Environmentalists Increase Influence on Local Governments

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In less than a year, three Orange County cities will be in the utility business. Fullerton, Costa Mesa, and Irvine have created a joint powers authority to purchase and distribute electricity to households and businesses in those cities, under what’s known as “community choice aggregation.”

It’s difficult to imagine how this model will result in lower electricity bills, although that’s one of the ways this program was sold to local elected officials who approved the plan. Southern California Edison will still be the primary supplier of electricity and will still manage the distribution. Since SCE only generates 19 percent of the power it distributes to customers, and purchases the other 89 percent, the costs to customers will only go down if this new joint powers authority outperforms SCE in their procurement efforts enough to offset the cost of the new bureaucracy.

As reported by the Orange County Register, “Unbound by long-term contracts many utilities hold, they can adjust the mix to take advantage of lower costs or to favor renewable energy — or both. Additionally, they can be more aggressive than private utilities in encouraging and developing clean local power generation and battery storage.” But which is it? Saving money? Or going green?

The problem with newly formed independent, city owned utilities being “more aggressive than private utilities” in developing clean renewable sources of energy is the existing state mandates are already the most aggressive in the nation, if not the world. California has mandated that public utilities deliver 100 percent carbon-free power by 2045. And SCE’s well on its way. In their 2019 Annual Report they claim they already deliver 48 percent carbon-free power to their customers.

There is a cost for “carbon-free power.” According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, California’s residential rates for electricity in October 2020 were 20.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to a national average of 13.6 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Texas, residents only pay 11.9 cents/KWh, in Utah, 10.3 cents/KWh. Even progressive Oregon manages to keep rates lower than the national average, at 11.37/KWh.

By now most rational observers realize that even if global warming is caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, the U.S. is only responsible for 15 percent of that, and California’s share is less than 2 percent. Readers of the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy know that for everyone on earth to consume half as much energy per capita as Americans, global energy production would have to more than double, and that renewables in 2020 accounted for less than 4 percent of all global energy production. This is why China, India, and every other rising economy in the world is developing additional sources of gas, oil and coal as fast as they can, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

So why are California’s legislators hell-bent on developing renewables?

The most charitable answer to this question is their desire to make California an example of environmental sustainability for the world to follow, and a belief that innovations pioneered in California will be emulated worldwide, delivering fantastic profits to Californian entrepreneurs at the same time as the planet is saved.

The problem with this noble explanation is that to accomplish these high minded objectives, California has been turned into an expensive laboratory, with 40 million captive subjects. While policies that elevate costs for electricity benefit public utilities and tech entrepreneurs, millions of ordinary Californians are driven into poverty. And this ideal, to make California a green beacon for humanity, finds expensive expression in far more than just electricity.

The green lobby in California has not only made electricity barely affordable for low and middle income households, but they have declared war on natural gas. In a state where electricity is four times as expensive as natural gas on an energy-equivalent basis, and in a nation where natural gas has never been as cheap or abundant as it is today, the movement to ban natural gas quietly gathers momentum.

As of November 2020, thirty-nine California cities have already enacted new ordinances limiting natural gas in new construction. The California Energy Commission is considering enacting a statewide ban effective in 2022. With a mandate already in place that requires new vehicle sales to be all-electric by 2035, it is clear that policymakers are determined to turn California into an all-electric, carbon-free state before anyone else, no matter what the cost.

This goal of a carbon-free society in California is also evident in housing policies, based on the theory that the denser California’s urban areas become, the less need for energy to be spent on transportation. While this theory rests on dubious foundations, it is already the primary rationale for countless local and state restrictions on development, which in turn is the primary reason housing is unaffordable in California.

Open land along freeway corridors is plentiful in California, but when attempts to develop it are mired in prohibitively expensive regulations and endless litigation, the only logical place to increase housing stock is within existing cities. The efforts in Orange County by local activists to advocate for this are typical. One such activist organization, People for Housing, announces on their website “Cities that are now on a new path.” They claim recent victories for their city council candidates in Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and Tustin.

One of the goals of these local housing advocates, echoed in pending state legislation such as Assembly Bill 68, passed in 2019, is to stimulate a “backyard building boom,” whereby homeowners can build new smaller homes in their backyards. Additional state legislation abounds, all of it designed to densify neighborhoods, and absolutely none of it designed to facilitate construction of new single family neighborhoods on open land. Meanwhile, residents who relied on zoning laws to preserve the spacious ambience of their suburbs are stigmatized as NIMBYs, racists, and “deniers.”

