What is Racism?

The recent Democratic presidential primary debate in New Hampshire offered another glimpse into the core strategy of the Democratic party – increase the percentages of nonwhite voters by any means necessary, and convince all of them that Republicans are racists.

Every candidate was on board with the message. As Bernie Sanders thundered when it was his turn, “We have a racist society from top to bottom.” Elizabeth Warren sounded almost sinister when she called for “race-conscious laws in education, in employment, in entrepreneurship.” Billionaire Tom Steyer called for “reparations.”

Elsewhere in America, candidate and billionaire Michael Bloomberg has apologized for his previous honesty about crime in New York City. All of these candidates agree: whites are racists, whites must be penitent, whites must make amends. They all have a plan.

Rather than highlight further examples of Democrats trying to outdo each other in trashing Americans as inveterate racists, much less exposing their hypocrisy, why not step back and examine the entire concept of racism. What is it? When is it truly deplorable, and when is it just a rhetorical bludgeon to attract naïve voters?

The reason racism is such a preoccupation for Democrats is so much because it still exists, but because by claiming it is a pervasive threat, they can manipulate voters. The following are common types of racism according to Democrats. Given the creativity of the racial justice warriors, this list is undoubtedly incomplete.

Unconscious Racism: Any negative behavior that is marketed as “unconscious” has to be put into perspective. These actions are either (1) totally innocent remarks and conduct that normal people would brush off without a second thought, (2) gaffes that socially awkward people make out of complete innocence, or (3) remarks and attitudes that are considered rude anyway, don’t require a label, and earn corrective social sanctions without requiring the intervention of intellectual experts and interventionist legislators. Does “unconscious racism” exist? Yes. But is the reality of unconscious racism, along with “microaggressions” (which are “microscopic,” hence, micro-aggression) worth diverting hundreds of millions of dollars to expand departments of “equity, diversity and inclusion” in America’s colleges and universities – and, increasingly, corporate America? No. And it is not racist to say so.

Institutional Racism: There is no debate that institutional racism against blacks and other minorities used to exist in America. But this racism is part of history, not the present. In all its forms, from the “peculiar institution” of slavery, to Jim Crow laws, to redlining, it has been wiped out. The truly institutionalized racism that remains in America is not directed against nonwhites, but against whites. Nowadays, in every American institution from corporations to colleges and universities to government contracting, whites – white men in particular – are the last to be hired, promoted, granted admission, or awarded a contract. In a well-regulated intersectional frenzy, any search for personnel invariably and relentlessly seeks out “people of color,” then women, and last of all, able-bodied, “cis/hetero” white males. Volumes could be written on this travesty (and have), whereby one form of institutional racism has been replaced by another. The idea that institutional racism in America today discriminates against nonwhites is laughable. Calling for this new form of institutional racism which is anti-white (and at times anti-Asian) to be abolished, is not racist.

Racial Profiling: This is a canard disguised as a cause distilled into talking points. The number of police encounters with nonwhites vs whites has to be matched with the number of crimes committed by nonwhites versus whites. And the data is unequivocal. The biggest victims when police are deterred from enforcing the law in nonwhite communities are the law-abiding citizens of those communities. It is true that racist incidents still occur in America between police and nonwhite citizens, sometimes with tragic, fatal results. But there are more than 1 million sworn police officers in America. There are probably over 1 billion police interactions with citizens every year in America. When you have a billion apples in a barrel, a few are going to be rotten. But pointing to a handful of horrific incidents of police racism, many of them based on dubious evidence, is not proof of officially sanctioned police racism. It is not racist to demand law enforcement do their job, “profiling” and all.

Disparate Outcomes/Wealth Inequality: This entire category of “racism” depends on studies, often biased and poorly sourced, that measure various achievements by groups and claim that the achievement gaps are the result of racism. This is a huge leap of logic. Why is it that supposedly white racism has held back black achievement, but has not held back Asian achievement? Why is it that some blacks, notably African immigrants, in some cases outperform whites economically in America? The dirty secret that is getting harder and harder for Democrats to conceal is that it is their own bigotry, in the form of low expectations, welfare, corrupt and mismanaged cities, lax law enforcement, and union-controlled public schools, that has done far more than the legacy of slavery and alleged white racism to deny opportunities to nonwhite communities. Encouraging nonwhites in America to step up, work hard and compete is a sign of respect, not racism.

Environmental Racism: This is one of the more insidious forms of alleged racism because it somehow equates the statistical proximity of America’s polluting infrastructure (what remains of it) to nonwhite neighborhoods as proof of racism. Insidious, because it’s one of the ways Democrats are trying to connect two distinct issues – environmentalism and race. That allows them to amplify both causes, which are already both oversold. We must save the planet, not only because the oceans are rising, but because saving the planet will ameliorate racism. But it’s based on a lie. The real reason for the statistical correlation between nonwhite communities and polluting infrastructure should be obvious. When you destroy the earnings potential of nonwhite communities through the politics of dependency, then they can only afford to purchase or rent inexpensive housing. And those less expensive homes are going to be the ones that happen to be close to polluting infrastructure because there’s less demand for homes near polluting infrastructure.

That’s just basic economics. It has nothing to do with racism.

Racist Voter Suppression: In one of their most brazen inversions of logic, Democrats are selling the idea that if you put in place safeguards to prevent voter fraud, you are conspiring to defraud voters. This is pure chicanery.

While issuing disclaimers every step of the way, Democrats are doing everything in their power to make it easier to commit mass voter fraud, from their flawed voting apps in Iowa to implementation of “motor voter” laws, mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, automatic registration at age 18, lowering the voting age to 16, and even making it a crime for registered voters not to vote.

Remember John Podesta, late on election night back in 2016, speaking in code to his operatives in the back rooms of precinct houses in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia? “They’re still counting votes, and every vote should count. Several states are too close to call.” The system wasn’t quite rigged enough back then. But they’re working overtime to fix that. And they have the nerve to claim that requiring a valid form of identification to vote is “racist.” It’s not.

Democrats are the Party Guilty of Racial Abuse

There can be endless debate over whether any of these forms of white racism still exist, and if so, still exist in sufficient measure to require even more laws, regulations, or even reparations. But citing examples of racism, and arguing over how prevalent they are, doesn’t get to the heart of the accusation. “America is a racist society from top to bottom.” These examples allege the how, but what is the why? What is the essence of racism?

To answer, it is first necessary to assert that racism, despite the wails of the Democrats, is not something that is exclusively practiced by whites against nonwhites. Plenty of nonwhite individuals harbor racist attitudes towards whites.

Nor do whites even have to be part of the racist equation. There are ample cases of racially motivated Hispanic antipathy toward blacks, and vise versa. The essence of racism is when anyone, no matter what their ethnicity, harbors automatic negative, prejudicial attitudes towards individuals of a different ethnicity.

This sort of racism barely exists in America today. It would be someone who believes that interracial marriage should be illegal, or who believes that the best person for a job should not be hired if they’re of a certain race. Apart from anti-white racism, which has taken over America’s institutions, that sort of racism is long gone. But there are other forms of racial abuses that are alive and well in America, growing all the time.

This racial abuse isn’t practiced by white Republicans, but by Democrats, backed by corporate socialists and globalist oligarchs. These special interests have to resort to race baiting demagoguery – as exemplified by today’s Democratic presidential primary candidates – because they cannot rely on facts and logic to justify what has become an intolerable political agenda. Their case is cynical but effective – America equals white equals racist. America is racist, therefore America must be “fundamentally transformed.”

The true agenda? Turn national citizens into global commodities.

This racial abuse practiced by Democrats, broadly defined, is the act of destroying an intact nation – borders, language, culture – in order to enhance the power, profit, and privilege of a small elite.

The strategy the Democrats are using to accomplish this, as already noted, is to increase the percentages of nonwhite voters by any means necessary, and convince all of them that Republicans hate them. The American patriots who resist the attempts by Democrats (and useless, phony opposition Republicans like Mitt Romney) to destroy their nation are not racists, they’re the ones insisting the nation be protected from those cynically working to divide and conquer us. And there are plenty of nonwhites among them.

As for America’s nonwhites who Democrats claim to protect, it is towards them that Democrats practice the most unforgivable racial abuse of all. It is obscene racial abuse for Democrats to nurture a victim mentality in the hearts of nonwhite voters, and shower them with preferences and entitlements and giveaways that take away their incentive to achieve. It is patronizing in a manner reminiscent of slavery, and perhaps actually worse, to destroy families with welfare, to destroy work ethics with impossible socialist fantasies, to destroy character with a narrative of bitterness and oppression.

Democratic momentum in America today is fueled by a marriage of convenience between diehard socialists and Communists and corporate globalists. Both of these groups are smart enough to know that their marriage of convenience is headed for an inevitable and very bloody divorce, but they hope that before that happens their alliance will be strong enough to erase America’s core traditions and historical pride. Both view the millions of people who still love American culture as obstacles to their taking complete control of the electorate, and hence the political destiny of the nation.

Before that happens, how many white Democrats may finally decide they’ve had enough of taking part in this abuse? How many nonwhite voters will realize that identity politics is a dead end putting them to work against their own interests? How many will realize the obvious connection between the redistributionist agenda of identity politics and straight-up communism? How many will realize that for nearly a half-century, Democrats have used accusations of “racism” as a way to silence dissent?

Racism has little to do anymore with actual white racism against nonwhites. Of course, a small amount of it still exists in America, as it exists wherever humans encounter others who they consider different from themselves.

But the far more significant racial abuse that threatens to destroy America transcends mere ethnicity, by weaponizing it to attack our way of life, our faith, our culture and traditions, our institutions, everything that has made us a great people and everything we cherish.

An edited version of this article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Fighting the One-Party State at the Local Level in California

It isn’t a partisan observation to say that California is a one-party state. It’s just stating a fact. The Democratic Party controls all the levers of political power in California. Consider the evidence: GOP registration is down to 23 percent of registered voters. There is a Democratic “mega-majority” (75% or more) in both chambers of the state legislature. The GOP only holds 7 out of 53 congressional seats. Democrats occupy every state office from Governor on down. The GOP hasn’t elected a U.S. Senator to represent California since 1988. Democrats control the city councils and boards of supervisors in almost every city and county. There are roughly 10,000 elected positions in California, from school boards to utility commissions and special districts, and Democrats run candidates and have professional funded campaigns for all of them, all the time.

The reasons that California is a one-party state are also not hard to understand. For this as well, the evidence is overwhelming. Virtually every financial special interest in California supports Democrats. Public sector unions, which are almost exclusively supportive of Democratic candidates and causes, collect and spend $800 million per year. California’s high tech industry, commanding mind-blowing wealth, is solidly Democratic. California’s wealthy and influential entertainment industry is solidly Democratic. The media establishment in California is also solidly Democratic, wielding priceless influence over voters. And as if that weren’t enough, politically active billionaires spend amazing sums of money in California to support Democrats.

It takes BIG money to control California politics, and the Democrats have it: California’s own Tom Steyer spent $45 million on CA ballot measures in 2012 and 2016. Steyer spent $60 million on U.S. congressional races in 2018, including several in California. New Yorker Michael Bloomberg spent an estimated 80 million on 24 battleground congressional races, and won 21 of them – including 3 in California. These and other major donors coordinated efforts with PACs supported by public sector unions to flip seven congressional seats in California in 2018 and increase their majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.

It takes hundreds of millions per year to win in California; the Democrats always have that kind of money, and the Republicans never do.

Californians Want New Ideas

A critical mass of Californians are realizing Democrats have failed them, and this, too, is not a partisan observation. There is ample evidence of how one-party rule has failed. There are now over 150,000 homeless living in permanent encampments on the streets of California”s cities. Among these unfortunate individuals are drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill, and criminals. Some of them urgently need help, others need to be incarcerated, but permissive laws and unrealistic regulations prevent action. Instead, voters are conned into paying for “affordable” public housing that costs, on average, over $500,000 per unit. The cost to build houses is prohibitive because of expensive permits (and endless delays in getting them), excessive fees, and a shortage of land where no shortage ought to exist because of “greenbelts.”

The litany of one-party state failure is endless. Taxpayers fund expansion of light rail despite low ridership, instead of upgrading California’s roads and freeways. Californians pay among the highest prices in the nation for gasoline, electricity, and natural gas. Californians endure water rationing because the one-party state won’t make effective investments in infrastructure. Californians are driven from their homes and some of them are killed because of wildfires caused by the one-party state’s negligence and misguided regulations, not “climate change.” Californians are forced to send their children to failing K-12 public schools, and when it’s time to send them to college, they will face an unaffordable tuition burden in order to pay for the population explosion of non-teaching administrators.

The one-party state has made life in California unaffordable and unfair, and the political system is rigged. But there are ways to fight back. Regardless of party affiliation, local elected officials, and citizens through the initiative process, can pass measures that have broad populist appeal. Here are examples of nonpartisan reform that are feasible at the local level.

Examples of Local Government Reforms

(1) Curb Corporate Cronyism: One way to get at this is via a “Fairness in Business” ordinance. The city council in Yorba Linda recently approved this ordinance, which  “shall prohibit any subsidy or business incentive from being provided to one business for their gain without the same subsidy or business incentive being given to all businesses.”

(2) Attack Corporate Welfare: A related measure could attack corporate welfare via a “Taxpayer Protection Resolution.” This measure would use the gift clause in the California constitution as the legal basis to minimize if not eliminate tax incentives and subsidies. The operative language would be “Government shall not expend, loan, or allow the use of public resources, nor use its taxing power, in aid of any individual, association, corporation, or other private party, unless such expenditure, loan, or use is for a public purpose, supported by consideration, and over which the public entity exercises continuing control.”

(3) Form an Independent Fire Department: California’s cities can emulate the experience of Placentia, which withdrew from the Orange County Fire Authority, with OCFA scheduled to be effectively replaced by mid 2020. According to Voice of OC, Placentia expects to save $28 million over the next 10 years by forming its own fire department and privatizing the paramedics services. Restoring local control over firefighting and emergency response services offers a huge opportunity to right-size pay, benefits, and work rules that have been a major factor in crowding out other services in California’s cities.

(4) Require Transparency in Local Government: Adopt a “Civic Openness in Negotiations” ordinance. Several California cities have passed ordinances that are helpful during negotiations with public employee unions to adopt or renew labor agreements. Key elements of COIN ordinances are the following: require an independent contract negotiator and an independent contract auditor, require public disclosure of offers and counteroffers, require elected officials to disclose all relevant communications, and allow for public disclosure and time for comments prior to final contract approval. Why hasn’t this always been the law?

