I didn’t have to read the entire Democratic Party platform, let alone the spend-tasmagoric Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force recommendations. Sitting here in California, I’m already living it. If polls are to be believed, left-coast policies are coming to you soon—and you’re not going to like it. California is an early glimpse for the rest of the country of a blackout-rolling, water-deprived, tax-hiking, spending-spiking one-party state longing for its old incandescent glow.
The U.S. may flip to one party rule; California is already there. Democrats have controlled the state Assembly since 1997 and the governorship since 2011—or 1999 if you ignore Arnold the Governator, as most do. Single-party rule means single-party rules. We’re No. 1 in the top marginal income tax rate at 13.3%, including for capital gains. That beats New York City. We’re also No. 1 in state sales tax, but only ninth when you include local levies. Still impressive! Everything else follows.
This month Californians have been subjected to rolling blackouts because of the state’s renewable energy mandates—33% today, 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2045. When the sun goes down, which I understand happens every evening, solar cells are worthless. So California has to buy energy on the spot market—sometimes for 10 times normal prices when it’s hot. So we get rolling blackouts. This craziness could be yours too in the near future. Get used to higher bills and resetting your clocks.
California is No. 3 in the nation in water prices. Sad, since it grows 90% of America’s broccoli, 95% of its garlic, 71% of spinach, 69% of carrots and two-thirds of fruits and nuts. Your prices are going up. And kiss incandescent lightbulbs goodbye—most were outlawed in California as of Jan. 1. Someone please send a box of 60-watt flame-tip candelabra base bulbs my way. I’m getting desperate.
by Guy Millière
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
August 30, 2020
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
Attorney General William Barr recently said:
“I thought things were partisan and tough 30 years ago — nothing compared to today. Things have fundamentally changed… [the left] represents a revolutionary Rousseauian party that believes in tearing down the system… They’re interested in complete political victory. They’re not interested in compromise. They’re not interested in dialectic, exchange of views… It’s a substitute religion. They view their political opponents… as evil because we stand in the way of their progressive utopia that they’re trying to reach…”
 The wave of riots that has followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 appears to have nothing to do with Floyd’s death and everything to do with groups seeking to overthrow America. Mayors of many cities and other local officials have deliberately protected criminals over law-abiding citizens and allowed the destruction to take place. Pictured: Fireworks, launched by rioters, explode in the middle of a group of police officers in Washington DC on May 30, 2020. (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images) |
An occasional interview series with everyday Americans who are challenging the status quo.
Jolted by an MSNBC host’s hostile treatment of the late Herman Cain in a 2011 interview, filmmaker Justin Malone set out on a path bucking the media establishment that has led him to directing this year’s surprise hit documentary “Uncle Tom.”
He was just coming out of film school, uncertain of his politics and his future, when he saw MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell accuse then-Republican presidential candidate Cain, who died this month, of civil rights cowardice.
“I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Mr. Malone told The Washington Times. “I was sort of undergoing my own political transformation at the time and the seed was planted right there.”
He remains astonished that an accomplished Black professional could be treated with such boldfaced contempt on a television news program. The notion that conservative thinking could be perceived as hostile or alien to the Black experience captivated him.
“It just seemed silly, to think Black people couldn’t be conservative or couldn’t be Republican,” said Mr. Malone, who is White.
The outlook permeates his film “Uncle Tom,” a black-and-white documentary that showcases several Black conservatives.
I have not seen these protests in Europe being reported on here in the states. We are not alone in our resistance to draconian corona virus rules. Nancy
Not long ago, the terms “corporate America” and “corporate culture” were synonymous with staid country-club Republican values. Corporate America has been inching left for years, but in recent weeks this trend has exploded. It was once cool and countercultural to be liberal. Today, the left is the establishment, and conservatives are part of a new counterculture that quietly seethes as the companies we patronize inundate us with woke virtue signaling.
Start with my morning coffee. I love La Colombe but was dismayed when the company joined the Facebook advertiser boycott, which now has nearly 1,000 companies. La Colombe said in an Instagram post that it was “calling for an end to hate for profit on social media.” I went to their website and saw a banner on the home page advertising a limited edition coffee and mug with proceeds “supporting the ACLU!”
I switched to tea for a couple of days, then got curious and looked at the website of Numi, my favorite tea company. I learned that Numi “stands in solidarity” with Black Lives Matter and the Anti Police Terror Project, among others. Now I’m drinking water with breakfast.
It should be ironic that La Colombe is on the one hand boycotting Facebook for failing to censor enough content, and on the other supporting an organization that’s supposed to protect civil liberties. In 2018 the ACLU advised Facebook against censoring offensive speech, but it’s been silent on the issue during the current boycott. Its most recent free-speech press releases condemn the EARN IT Act, which seeks to curb the spread of child-abuse images on social media. The ACLU is concerned the bipartisan bill would be “a disaster” for “the LGBTQ and sex worker communities.”