There is no effective opposition to California’s drive to confine its residents to existing cities, nor to challenge the move to a carbon-free, all-electric society. Both goals are impractical and extremely expensive. Shorn of the supposedly enlightened motivations behind these goals, their impact is explicitly misanthropic, and it hurts everyone.

The influence of environmental activists is the reason for California’s unaffordable cost-of-living. It is a form of economic oppression, justified on environmental grounds, but also a convenient cover for opportunistic special interests. Along with the high tech industry, the clean power industry, public utilities, real estate investors, and subsidized housing developers, California’s powerful public sector unions are big winners.

With every new regulation, and every time a private enterprise is coopted by a new government agency, more jobs are created in the public sector. This translates into more dues paying union members which results in more political spending by union leadership on the candidates of their choice. At the same time, whenever environmentalist activists block public spending on new infrastructure that might enable more suburban development, that money is redirected to pay and benefit increases for public sector workers.

There is a tremendous symbiosis between California’s economic elite, its environmentalist activists and their allies in the social justice movement, and the unionized public sector. But despite all the rhetoric about helping the disadvantaged, the biggest victims are those Californians who can least afford to fund the bleeding edge.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Schwarzenegger’s Videos Should Offer Hope, Not Polarization

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In his life so far, Arnold Schwarzenegger has logged an extraordinary, eclectic mix of accomplishments. Most notably, he is a former Governor of California, a movie star, and five time winner of the Mr. Universe title. If it weren’t for his status as an immigrant, which by law prohibits him from running, there’s a good chance that by now he could have been elected U.S. president.

Schwarzenegger’s greatest political strength, apart from being a likable, accomplished man, is that he is a political centrist. This has earned him the enmity, some of it deserved, of conservative populists, but that is the price of trying to be part of a moderate centrist coalition. But Arnold Schwarzenegger recently made a huge mistake.

On January 10, Schwarzenegger released a video entitled “My message to my fellow Americans and friends around the world.” In this seven minute video, Schwarzenegger discusses his upbringing in post-war Austria and explains how in that time and place, events leading up to World War II were fresh in everyone’s memories.

In particular, Schwarzenegger brings up one of the pivotal moments in the Nazi regime’s transition to absolute tyranny in Germany, the “Kristallnacht” which took place in November 1938. Although the Nazis had already been in power since 1933, the events on Kristallnacht (rough translation is “night of broken glass”) served notice to any Germans still wondering: They were no longer free. To Germany’s Jews, whose homes and businesses were specifically targeted, the message was much worse: You are enemies and we are coming for you.

Schwarzenegger goes on to claim that Kristallnacht was carried out “by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys,” and that the mob that overran the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was America’s “Kristallnacht.” He accuses President Trump of provoking the mob, trying to engineer a coup, and calls for any politicians who have supported Trump to be “held accountable.” He concludes by reminding us how strong our democracy is, “like a tempered sword,” and how it is important to support president-elect Biden “in defense of our democracy and those who would threaten it.”

This video, despite Schwarzenegger’s likely good intentions, will only cause further polarization. It reinforces the same one-sided narrative that has for years infuriated at least half the nation. It is yet another salvo of a biased, offensive narrative that is one of the reasons Trump got elected, and one of the reasons why the movement he catalyzed is not going to go away.

Reminding people of the double standard applied by the media to events of the past year and in prior years has become almost insipid. We’ve heard this story over and over. But when someone with the stature and influence of Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to compare the events of January 6, 2020 to the Kristallnacht, and wants to compare the Proud Boys to the German Nazis of the 1930s, it’s time to go down double standard lane, yet again.

Schwarzenegger is invited to review the video files, readily available, showing formations of militant Antifa cadres marching through the streets of every city in America, chanting violent slogans, carrying clubs and shields, wearing helmets and body armor, all dressed in black. Schwarzenegger is invited to view video clips showing these dangerous militants beating the hell out of unarmed, outnumbered victims that dared to wear a MAGA hat or carry an American flag. Schwarzenegger is encouraged to review the pitched battles that have been fought by Antifa militants for months on end in cities across America. He should take note of the burning buildings and the broken glass.

