

Since taking office, Boudin has tried zero homicides, and essentially shut down the justice system in San Francisco. Boudin released a previously jailed criminal who killed two people and on his watch crime is up 46 percent.

It is serious crime too – “brazen robberies” and “daytime shootings”.

George Gascon, district attorney of Los Angeles, has removed all crime enhancements in trials, ordered prosecutors not to attend parole hearings, and supported the re-sentencing [revisions of sentences?] of those with murder convictions after serving only 15 years.

These measures sparked a recall effort that will soon be authorized to gather signatures.

Like Gascon and Boudin, Gavin Newsom has a soft spot for violent criminals. In March of 2019, Newsom reprieved all 737 murderers on California’s death row, the worst of the worst, serial killers, cop killers and the like.

A year later, Newsom invoked the “leadership” of his one-time aunt Nancy Pelosi as he locked down the state, with notable exceptions. Newsom released thousands of imprisoned criminals

During an unemployment scandal that has now surpassed $30 billion, California paid out $421,370 to death row inmates alone …

Nancy Pelosi herself. presiding as Speaker of the House over the passing of H.R.1 which “legalizes” all the methods of cheating in elections that the Democrats tested and found good in November 2020, is another believer in the rule of lawlessness.

Government by the stupid for the stupid 194

… but not of the stupid.

Paul Joseph Watson is on to them.

He shows some of the ways Big Virtue tries to discombobulate us.

To arms, citizens! 84

What are conservatives looking to, to stop the Marxist revolution now underway in America?

In what are we putting our hope and trust to save us from the national calamity that has not just begun but is gathering force and pace?

The November election.

We cling to the hope that Donald Trump will be re-elected to the presidency, both the House and the Senate will achieve Republican majorities, and then – hey presto! – the Left, its black-masked militant cohorts, its murderous thugs, it screaming mobs, its nasty leaders in Congress, its billionaire funders, its powerful propaganda media, the public schools and the universities teaching that the federal republic of America is too immoral to be allowed to continue, the governors and mayors authorizing insurgency, will give in, and all the revolutionary activity will subside like a spent summer storm.

They won’t. It won’t. If the Left loses the election, the mobs, the leaders, the funders, the media, the Marxist theorists, the little Stalins and Maos of the states and the cities will intensify their violent aggression.

If they win, the free republic of America will be finished, over, lost.

Either way, the election will not save us.

We have vaguely expected that a magic document we call “The Durham Report” will be published soon, and it will produce such facts, such accusations, such proofs of perfidy and corruption in the Obama administration that inevitably justice will be done, the guilty men and women who plotted a coup d’état against President Trump will go to prison covered with shame, and lo! law and order, constitutionality, safety and freedom will be restored.

It won’t. If this rumored report ever appears, it is unlikely to do so before the election; if it does appear before the election, it is unlikely to indict the guilty; if it does indict the guilty, they are unlikely to be brought to trial; if they are brought to trial, they are unlikely to be found guilty; if they are found guilty, they are unlikely to go to prison. Even if our hopes are rewarded, and before November the plotters are charged, tried, and condemned to long terms of imprisonment, it will not give the Leftist revolutionaries a moment’s pause.

Can we do anything to save our country and ourselves?

Mark Tapson writes at Front Page:

It is time for American patriots to turn the tide against the hateful race agitators, the masked anarchists, and the Marxist subversives terrorizing our nation and wreaking a destructive, “fundamental transformation” of the United States. That includes not just the demonic foot soldiers of the mob itself, but their enablers in academia, the news media, the entertainment arena, and political office.

It’s not enough anymore for our side to share snarky social media memes ridiculing social justice snowflakes; the time for joking about this cultural upheaval is over, because the other side has taken it very, very seriously for half a century, and those snowflakes are now waging a scorched-earth policy against every American institution and value.

What then do we do? …

First and foremost, get off our knees. … Free American citizens do not bow and scrape before any man, any mob, any tyrannical ideology. Forget trying to placate and to reason with the leftist mob; neither is possible. Simply resist and fight. If you give the left an inch, they will take mile after mile after mile. Do not give them that inch.

Speak the truth fearlessly, every day and everywhere, and never apologize for it. Teach your children the truth, and demonstrate to them what courage and integrity look like by standing up for it. Speaking of your kids: take them out of public schools (and even many private schools) at the earliest possible opportunity and commit, no matter the sacrifice, to homeschooling them – or you will lose them in the indoctrination mills of the left.

