by Clarice Feldman, American Thinker:
I suggest you start preparing for a great deal of left-wing civic violence, supply disruptions (including food shortages) and widespread urban chaos. I say this because it is my sense that the Democrats, deep state, and their media enablers are all in rough shape and have no other way out but to fall back on their usual criminal methods of retaining power.
I find it impossible to believe that President Biden will be the Democrat nominee, and if he is, that he can win. What do the Democrats do? They certainly can’t substitute Kamala Harris for Biden; she’s tanked in opinion polls even lower and faster than has Biden. There are no nationally known non-geriatric substitutes in the wings, save for California governor Gavin Newsom, whose record for screwing up is at least as bad as Biden’s. Youth and a good haircut can only go so far outside Newsom’s home state. Even liberals are now conceding the West Coast has lost its way and become dysfunctional, and who is a better avatar of West Coast progressives than Newsom?
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In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof asks if they have lost their way. He decries the lack of sensible governance, arguing that good intentions aren’t enough and good governance has demonstrably been lacking:
[M]y take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes. [snip]
Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.
For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.
The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering. [snip]
One of the passions of the left, drawing partly on Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” has been that if a policy leads to racial inequity, then it’s racist even if it wasn’t meant to be. But by that standard, West Coast progressivism abounds in racism.
We in the West impeded home construction in ways that made cities unaffordable, especially for people of color. We let increasing numbers of people struggle with homelessness, particularly Black and brown people. Black people in Portland are also murdered at higher rates than in cities more notorious for violence, and Seattle and Portland have some of the greatest racial disparities in arrests in the country. [snip] It’s absolutely true that good intentions are not enough. What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and the best path to do that is a relentless empiricism — which clashes with the West Coast’s indifference to the laws of economics.
The basic reason for homelessness on the West Coast is an enormous shortage of housing that drives up rents. California lacks about three million housing units, in part because it’s difficult to get permission to build. [snip] Public sector efforts to build housing are often ruinously expensive, with “affordable housing” sometimes costing more than $1 million per unit, so the private sector is critical. Yet one element of progressive purity is suspicion of the private sector, and this hobbles efforts to make businesses part of the solution. Business owners who earn an income from their company are effectively barred from serving on the Portland City Council. [snip]
Without opposition party oversight, problems aren’t always fixed expeditiously.
His experience is largely in Portland, but the Portland experience is as relevant to all of Newsom’s California.
Here’s Jillian Michaels, a fitness guru who’s a lesbian, daughter of a Jewish woman and an Arab father, and an adoptive mother of two children — one black and one part Hispanic — on why she moved to Florida from her home state of California:
“I hold a million cards in your game of woke victimology poker. And when I leave California, maybe you’ve lost your f—ing mind. Just maybe! Like when you have me running from home, maybe it’s gone way too far.” She says she can’t stand Newsom as for the laws under his governance she displays utter contempt:
“Some of these laws that are passing here are absolutely f—ing mind-boggling,” Michaels said. “In relation to crime, protecting our kids, like, we’re decriminalizing everything, which arguably I would probably be okay with but we’re not regulating any of it. So it’s like, okay, you’re gonna decriminalize sex work but only so women can loiter on the streets, not to keep them safe, not to have them pay taxes, not to make them, you know, regularly check for STDs, not to take away the pimps out of the equation. Like if you made that argument to me, I’d be like, ‘well, yes, of course.’ I could be liberal! I could go there with you! I grew up this way! Or the fact that a 12-year-old child can be put on off-label cancer drugs to irreparably change their body. Again, if my son came to me and said, ‘Mom’ — or my daughter — ‘I think I’m trans.’ I’d say okay, you know, like, you want to dress this way. You want me to call you whatever the heck you want, dress, fine. Explore it. I love you. I’m cool, do you as long as we’re safe, but we’re not changing your body until it’s fully developed. I’m sorry. Conversation’s over. Can’t get a f—ing tattoo!
So, even someone you’d suppose would ignore the dysfunctionality of the West Coast left finds it a bridge too far.
I think I’m not far off the mark when I suggest that the Democrat-run institutions and cities, which regularly are tolerating, if not encouraging, violent demonstrations by demonstrably linked green, pro-Palestine, Antifa gangs, are setting the stage for November’s elections, with the federal government’s apparent connivance. There’s no indication that the FBI is seriously investigating these groups for criminal behavior or even foreign influence. No one seems to be stopping the road and highway blockages and as the left’s election prospects grow dimmer, I see them upping their game.
Of course, using the easily mismanaged and hacked electronic voting machines they will make every effort to rig the results. But the gambit best used in 2020 — changing (illegally) the voting rules on the pretext of a pandemic — seems less likely this time around. And the Republicans say they are upping their game to minimize election cheating. Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump reports, that she and the RNC are working to raise a veritable army of “over 100,000 poll watchers and over 500 lawyers” to “deploy” at election sites across the country in November. “
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