These videos of Antifa in action are terrifying. They reveal a growing movement with tens of thousands of members that is well trained and well organized, and committed to sustained violence and intimidation against anyone that doesn’t support them. If anyone in the United States today should be compared to the black shirted fascist Nazis that terrorized Germany in the 1930s, it is Antifa.

A good source for Schwarzenegger to find these video segments would be the Twitter account of Andy Ngo, a journalist who has been a victim of Antifa violence. Ngo gets almost no press coverage and when he does, this gay, Asian, immigrant journalist is accused of having ties to “right wing extremists.” Not only is this accusation a flagrant lie, but even if it were true, Ngo’s videos aren’t doctored. The videos don’t lie. Antifa has served notice to local political candidates and politicians in cities all over the country: Don’t defy us.

As another exercise in contrary facts so obvious it feels insipid to bring them up, Schwarzenegger ought to review the plentiful examples of prominent Democrats and news commentators encouraging the leftist violence that gripped the nation throughout 2020. Pointing out double standards isn’t “deflection.” It’s justice.

Before Arnold Schwarzenegger makes another video, he might consider what’s really happening on the streets of America.

It is true that some Trump supporters have become militant, or have succumbed to the momentum of the mob. Nonetheless, if any mass demonstrations could accurately be described as “mostly peaceful” over the past year, it would be those held by Trump supporters, including the massive rally and march on January 6. A minute fraction of that massive crowd got out of hand. It is a self-serving lie, defying all observational data to claim that Trump’s supporters are usually the aggressors. Events over the past year contradict this claim.

Whenever Trump supporters held a rally or a march, or even whenever GOP candidates held a meeting or a convention, it was Antifa that would show up to provoke violence. After Trump supporters hold events, Antifa gangs stalk the streets, looking for stragglers to beat up. This pattern is well documented on videos posted online, but the news media either ignores it, or attempts to present the confrontations in a manner that makes the Trump supporters appear to be the instigators.

Ultimately, by going down this well worn path of one-sided condemnation, Schwarzenegger is enabling further violence. Everything the establishment is doing, from escalating online censorship to presenting outrageously slanted news and analysis to conducting mass arrests, plays into the hands of extremist provocateurs. Where was the censorship, the news spotlight, or the mass arrests last year, during months of orchestrated violence and vandalism coming from the Left?

What escalates violence in any nation is when people lose hope. The nihilistic passion that drives Antifa cadres to call for the overthrow of the American government is because young Americans do not have the opportunities they had a generation ago. The irony here is deep. It is the marriage of big business and socialist government – also known as economic fascism – that has dried up opportunities and elevated the cost-of-living in America, with Schwarzenegger’s adopted state of California as ground zero for this disaster.

If he were willing to work as hard on his next video as he once worked on his biceps back in his body building days, Schwarzenegger could articulate a centrist vision that steers clear of blaming either wing of disaffected Americans for their anger and militancy, and instead offers hope.

That could be hope in the form of deregulating the housing market, standing up to the extreme environmentalists, reviving the timber industry to thin the forests and end catastrophic wildfires, spending more money on freeways to make room for all those electric cars, keeping Diablo Canyon open and commissioning another nuclear power plant in California, investing in water storage projects and desalination plants, breaking the power of the teachers’ union monopoly on public education, and restoring law and order to California’s cities while moving the homeless – fast – into supervised tent encampments instead of spending billions to build them free housing on the beach.

To the extent these solutions are controversial is thanks to the special interests that control California. If anyone understands the nature of these special interests, Schwarzenegger does. But he is operating out of their playbook, and just adding his voice to a one-sided divisive chorus, instead of doing the hard work of fighting for policies that offer hope.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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The “Trump Nation” Numbers At Least 150 Million

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“Getting rid of Trump is the easy part, cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.”
– ABC News Political Director Rick Klein, in a tweet he later deleted.

This sums up the sentiments that inform America’s establishment media, its corporate elite, Big Tech, academia, most of the public sector, the entire Democratic party, and most of the Republican party leadership. What do we do with 74,222,593 people? How will we reeducate these troglodytic haters? How will we control these dangerous insurrectionists?

Despite virtually every powerful special interest lined up against them, this “cleansing” will indeed be tough. Because, first of all, we are not talking about 74 million Trump supporters. We’re talking about over 150 million Trump supporters. To say that only 74 million Americans support Trump rests on an impossible assumption: That every American who didn’t vote for Trump, or for Biden, automatically is supposed to have supported Biden.