(5) Get Retiree Health Insurance Spending Under Control: Right-size retired employee health insurance subsidies. In 2015 the City of Glendale decided to no longer guarantee that retirees would pay no more than active employees for their health insurance, by no longer subsidizing the higher premiums that typically apply with older participants. As noted in Glendale’s 2017 Annual Financial Report: “In October 2015, the City Council approved unblending medical insurance premium rates between active employees and retired employees effective June 1, 2016. Accordingly, City’s actuarial liability decreased from $214 million as of 6/30/2013 to $16 million as of 6/30/2016.

(6) Keep Taxpayer Funds Out of Political Advocacy: Regulate use of city or county expenditures on “public information campaigns.” California’s public officials have sought to raise local taxes and fees through “information” campaigns designed to appeal to local voters. These are thinly veiled, barely legal forms of political campaigning. Make them explicitly illegal, through a measure that states, among other things: “This city/county will not use public money – either internally, through its own staff and treasury, or externally, through the hiring or use of outside vendors – to engage in public education; public opinion polling or studies; or communications intended or may seem to be intended to determine the outcome of political campaigns.”

(7) Pension Reform: Two major cities enacted pension reform in the past decade, San Jose, and San Diego. Both of these reforms were relentlessly attacked in court by attorneys representing public sector unions, but significant reform elements remained in effect. Some of the key reforms include: Restrict what qualifies as pension eligible compensation. Move new employees onto 401K plans. Set a maximum percent-of-salary limit on city contributions to pensions. Change age of eligibility for pension benefits. Reduce maximum allowable cost of living adjustments to retiree pensions. Cap amount of pension eligible final salary. Assign “disability” retirement awards to independent panel. Discontinue “supplemental” pension payments to retirees.

Using the Initiative Process to Enact Local Reforms

While a city council of county board of supervisors can enact local political reforms, the initiative process offers a method to bypass the local elected officials. Getting a measure onto local ballots in California is still a fairly straightforward process.

Local Initiative Process:

  • Draft ballot measure and submit to City Attorney
  • Verify signature petition meets state and local legal requirements
  • Publish legal ad within 10 days of receiving title & summary
  • Gather signatures – typically 10 percent of registered voters
  • Collect 50 percent more signatures than you need (15 percent)
  • Submit signed petitions within 180 days of getting title & summary
  • City has 30 business days to verify signatures
  • If City doesn’t enact measure, it goes before voters in next election

While all of the already listed reforms can be enacted by a governing body or by a vote of local residents, doing it by initiative actually has some advantages. Most notable, a citizen’s initiative cannot typically be overturned by a city council or board of supervisors, it can only be repealed by holding a referendum asking voters to repeal what they’d previously approved. Since the one-party state can almost always retake control of a city council or county board of supervisors where the political reformers temporarily gained a majority, the initiative route implements a solution that can be more durable and lasting.

The following examples of political reforms via the local initiative process are actually being tried in California. In North Los Angeles County, a group of volunteer activists have placed several ballot measures before voters that if approved would repeal various local tax increases, usually utility taxes. In Oxnard, a group of volunteer activists are attempting to place a slate of linked initiatives on their local ballot, a tactic which makes sweeping changes possible in one election cycle.

(1) Repeal Local Tax Increases: Sample language can be quite simple, as shown by this example from a repeal measure placed on the April 2018 ballot in Sierra Madre: “Shall the City of Sierra Madre adopt a measure repealing the City’s Utility Users Tax in its entirety?” Political reformers who succeed in getting these proposals onto local ballots should prepare for a creative counterattack in the form of an “Advisory Measure” placed adjacent to the repeal on the ballot, asking voters “if the tax repeal passes, should the City Council eliminate paramedic services, reduce and outsource police services and library services, reduce code enforcement, and fire suppression service…”

(2) Place several reforms on the ballot at once, such as was attempted in Oxnard with the following five ballot measures: Fiscal Transparency and Accountability Act, which would make the city treasurer, an elected official, the head of the finance department. Keeping the Promise for Streets Act, which would deny the city certain sales tax revenue if it fails to maintain streets to specific levels. Term Limits Act, which would limit the mayor and council members to no more than two consecutive four-year terms. Open Meetings Act, which would require city meetings to begin no earlier than 5 p.m. and allow public speakers no less than three minutes to comment. Permit Simplicity Act, which would reform the permitting system with training, new guidelines and an auditing process that would lead an applicant to obtain a permit in one business day.

Other Ways to Fight for Nonpartisan Political Reform in California

To state the obvious, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive list of political reforms that can be enacted at the local level in California. A few additional noteworthy items are: reform the binding arbitration process, resist the ongoing assault on charter schools, defend the right of public employers to speak openly to employees about the costs and benefits of union membership, fight to enforce the Janus decision, and raise public awareness about the harm government unions are doing to our democracy.

The political landscape in California, unfortunately, cannot be significantly changed without state legislation or state ballot initiatives. Absolutely crippling, cruel legislation passed in Sacramento by the uni-party has brought California to the brink of becoming a feudal state, and only statewide rolling back of these laws will result in dramatic change. But citizens initiatives that work at the local level can also work at the state level. It just takes a lot more signatures to get it done.

State Initiative Process:

  • Draft ballot measure and submit to Attorney General
  • Get title & summary, begin signature gathering period
  • File petition with election officials in all 58 counties
  • Statute or referendum 5% (623,212), amendment 8% (997,139), of votes cast for governor in most recent election
  • Collect 30-50 percent more signatures than you need
  • Submit signed petitions within 180 days of getting title & summary – must be submitted by county
  • Petitions must be submitted six months prior to November election

This is a daunting undertaking, which is why most state ballot initiatives require millions in funding to pay for professional signature gatherers, attorneys and consultants. And then, if the initiative is qualified for the state ballot, additional tens of millions must be spent to run a campaign in a state with 20 million registered voters, spanning seven major television media markets.

There are exciting new ways these costs can be driven way down, way down, by using the latest online technologies and by viral networking of disgruntled, disenfranchised activists. Millions of these people still live in California, and all of them want to do something to save their state. But a good first start for reformers is to attack on the local level, where they have a chance to marshal sufficient forces to prevail.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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NeverTrump Could Cost GOP House and Senate

Trump’s chances for reelection have never been higher. The latest Gallup poll puts his approval rating at 49 percent, other polls have measured even higher, and he just gave the speech of his life in his third annual State of the Union address. But watch out. Without GOP control of the Senate in 2020, much less recovering control of the House of Representatives, the impact of a second Trump presidency will be profoundly diminished.

It’s bad enough that left-wing billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Donald Sussman, James Simons, George Soros, Stephen Schwarzman, Fred Eychaner, Karla Jurvetson, and Jeff Bezos have contributed hundreds of millions almost exclusively to Democrats over the past few years. For example, in 2018 these Democratic mega-moguls constituted nine of the top twelve individual political contributors to federal elections.

Funny how the American media and most citizens still believe that the GOP is the party of the rich. And then there are the unions, who routinely spend in favor of Democrats at a ratio of roughly ten-to-one. Public sector unions, using money flowing directly from taxpayers into the treasuries of Democratic campaigns, are the worst offenders of all.

Unwinding who gives to whom is a tedious process, but if anyone doubts that the big money is favoring Democrats, consider the words of GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in reference to the 2020 congressional races, “They are kicking our ass,” he said, referring to Democrats.

As reported in Politico on January 28, “House Republican leaders privately conceded in a closed meeting Tuesday morning that they are in the midst of a full-blown fundraising crisis, which would imperil any chance they have at regaining their majority in 2020.”

Despite a Trump surge, the money and ground game on the down ticket federal races overwhelmingly favors Democrats across the nation. This means the GOP could lose seats in the House in 2020, where they already are 35 seats short of a majority, and they might even lose their thin majority in the Senate. FiveThirtyEight.com ranks four of the 23 seats Republicans have to defend in 2020 as toss-ups. RollCall.com considers six GOP senators at risk.

Republicans Are Helping Democrats Defeat Republicans

Ever since Trump roared onto the scene in June 2015, the Republican establishment has been on the defensive. As Michael Anton put it in his pivotal 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” Republicans have spent the last twenty years engaging in phony opposition. He writes: “To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.”

Today, some of the smartest Republican establishment operatives are doing everything they can to see Trump defeated. Consider the title of this guest opinion piece that was recently welcomed onto the editorial pages of the New York Times: “We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated.”

The authors of this hit piece are not lightweights. They’ve worked in the inner circles for top tier GOP candidates, including Bush Jr. and Bush Sr., McCain, Kasich and Schwarzenegger. But there’s a pattern here; these consultants are all establishment Republicans, who served establishment Republican candidates. They were also, presumably, unemployed.

The most recently visible of the co-authors, who in their New York Times column claim that Trump’s GOP defenders are “imbued with an ugliness, a meanness and a willingness to attack and slander those who have shed blood for our country,” is none other than Rick Wilson. For those who have already put his shameful performance out of their minds, Wilson is the man who joined CNN host Don Lemon to ridicule Trump voters as “the credulous boomer rube demo,” that thinks “Don’l Trump’s the smart one and y’all elitists are duuuumb,” with “your math and your readin’….and all those liiiines on the map.”

Exactly what part of Wilson’s moments of candor on CNN were not “imbued with an ugliness, a meanness and a willingness to attack and slander”? Further evidence of this can be found in an in-depth interview Wilson gave Salon on January 16, 2020. Just in case one might think Wilson’s CNN performance was an aberration, here’s the title of the Salon interview: “Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson: ‘F**king hating’ Trump is the key to winning in 2020.”

Wilson and his cohorts are smart people, using everything they’ve learned in a lifetime of politics to help Democrats in the 2020 election. Here’s a revealing excerpt from Wilson’s Salon interview, where he talks about what it will take to boost Democratic voter turnout:

“I helped build this machine. I helped do this a long time. Lord, give me a Democratic policy briefing book because I will make a hundred ads out of it. They will be demagogic. They will be terrifying. They will be lies piled upon lies. But the fundamental thing is that they will scare the crap out of the voters I want to scare the crap out of.”

A Trump victory in 2020 cannot be taken for granted, but the chances he will win look better than ever. Which party ends up in control of the House and Senate, however, hangs by a thread. And into what is a tight, uphill battle for Republicans, wades the Never Trump Republicans. What motivates them? Could it be that these consultants who boast they can build “lies piled upon lies,” and who by their own admission “built these machines,” are upset because they’re out of work? It’s hard to assign moral credibility to anyone who is capable of the performance that Rick Wilson just delivered on CNN. What about the rest of them?

Mitt Romney Epitomizes the Pathetically Grasping Never Trump Mindset

Which brings us to our favorite Never Trumper, Mitt Romney. To indulge in some Rick Wilsonian cruelty, Romney is not aging well. Catch a photo or video of him when he’s a bit fatigued. Observe his high, top heavy, squared off forehead, his prominent brows and sunken eyes, and that grimace that passes for a smile. If you blurred that image only slightly, you might mistake him for Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

This is an apt metaphor, since Romney is a cobbled agglomeration of parts: part moralist, part opportunist, part globalist, part patriot, part Democrat, part Republican, part religious devotee, part corporate raider. Partly a Trump sycophant, groveling for a Secretary of State appointment. Partly a Never Trump backstabber, “reluctantly” opposing Trump whenever it might goose his chances to someday himself become president. Newsflash, Mitt, you will never be the American president. Nobody trusts you, not even your Mormon constituents in your latest adopted “home state” of Utah.

Maybe an even better example of a Romney equivalent would Tolkien’s Gollum, whose desire for the One Ring consumed him. What a perfect metaphor – the One Ring is the ultimate power. Picture Gollum in the movie versions of the book, his burning eyes, his long, withered, grasping fingers, his aged skin stretched over his skeletal form. It’s Mitt!

For the best description of Romney, however, one must go all the way back to Hunter Thompson’s unforgettable book “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972,” where he compares a career politician on the scent of the presidency to a bull elk in a mating rut. Here is a snippet of Thompson’s arresting prose:

“The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of  human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares. A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way.”

Don’t believe a word of Romney’s pious disclaimers. Impeachment put him in a rut.

If you were to select another member of America’s establishment uni-party who most resembles Mitt Romney, the monster, it could easily be the cadaverous Tom Steyer. Find anything the two of them – both former hedge fund predators – might disagree on. Open borders? Check. Lower wages? Check. Outsourcing? Check. De-industrialization? Check. Trade giveaways? Check. Endless war? Check. At least Steyer, to his credit, calls himself a Democrat.

The Choice Between Democrat and Republican Candidates in 2020

Here’s a reality check for Mitt Romney, along with Rick Wilson and his Never Trump super PAC, along with Bill Kristol and his “Bulwark,” and all the rest of the GOP’s Fifth Column who claim they’re trying to help America. They’re not. Their criticism of Trump is hollow, transparently self-interested babble. They are dancing with the Devil, each of them, because Trump didn’t make them Queen of the Prom. With America at an epic crossroads, it’s really that petty.

Let’s remind ourselves what Democrats (and Never Trump Republicans) stand for, along with open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless war:

Democrats want us to believe that America is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, blah blah blah, [insert*]phobic, hatemongering nation. They spread this despicable lie in America’s union controlled public schools, in the leftist controlled media and entertainment complex, and via every politician with a “D” by their names, despite the fact that America is the most inclusive and tolerant nation to ever exist.

To “mitigate” for America’s many “phobias,” Democrats want to tighten the regulatory screws down even further. They want to expand the mandates that in every institution in the nation – academia, business, politics, even art and music – at all levels, require every identifiable “protected status group” to be present in the exact same proportions as they are represented in the general population. What could possibly go wrong?

Democrats also want us to believe the planet is in imminent peril thanks to “climate change” induced by use of fossil fuel. They are pushing a “carbon neutral” future as a matter of dire emergency, heedless of the fact that 85 percent of all global energy comes from fossil fuel, and heedless as well of the fact that energy production worldwide needs to double if humanity is to have any chance of lifting its final burgeoning billions out of high birth rates and desperate poverty.

Never mind. Ration energy. Ration land, transportation, water; micromanage everything. Create a society existing primarily to monitor and, as deemed appropriate, suppress all economic activity, relying on an army of bureaucrats, a panopticon of algorithms, with every durable appliance from cars to coffee makers wired into a surveillance device. Connect any contrarian desire for freedom and property rights to every smear in the book – racist, xenophobe, “denier.” Flood the nation with “climate refugees.”