Do not kowtow to the power-lust of petty Democrat despots like governors Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, or Gavin Newsom, whose coronavirus strategy is to release felons from prison and allow mass, violent protests while cracking down on law-abiding citizens for singing in church. Commit to civil disobedience against their unreasonable dictates – and to uncivil disobedience if it comes to that.

Take a leaf from the Left’s playbook and community-organize. Organize to flood your representatives, local and national, with emails and calls demanding they take immediate, concrete actions to protect our heritage, defend the police, and enforce law and order. For that matter, take another leaf from the leftist playbook and pack their offices with noisy protesters who refuse to leave until our demands are met. Those demands are to stop hamstringing law enforcement and start protecting the community’s citizens, businesses, and monuments. Show up armed, if your state allows open-carry. Support law enforcement and other first responders in word and deed. Tell every cop you know and see that Blue Lives Matter and you respect and appreciate them for putting their lives on the line.

To trace our way back to some measure of sanity, civility, and security in America, the collectivist, racist, divisive mentality of identity politics that has spread like a cancer in this country must be eradicated. Reject this ideology wherever it rears its ugly head. Push back against your children’s teachers and administrators when it is taught in the schools. Call it out in the workplace, consequences be damned; silence and keeping your head down will no longer save you. Reject the ideology when you make your shopping choices. When corporations send you emails notifying you of the steps they’re taking to help achieve “racial justice,” email back and ask them how their virtue-signaling on behalf of anti-Semitic, black supremacist communists like Black Lives Matter helps ease racial tensions. Boycott and down-vote any entertainment featuring elitist celebrities who loudly proclaim their contempt for this country and for the people who love it. Boycott the NBA and protest their racial division outside their arenas at game time. Boycott the NFL, especially the Super Bowl. Boycott Nike and its hate-mongering spokesman Colin Kaepernick.

The time for smug complacency about our side “having all the guns” is over, unless we’re willing to actually use those guns in defense of our country and our freedoms, and not just our homes. If you are a gun owner (and if not, why aren’t you?), hone your skills and, as my friend the columnist Kurt Schlichter always advises, stock up on ammunition. Create networks of friends, relatives, and neighbors you trust and formulate a multi-stage plan for having each other’s backs in various scenarios in which the shit hits the fan – because if the mob hasn’t reached your neighborhood yet, don’t assume they’re not coming. When the lily-white, nose-pierced assistant professors of Antifa in their skinny jeans are confronted by organized resistance, they wet themselves.

Don’t sit back and expect this communist takeover of the United States to fizzle out; it will not. Don’t expect the current madness to ensure a Trump landslide in November, either; in fact, what you can expect is massive Democrat voter fraud, and if Trump survives that, there will be violent resistance surpassing anything we’ve seen so far. So the time to act is now.

It’s probable that the revolutionaries are not taking the November election seriously anyway; that they regard all the old white political traditions such as elections as empty rituals, their results of no importance, carrying no consequences. Which explains why they have put up a dummy as their candidate, a senile leftover from the Obama days, allowed to burble whatever nonsense oozes out of his poor old addled brain.

We must fight now. By all necessary means.

Anarchism rising in the Socialist Republic of California 277

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 hellish fire of Paradise 72

The earth of California burns as a result of human activity – or rather of the inactivity of environmentalists. 

The Washington Post reports and comments:

The wildfires scorching California in the past few days have been vast, bringing their destruction and lethality to numerous communities across large swaths of the state, including  one in Los Angeles County and another gigantic burn along the northern mountains.

The Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento, is now the most destructive individual wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday, it already had destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in and around the mountain town of Paradise and has been blamed for 23 of the 25 overall deaths, though more could come.

“This event was the worst-case scenario,” Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea said. “It’s the event that we have feared for a long time.” …

There are reports of about 110 people missing. …

in Southern California, authorities said two bodies were found, both burned, in Malibu in a vehicle that had been in the path of the wildfire …

About 200,000 people were displaced by the Woolsey Fire, which began mid-afternoon Thursday near Simi Valley, even as fire departments were responding to a second wildfire, called the Hill Fire, just west of Thousand Oaks. The Woolsey Fire proved to be explosive, expanding within 24 hours to some 35,000 acres. It raced from the Conejo Valley to the Pacific Ocean, across Highway 101 and the Santa Monica mountains, at speeds that impressed veteran fire officials. …

On Saturday, President Trump made his first comments on the wildfires, alleging mismanagement of the forests.