Unfortunately for the tastemakers and kingmakers of America, that’s not how reality works. A careful examination of the official election results by state yields several fascinating facts. For example, assuming the 1.8 percent going to 3rd party candidates splits equally between Trump and Biden (with such a small fraction, it doesn’t matter much anyway), then Trump voters spoke for 47.7 percent of the population, and Biden voters spoke for 52.3 percent of the American population. That would be, for Trump, over 157 million people.

Why wouldn’t this be true? On what basis would anyone assume that Trump would not command the support of as many non-voting households as Biden? Moreover, in the 25 states where Trump won, a larger percentage of the population is under age 18, 24 percent, than in the 25 states where Biden won, 22 percent. That’s a slim difference, but it puts to rest the notion that the states where Trump won are filled with aging hillbillies.

In fact, one of Trump’s most decisive victories came in Utah, where he earned 61 percent of the vote despite the unhelpful influence of Mitt Romney. Utah is America’s youngest state, with 30 percent of its population under age 18.

Another indication that the Trump Nation is closer to half of all America instead of just the 74 million number that keeps getting tossed around has to do with the turnout of eligible voters. This statistic is more meaningful than the conventional “turnout” percentage which only measures turnout of registered voters, because it indicates not only success in getting out the vote, but it also takes into account efforts to register eligible voters. And the numbers are revealing.

In the states where Trump won, 59.4 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. In state where Biden won, the figure was 62.0 percent. And in the six contested swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – a whopping 65.0 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.

This disparity of 5.6 percent when applied to the 38.7 million eligible voters living in those six swing states equates to 2.2 million more people voting. The cumulative margin of victory for Biden in those six states was a mere 312,288 votes.

The point here is not to contest the result of the election. That’s been done, that’s being done, and that debate will live on across the pages of history. But this data plainly shows the impact of the decision by Mark Zuckerberg to spend $400 million to register voters and get out the vote in these swing states. It shows the impact of last minute laws and rule changes designed to facilitate ballot harvesting, mail-in ballots, same day registration, combined with that avalanche of pro-Biden money. And Zuckerberg was just the biggest wave, part of a tsunami of pro-Democrat billions that bought the presidency.

But while money may facilitate collecting extra votes from America’s most politically disengaged in Democratic strongholds, it is reasonable to assume that money could also facilitate collecting more votes from the apolitical masses across the Red expanses of America. But even if they didn’t go to the polls, and they didn’t, because there was no Mark Zuckerberg to pay someone to drag them to the polls (or harvest their ballot), their sentiments likely reflect the sentiments of their neighbors. And these sentiments are not racist, or sexist, or hateful. They’re common sense, pro-American sentiments that Trump, for the first time in over a generation, spoke to without apology.

There were good reasons to vote for Trump. He was the first president since Jimmy Carter to not start a new war, while at the same time, and unlike Carter, he built up the American military deterrent. He encouraged the Europeans to provide more for their own defense, and negotiated peace agreements in the Middle East. He approved the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. He deregulated the economy and brought jobs and capital back to the United States. He stood up to the environmental extremists. He rejected “critical race theory.” He fought for realistic, pro-American immigration policies. He renegotiated trade agreements. He fixed the VA. He did as well as anyone would have done dealing with COVID-19 including developing vaccines in record time. There’s more. It’s a long list. Trump did a good job, while enduring more sustained harassment than any president in history.

Ideologues like ABC News Political Director Rick Klein, and his photogenic stooge ABC News Anchorman David Muir, are playing with fire. Along with their counterparts across America’s entire media complex, conventional and online, they have stoked the flames of division and resentment. They have told so many lies, and have displayed such obvious bias, that nothing they say can be believed any more. And the number of awakened people who don’t believe anything coming from sources like ABC is not 74 million, it’s well over 150 million.

Trump was a polarizing figure, and his enemies took advantage of that to endlessly use every negative utterance he ever made, invariably presented out-of-context, to terrify low-information voters, or voters who only consume conventional media (nearly synonymous groups). And despite this endless war against Trump by every establishment institution in America, he was gaining ground towards the end of the campaign, not losing ground. If the election had been held even a few weeks later, all the money and dirty tricks in the world may not have been able to prevent his victory.