Shall we go on? This is the tyranny that Never Trump Republicans are inviting. It is difficult to find words too harsh for what they are doing.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Teachers Union Promotes Property Tax Increase

Last week what is arguably California’s most powerful political special interest, the California Teachers Association (CTA), or teachers union, held its quarterly State Council of Education meeting at the plush Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

The CTA reported revenues of $209 million on their most recent IRS Form 990 (results through 8/31/2018), and their total assets increased from $296 million to $334 million. The CTA’s “savings and temporary cash investments” increased from $56 million to $79 million during their most recent year of operations.

Even here in California, these are astonishing sums of money. Moreover, the CTA, operating statewide, only wields about half of the teachers union’s financial firepower deployed in California. Additional financial resources come from the CTA’s national affiliate, the National Education Association, as well as from the dozens of major local affiliates, such as the United Teachers of Los Angeles.

Getting Rid of Proposition 13 Protection for Commercial Properties

A helpful mole inside the CTA’s recent meeting has provided four examples of what is one of the top priorities for the CTA these days, which is to strip commercial properties of the protections they have enjoyed under Prop. 13. To that end, they have endorsed and are major contributors to the “Schools & Communities First” state ballot initiative, likely to face voters in November 2020.

Since 1978, Prop. 13 has limited property assessments to a maximum of 2 percent increases per year when calculating the base on which to impose property taxes. The only time the taxable base value is reset is when a property is sold. If a business property is inherited, to purposes of property taxation the descendants inherit the base value without reassessment.

Let’s be clear, Prop. 13 protection constitutes one of the last, if not the last, advantage businesses have when trying to operate in California. As this first flyer shows, that last bit of relief businesses get in what is the most inhospitable state in America is not as important as putting “Schools & Communities First.”

A very long time ago, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan famously had this to say about business taxes:

“Some say shift the tax burden to business and industry, but business doesn’t pay taxes. Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. Business is being taxed, so much so that we’re being priced out of the world market. But business must pass its costs of operations–and that includes taxes–on to the customer in the price of the product. Only people pay taxes, all the taxes. Government just uses businesses in a kind of sneaky way to help collect the taxes. They’re hidden in the price; we aren’t aware of how much tax we actually pay.”

In reality, it’s worse than that, because the corporations that will be able to pass on higher costs to the consumer will be the major multinational corporations, the franchises, the chains, whatever outposts of big business that haven’t already pulled out of California.

The victims, that will not be able to pass on higher costs to the consumer when their property taxes suddenly go sky high are the small family owned businesses. Many of these small businesses are multi-generational, and the only reason they have been able to stay in business is because their property taxes are manageable. But have a look at this next flyer.

According to the CTA, the “Schools and Communities First” Act will “level the playing field for all the businesses that already pay their fair share.” Wrong. It will tilt the playing field in favor of the mega-corporations, taking away the last advantage of the little guys.

The dirty secret that the CTA in particular and California’s one-party political establishment in general don’t want voters to know is that over-regulation helps big business. The biggest, most financially secure businesses use regulations to consolidate their position at the top, while the smaller competitors die off because they can’t to afford to comply.

If you’re wondering how the CTA intends to get the “Schools & Communities First” Act onto the ballot, have a look at this next flyer. There’s big money behind gathering signatures, but in Los Angeles last week the CTA was making sure every available activist had a chance to get personally involved.

How could anyone refuse this pitch? Look at the boxes that are prechecked: “End the shady tax breaks for corporations and wealthy investors.” Too bad the biggest ones are the least harmed by this change in the law, while the mom and pop businesses are going to drop like flies.

As for “Reclaim over $12 billion per year for K-12 schools and communities,” well, that’s right, the estimated annual proceeds of $12 billion – 100 percent of which will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices – will be thrown into the maw of California’s public education budget.

The problem with this is simple: The educational policies supported by the CTA are not going to improve education. In fact one might say it is the educational policies supported by the CTA that have grossly undermined the quality of K-12 public education in California. So we’ll give them more money with no change in these policies?

This next flyer shows the reach of the CTA, enlisting an army of teachers and other school employees to actively solicit signatures for the “Schools & Communities First” Act.  But it’s important to note that the CTA, and the PAC it supports, does not need volunteer assistance.

According to the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the “top aggregated contributions” for the “Schools & Communities First” Act, Measure # 1864, already has collected $11.5 million, which even these days should be sufficient to pay professionals to gather the requisite signatures.

What Ought to be Preconditions for Increasing School Funding?

The problem with opposing measures like this is rooted in the very human and very virtuous urge most people feel to do the right thing. Who opposes something that will “help the children learn?” Who doesn’t want teachers to receive a “living wage?” The answer, of course, is that nobody apart from the most hardened misanthropes would ever oppose these things. The problem is that the educational policies the CTA pushes are not going to help the children learn, and the pay increases they want to give the teachers will not reward the best teachers.

For example, whether or not all public school teachers are underpaid is debatable, but clearly the finest teachers are underpaid, because the union work rules do not sufficiently reward the finest teachers. The Vergara case, not even heard by the California Supreme Court based on a technicality, offers compelling evidence of the damage caused by these work rules.

In the case, which challenged statutes governing layoff, dismissal, and tenure policies, the plaintiffs argued that by favoring seniority over merit in layoffs, by making it extremely difficult to fire incompetent teachers, and by awarding tenure after barely a 1.5 years of classroom observation, students were denied quality education. Moreover, the negative impact of these statutes had a disproportionate impact in low income communities. Watch the plaintiff’s closing arguments, made six years ago in a Los Angeles courtroom, to see how persuasive those arguments were and also to realize how much California’s students lost when that case died.

California’s teachers should be paid more when California’s teachers are truly held accountable for their performance and when incompetent teachers are fired.

One may argue endlessly about the effectiveness of union work rules, just like one may argue about Common Core and a host of other curricula that are, depending on who you ask, either necessary preparation for life in the 21st century or divisive and destructive indoctrination. But it wouldn’t matter if parents had a choice about where they send their children to school.

And this brings us to the other big issue, school choice. The CTA opposes expansion of charter schools, making the dubious claim that charter schools take money away from traditional public schools. The problem with that claim is that if the charter schools were defunded, returning that money to the traditional public schools, the charter school students would also return to traditional public schools, making crowded classrooms even more crowded. For much more on the fallacy that charter schools damage the finances of traditional public schools, read “Modest Strike Settlement Nonetheless Puts LAUSD in Even Worse Financial Shape.”

Moreover, why should charter schools, which compete for students, permit diverse educational strategies, and leave power in the hands of fully accountable principals to hire and fire teachers, be the only solution? Why are school vouchers considered a third rail by education reformers as much as by the opponents of vouchers? Why? Why not allow parents to receive vouchers that they can use to pay for their children to go to any accredited school they want, whether it’s public, private, charter, parochial, or home schooling? Why should parents whose children could never thrive in a traditional public school pay taxes to support those schools, then also have to pay tuition for private schools?

The bottom line with the California Teachers Association is that it does not want teachers or schools to be held accountable for their performance, much less to compete for students. They just want more money.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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The Undifferentiated Human Matter of Replacism

Just over a year ago, an English translation was published of the 2012 book You Will Not Replace Us. Written by Renaud Camus, a French author and political thinker, it was intended as a condensed summary of lengthier volumes he’d already published on the subject of culture and demographics.

The phrase “you will not replace us” gained notoriety in August 2017 when it was chanted by an assortment of right-wing protesters who had shown up in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the planned removal of Confederate monuments in that town.

There is no excusing the violent extremists who were among those present in Charlottesville, much less the unforgettable and tragic outcome. And it is unlikely that many of the protesters in Charlottesville had any idea that a relatively obscure French writer had coined the phrase they were shouting as they marched across the University of Virginia campus.

But Renaud Camus, whose literary career began in the 1980s as a “pioneering gay writer,” in more recent years has become, as described in The Nation, “the ideologue of white supremacy.” In March 2019, The Washington Post referenced Camus’ book as the inspiration behind the mass murder of Islamic worshipers that had just happened in Christchurch, New Zealand. In September 2019, the New York Times described Camus as “the man behind a toxic slogan promoting white supremacy.”

It’s always problematic to discuss anything questioning the demographic transformations sweeping the West. It’s easy and politically acceptable to celebrate diversity, and even gleefully to anticipate the permanent political ascendancy of the global Left in Western democracies, as the demographic character of the electorate inevitably shifts as a result of mass immigration. But to ask whether or not this shift is desirable invites accusations of racism, xenophobia, and white nationalism. It even invites accusations that to open this discussion is to encourage extremist violence.

Given these stigmatizing constraints, the only reason to bother exploring the potential downside of “diversity” is that behind the term “diversity” is possibly the most unexamined, voluntary, abrupt and profound transformation of a civilization in the history of humanity. And what if suppressing this discussion, pretending nothing of consequence is happening, and censoring voices of caution is actually what encourages extremism and violence?

In a New Yorker article written about Camus in 2017 by Thomas Chatterton Williams, entitled “The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us,’” the Frenchman is described as “a kind of connective tissue between the far right and the respectable right,” who can “play the role of respectable reactionary because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered.”

That description offers a broader perspective on Camus than one of someone merely motivated by xenophobia or racism. Camus is reacting against globalism as an economic nationalist and as a cultural preservationist. He claims that what he calls a “Davos-cracy” has deemed cultures secondary to having a critical mass of consumers, and that it considers all humans interchangeable. The phrase he’s selected to drive his point home, and repeated throughout his book, is “Undifferentiated Human Matter,” or UHM.

Replacers, Replacists, Replacees, Replacism, Anti-Replacism

Camus begins his book by declaring “replacing is the central gesture of contemporary societies.” But he isn’t just talking about people, he’s talking about everything. Claiming “the world itself is fast becoming just another amusement park,” he describes the process of replacism in all encompassing terms. In an extended explanatory passage, he writes:

“Faux, simili, imitation, ersatz, simulacrum, copies, counterfeiting, fakes, forgeries, lures, mimics, are the key words of modern human experience. Stone masonry is being replaced by ferroconcrete, concrete by plaster, marble by chip aggregate, timber by PVC, town and countryside by the universal suburb, earth by cement and tar….literature by journalism, journalism by information, news by fake news, truth by fallacy, last name by first name, last name and first name by pseudonyms….history by ideology, the destiny of nations by plain politics, politics by economics, economics by finance, the experience of looking and living by sociology, sorrow by statistics, residents by tourists, natives by non-natives, Europeans by Africans….peoples by other peoples and communities, humanity by post-humanity, humanism by transhumanism, man by Undifferentiated Human Matter.”

What Camus is defending is more than preserving an indigenous ethnic majority in his country. He is defending, as he puts it, “an order, a prosperity, a sense of generosity in terms of social benefits and safety nets, the sound functioning of institutions which have been achieved through centuries of nurturing efforts, trials and tribulations, cultural transmission, inheritance, sacrifices and revolutions. What makes countries, continents, cultures and civilizations what they are, what we admire or regret, are the people and the elites who have fashioned them….man is not, or not quite yet, some undifferentiated matter that one can spread indiscriminately, like peanut butter or Nutella, anywhere on the surface of the Earth.”

Rejecting most conventional terms, Camus has built his own nomenclature around what he believes are fundamental mega-trends that are not adequately described with existing vocabulary or commonly understood polarities: liberalism vs conservatism, globalism vs nationalism, capitalism vs socialism. Instead, he has come up with the ideology of “replacism,” with three protagonists, “the replacists, who want to change the people and civilization, which they call multiculturalism, the replacers, mostly from Africa and very often Muslims, and the replacees, the indigenous population, whose existence is frequently denied.” He then divides the “replacees” into two groups, the consenting replacees, and the unwilling replacees.

Is France Actually Destined to Replace its Population?

The concept of demographic replacement brings with it an assortment of tough questions, largely ignored, dismissed, or even censored by the establishment media and mainstream politicians. In France, the government collects no census or other data on the race or ethnicity of its citizens, which means any tracking of alleged “replacement” of the native population has to rely on estimates. Estimates, however, reveal dramatic shifts in just the past two decades.

An article published by the Brookings Institution in 2001 estimated that five percent of the French population was non-European and non-white. From what information can be found since then, that percentage has changed at a blistering pace. According to World Population Review, “when statistics were released in 2008, it was reported that 11.8 million foreign-born immigrants and their immediate descendants were residents in the country; a figure which accounted for around 19% of the total population of the time.”

While a rise from 5 percent to nearly 20 percent in less than a decade is a stunning statistic, it may actually understate the magnitude of the so-called replacement, because it doesn’t take into account birthrates. For example, a chart on the Wikipedia page “Demographics of France,” quoting data available (in French) from the “Institut national de la statistique,” reports that in 2014, an estimated 29 percent of all births in France were to parents where at least one was foreign-born. Moreover, of the 71 percent of births in that year to parents who both were born in France, it is probable that a significant portion of those were to second- or third-generation immigrants of non-European origin.

A 2017 article appearing in the Washington Times, referencing a study published (in French) by the “Institute des Libertes,” offers projections based on known population demographics and birthrates in France. The study predicts that within 40 years, or barely after mid-century, the white population in France will become a minority. This forecast extrapolates from a white birthrate in France of 1.4 children per woman, compared to a Muslim birthrate of 3.4 per woman. If these birthrate disparities persist, France is destined to become a Muslim majority nation within just a few decades, even if immigration were stopped entirely. Among the younger generations of French, that threshold will be reached much sooner.

Is Integration Possible in France and How is Mass Immigration Justified?

According to Camus, several false narratives are being spread in France by the “replacists” to dismiss the significance of the current migration by saying it is nothing new. Camus argues that it is preposterous to say that “France has always been a country of immigration,” because “for about fifteen centuries the French population has been remarkably stable, at least in its ethnic composition.” To the extent there was immigration, it was always thousands of people, of European stock and Christian faith, compared to millions today who “have almost all been African and more often than not Muslim.”

Whether or not Camus is a white supremacist is debatable, but his skepticism towards the possibility of integration is unambiguous. He writes “Their African culture and Mahometanism make it a much stronger challenge for them to become integrated into French culture and civilization, all the more so because most of them show no desire whatsoever to achieve any such integration, whether as individuals or communities.” Sadly, without honest, balanced, and well-publicized research into this very question, it is impossible to dispute this assertion.

Other popular narratives, according to Camus, also designed to justify mass immigration, include the claim that France was liberated from the Germans in 1944 by Northern and Central Africans recruited by the Free French. Anyone familiar with the battles of World War II would dispute this based on the fact that the main invasion was at Normandy by American and British forces. While units of the Free French army did land along with other Allied forces in Southern France two months after D-Day, this later invasion was launched after the Germans had begun to withdraw their forces to fight in the north, and in any case, only about one-third of the Free French troops were of African origin.

Another popular myth that Camus claims is promoted by France’s multiculturalists, or replacists, is that North African workers reconstructed France after World War II. This is clearly inaccurate since France’s post-war reconstruction was completed well before the 1970s, which is when mass migrations began from Africa into France.