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

The Californian authorities – Democrats all, and passionate believers in man-made global warming – blame President Trump (and global warming – see below) for the fires, claiming that he does not provide sufficient federal funds for the vital work of neglecting the forests.

And what’s more, they say, he’s heartless:

A spokesman for Governor Jerry Brown (D) said that more federal forest land has burned than state land, adding that the state has expanded its forestry budget while the Trump administration has cut its budget for forest services. …

Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters, also responded to Trump’s earlier tweet.

The president’s message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is Ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines. The president’s assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong . . . nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another two-thirds under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California.

Who is right?

Matthew Vadum writes at Canada Free Press:

As huge wildfires continued to devour forests, homes, and businesses across California over the weekend, President Trump lashed out at the destructive, deadly policies long pushed by environmentalists that set the stage for the Golden State’s now-routine fiery catastrophes.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” President Trump tweeted Nov. 10 at 3:08 a.m. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

On Nov. 11 at 4:40 a.m. he followed up with: “With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!”

In-between the two tweets, Trump used Twitter to urge people in the affected areas to “evacuate quickly”, praised the “more than 4,000” who are fighting the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California, and expressed sympathy for the fire victims.

Idiot celebrities and clueless politicians weighed in across the fruited plain, eager to attack Trump. …

California Governor-elect Gavin Newsom (D), a strong supporter of the no-growth economic policies that caused the deadly fires, tweeted:

“Lives have been lost. Entire towns have been burned to the ground. Cars abandoned on the side of the road. People are being forced to flee their homes. This is not a time for partisanship. This is a time for coordinating relief and response and lifting those in need up.” …

But as usual Trump is right … and his critics are wrong.

Years ago environmentalist lobbies ideologically opposed to economic growth put the screws to California’s once-thriving wood-harvesting industry. New federal and state regulations came into effect make it increasingly difficult for the industry to operate.

“As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need,” Chuck DeVore, Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, writes at Forbes.

As timber harvesting permit fees rose and environmental regulations intensified, industry employees left the field and “the combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees”.

With all that kindling piling up on forest floors, today’s devastating wildfires were not hard to foresee.

Back in 2005 experts were predicting “larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape,” DeVore writes. They saw the rise of “fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control. Federal lands have not been managed for decades …”

For decades before the election of President Trump …

… threatening adjacent private forests, while “federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been ‘borrowed’ for fire suppression expenses,” DeVore writes. “The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.”

Two decades ago there used to be an orderly burning of wood waste – including brush and smaller trees cleared by thinning efforts— from timber operations. … That waste fed “renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state”, but taxpayer-subsidized solar power coupled with California’s air-quality regulations and less wood waste to use forced biomass generators to shut down.

“What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires,” he writes. “Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.”

Outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown (D) pigheadedly blames global warming for the fires but as Cato Institute meteorologist Ryan Maue noted on Twitter back on Aug. 5:

Please take a deep breath and read up on California’s forest management issues that are decades in the making. Governor Brown blames climate change for wildfires and avoids any meaningful conversation on policy solutions.

… Arms of the federal government which have long been under the influence of the same left-wing enviro-radicals who run California, are [also] largely to blame.

As always, government does badly what it takes it upon itself to do. As always, private enterprise does it much better:

In charge of 190 million acres of land, the U.S. Forest Service can’t manage land to prevent fires or protect property after blazes begin, Robert Smith, a distinguished scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said …

Private owners cannot afford to let their forests die of disease, insect infestations or wildfire. They are on the job 24 hours a day, unlike 9-5 government bureaucrats. If private owners fail they go bankrupt. If Forest Service managers fail, at worst they are transferred to another forest.

But though enviro-radicals in the federal government must bear their share of blame, President Trump’s accusation against the Californian government is not misplaced:

Smith laid some of the blame at the feet of radical environmentalists for preventing the Forest Service from managing woodlands by taking away the old or dead trees that are most likely to catch fire. The [Californian] government’s refusal to open roadways in forested areas also makes fighting fires unnecessarily difficult … 

The evidence, Vadum says, is on the President’s side.

Paradise lost