What America need now is not a “cleansing” of Trump supporters. What America really needs is a thorough reformation of voting laws across the country, combined with an acceptance of online freedom of speech. Sadly, the powers that be are doing the exact opposite. But they are not alienating a small minority of clingers. They have already alienated at least 157 million people, and every time they tell another lie, or silence another voice, that number grows.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Homeless Industrial Complex and the California State Budget

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AUDIO/VIDEO:  How attempts to help the homeless have been taken over by the Homeless Industrial Complex, a system of legalized corruption where billions of dollars are wasted building “supportive housing” at a cost of over $500,000 per unit, and only developers and politicians benefit. 2nd segment: A quick look at California’s just-released 2021-22 State Budget proposal  – 18 minutes on KABC Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the Larry O’Connor Show.

Mayor Garcetti’s Homeless Policy is Destroying Los Angeles

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Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is arguably the most incompetent, destructive, negligent, no good, irresponsible mayor in American history. And he’s got plenty of competition, especially now. San Francisco’s London Breed, Ted Wheeler in Portland, Bill DeBlasio in New York City. Blue City mayors bent on destroying civilization are plentiful, but Eric Garcetti is the worst member of this odious gang.

It isn’t as if Garcetti doesn’t have partners in the ongoing annihilation of urban civilization in what ought to be America’s magnificent megacity on the Pacific Rim. He’s got a city council that is equally corrupt and delusional, and a newly elected Los Angeles County District Attorney, George Gascon, who is one of the most dangerous, pompous imbeciles to ever live. But Garcetti is in the bully pulpit. Garcetti sets the tone. Garcetti could make a positive difference if he had the vision and the guts. The buck stops with Garcetti.

Garcetti attracted well deserved outrage when he not only arbitrarily enforced “lockdown” orders throughout most of 2020, but went a step further and posted a page online – still up – where people can turn in anyone they think is violating the “Safer at Home” order. Then, just in case anyone hadn’t yet realized what a sinister authoritarian they had as mayor, Garcetti set up a bounty to encourage people to turn in their neighbors, and announced to the press that “snitches get rewards.”

The arbitrary enforcement of pandemic restrictions make Garcetti’s snitch hotline particularly offensive. Neighbors, and competitors, get paid to anonymously turn in the corner bistro or nail salon, while big box retailers and corporate fast food franchises stay open with impunity. Citizens can be turned in and cited for walking their dog, while within the city’s growing archipelago of homeless favelas, anything goes.

The problem of affordable housing and a growing homeless population afflicted Los Angeles before the pandemic, and since the pandemic began has become worse than ever. It is the signature failure of Garcetti’s mayoral tenure. The manner in which Garcetti has bungled the related issues of housing and the homeless provides a sordid glimpse into an administration riddled with corruption and delusion. They have literally done everything wrong.

There are many flawed theories that underlie housing and homeless policies in Los Angeles. To name a few: “Housing first,” first endorsed by Obama’s Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, which prioritizes funds to provide shelter before using any government money for treatment or counseling. The concept of “wet shelters,” which admit homeless individuals regardless of their sobriety. And the most misguided of all, “inclusive zoning,” the preposterous theory that the most appropriate way to house the homeless is to construct shelters on some of the most expensive real estate on earth.

This notion, that somehow anyone who is homeless, for whatever reason, has a right to live for free in a wealthy neighborhood, would be material for hilarious satire, except for the fact that the purveyors of this nonsense are dead serious. Some of the proponents of inclusive zoning are motivated by compassion unfettered by the numerous reality checks that should apply, others are stone cold communists, determined to destroy the rights of property owners. But the most influential advocates for inclusive zoning are the special interests that correctly recognize it as a scam they can ride to riches.

On January 13, the City of Los Angeles Planning Commission is going to vote on whether to approve the “Reese-Davidson Community,” a proposed 140 unit monstrosity to be built on 2.8 acres that straddle the main thoroughfares connecting Venice Beach to the rest of Los Angeles. Located just a block from the beach, the city-owned property is currently used to provide parking for beach visitors. The most virtuous choice for the city would be to keep the property as it is, at least if they ever manage to make the beach a safe place again for families to visit on the weekends. But there are other options.

Real estate in the heart of Venice Beach and close to the ocean is extremely expensive. The market value of this land, if it were sold to a developer to build an unsubsidized, 140 unit multi-family complex, is conservatively estimated at $35 million. Imagine how this money might be spent by a resourceful city council committed to helping more people at a reasonable cost. Low income housing can be built in low income areas of Los Angeles for a fraction of the cost for the Reese-Davidson project, as can “permanent supportive housing” for the homeless. The construction cost alone is estimated at over $1,000 per square foot, over $68 million. Taking into account the value of the land and the parking structure, this project is going to end up costing over $735,000 per unit – most of them studios.