Possibly what might be considered by replacists to be the most compelling argument in favor of mass migration is that it serves as recompense for the depredations of the French as colonial occupiers. But if the colonial era were so horrible, Camus asks, why is it that millions of Africans “appear to nurture no plan more clearly and cherish no higher ambition than to come to France and live with the French?”

Camus makes an important distinction between European colonialism and mass migration into Europe from Africa, one that calls into question both mainstream claims—that integration is possible, or that mass migration is justified. As he puts it, “France and Europe are much more colonized by Africa, these days, than they ever colonized it themselves.” His point is that the Europeans imposed a military, administrative and economic occupation on its overseas territories, but “this type of colonialism, developed in a political framework, is much easier to end—all that is required is for the conqueror’s army to withdraw.” What is happening in France today is what Camus refers to as “settler colonialism,” which is far more difficult to undo, if not impossible.

If the immigrant vs native French interactions Camus writes about are typical—“making life impossible or an unbearable ordeal to the indigenous people….through aggressive gazes, overbearing posturing to force passers-by down from the sidewalk….the creation in the citizenry of a general feeling of fear, insecurity, dispossession and estrangement….unprecedented forms of hyper-violence up to full-blown terrorist acts and massacres….which in the process secure under their rule additional chunks of territory for themselves”—then eventual integration may be very unlikely, and his characterization of mass migration as a foreign occupation may be more descriptive.

The Case for “Undifferentiated Human Matter”

To criticize the double standard applied by most online and offline media on topics relating to race has been dismissed as “whataboutism,” as if double standards don’t matter, as if differing sets of moral criteria should apply depending on what group or worldview is being examined. This double standard is in effect throughout the West, enforced in matters ranging all the way from online censorship to offline criminality. Camus notes countless Christian church desecrations in France, rarely prosecuted, and compares those to the heavy sentences levied onto protesters who unfolded a banner on the roof of the “Great Mosque” of Poitiers during its construction.

In France, Camus writes, “non-European youngsters by the thousands can post horrible and very disturbing messages on Twitter or Facebook about European or White people in general without the slightest threat to have their social network accounts suspended or be interrogated by the police; while opponents to mass migration are the permanent target of the most finicky censorship.”

Camus marvels at the fact that contemporary Western Civilization is the first in history to be lenient “towards those who want its eradication while it relentlessly persecutes those who would put up efforts to defend it and work for its salvation.” But what is Western Civilization? Is it bound up with ethnicity, or is it something more intangible yet more profound?

In France, the very notion of “race” has been deleted from Basic Law texts. The conventional explanation for this transformation, implemented in the 1970s, was that it reflected the revulsion the French people felt towards Nazism and their horrific experience under German occupation when Jews were being deported to German death camps. Undoubtedly, this is true, but Camus focuses on how the termination of the concept of race fulfills the goals of the replacists.

Mocking the mainstream scientific dogma that proclaims races do not exist, Camus takes the position that “race” embraces “social, literary, or poetic, or taxonomic creations of such considerable impact that proclaiming they do not exist is tantamount to seriously testing the meaning of the verb to exist.” He uses “race” interchangeably with “a people” and argues that conflating biology with culture is to suggest that Europe does not exist, that European civilization did not exist; no such thing as French culture; no such thing as French people—that there are only people with a French passport.

“In industrial and post-industrial societies, especially those where the main industry is the industry of Undifferentiated Human Matter, where man is the producer, product and consumer at once, there is no such thing as a genuine product.”

The “Anti-Racist” Paradox: The True Agenda of the Anti-Racists

If everyone is undifferentiated human matter, and races—biological or cultural—do not exist, how can racism exist? And if races do not exist, why must anti-racists so aggressively enforce a drive to achieve perfect equality among races; why must they insist that all races are equal?

This logical flaw is inexplicable, according to Camus, until you consider how the meaning of anti-racism has changed. Anti-racism no longer means a stance against racism as it is historically understood, it now denotes a stance against the existence of races and a willingness to have them disappear. Camus considers this evolution of the term anti-racism, impelled by the paradoxical concept that races both do not exist and are all equal, was a critical enabling condition for the Great Replacement.

As he puts it, “Paradoxically, without the non-existence of races, the change of race would not be possible . . . since there are no races, there can be no substitution of races . . . change was obvious, and rather unpleasant, but it was not taking place. How could it occur, since it was scientifically impossible?” But why? Who benefits?

It is here that Camus’ opening remarks, “replacing is the central gesture of modern societies,” comes back into play, addressing a phenomenon of which mass migration is only a part, albeit a very, very big part. If the native French are being replaced by settler colonials, then who is orchestrating this, and why? Camus claims “what we are dealing with here is a delegated form of colonization, a colonization by proxy, and that the forces that want it, and who organize it, are not the forces who actually accomplish it.”

This two-fold colonization, orchestrated by the very rich and implemented by the very poor, is part of the destruction of culture that began before the mass migrations. As he writes, “no people that knows its own classics would accept numbly and without balking to be thrown into the dustbins of history . . . this numbness had to be created.” Here and elsewhere, Camus is not talking about a conspiracy, but rather “powerful mechanisms” created by the combination of ideals and interests. The main ideal; equality. The main interests: “normalization, standardization, similarity, sameness.”

What Camus calls a “powerful mechanism” can indeed explain the rise of globalism without resorting to conspiracy theories. For global investors and multinational corporations to achieve maximum growth and profit, the prerequisites are standardization, free trade, open movement of people and capital, and a growing mass of consumers in every economic zone—dependent, destitute, it doesn’t matter. But to justify this, to make it a virtue, even a populist cause, the ideology of equality and anti-racism are in-turn prerequisites.

This erasure of high culture, this popular contempt for a cultivated class that might perpetuate reverence for traditions and greatness, this devolution, suits the ideology of the anti-racists. But it is useful as well to global commercial and financial interests. In an irony of history, Lenin’s useful idiots, the leftist movements in Western nations, are now serving not the international communists, but global capital.

It isn’t just France, of course, where traditional culture and proud national histories are being deconstructed and disparaged by the Left. In the name of anti-racism, the history of Western Civilization is now being taught in America, increasingly, from elementary school through graduate school, as an unending saga of oppression and exploitation. In the name of equality, SAT scores, and even grades, are being dispensed with in schools and universities, double standards are established based on racial quotas in academia and business, because race does not exist, yet all races are equal. All this paves the way for an erasure of peoples, the replacement of culture and identity with undifferentiated human matter.

The Genealogy of Replacism

On page 138 of the English edition of You Will Not Replace Us, Camus offers a family tree of sorts that pulls together the historical events and ideological evolution which led France, and by extension the West, to its present state. It not only attempts to illustrate the origins of replacism, but also the cultural devolution that he believes made replacism possible. Shown below is a graphic representation of what Camus describes in painstaking detail. Here is the “marital status” of replacism. “Son of Anti-Racism and High Finance (themselves, respectively son of Egalitarianism and Anti-Fascism, and daughter of Taylorization and Ultra-Liberalism, granddaughter of Industrial Revolution and Capitalism), marries Petite-Bourgeoisie, daughter of Democratization and Welfare State, grand-daughter of French Revolution and Proletariat.”

The logic of this genealogy makes a lot of sense. Replacism is ideologically justified by anti-racism at the same time as it serves the interests of High Finance. “Taylorism,” loosely synonymous with “Fordism,” is the system of factory management that evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to break production into standardized repetitive tasks, greatly improving both the efficiency of manufacturing as well as making it possible to hire far less-skilled workers for less money, and making them easily interchangeable. Ultra-liberalism is Liberal ideology as originally conceived, devoted to the virtues of free trade and free movement of capital.

By marrying replacism to petite bourgeoisie, Camus is showing the synergy between a loss of higher culture and the replacist agenda. By depriving Western Civilization of its “cultivated class which is indispensable to culture in the old sense of the word,” by allowing respect for Western Civilization to slowly disappear, indeed by demonizing all vestiges of privilege, and by glorifying the most popular, largest common denominators of human experience, by democratizing education to the point where everyone and nobody is educated anymore, by mass-producing simulacrums of culture designed to appeal to the most universal and primal ambitions, there is no longer a people, there is no longer a unique culture, there is no longer history, tradition, pride, identity, the nation becomes an economic unit and nothing more.

Another fascinating aspect of the genealogy that Camus has described is that it is not just logical, but perhaps some of what he is describing is also inevitable. In hindsight, where would the human path have deviated from these outcomes? Is it much of a stretch to say the industrial revolution was inevitable, or the innovation of mass production and standardization? Is it unreasonable to suggest the rise of workers and unions to the abuses that characterized the first hundred years of industrialization may  have been inevitable? Is all that Camus really has to say mere sentimentality, mere nostalgia, is this just a primal scream of a book and the movement it represents merely the last mad roar of a primitive nationalism whose time has come and gone?

Nostalgia and sentimentality may well inform the millions who merely wish that things could go back to the way they were, but for Camus, at least, stronger emotions and reason inform his motivation. First of all, he would probably deride it as thoughtless and typical for his critics to think that objecting to the destruction of Western Civilization, in all of its traditions and values, is mere reactionary nostalgia and sentimental longing for the past. But he also would remind us of the threat we face, not only at the hand of the replacists, but when the replacers eventually confront the replacists.

Replacism, for all its deplorable sameness, for all its drive to conquer and merge all cultures in the name of anti-racism and in the interests of high-finance, at least has a new world to offer. It may be grotesque and shallow, hedonistic and common, replete with addictive gadgets that pass for fulfillment and while away lifetimes, but there is profit, there is order, bread, circuses. There is still civilization, after all, cheapened, flattened, filled with undifferentiated human matter. But what if the replacers have a different agenda entirely?

Camus believes the combination of leftist morals and traditional right-wing business interests gives a unique power to replacism. He writes, “as if the ruthless power in the upper district of Metropolis, had, to top it all and make it worse, the capacity to project to the world the gentle image of the soft social order found in the Alpine pastures of The Sound of Music. He describes replacism as a totalitarian ideology devoted to promoting the replaceability of everything, man included. But he also claims that the only totalitarian ideology in the world capable of rivaling replacism in the world today is radical Islam. What a choice.

Neither Conspiracies Nor Scapegoats Account for Replacism

The phrase “conspiracy theorist” or “conspiracy theory” recently has been weaponized by globalists throughout the West. Wielded along with the more established word weapons, “racist” and “denier,” “conspiracy theorist” is now used as a verbal bludgeon to silence anyone who questions globalization or replacism.

Camus has much to say on this and the related topic of scapegoating. He writes, “The theory of conspiracy theory is one of the most effective, catchy and brilliant inventions of the ideological power and its executive clique, the media, to discourage any reflection on its own workings, on the nature of its power and on the crimes it might have committed. The theory amalgamates all conspiracy theories into one, whose model are the most eccentric views about the attacks of September eleventh against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. But just as being paranoid does not mean you have no enemy, accusing everyone whose views differ from yours of being an adept of some conspiracy theory does not mean there is no plot and no conspiracy.”

Having made that assertion, Camus backs away from alleging there is a conspiracy. Dismissing attempts by others to blame replacism on the European Union, Wall Street, the International Monetary Fund, or Jews, he suggests, in fact, it is “some enormous, bizarre and complex process, so intricate that no one can understand perfectly how they work and why, and no one can master and stop them once they are started.”

This makes more sense than it may initially seem. It returns to the idea of a logical and almost inevitable flow of history. Only at pivotal historical moments can that flow be willfully directed through the exertions of a united people, because so much of its momentum is mechanical. And clearly that is what Camus is calling for, when he writes “it is for us to break the machines which churn out men like others churn out cookies, or Nutella, or surimi.”

Camus explicitly challenges the theory, not his, but prevalent among some right-wing factions, that Jews are providing the money and brains behind replacism. He correctly notes that in Europe they are the first victims of the Great Replacement. He discusses at length how “the change in the population of Europe has made daily life very difficult, if not impossible, for a number of Jews who are almost permanently exposed to very strong Muslim aggressiveness, modern anti-Zionism flourishing both as a form of exasperation and as an excuse, a more decent cover, for very classical Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.”

While identifying Muslim immigrants as the source of revived anti-Semitism in Europe, Camus dismisses the role of “classical occidental European anti-Semitism,” referring to it metaphorically as “a derelict shop in the dilapidated historical downtown, now entirely driven out of business, and fashion, by the enormous shopping malls in the banlieues.” He notes that many Jewish communities in Europe that survived the Holocaust are not going to survive the Great Replacement, with thousands of Jews now being driven out of France every year.

The experience of European Jews today in the face of mass immigration of Muslims has led Camus to conclude that while there are some prominent Jews involved in promoting the Great Replacement, such as George Soros and others less known, he believes that in recent years the proportion of replacist Jews and anti-replacist Jews is now almost reversed, with anti-replacists predominating. And he makes a claim, similar to sentiments observed by Churchill a century earlier, that “Jews are very much divided on that issue [replacism], which makes them no different than any other community.” It may be fair to say that Camus sees the Jewish community, certainly in Europe, as a microcosm, split on the polarizing issues of our time in a way reasonably proportional to the rest of the Western elites.

And perhaps in this we will come a recognition that Zionism is only one form of nationalism, and Jews and Gentiles alike throughout the West will begin to coalesce in support of preserving the peoples and cultures of all Western nations. Camus writes “Israel belonging to the Jewish People, with Jerusalem as its capital, is the model and the essential reference, at least in Western culture and civilization, to all sense of belonging. If those three did not belong to each other, it would be the end of all belonging. If Jerusalem were not Jewish there would be no reason for Paris or Saint-Denis to be forever French, for London or Winchester to be English, or indeed for Washington or Concord to be American.”

The Flight 93 Civilization

If you believe even half of what Camus has to say, Western Civilization is all but doomed. It is to be replaced either by a generic replacist world consisting of undifferentiated human matter, or an Islamic world, which would take shape in the aftermath of a cataclysmic conflict in which the replacers overthrew the no longer useful replacists. What can be done?

Towards the end of his book, Camus calls for “remigration” of immigrants out of France and back to their nations of origin. To accomplish this, he views the European Union, currently controlled by replacist interests, as something that could potentially be taken over by anti-replacists. As he puts it, “The continent is being invaded, the nations which are part of it should stick together and resist, not try and find salvation one by one, in dispersion and isolation.” But he reemphasizes how what threatens European civilization is bigger even than colonization, writing “when we Europeans started to be subjected to another, more brutal and direct colonization, we were submitted to an Islamisation of our Americanization.”