If you click on the link you will be able to hear an in-depth analysis in a video of how Wokeness is affecting our country. Nancy
Wokeness” has become the nomenclature for the ideology or mentality of radical leftist activists on college campuses, at protests, and on social media.
But wokeness has not been limited to just a handful of activists. It’s becoming a dominant mindset in the American workplace, in both the public and private sectors, as a method to promote “anti-racism.”
A Heritage Foundation panel on July 24 addressed first what wokeness actually is, but also how it has crept into corporate boardrooms and why it’s such a problem.
Angela Sailor, vice president of The Feulner Institute at The Heritage Foundation, said that “pervasive trends under the guise of equality makes diversity training in government, and corporate America, and schools, destructive, divisive, and harmful.”
How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>
James Lindsay, the co-author of a forthcoming book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody,” says wokeness is actually a combination of many different ideas.
“Wokeness is a fusion of the critical theory school of neo-Marxism, which is a form of identity politics, and radical activism that has a very particular worldview that separates the world into liberationists versus oppressors or oppressed versus oppressors,” said Lindsay, whose book is set for release Aug. 25.
It marries that, Lindsay said, with postmodern theory, which holds that “all applications of truth are actually applications of politics by other means.”
In other words, the truth is malleable, based on power and who drives the narrative of what truth really is. In effect, the truth is replaced by my truth.
Marxism is a mostly economic theory, with origins in the 19th century. Those ideas, he said, led to some of the worst atrocities in world history.
Traditional Marxist ideas were adopted but changed in the 1920s by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and others, and became the project of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. That new theory focused more on shaping culture, Lindsay said, marrying traditional Marxism with Freudian psychology and other social theories to change the way people think.
If you click on the link you will be able to hear an in-depth analysis in a video of how Wokeness is affecting our country. Nancy
Wokeness” has become the nomenclature for the ideology or mentality of radical leftist activists on college campuses, at protests, and on social media.
But wokeness has not been limited to just a handful of activists. It’s becoming a dominant mindset in the American workplace, in both the public and private sectors, as a method to promote “anti-racism.”
A Heritage Foundation panel on July 24 addressed first what wokeness actually is, but also how it has crept into corporate boardrooms and why it’s such a problem.
Angela Sailor, vice president of The Feulner Institute at The Heritage Foundation, said that “pervasive trends under the guise of equality makes diversity training in government, and corporate America, and schools, destructive, divisive, and harmful.”
How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>
James Lindsay, the co-author of a forthcoming book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody,” says wokeness is actually a combination of many different ideas.
“Wokeness is a fusion of the critical theory school of neo-Marxism, which is a form of identity politics, and radical activism that has a very particular worldview that separates the world into liberationists versus oppressors or oppressed versus oppressors,” said Lindsay, whose book is set for release Aug. 25.
It marries that, Lindsay said, with postmodern theory, which holds that “all applications of truth are actually applications of politics by other means.”
In other words, the truth is malleable, based on power and who drives the narrative of what truth really is. In effect, the truth is replaced by my truth.
Marxism is a mostly economic theory, with origins in the 19th century. Those ideas, he said, led to some of the worst atrocities in world history.
Traditional Marxist ideas were adopted but changed in the 1920s by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and others, and became the project of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. That new theory focused more on shaping culture, Lindsay said, marrying traditional Marxism with Freudian psychology and other social theories to change the way people think.
The goal of postmodernists who were part of that movement was to “deconstruct the very meanings of things,” said Lindsay.
Those ideas reached a new phase with the writings of Herbert Marcuse, a Columbia University professor in the 1960s and 1970s who advocated radical activism based on identity politics.
But this radicalism burned out, Lindsay said, because its violence ultimately made it unpopular.
The radicals then left the streets and embedded themselves in our schools and universities.
“It has all of the conflict theory—separate the world into oppressor-versus-oppressed classes—with zero-sum conflict, no ability to agree or understand one another across those, and then takes on the postmodern understanding of truth being just politics by other means, which removes all of the brakes standing up against it,” Lindsay said.
Seeing the world through that lens is what constitutes wokeness.
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and author of the new book “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free,” explained how these ideas entered the workplace under the guise of combating racism and why they are so toxic.
“Anti-racism training is a con,” Gonzalez said. “These consultants get paid exorbitant amounts of money. Often these fees come from taxpayer funds.”
Though many of the advocates of wokeness are con artists, we have to take them seriously, Gonzalez said, because there is a strong ideological component to it.
“The true name of anti-racism training is consciousness-raising struggle sessions,” he said.
It’s used to demolish the “hegemonic narrative,” which in simpler terms, Gonzalez said, is simply “the American story, the American dream, the promise of liberty and prosperity that have attracted about 100 million immigrants from all over the world from 1850 to the present.”