This isn’t unusual for taxpayer subsidized housing projects in Los Angeles. In 2019 the City Controller, Ron Galperin, published an embarrassing audit of how the city used its voter approved Prop. HHH funds, which authorized the city to issue $1.2 billion in general obligation bonds to partially subsidize the development of supportive housing units. The gist of that report? Galperin writes: “The current median cost per unit for projects in the Proposition HHH pipeline is $531,373, and more than 1,000 units are projected to exceed $600,000.”

The implications of these findings, which represent not only a scandal for Los Angeles, but dozens of other cities in California under the same mismanagement, illustrate the futility of this approach. To house the more than 60,000 homeless living in Los Angeles today at these prices for shelter would cost $32 billion. Since these projects are also designed to accommodate low income residents of Los Angeles, easily ten times more numerous than the homeless, the true cost to get the job done is in excess of $300 billion. And this is the low estimate.

The current theory of “housing first” means that until all the homeless are housed, money cannot be allocated to treating their addictions, even to the extreme of not requiring sobriety as a condition of their residency in these permanent housing units they’re being given. This means that Los Angeles, with its mild winters and inviting beaches, is a magnet for the indigent across America, from sea to sea. This is already a demonstrated fact, as a street culture reminiscent of Lord of the Flies plays out daily in Venice Beach. The party never stops, and the only heat comes from gangs.

But even if the number of homeless in Los Angeles were capped somehow, meaning that someday they all would find permanent supportive shelter, why would the developers that are building and operating these housing projects ever want to solve the problem? This is where the concept of “inclusive zoning” becomes extremely useful. One of the besieged Venice Beach residents, Soledad Ursua, recently interviewed by the Epoch Times, explained how the racket works. “Developer fees are a fixed percentage. If you’re one of these nonprofit developers, what which project would you work on, one that pays 10 percent of $10 million or 10 percent of $100 million?”

This ten-to-one range of potential costs is not far fetched. Taking into account the value of the land and the inevitable cost overruns, it is possible, even likely, that the apartments of the Reese Davidson project in Venice Beach will come in at a total project cost of around a million dollars per unit. If the many amenities were dispensed with, and these studios were constructed efficiently in some of the inland neighborhoods of Los Angeles, it ought to be possible to build studios at a cost of $100,000 per unit. And for that matter, why aren’t homeless, especially the significant percentage that would be sane and able bodied if they were denied drugs and alcohol, not just rounded up and offered shelter in a supervised tent encampment? Such facilities could be built quickly and cheaply, and overnight, not only would taxpayers save billions, but Los Angeles would lose its status as a magnet for the stoners of the world.

One must ask, and ask again, why aren’t these solutions being pursued, or even seriously considered? Why isn’t Eric Garcetti using the resources of his city to change the legal and legislative environment to make practical solutions possible? What aren’t taxpayers demanding these reforms? The reason is because too many people are getting rich on this fraudulent masquerade of compassion. They are making billions in fees, receive additional billions in tax credits, to create projects that operate exempt from property taxes and business taxes. As the problem just gets worse.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti may or may not deserve all of the unflattering descriptions leveled at him by his critics. He is part of a much larger hypocrisy. But Garcetti knows exactly what is going on, and nobody is in a better position to do something about it than him. The homeless and housing policies of Garcetti’s administration are destroying Los Angeles. With the lone exception of the relative handful of bureaucrats, consultants, builders and operators that are making a killing, everyone in this vast city are victims of this failed policy. Not just the hard working residents who can still afford their rent or their mortgage, but the homeless themselves.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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California’s General Fund Relies on Bailouts and Billionaires

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One of the biggest reasons California’s technology moguls supported the Biden/Harris candidacy had nothing to do with ideology. It had to do with their pocketbooks. Because with a Californian presiding over the Senate, and a Californian Speaker of the House, expect federal bailouts to flow west by the hundreds of billions.

The likelihood of federal money to prop up failing local governments, state agencies, and public employee pension funds has just gone from remote to probable, as Democrats take control of all three branches of the federal government later this month. Simultaneously, and as a result of this political outcome, the likelihood of massive new state taxes here in California targeting the super rich drops from probable to too-close-to-call.