American cultural power, such as it is according to Camus, populist, egalitarian, flattened, Petite bourgeoise, is almost—stress, almost—a proxy for globalism sweeping away the unique cultures and peoples of the world. Camus might say that America, when it comes to replacism, is as much a culprit as a victim.

Which brings us to America, where, just as in Europe, resurgent nationalism—unwilling replacees—contends with a daunting coalition of replacists, replacers, and willing replacees. The eventual outcome hangs by a thread, and no matter what the outcome, so much can go wrong.

In 2016, an influential essay entitled “The Flight 93 Election” compared the presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump with the choice passengers faced on the doomed Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. As he put it, “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”

Written by Hillsdale College research fellow Michael Anton, who went on to serve for a time as a senior adviser in the Trump White House, this essay addresses all of the same issues of replacism, in the broadest context of the term. The dispossession of the American people, culturally, economically, and eventually, through actual physical replacement. Anton manages to make his points without inviting quite the opprobrium that Camus has attracted, but his words—a breath of fresh air to many but an unforgivable transgression to others—were so frank and so incendiary that he initially wrote under the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus.”

What Camus has dubbed the Davos-cracy, Anton called the “Davoisie,” as he implicates America’s conservatives as “sophists who rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless wars.” Anton went on to reserve an entire section of his essay for the “other” issue, writing that “The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.”

Anton’s description of America under a Clinton administration is almost synonymous with how Camus describes France under Macron, differing only in the particulars. “A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent… We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.”

Three years after Trump’s stunning upset victory, the power of the Left in America remains pervasive and growing. Under the twin ideological poles of anti-racism and climate action—which is a proxy for economic replacism—they have more or less consolidated their hold on academia, and continue to expand their influence in government at all levels along with most major corporations. Imagine if Trump had lost.

Characterizing the U.S. election of 2016 as a last chance to have a chance, a last chance to avoid certain death, was accurate. Now the battle is joined but the odds remain stacked against the anti-replacists. The Davoisie in all its power is doing everything it can quiet the passengers and regain full control in the cockpit. The Flight 93 Civilization remains fitfully airborne, but for how long?

The Inchoate Rebellion Against the Ruling Class

Across the United States and Europe, a rebellion is brewing that lacks coherence or unity. Indeed many of the rebellious groups are battling each other at the same time as they share a rage against the Davos-cracy. In France, the Yellow Vest Movement which has gripped that nation for over a year has attracted far-left and far-right demonstrators.

While the Yellow Vest Movement in France was sparked by rising fuel taxes, the duration and intensity of the protests bespeak years of frustration. What unifies the participants is the punitive cost-of-living in France, but there is no apparent agreement on the cause. To speculate as to the cause, for the Right, immigration is the primary factor; for the Left, global capitalism is the main reason. In fact, they’re both correct.

The unemployment rate among immigrants in France in 2018 was 15.3 percent, nearly twice that of non-immigrants at 8.3 percent. This ratio is virtually unchanged for over a decade. While it is now almost impossible to find reports connecting the Yellow Vest protests to anger over immigration—which means nothing—even President Macron has agreed to new, tougher immigration enforcement. In November 2019 the New York Times quoted Macron as saying “The bourgeois live in areas with few immigrants and do not encounter immigration in their daily lives. It is France’s working classes that live with the difficulties of immigration, and have thus migrated to the far right.”

On the other hand, huge sectors of the French economy have been devastated since the introduction of the Euro in 1999, and this consequence of globalization would have happened with or without immigration. Two searing, pessimistic visions of where this is leading are found in books by the bestselling French author Michel Houellebecq. His 2015 book, Submission, describes a bloodless transition in France from a secular republic into an Islamic theocracy. His 2019 book, Serotonin, includes chapters describing how France’s agriculture industry, which for centuries was a vital, productive, diverse ecosystem comprising hundreds of thousands of independent farmers, was within just a few years nearly wiped out by foreign imports and corporate takeovers.

It would be simplistic and inaccurate to characterize the Yellow Vest Movement as either Right or Left, just as it would not be accurate to describe Marine Le Pen’s National Rally political party as right-wing. The Yellow Vest Movement is a populist reaction to replacism, for mostly economic reasons. The National Rally candidates are a nationalist reaction to economic and cultural replacism.

This illustrates how Camus has invented a term, replacism, that not only transcends conventional definitions, but creates space for new combinations of political ideologies to form. Why should the anti-replacists be capitalists instead of socialists? Capitalism has been the justification to impoverish the middle class and fill the nation with foreigners. Globalist (or international) capitalism has been rejected by all within the otherwise inchoate Yellow Vest Movement. Is there such a thing as nationalist capitalism? And if not, is the battle taking shape one between national socialists and international socialists? That would make sense.

The Rising of the Bronze Age Mindset

If Renaud Camus now plays the role of “respectable reactionary,” a book that has quietly sold its way into influence and infamy is Bronze Age Mindset, self-published in 2018, written by a pseudonymous author “Bronze Age Pervert,” which he typically shortens to “BAP.” Bronze Age Mindset is a book that disrespects pretty much everything about modern life. Instead, the author exhorts readers to aspire to become the piratical, fearless figures of Bronze Age antiquity. Talk about reactionary!

The author, who in his book periodically dispenses with grammar, recently surfaced to publish a response to a review of Bronze Age Mindset written by Michael Anton. Both the review and the response are valuable reading for anyone trying to understand the evolving mindset of the anti-replacists. Because closely linked to the reactionary resistance to both cultural and economic annihilation is, obviously, a rejection of the so-called ruling class. This sentiment, and little else, unites the Yellow Vest Movement in France. A feeling of being betrayed by the ruling class also informs movements in the United States that are otherwise bitterly opposed to one another. BAP writes:

“What you are witnessing is the unraveling of the postwar American regime—or what is mendaciously called by its toadies the ‘liberal world order’—in a way that is far more thorough than the disturbances of the 1960s, and with consequences that will be far more dire. The ‘altright’ doesn’t exist and has nothing to do with the media representations of it as a form of ‘white nationalism,’ or even—and here is what is crucial to understand—just ‘white males’ or just the ‘right wing.’ The same phenomenon is taking place on the left, and there is much more crossover than older people realize: there is much more involvement also by nonwhite youth and particularly by Latino, Asian, and multiracial youth in this phenomenon than people want to admit.”

In BAP’s essay, entitled “America’s Delusional Elite is Done,” he accuses the conservative intellectual establishment of failing to oppose “the violent racial hatred and other forms of unprecedented insanity coming from the new left,” including “the destruction of the family, and the new push to groom children on behalf of transsexualism and other supposed sexual identities.” He points out that “this one crucial matter extends the appeal of the ‘frog people’ far beyond that of any one racial or ethnic group.”

So where Camus saw cultural deconstruction as a prerequisite to ethnic replacement, to be resisted, BAP sees resistance to cultural deconstruction as something that is unifying various ethnicities. Economic globalism and cultural deconstruction may have left France open to ethnic replacement and ethnic conflict, but in the United States, these same two mega-trends could form a reactionary and multiethnic solidarity. The difference is that the Yellow Vest Movement unifies a diverse assortment of factions based, so it appears, purely on economic grievances. In the United States by contrast, among the still gestating Bronze Age resistance, the economic factors are present but equally unifying are the cultural grievances.

In the long run, France and the United States face very different challenges with respect to mass immigration. Compared to America, France is a nation poorly equipped culturally to absorb and assimilate millions of immigrants, and—can we say this?—the immigrants entering France are not easily assimilated, insofar as they are mostly African and mostly Muslim. Moreover, France’s mostly secular native population will not find much common ground with the social conservatism practiced by Muslims, whereas a far higher percentage of white Americans are Christian, practicing variants of Christianity that overlap almost completely with those of immigrants to the United States from Latin America.

Until very recently, America’s dominant culture emphasized the importance of assimilation, and even in its atrophied, discredited current state, America’s ability to assimilate its immigrants remains robust. Asian immigrants entering the United States typically come from successful, developed nations, bringing a strong ethic for higher education and entrepreneurship. America’s Muslim immigrants constitute a far smaller fraction of America’s immigrant population, and on average they have more education and skills than the waves of Muslim immigrants entering France. For these reasons, America is far more likely than France to eventually absorb its immigrants while leaving its culture relatively intact.

But BAP isn’t done. Perhaps he offers further encouraging words to those conservative nationalists whose demographic awareness has made them give up when he writes the following: “Conservatives pretend to be able to recruit Latinos to their cause with the degraded ideology of Jack Kemp but Latinos see David French call forced ‘drag queen’ visits for schoolchildren ‘part of free life,’ and want nothing to do with it. We are far better at recruiting Latinos, and as the example of Bolsonaro among many others shows, this new, energetic and popular form of the right is a Latino movement, and it is the future.”

And where is the Davos-cracy in all of this leftist debauchery and conservative cowardice? BAP is one with Camus in implicating the “large monopolies that promote mass immigration, mass surveillance, and the most bizarre type of speech restrictions, not only on its own employees, but now on American society at large.” In America, the NeverTrumpers and Libertarians, and all of what Michael Anton may have been the first to refer to as “Conservatism Inc.,” have been worse than useless, they have been puppets of the Davoisie.

Finally, BAP’s observations are in accord with Camus on how the meaning of “equality” has been entirely perverted by the replacists. BAP writes:

“It is indeed possible to oppose this vicious and exterminationist hatred on purely liberal and racially egalitarian grounds. But this didn’t happen, which puts the lie to the claims that traditional conservatives care about equality under the law or about any of the ideals they claim to espouse. We are now faced with a left that has embraced a dialectic of racial and class destruction in a context where belief in absolute human equality is professed at the same time that no one believes in it anymore.”

In the 21st Century, the United States and Europe, France in particular, faces increasingly radicalized, politically disenfranchised, economically abandoned, embittered masses. What mindset they adopt, what alliances they form, may be the surprise of the century.

The Solution to Replacism—A Community of Nations

Camus considers an “orderly and peaceful” remigration of millions of French immigrants back to their nations of origin to be the only way to preserve French culture. It is hard to imagine how this could ever happen. But it is probably true that either assimilation or remigration will be necessary in France in order to avoid either civil war or submission to Islam. Houellebecq’s book of that name is not in the least far fetched, although if it were to happen it prefigures a larger eventual clash, since an Islamicized West would still have to deal with China and other Asian nations that remain committed to preserving their own cultures.

Which begs the question: What does it take for a nation to be willing to fight to again assimilate its immigrants? In France, the economic challenges caused by globalization have already sparked the Yellow Vest Movement, which led to dramatic recent shifts on immigration policy by Macron. But can France, and the other Europeans, recover a sufficient belief in their own history and traditions and identity to demand others assimilate to their ways, instead of the other way around?

In his 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, British conservative author and journalist Douglas Murray suggests that those forces still extant in Western societies that resist the leftist derangements of our time—the secular and the religious—put aside their differences and unite to save their civilization. That’s an interesting idea not only because it might enable a critical mass of resistance to arise, but because it represents a new synthesis of Western culture that might help defuse the mutual resentment of Right and Left. They’d better get busy.

Nothing BAP discusses, either in his book or in his essay addressing Michael Anton’s review, offers a solution. BAP describes his work as that of a Samizdat, those Eastern Bloc dissidents who reproduced and distributed censored and underground publications critical of the regime. Anton, for his part, adheres to the ideals of the American Founding Fathers. To which BAP responds, “he [Anton] should admit that this form of government would today be called white supremacism or white nationalism, as would Lincoln’s later revision of it, as would indeed the America of FDR and Truman, not to speak of Theodore Roosevelt.”

Indeed it is. By the Left.

So where does Camus cross the line? How is Camus the “ideologue of white supremacy?” Why did Michael Anton have to use the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus” when writing candidly about the Davoisie’s embrace of mass immigration into the United States? Why is Bronze Age Mindset written by “Bronze Age Pervert,” instead of whoever lives behind that name?

Camus answers this repeatedly in his book. Anti-racism has come to mean anti-white. Examining the phenomenon uncovers endless examples and makes a strong case for the truth of this statement. Neo-commissars variously described as Chief Equity Officers now infest public and private bureaucracies in departments of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” They manage aggressive staffs, expensive and empowered, micromanaging everything from micro-aggressions to the precise ethnic proportions represented in the personnel headcounts of every institution in America. This is authoritarian, totalitarian fascism, bureaucratized and masquerading as anti-fascism. It is explicitly racist, yet it markets itself as anti-racist. That is already a reality in much of America, and it’s spreading fast.

In Europe in general, and France in particular, the same applies. If you question the future of your nation, based on utterly indisputable facts—consistent and immutable voting patterns by ethnicity, leading societal indicators by ethnicity, demographic reality—you are branded a “white supremacist” and the consequences are swift. In ascending order: Unwelcome in polite society. Banned or suppressed online. Fired from your job. Denied various public and private services. Prosecuted and fined. Imprisoned.

And yet the movement of anti-replacists isn’t necessarily “white,” at all. The Yellow Vest Movement isn’t white, and it is ideologically heterogeneous. The rising Bronze Age reactionaries in the United States aren’t ethnically pure, and their ideology remains very much in flux. For these reasons, practical nationalism—centrist but honest, faithful to culture and tradition, having expectations of immigrants instead of the other way around, willing to protect national industries in defiance of the libertarian Davos-cracy, able to put the national interest first—still could have a future in the West. And it may have nothing to do with “whiteness” at all.

The alternative, prosecuted by the Left and condoned by a cowardly Right establishment, is Balkanization based on race and gender, even though race and gender “are a social construct.” It is enforced equality according to race and gender, even though all races and cultures are already equal, and in any case, “race and gender are social constructs.”

The alternative, prosecuted by the Davos-cracy, is to flatten the world, erase borders in the interests of commerce, and reduce humanity to undifferentiated human matter. How does this square with the “celebration of diversity” that informs every coopted institution of the Davos-cracy, from mainstream media to monopolistic multinationals? It doesn’t until you return to one of the first points Camus makes, where he emphasizes that replacism isn’t merely to turn humanity into undifferentiated human matter, but to create simulacrums of culture replacing genuine culture. The iconic buildings and monuments and historic plazas of Paris or London will be faint and boring ruins compared to the neon recreations of those same places around the planet, in cities turned into theme parks. The commodification of high culture is the essence of replacism.

Understanding this fact, that replacism is a wholistic repatterning of all national cultures and a wholesale erasure of national economies, is crucial to refuting the claim that to be anti-replacist is to be a white supremacist. The journey into the future, with technology and globalization whipping forward faster than anyone can fully track or comprehend, changing everything in decades, then changing everything yet again, and again, will not be weathered without the strength of national cultures that embrace and cherish and share a common faith, tradition, values, patriotism, being part of something.