Christopher Rufo, the director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, has delved into how “anti-racist training,” together with the Black Lives Matter movement, has invaded the boardroom and government.
“This is now becoming the default ideology of the bureaucracy, and people are making, in some cases, millions of dollars offering essentially political indoctrination on the public dime to public employees,” Rufo said.
All levels of government, as well as nonprofits and corporations, now have human resources departments that have adopted critical race theory as their dominant functioning ideology, he said, adding that it’s become a particularly big problem at the federal level.
“You have an apparatus of federal power that has grown extraordinarily since the days of Woodrow Wilson through [Franklin Roosevelt] through [Lyndon Johnson] in this kind of permanently expanding power that until recently, at least theoretically, operated under the ostensible ideology of the social sciences, of neutrality, but it’s really been abandoned,” Rufo said.
The permanent bureaucracy, no matter who the president is, has adopted critical race theory as its ideology of choice.
That’s leading to a “change in regime” that has never been voted on or approved by the American people, Rufo said. The result is that the machinery of the bureaucracy will be weaponized against the American people.
Rufo spoke of potential ways to stop this form of regime change. He said that it’s important to create institutional infrastructure to protect people from being targeted and “canceled.”
Gonzalez said that it is essential to inform other Americans of the transformation taking place and warn them of the radical changes to come if these ideas are not stopped.
“The more we write about this, the more we expose people to what has taken place, to why, who did it, how they did it, and what is their real goal here, we can start to demolish this idea that ‘no, this is nice because people need … justice,’” Gonzalez said, adding: “Let’s really be honest, and without rancor in our heart, just expose them. Sunshine can be a great disinfectant. Let’s really allow in the light and expose this for what it is.”
The goal of postmodernists who were part of that movement was to “deconstruct the very meanings of things,” said Lindsay.
Those ideas reached a new phase with the writings of Herbert Marcuse, a Columbia University professor in the 1960s and 1970s who advocated radical activism based on identity politics.
But this radicalism burned out, Lindsay said, because its violence ultimately made it unpopular.
The radicals then left the streets and embedded themselves in our schools and universities.
“It has all of the conflict theory—separate the world into oppressor-versus-oppressed classes—with zero-sum conflict, no ability to agree or understand one another across those, and then takes on the postmodern understanding of truth being just politics by other means, which removes all of the brakes standing up against it,” Lindsay said.
Seeing the world through that lens is what constitutes wokeness.
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and author of the new book “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free,” explained how these ideas entered the workplace under the guise of combating racism and why they are so toxic.
“Anti-racism training is a con,” Gonzalez said. “These consultants get paid exorbitant amounts of money. Often these fees come from taxpayer funds.”
Though many of the advocates of wokeness are con artists, we have to take them seriously, Gonzalez said, because there is a strong ideological component to it.
“The true name of anti-racism training is consciousness-raising struggle sessions,” he said.
It’s used to demolish the “hegemonic narrative,” which in simpler terms, Gonzalez said, is simply “the American story, the American dream, the promise of liberty and prosperity that have attracted about 100 million immigrants from all over the world from 1850 to the present.”
Christopher Rufo, the director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, has delved into how “anti-racist training,” together with the Black Lives Matter movement, has invaded the boardroom and government.
“This is now becoming the default ideology of the bureaucracy, and people are making, in some cases, millions of dollars offering essentially political indoctrination on the public dime to public employees,” Rufo said.
All levels of government, as well as nonprofits and corporations, now have human resources departments that have adopted critical race theory as their dominant functioning ideology, he said, adding that it’s become a particularly big problem at the federal level.
“You have an apparatus of federal power that has grown extraordinarily since the days of Woodrow Wilson through [Franklin Roosevelt] through [Lyndon Johnson] in this kind of permanently expanding power that until recently, at least theoretically, operated under the ostensible ideology of the social sciences, of neutrality, but it’s really been abandoned,” Rufo said.
The permanent bureaucracy, no matter who the president is, has adopted critical race theory as its ideology of choice.
That’s leading to a “change in regime” that has never been voted on or approved by the American people, Rufo said. The result is that the machinery of the bureaucracy will be weaponized against the American people.
Rufo spoke of potential ways to stop this form of regime change. He said that it’s important to create institutional infrastructure to protect people from being targeted and “canceled.”
Gonzalez said that it is essential to inform other Americans of the transformation taking place and warn them of the radical changes to come if these ideas are not stopped.
“The more we write about this, the more we expose people to what has taken place, to why, who did it, how they did it, and what is their real goal here, we can start to demolish this idea that ‘no, this is nice because people need … justice,’” Gonzalez said, adding: “Let’s really be honest, and without rancor in our heart, just expose them. Sunshine can be a great disinfectant. Let’s really allow in the light and expose this for what it is.”
We’ve been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages. But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.
In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility in any case. The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.
It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution. But we are not the New York Times. Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.