Absent intact and confident national Western cultures who know where they came from and who they are, the immigrant waves that retain the most confidence in their collective identity will overwhelm those cultures that do not. And that may not end well for anyone or anything, including the Davos-cracy, including modernity itself.

To the extent Renaud Camus fights a lonely battle, with the smug opinion-makers of the world stigmatizing him and everyone like him as a “white supremacist,” chances are France will become a nation of undifferentiated human matter, or an Islamic state, or some hybrid of the two. But France will no longer be France.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Using Online Resources to Qualify Ballot Measures

There is a mass delusion afflicting millions of Californians. They endure a cost-of-living nearly twice the national average, high taxes, the highest incidence of poverty, the most hostile business climate, some of the worst K-12 schools, well over a $1.0 trillion in bond and pension debt, unaffordable homes, among the highest prices in the nation for gasoline and electricity, water rationing, and they drive on congested and decaying roads and freeways.

Yet the latest PPIC poll, released this month, finds 49 percent of likely voters approve of Governor Newsom’s job performance, and 47 percent approve of the state legislature.

Meanwhile, on the streets and in the parks of every major California city, over 150,000 homeless people are permanently encamped. Literally tens of thousands of them are either insane, diseased, drug addicts, criminals, or all of the above. As working Californians attempt to keep their shops open, or walk to work, or live in peace, these homeless, who need help, not “lifestyle tolerance,” defecate, shoot heroin, and shriek in terror of schizophrenic demons. But instead of declaring an emergency, Governor Newsom just throws additional billions at what is a well documented scam, where politically favored cronies build “supportive housing” at average costs of over $500,000 per unit.

Yet this same poll finds that “fifty-eight percent of Californians are optimistic that the governor and legislature will be able to work together and accomplish a lot in the next year.”

This is mass delusion. Because as long as a clique of leftist oligarch cronies and public sector union bosses control everything that happens in California, they will enrich themselves, and none of these problems – homeless, housing prices, cost-of-living, high taxes, etc. – will ever get solved. Eventually, Californians will realize that Newsom and his entire gang’s supposed solutions are scams, and their incessant virtue signaling on issues of social equity and “climate change” are diversionary cons.

California’s Red Pill Moment is Coming

In the movie Matrix there is a scene where the main character is offered a choice: He can take a blue pill and continue to live in a dream world, or he can take the red pill and confront harsh reality. As rebel leader Morpheus warns, “all I can offer you is the truth.”

The truth is this: California is a feudal state masquerading as a democracy. A supermajority of voters are either ultra-wealthy, or they are the well heeled professional class that serves them, or they are public employees whose pay and benefit packages exempt them from the laws and the costs they impose on everyone else, or they are low income residents who’ve been bought off – some by state funded benefits, others by socialist rhetoric. But it can’t go on.

It will only take a few influential Californians to take the red pill, and accurately view the harsh reality of life for most Californians, and a preference cascade will ensue. By the millions, Californians will suddenly realize that their supposed saviors are actually the exploiters. They will see social justice excess and environmentalist extremism for what it is, cover for the corporations and the bureaucrats to consolidate their power over every aspect of economic life, making it almost impossible for working people to live here.

Overnight, California will transition from having not millions, but tens of millions of engaged, politically disenfranchised residents who want to do something, anything, to save their state. And there is something they can do. They can file state ballot initiatives.

Building An Open Source Ballot Initiative Capacity

The one way Californians can bypass their legislature is via the initiative process, even though that process has been undermined by lawmakers. Recent legislation requires signature gatherers to be paid employees instead of independent contractors, greatly raising costs and liabilities. The minimum one can expect to pay to place an initiative on the California state ballot is $5 million. What if that cost could be reduced by 80 percent?

What if a comprehensive online resource for any state ballot initiative campaign could be developed, posted as open source, and made available to California’s beleaguered serfs? Who cares if the aristocrats also get their hands on it? They don’t need it. They already have all the money in the world, and they already do whatever they want. It doesn’t help them. But for the serfs, direct Democracy restores the balance of power.

With access to lists from well established, supportive grassroots organizations, along with viral endorsements from celebrities and influencers, activist Californians could be driven to a set of online resources that would comprise a one-stop shop for volunteer sustained ballot initiatives, from concept to polling to signature gathering. Those who shared their lists could have input into what initiatives would be promoted. But that would just prime the pump. The project would acquire its own momentum and attract followers who immediately recognize its breakthrough potential. These resources would include:

1 – Central online dashboard – a website that explains the project along with how the initiative process works, and provides links to all areas.
2 – YouTube instructional videos explaining each step in the process (for example, petition downloading and petition verification).
3 – A “polling” module (and report generator) where registrants vote on various initiative concepts.
4 – A status report module showing where various initiative concepts are in the pipeline.
5 – Downloadable petitions that can be printed and signed.
6 – Signature verification module to be utilized by volunteers (with professional assistance) in each county.

The technology for all of this exists. It is an idea whose time has come. In most cases utilizing off-the-shelf plugins (along with gaining access to the current California voter file from the Secretary of State), this entire online resource can easily be built. If it were built as open source and shared, multiple populist insurgencies could operate simultaneously.

Leveraging online technology and volunteers to greatly reduce dependence on paid signature gatherers has already been done by San Diego based Reform California. They successfully put a gas tax repeal measure, Proposition 6, onto the state ballot in November 2018. Although the initiative was defeated, the innovations implemented by Reform California dramatically reduced the cost to qualify their measure for the ballot, and paved the way for future efforts.

There are several populist reforms that would appeal to Californians of all political sentiments and across all backgrounds of income, ethnicity and gender. In education, union work rule reforms, more charter schools and school vouchers would all have broad appeal. In other areas, for example, spending more on water and transportation infrastructure, repealing crippling environmental edicts, reforming the disastrous downgrades of property and drug crimes, changing policies governing treatment of the homeless, and requiring pension fund investment in infrastructure revenue bonds would all have broad appeal. Californians want these reforms, but the legislators won’t do any of it.

This could be a game changer. A slate of activist generated state ballot initiatives with broad populist appeal could offer candidates a platform, it could offer opportunities to educate the electorate on alternatives to the one-party rule, and it gives activists something tangible to work on. Initiatives successfully placed onto the ballot will drain tens, if not hundreds of millions of opposition dollars out of the coffers of the aristocracy, and some of them will still win, transforming the political landscape of California.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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A Vision for California’s Visionless Republican Party

About a month ago, the California Republican Party apparently harvested my email address, because since then I’ve been the lucky recipient of an email avalanche from “CAGOP.” Now, almost daily, their messages turn up in my in-box with subject lines such as “Are you as tired of Gavin Newsom as we are?,” “Are YOU watching this impeachment sham, Edward?,” “Nancy Pelosi continues to drag on the impeachment SHAM,” “Will the impeachment sham ever end?,” and “Nancy Pelosi is Obstructing the Senate.”

A few weeks ago they sent a “Sustaining Membership Statement” in the mail, complete with a “Member ID” and “Member Code,” and a “2020 Election Year Sustaining Membership Renewal, Requested Contribution” of, get this, either $290, $435, $580, or “other.” Check a box. Enclose a check. Huh? I’ve never been a “sustaining member” of the CAGOP. And what’s with the odd amounts of money? Did a focus group indicate that putting weird amounts into a letter would get our attention?

The letter, like the emails, was filled with short, single sentence paragraphs, liberally sprinkled with words written in all capital letters, or underlined, or in bold fonts. Written in a style that would not challenge the average third grader, all of them were designed to throw red meat at knee jerk paleo conservatives, but offered nothing in the way of a policy agenda. We push buttons. You give money. Me Tarzan.

This is condescending, hypocritical garbage, coming from party leadership that is ran by consulting firms whose mission is not to save California, but rather to stay in business. For starters, the leadership in California’s Republican Party don’t like Trump. Because if they did, they wouldn’t confine their endorsements of Trump to fundraising letters and emails to “sustaining members,” they’d proclaim their support publicly, loud, proud, often, and everywhere. They don’t.

This is not just a failure of courage and vision, it is a strategic blunder. California’s Republican party has declined from 31 percent of registered voters in 2009 to 26 percent in 2017 to only 24 percent today. Yet an astonishing 35 percent of all Californians approve of Trump’s job performance. That’s over seven million registered voters. A November 2018 Public Policy Institute poll put Trump’s support at 39 percent among likely voters.

The last time California’s GOP had a share of California’s voters in excess of 35 percent was over 30 years ago. Until and unless CAGOP registration comes anywhere near to Trump’s approval rating in California, they cannot point to his presidency as the cause of their ongoing decline. CAGOP has nothing to lose by publicly supporting President Trump. Sending private emails gushing over Trump while avoiding any public mention of him is pathetic behavior.

A Policy Agenda and Political Strategy for CAGOP

To be fair, it isn’t easy for the CAGOP in California, where leftist oligarchs and public sector unions are willing and able to spend hundreds of millions every election cycle to support Democratic candidates and causes. But courage and vision are free. You don’t have to spend $900,000 on focus groups and polling if you have a good idea. You just go out and sell it.

It should go without saying, that you can support Trump’s policies without having to agree with every one of his often incendiary tweets, sometimes numbering over 100 per day. You don’t have to defend every action he’s taken, and you don’t have to agree with all his policies. But what you can do is visualize and articulate how Trump’s overall policy agenda is rooted in common sense centrism, and you can identify specific examples of how it is relevant to California’s challenges.

State funded infrastructure projects, for example, can make libertarian heads explode. But Trump, along with most California politicians, support infrastructure projects. And Trump, unlike most of California’s politicians and bureaucrats, actually understands the construction business. Why not invite him to lead a symposium in Los Angeles on tunneling to solve transportation gridlock? Bring in Elon Musk’s Boring Company and turn him loose on 3-D traffic solutions the same way he was turned loose on rocketry.

Energy and the environment are another area where Trump’s gut calls on what is practical policy are echoed by many common sense politicians and experts. There is no reason why California isn’t building desalination plants on the Southern California coast. As relatively late adopters, California’s utilities can install pre-manufactured modular plants that are becoming the norm worldwide, and cost far less to engineer.

Similarly, there is no reason California should be importing gas and oil from Venezuela; surely there are some in-state reserves that could be tapped without creating the environmental havoc that the plaintiff’s bar (oops, the environmentalist lobby) constantly allege.

On the topic of the environment, why hasn’t the California Environmental Quality Act been repealed? It is one of the biggest reasons housing costs so much in California. Why aren’t Californians widening and upgrading every highway and freeway in the state, and getting them smart vehicle enabled, instead of blowing through billions on a bullet train? Why aren’t Californians allowed to build entire new cities along the I-5 or Highway 101 corridors? Why aren’t the connecting east-west roads, such as Highways 198, 41, and 58 being widened and improved? Why aren’t we building beautiful new suburbs that could bring to life what is now arid and underutilized cattle range?

No discussion of the environment in California can ignore the catastrophic mismanagement of forest and wildland, where for decades, environmentalist regulations ended or greatly reduced the ability for landowners to do selective logging, salvage logging, controlled burns, cut and maintain firebreaks and access roads, and create defensible space. Imagine how much could be done, fast, if Trump’s Dept. of the Interior got involved. Imagine the benefit if federal regulations were rewritten to permit commercial timber companies to harvest viable lumber in exchange for performing thinning operations?

Exposing Progressive Lies, Offering Centrist Alternatives

If the CAGOP had vision, they would embody these projects in candidates willing to unapologetically push for their implementation. They would resolutely proclaim, accurately, that energy development, suburban expansion, public spending on infrastructure, and sensible reforms to environmental regulations are moderate centrist positions.

At the same time, these candidates can expose the stunning, corrupt hypocrisy of Democrats in California, who for years have deliberately enacted policies that have made California unaffordable, and the only beneficiaries have been the wealthy elites. You want affordable homes? Build suburbs again on open land. You want affordable energy? Keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open, and drill again for oil and gas. You want, for that matter, affordable tuition? Then fire 75 percent of college administrators, who suddenly, and for no good reason, nearly outnumber classroom instructors.

CAGOP candidates can explain that the people most harmed by these Democratic policies are the low income communities who are the strongest constituency of the Democrats. They’ve been conned. For example, the public schools have been ruined by the teachers union. Don’t pussyfoot around, fighting over how many charter schools the legislature will “compromise” on. Call for school vouchers so parents can send their kids anywhere they want!

An effective message from the CAGOP wouldn’t just spew carefully curated sound bites, pretending to dislike Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. It would offer a specific policy agenda, and propose not only candidates, but citizen initiatives sponsored directly by the party, that would fulfill that agenda. That’s a message that would not be deleted. That would be a message from an organization with a genuine mission, instead of yet another rote ejaculation from a diminishing fiefdom of supposedly conservative consultants, past their prime, hanging on to dwindling donor dollars.

A CAGOP with courage and vision would emulate President Trump, fiercely defending his policy agenda, fearlessly calling for policies in California that are consistent with what he is trying to do nationally, and stating, over and over, that they are the moderate ones, and the Democrats are the dangerous extremists.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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How California Embraced Corporate Socialism

Gavin Newsom, the lily white, urbane, coiffured scion of of San Francisco’s posh royalty, is California’s highest ranking Democrat. He presides over a party that has taken progressive ideals beyond absurdity to the brink of tyranny, a socialist party that openly disparages whiteness and wealth. One would think that the party of Gavin Newsom is bent on destroying everything Gavin Newsom represents. So what’s going on?

To understand the rise of Newsom, and every other hyper-privileged Democrat that even today remains in firm control of the progressive movement, it is necessary to define a 21st century version of corporate socialism. This goes well beyond the use of the term merely to describe government subsidies for, say, the oil and gas industry, or, for that matter, the wind and solar industry.

Corporate socialism in California today is a marriage of convenience between, on one hand, monopolistic corporations and the oligarchy they’ve spawned, and on the other, a seething coalition of progressive socialists with an agenda that is best described as a self-contradictory mixture of nihilism and idealism. What California’s corporate socialists have done is concoct a profitable interpretation of this agenda, implementing those elements that will aggrandize them, and paying lip service to the rest. There are ample examples of this practice.

To ensure “diversity,” an amazingly lucrative profession has emerged, embodied in “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” departments inside every institution of higher education, as well as embedded in the human resources departments of every major corporation.

To protect wilderness, sound principles of land management such as controlled burns, maintenance of firebreaks and access roads, selective logging and salvage logging have been either banned altogether or mired in prohibitive levels of bureaucratic delays, leading to catastrophic fires that were blamed on the “climate.”

To protect the “climate,” land development outside of existing cities has been all but frozen, restricting the supply of new homes and driving prices to unaffordable levels. For similar reasons relating to “climate,” clean conventional energy from natural gas and nuclear power are are being systematically reduced in favor of heavily subsidized “renewable” energy providers.

To ensure housing “affordability,” the Homeless Industrial Complex has arisen, with budgets so padded that the average cost to build “permanent supportive housing” in California now exceeds a half million per unit.

To respect the rights of the homeless, as well as “alternative lifestyles,” hundreds of thousands of vagrants, most of them either insane, substance abusers, predators, or all three, have been permitted to camp on the sidewalks and in the parks of every major California city. To assist them, tens of billions are being spent on public employees and nonprofit personnel, and the problems just get worse.

And finally, central to all of this, public sector unions have fervently supported every expansion of government regulation and its requirement for new agencies and staff. They have “negotiated” pay and benefit packages for their membership that have made California’s government itself unaffordable, with personnel costs crowding out investment in infrastructure and public services.

All of these policies derive from socialist ideals, but benefit corporate interests. This is corporate socialism in the 21st century, California is its epicenter, and it is an unmitigated disaster.

California Before and After the Rise of Public Sector Unions

It is ironic that California in the 1950s and 1960s offered a good example of a state government that respected property rights and nurtured competitive businesses, yet engaged in massive public investment in those areas where it was not possible to make competition effective. During this golden age, barely twenty years in duration, in partnership with the Federal government, the State of California built the most comprehensive network of water conveyances in the world. At the same time they built the finest system of public colleges and universities in the world, and they built freeways and expressways that enabled urbanization and affordable market housing.

In those days, a middle class family could expect to own their home, travel on uncongested roads, and pay college tuition for their children. Today, none of that is possible. What happened?

In California’s case, the simplest explanation would be that the state itself became a special interest, viewing bigger government as central to its special interest agenda. By the end or the 1970s, nearly all of California’s state and local government agencies had become unionized, and these unions became increasingly aggressive pushing their agenda, which was to grow government in order to collect more union dues and acquire more power and influence. Like any organization, government unions sought to aggrandize themselves.

The problem, of course, was that the government does not operate in a competitive environment. Government unions collect money through dues withheld from government paychecks. Public-sector unions do not negotiate with management accountable to shareholders, but instead with politicians whom they help elect and, therefore, are accountable to the unions. Moreover, politicians, unlike corporate executives, typically occupy their offices for shorter periods of time. And politicians, unlike corporate executives, don’t own shares that might be devalued after they leave office due to decisions they made while in office.

Not only are politicians far more accountable to the unions they negotiate with than to the people they serve, but the consequences of giving in to outrageous demands from public-sector unions are much less immediate and personal for the politicians. When a corporate executive gives in to union demands that are unsustainable, the corporation goes out of business. Union negotiators know this, and in the private sector, the possibility of business failure tempers their demands.

But the survival of government agencies doesn’t depend on efficiently competing in a market economy where consumers voluntarily choose to purchase their product or service. When government agencies incur expenses that exceed revenues, they raise revenues by increasing taxes. Consumers have no choice but to pay the higher taxes or go to jail.

If electing their own bosses and compelling taxpayers to guarantee revenue sufficient to fulfill their demands weren’t enough, public-sector unions have another advantage denied private sector unions. They operate the machinery of government. Their members run California’s public schools, its transportation agencies, its public utilities, its administrative bureaucracies including code enforcement and construction permitting, its public safety agencies; everything.

This confers countless unique advantages. Depending on the intensity of the issue, the percentage of unionized government employees willing to use their positions as influencers, educators, gatekeepers, and enforcers may vary. But within the permanent bureaucracy of government, it doesn’t take a very large minority of committed operatives to wield decisive power.

Public-sector unions epitomize the establishment. Politicians come and go. But like the so-called deep state, public-sector unions are permanent, embedded in the bureaucracy, running the show. And if the show’s script calls for running in place, or even running backwards, so long as corporations and bureaucracies can amass more profit and more power, no problem.

How Government Unions Acquired Allies and Formed the One-Party State

During the 1980s and steadily thereafter, these unions acquired powerful allies. The rising environmentalist movement was particularly useful. It is indisputable that California needed to aggressively address the problem of air pollution in its coastal cities, boxed in by mountains and beset with unhealthy levels of smog. But by the 1990s, with air pollution reduced to a fraction of what it had been in the 1960s despite the state population doubling, environmentalism had become full spectrum, affecting every aspect of economic life in California.

For a while, California’s left wing, the government unions and the environmentalists, fought against corporate interests in a political battle where neither side completely dominated. But after the turn of the century that began to change.

The last big chance to stop California from becoming a one-party state dominated by Democratic Socialists may have been the special election of 2005. It’s easy now to forget the excitement incoming Governor Schwarzenegger had generated among the GOP faithful in California. Here was a candidate, as far removed from the establishment as Trump was a decade later, sitting in the guest’s chair, telling Jay Leno and half of America that “it’s the unions that are breaking California, and I’m going to terminate them.”

Schwarzenegger tried work with legislators to enact reforms during his first year as Governor, and he got nowhere. So in 2005 he took his case to the people, filing four initiatives – a balanced budget, redistricting reform, lengthened evaluation period for teacher tenure, and paycheck protection. His consultants, what a surprise, talked him out of a fifth – pension reform. And what happened?

There Schwarzenegger was, on television again, saying it was up to the people to save California. But he said it by himself. Alone. Where was California’s GOP during that entire election season? Instead of tapping into the populist momentum that had put Schwarzenegger into office, and giving it voice, most of them were running away from Schwarzenegger as fast as they could.

Nobody who condemns Schwarzenegger for later pivoting left should forget that back in 2005, while the unions spent well over $100 million to defeat his initiatives, the GOP and its donors did not step up to match them in money or, more importantly, in their tone. They went to their safe spaces, protected their safe seats, and continued as the minority party, the dwindling opposition. Bleating haplessly. Losing.

By 2010, with pro-business Republicans becoming a permanent minority in the state legislature, with every one of California’s state office holders from the Governor to the Superintendent of Public Instruction in the hands of Democrats, and with Democrats in firm control of nearly every major city, the business community moved further and further towards also supporting Democratic candidates. Searching for the candidates least likely to lean far left, up and down the state, they gave up on conservatives.

Also happening during the 2010s was the rise of the super billionaires of Silicon Valley. Always a center of global wealth and a liberal stronghold, the latest tech wave, the social media monopolies, brought onto the scene politically active billionaires that were even wealthier and even more liberal than their predecessors. With these turns, California went from being a state dominated by socialists with at least a viable conservative opposition to being a one-party state dominated by not merely socialists, but corporate socialists.

Today Democrats don’t hold a super-majority in the state legislature, they now hold what’s been dubbed a mega-majority. That is, they control not two-thirds of all seats in both houses, but three-quarters of all seats in both houses. With the legislature, the governor, the judiciary, and the most powerful special interests – government unions, the environmentalist lobby, corporations, and individual billionaires – operating in consensus – there are no checks on their power.

The Face of Corporate Socialism

Every era has its unique brand of collectivism, and California in the 21st Century will not offer exact analogues to socialist regimes a century ago in Europe, nor should it. California is not a brutal totalitarian regime, nor has California’s economy come anywhere close to that most extreme version of socialism, communism where the state owns all property.

Instead, California is run by an oligarchy, working in partnership with a legislature that is controlled by a handful of powerful government employee unions. These oligarchs and their counterparts, the union leaders, form a defacto politburo. The most accurate way to describe the political economy of California would be corporate socialism. A more vivid, and equally accurate description would be feudalism.

If one were to examine the concept of California as a feudal state, all the pieces would be identifiable. The aristocracy are the wealthy billionaires and the titans of the high tech industry. The knights and the nobles are the public employees. The clerisy are the academics and the nonprofit activists, which would include environmentalists, homeless and low income housing advocates, and social justice warriors. Everyone else would be serfs. These serfs would either be members of California’s dwindling middle class and small business owners, paying crippling tithes to the feudal regime, or they would be the lower class and the unemployed, who would rely on alms from the nobles for their sustenance.

Other metaphors work as well. To use Soviet metaphors instead of feudal metaphors, the aristocracy becomes the politburo, the nobles become the nomenklatura, the clerisy become the commissars, and the serfs become everyone else. The feudal metaphor is perhaps more applicable for California today, because unlike in the Soviet Union, private property is alive and well, so long as you are one of the fabulously wealthy few, and willing to partner with the state legislature.

The darkest but nonetheless somewhat apt metaphor for California is Nazism, for two fairly encompassing reasons. First, because the economic models are almost identical; private oligarchs and subsidized monopolistic corporations operating in partnership with a micromanaging government. Second, because where the German Nazis condemned Jewish wealth in particular, and capitalist profiteering wealth in general, California’s Democrats focus their scapegoating on “fossil fuel” wealth, or wealth amassed via unwarranted “privilege,” while enacting laws designed to penalize all wealth.

When individualism gives way to collectivism, tyranny eventually and inevitably follows. Californians who are sanguine about the future of their quasi-socialist, one-party state, may cite the extraordinary cultural revolution taking place, where individual freedom to express whatever gender they wish is celebrated, as is the freedom to experiment with any drug. Surely the German Nazis had views antithetical to this sort of individual freedom! This is true, but misses the point.

Where the German Nazis had a collectivist tyranny that suppressed what they considered to be social or sexual deviancy, California’s Democrats have a collectivist tyranny designed to suppress any individual who advocates for traditional conservative social or sexual behaviors. Equally pervasive and equally if not more sinister, they also have a collectivist tyranny that seeks to suppress and ostracize anyone who questions “climate change,” and they are using the supposed climate emergency to enact increasingly restrictive intrusions on property rights and business operations. Collectivism is creeping into every aspect of life in California. It might not have the same face of Nazism, but it has the same essence.

California’s Democrats differ from the German Nazis, of course, insofar as they haven’t opened up death camps, and probably never will. But they also differ in their level of hypocrisy. One might argue that California’s state legislature, and the Democrats that run it, are even more hypocritical than the German Nazis were. Despite their ritual demonization of profits and wealth, the private wealth that has accumulated in California in recent years, with the social media monopolies piling countless billions onto the piles of wealth already amassed in previous tech booms, has few if any rivals in the history of civilization.

The Consequences of Corporate Socialism

As California’s aristocracy has consolidated its power, an epic transfer of wealth has occurred. Corporate monopolies, financial intermediaries, wealthy individuals, public sector treasuries and public employee pension funds have all become spectacularly endowed. At the same time, at the other extreme, California has become a magnet for welfare recipients and economic refugees from around the nation and the world, who survive by collecting state funded benefits. Meanwhile, California’s middle class and small businesses, beset by a high cost of living and crippling regulations, watch their investments and their enterprises dwindle away.

The consequences of California’s descent into feudalism are well documented. High Taxes. Overregulation. Record high homelessness with feces and discarded needles littering the streets. High gas prices. Spikes in crime. Crumbling infrastructure due to green initiatives. Failing public education. Middle class flight other states. Housing policies that limit new housing construction. Rent control policies that limit private investment.

But these failures serve a purpose. They are the product of California’s long standing one-party regime controlled by oligarchs and public sector unions, buttressed by the politically useful fanaticism of social justice warriors and environmentalist extremists. They have disenfranchised the middle class, at the same time as they have rendered low income and undocumented communities utterly dependent on government handouts, and to the extent they vote, turned them into reliable Democratic voters.

Meanwhile, public employees don’t have to suffer the consequences of what California’s Democratic politicians are doing. Why should it matter if housing is expensive, if you are collecting pay and benefits package that amounts to twice what you would make in a market based hiring environment? Why should you feel pressure to pay off your exorbitant mortgage before you retire, if you will be collecting a pension that is likely to be equal or greater than the pay you received when you were working?

Giving public employees job security, compensation and benefits far in excess of private sector norms creates a conflict of interests between public employees and the citizens they serve. It undermines the value of citizenship itself, by making ordinary private citizens eligible for a package of government benefits that are more comparable to (if not less than) what undocumented immigrants receive, while the far better path to job security, a middle class lifestyle, and retirement security lies with the privileged public sector.

This inherent conflict of interests plays out in countless ways that damage trust in government and undermine faith in American institutions. Why should we control our borders, if membership and dues revenue in the teachers union depends on increasing public school enrollment by any means necessary? Why, for that matter, should immigration laws at least favor newcomers who have job skills and can support themselves, if that would mean fewer unionized employees in public education and elsewhere within the public bureaucracies to provide for the special needs of the illiterate and the destitute?

And how, for the record, does it help nations with out-of-control birthrates if a few hundred thousand end up in the public schools of Los Angeles County, when tens of millions are added to their burgeoning populations every year? But it surely does benefit the teachers union.

The cold truth confronting ordinary Californians is that they can expect no help from the oligarchs. They have secured for themselves obscene profits and investment returns thanks to a regulatory environment where only the biggest corporations can afford to comply, and thanks to politically contrived artificial scarcity that has rewarded preexisting holders of assets and locked out newcomers.

Ordinary Californians may, however, eventually find growing support from members of public sector unions who, one at a time, drift away from their leadership’s blind adherence to the corporate socialist agenda. The plain and obvious fact that this agenda is not working – not in any phase of public policy, from public education to housing, homeless, and transportation – will move many of them to support alternative policies. For the sake of their less fortunate cousins, in-laws, and friends they will begin to question current policies, and seek new solutions.

It is possible they will mount an insurgency within their unions, and turn some of that public sector union political power to work for all the people.

Fight to lower barriers to building new suburbs on open land, instead of letting the oligarchs and greenies cram everyone into the footprint of existing cities. Fight for water infrastructure projects – storage, desalination plants, aqueduct upgrades – that are completed on time and under budget, like they were back in the 1960s. Fight to build more freeways instead of “light rail” that nobody wants to ride, and to build practical intercity commuter trains instead of a grossly overpriced “bullet train.”

Fight to get help for the mentally ill and substance abusers, instead of only helping a fraction of them by building a boondoggle archipelago of “affordable” apartments that cost taxpayers $600,000 per unit. Fight to restore sensible wildland management practices to prevent future infernos. And fight for school vouchers so we can save a generation of school children, regardless of where they come from and what they bring to the classroom.

Deep in the tarnished Golden State, one may still hope.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Manhattan Beach Firefighter’s Earn Over $300,000 Per Year

There is now a $300,000 club for California’s firefighters. In the City of Manhattan Beach during 2018, the average pay and benefits for a full time firefighter were $300,242. While the Manhattan Beach firefighters, at least through 2018, belong to an exclusive club, twelve California cities pay their firefighters over $250,000 per year, and 69 California cities pay their firefighters over $200,000 per year. Are these levels of firefighter pay appropriate? Are they affordable?

Its perfectly understandable that nearly everyone, in a perfect world, would not consider any amount of compensation too high for a firefighter, given the work they do. On the other hand, we don’t live in a perfect world. Ordinary Californians face unprecedented financial challenges, nearly all of them caused by public policies that have raised the costs for everything – housing utilities, gasoline, and taxes. It costs twice as much to live in California as it costs to live in most states in America. Why should firefighters in particular, and public employees in general, be exempt from the misery the politicians they elect are inflicting on everyone else?

These policies are the product of California’s long standing one-party regime controlled by oligarchs and public sector unions, buttressed by the politically useful fanaticism of social justice warriors and environmentalist extremists. Just in California, public sector unions collect and spend over $800 million dollars per year, and there is no political special interest, anywhere, that has the slightest interest, much less the ability, to ever seriously challenge them.

One reform minded donor of moderate means, who did not want his name used, speaking about the power of government unions in California’s local politics, had this to say about an election a few years ago in a small California city: “A candidate who I asked to stand up to the unions on issues of compensation and pensions set me straight. He said ‘look, the firefighters union will spend $100,000 dollars to either elect me, or to elect my opponent, and they’ll do it every election. Do you have anyone who is prepared to do that?'”

The answer is of course not. Maybe once in a great while, somewhere, a maverick steps up with a pile of money and supports a reform candidate. Maybe they even acquire a majority on a city council. But like the Eye of Sauron, the unions find and focus their attention on the rebel insurgency, and in the next election, yielding to overwhelming financial might, control passes back to the union friendly candidates.

How to Calculate Average Pay for a Firefighter in a California City

To make the calculations reported here, raw payroll data for California’s cities in 2018 was obtained from the “downloads” page of the California State Controller’s “Government Compensation in California” website. The “2018 City Data” file contains 338,874 individual payroll records for employees of 483 cities. To get at the rate of pay for full-time firefighters, the data was filtered in two ways.

First, individual records for all part-time positions were excluded. This was done by eliminating any records where the base pay reported was less than the amount showing as the minimum rate of pay for that position. This eliminated records where an employee didn’t work a full year either because they were hired, terminated/retired, or transferred before a full year had elapsed. Next, records were eliminated in any case where base pay was less than $30,000 to eliminate part-time workers. Finally, records were eliminated if there was no employer expenditure for the defined benefit pension or for health insurance.

Second, individual records were then screened to only retain those which had the consecutive characters “fire” either as a separate word or as letters within a word (such as “firefighter”) either in the department description, or in the description of the job title.

It is important to emphasize that this methodology necessarily understates the averages that were calculated, for a few reasons. A record reporting base pay in excess of the minimum specified, but less than the maximum, can still be for someone who didn’t work a full year in the position. Similarly, a record reporting pay in excess of $30,000 can still be for a temporary position. And swept into the pool of records when admitting any job where the letters “fire” is within the department or the job title will include most of the fire department administrative personnel whose pay scales are far below and unrepresentative of actual firefighters.

What is the Average Pay for a Firefighter in a California City?

The average total compensation for a full time firefighter in a California city is $207K per year. This consists of $105K in base pay, $40K of overtime, $14K of “other pay” (including “lump sum pay”), for an average total pay before benefits of $159K. Total compensation, as any sole proprietor is viscerally aware, also includes how much your employer shells out for benefits. In the case of firefighters in California’s cities, the cost for the average employer paid benefits added another $49K, with $33K of that being a contribution towards their retirement pension, along with $16K for other benefits, mostly current health insurance.

Shown below, in a table too lengthy to include in the body of this report, are the results for the 201 California cities that directly employ firefighter personnel. But there are a few additional nuances relating to these calculations that are too big to pass over in any serious discussion of firefighter compensation in California.

First, there is the so called UAAL payment, which 28 cities still report (those highlighted in yellow on the chart below), and 173 cities do not. The acronym UAAL stands for “Unfunded Actuarial Accrued Liability.” That is the amount by which the pension system for any given California city is unfunded, i.e., the amount by which the assets invested on behalf of each city in the pension fund are exceeded by the present value of all retirement pension payments they estimate they will eventually have to make.

The UAAL payment, or “catch up” payment, is the amount, per employee, that the city is paying each year to catch up and bring their pension funding status back up to a financially healthy level. This is an abstruse concept, but it has profound financial relevance.

An obvious way to illustrate this relevance, referring to rows two and three in the chart below, is to compare the average pension payment reported by cities that included their UAAL payment, $42K, vs. the amount reported by cities that did not, $24K. Does the UAAL payment belong in a calculation of firefighter compensation? Some would argue it does not, claiming the amount is overstated because it is apportioning a payment only to current employees that ought to also be spread over retirees. Others make the rather strained argument it does not because if the pension fund underestimated how much money they’d need, that should not impact how much we estimate firefighters are earning in any given year.

There are a few ways to reconcile these arguments, none of them perfect. At varying levels of precision, from evaluating every individual actuarial record including that of retirees, to simply picking a number that seems reasonable, you could apportion some percentage of the UAAL payment, but not all of it, to current employee pension benefit payments. Or you could not include any UAAL payment, but add to the normal pension payment that all cities report some additional amount based on a more conservative assessment of how much these pension funds are really going to earn over the next few decades. Both of these methods are valid; neither of them satisfy everyone. But it is reasonable to say that cities that did not include the UAAL payment (such as Manhattan Beach) have understated their firefighter compensation by around $10K per year, and perhaps those who have included the UAAL payment may have overstated their firefighter compensation by about that same amount.

Second, there is the so called OPEB payment, which very few cities make, and even fewer report. OPEB, which stands for “Other Post Employment Benefits,” primarily refers to employer payments for retirement health insurance premiums, which is a common and very lucrative benefit for firefighters. In most cases, OPEB is not pre-funded, that is, unlike pensions which at least in theory are supposed to be 100 percent pre-funded, OPEB payments are made by employers on behalf of their retirees as they are incurred, out of operating budgets, with typically only a small fraction of those payments drawing on pre-funded reserves. In any accurate assessment of total employee compensation, the cost of funding post-retirement health insurance via payments during working years should be included.

Taking all of this into account – the drift of part-time, transitory, and administrative positions into the pool of records to be averaged, along with the underreported cost of the UAAL and OPEB payments, means the true average cost for a full time firefighter in a California city in 2018 was not $207K, but probably closer to $220K. And every budget year, and at every contract renewal, and whenever they’re endorsing candidates or campaigning for new local taxes, they want more.

Exempting Public Servants Means They Will Never Support Reforms

If you don’t have to suffer the consequences of what your politicians are doing, you will be unlikely to call for new policies. Why should it matter if housing is expensive, if you are routinely collecting a pay and benefits package that amounts to $220,000 per year? Why should you feel pressure to pay off your mortgage before you retire, if you will be collecting a pension that is likely to be equal or greater than the pay you received when you were working?

Giving public employees taxpayer funded retirement benefits that differ significantly from what the rest of us receive via Social Security and Medicare creates a conflict of interests between public employees and the citizens they serve. It undermines the value of citizenship itself, by making ordinary private citizens eligible for a package of government benefits that are more comparable to (if not less than) what undocumented immigrants receive, while the far better path to job security, a middle class lifestyle, and retirement security lies with the privileged public sector.

This inherent conflict of interests plays out in countless ways that damage trust in government and undermine faith in American institutions. Why should we control our borders, if membership and dues revenue in the teachers union depends on increasing public school enrollment by any means necessary? Why, for that matter, should immigration laws at least favor newcomers who have job skills and can support themselves, if that would mean fewer unionized employees in public education and elsewhere within the public bureaucracies to provide for the special needs of the illiterate and the destitute? And how, for the record, does it help nations with out-of-control birthrates if a few hundred thousand end up in the public schools of Los Angeles County, when tens of millions are added to their burgeoning populations every year? But it surely does benefit the teachers union.

Which brings us back to California’s firefighters. Why did they march with the United Teachers of Los Angeles one year ago during the teachers strike? Why aren’t informed firefighters letting their union leadership know what an embarrassment this was? How many firefighters have studied the Vergara decision, or looked at data on charter schools?

If firefighters want to have a union and use its unwarranted power – because unions in the public sector elect their own bosses and work for entities that can raise taxes instead of facing competitive business realities – to pay themselves far, far more than they would make in a market based hiring environment, that’s bad enough. But at the least, use some of that political power to work for all the people. Stand up to the fanatical Left in this state.

Fight to lower barriers to building new suburbs on open land, instead of letting the oligarchs and greenies cram everyone into the footprint of existing cities. Fight to build more freeways instead of “light rail” that nobody wants to ride. Fight to restore sensible wildland management practices to prevent future infernos. And fight for school vouchers so we can save a generation of school children, regardless of where they come from and what they bring to the classroom.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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“Density Ideology” Will Destroy America

If you’re searching for an organizing principle that unites the Left, density ideology should be at or near the top of your list. Far from being a sideshow, density ideology is behind the leftist drive to cram America’s rising population into the footprint of existing cities. It fulfills the agenda of every big player on the Left. Environmentalists get to preserve open space. Social justice warriors get to experiment with forced ethnic and economic integration via mandatory “inclusionary zoning,” and investors—and this, above all, is critical—get to make a killing as the price of real estate skyrockets inside the areas where building is still allowed.

Every premise that the densification gang advocates is flawed. In particular, as argued in “The Density Delusion,” there is no shortage of open land available to host new suburbs, and there is no compelling argument that suburbs cause more per capita greenhouse gas emissions than crowded cities do. And the consequences, unaffordable housing through politically contrived scarcity, rolls its way across the nation as the density advocates fly under the radar, and convert city after city.

As might be expected, ground zero for density ideology is California. Hiding behind innocuous labels such as “smart growth,” “infill,” “greenbelts,” and “new urbanism,” this process of urban containment is one of the primary reasons housing in California is beyond the reach of middle-income families.

Urban geographer Joel Kotkin recently offered a chilling summary of how everything California’s legislature is doing to “solve” the state’s housing crisis is only making the problem worse. He cites new laws that will further “block development in outlying areas, where land costs are cheaper, in favor of dense development in already expensive urban areas.”

One of these laws is Senate Bill 743, which attempts to reduce “vehicle miles traveled” (VMT), is now being used to tie new housing permits to the developer’s ability to minimize or mitigate the additional VMT totals logged by the new homeowners. This will penalize developments that aren’t within the confines of existing cities. But SB 743 has a synergistic value to the greens: it makes war on single-family dwellings at the same time it makes war on the family car.

A significant new piece of proposed legislation, favored by the oligarchs, the greens, and the bureaucrats, but bitterly opposed by literally everyone else, is Senate Bill 50. The bill would allow “neighborhood multi-family areas,” i.e., it would permit developers to buy out your neighbor or entire blocks, demolishing single-family homes and replacing them with a patchwork of apartment buildings, often with subsidized units.

Senate Bill 50 would wipe out tranquil suburbs up and down the state and is the preferred alternative to simply allowing cities to geographically expand. And while the coalition of oligarchs, greens, and bureaucrats possesses awesome political strength, they propose to exempt from this law select wealthy counties such as Marin and Santa Barbara, to ensure its passage.

Density Ideology’s Partner: Inclusive Zoning

It’s bad enough that the affected residents will have to endure the consequences, as tax-subsidized investors purchase and demolish homes at random and replace them with apartment buildings, but that’s only half the story.

As Howard Husock recently explained in City Journal, “The term ‘fair housing’ sounds straightforward, predicated on ensuring that no one who can afford to rent or buy is turned away based on race or other discriminatory criteria. The Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, however, took things much further, using fair-housing law ‘affirmatively’ to push localities not only to bar discrimination but also to change the broad socioeconomic makeups of American communities.”

While the Trump Administration now has HUD pulling back somewhat from the Obama era’s move toward socially engineering America’s suburbs, where the Feds have faltered, the density ideologues are stepping up. “Inclusive zoning” is an integral part of density ideology. In practice, it means that guaranteeing economic and ethnic diversity must be a condition of acquiring building permits and building subsidies, as well as rent subsidies after the projects are completed.

It’s important to address the most common and most effective accusation that is leveled against anyone who objects to inclusionary zoning, which is that they are motivated by racism. Like the epithet “denier,” which is used to silence anyone who objects to densification, “racist” is deployed to silence anyone who doesn’t want a subsidized fourplex dropped onto the property next to their single-family home, and filled up with rent-subsidized economic migrants who overwhelm the resources of local school systems, emergency rooms, and county welfare offices.

Most Americans aren’t racist. But they rightly have an aversion to spending their life’s savings to purchase a home in a neighborhood with a certain ambiance, only to then have their taxes increased so people who could never earn enough money to live in their neighborhood come in and live there anyway.

It is impossible to overstate the impact of inclusive zoning laws. They are a frontal assault on everything that motivates Americans to work and strive. Why should anyone work hard their entire life, creating generational wealth, if the neighborhoods where they’ve fought so hard to be able to live are suddenly filled with people who in many cases didn’t have to work at all to live there?

Economic segregation and racial segregation are entirely distinct notions that the Left, and their corporate partners, have successfully sold as inseparable. This is a lie and a big one.

Racial segregation is wrong. But economic segregation is the inevitable and desirable consequence of a meritocracy where competitive incentives are preserved. For the government to try to forcibly eliminate economic segregation invalidates all the hard work that people perform in order to provide a safe, pleasant lifestyle for their families. If so-called white neighborhoods were racially integrated, but the nonwhites in these neighborhoods were economic equals through hard work and competitive achievement, the overwhelming majority of whites would welcome them.

The Left has already strained the natural process of ethnic integration by stacking the economic deck in favor of minorities through institutionalized reverse-racism via affirmative action, race-based hiring quotas, and race-based preferences in government contract awards.

Even if one accepts, as historical redress, the necessity for affirmative action, these new inclusionary zoning laws go well beyond that. Imposing forced economic integration on any middle-class neighborhood would alarm all existing residents, regardless of their ethnicity, because everything they worked to escape would suddenly be right back in their faces. That is the cold reality to which the Left is utterly indifferent.

All of this is being done in the name of saving the climate and enforcing “climate justice”—mass immigration of the unskilled and unassimilable, rationed land, energy, and water, and forced economic and ethnic integration. It is a comprehensive formula for the expansion of government, and enrichment of a very wealthy few.

Pay attention to zoning decisions in your cities and counties. At all levels, densification and “inclusionary” zoning laws are rolling across the nation. Stopping this is a prerequisite to preserving American freedom.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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