Consider the impact of Assembly Bill 2088, if enacted, on California’s wealthiest households. This “wealth tax” will impose, year after year, an annual tax at a rate of 0.4 percent of any California resident’s worldwide net worth in excess of $30 million.

To use the example of California’s richest man, Elon Musk, who according to Forbes had a net worth in early January of $176 billion, AB 2088 would require Musk to pony up 704 million, every year, for the privilege of living in California. Mark Zuckerberg, with a current estimated net worth of $92 billion, would have to pay the state $368 million. Every year.

It is easy enough to understand the emotional indifference that a libertarian might display towards Musk getting soaked for $704 million per year, or that a conservative might display towards Zuckerberg having to turn over $368 million per year, or that liberals arguably feel towards anyone wealthy being forced to pay their “fair share.” But California’s rich already pay a huge share of California’s total state tax revenues.

For example, the Governor’s Budget for 2019-2020 projected 69 percent of all general fund revenue to come from personal income taxes. Another 20 percent came from sales taxes and 9 percent from corporation taxes. The other 3 percent came from a variety of sources, mostly insurance tax. While property tax is a significant source of revenue, it is a local revenue source and only impacts the state budget insofar as when property taxes go up, it relieves pressure on the state to allocate more out of the general fund to support local schools and other local agencies.

Bearing in mind that nearly seven out of every ten dollars going into California’s general fund comes from personal income taxes, the following chart shows who is paying those taxes. Using Franchise Tax Board data from 2018, and sorted by the reported taxable income of the 16.8 million Californians filing returns, it is immediately apparent that nearly everyone paying taxes made under $100,000. That is, 13.2 million Californians, or 78 percent of the people filing state income tax returns, contributed only $7.8 billion or 9 percent of the total personal income taxes collected.

On the other side of this chart, to the right, the flipside of this top-heavy equation is presented. There were 89,000 Californians in 2018 that reported taxable income of over $1.0 million. At one-half of one percent of the total filers, their numbers don’t even register on the chart. But the orange column, representing the $34.5 billion they paid in taxes, dwarfs the contributions from the other brackets. One-half of one percent of California’s taxpayers paid 40 percent of all personal income taxes.

Moving one notch to the left to incorporate the filers who reported taxable income in excess of $500,000 in 2018 yields further evidence of just how top-heavy California’s reliance is on the wealthy to fund state government operations: Only 275,000 individuals, representing 1.6 percent of tax filers, paid 56 percent of all personal income tax revenue, which in turn is 40 percent of ALL general fund revenue in the State of California.

It is easy enough to scoff at the prospect of extremely wealthy people having to pay more. But one way or another, California’s state government needs more money. Governor Newsom’s proposed 2021-2022 state budget proposes record spending. He does this in the face of structural deficits that existed before COVID-19 trashed California’s economy. The pandemic drove the global economy online, disproportionately helping California’s tech industry, but how much higher can tech stocks soar, and how much more will the tech billionaires pay?

In addition to a wealth tax, still under consideration in the state legislature is Assembly Bill 1253, which would impose “three new surcharges on the state’s highest earners: 1% for taxable incomes over $1 million, 3% for incomes over $2 million and 3.5% for incomes over $5 million, meaning California’s wealthiest could pay 16.8% on their taxable income.” The tax is expected to generate over $7 billion per year.

Of the two bills, AB 1253 is more likely, since it would not require the gyrations that a precedent setting wealth tax would require. But would California’s wealthy residents leave the state? The litany of reasons California is driving away residents and businesses is long and compelling, with high taxes having an impact along with exhausting, endless regulations, a punitive cost-of-living, and a passive-aggressive bureaucracy.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Californians paid relatively high taxes (for the time), but got plenty for their money. Californians saw their taxes used to build a massive, statewide system of water storage and distribution, beautiful freeways to tie together the growing cities, and the finest public university in the world.

Today Californians live in a state of 40 million people with an infrastructure designed for 20 million people. New infrastructure projects are rarely approved, and when they are, more money is spent on litigation and bureaucracy than on actual construction. Thanks to preposterously overwritten regulations, California’s homebuilders cannot profitably build affordable homes without collecting government subsidies. California’s timber industry could thin the forests and would pay taxes on their earnings, but because they have been regulated nearly into oblivion, California’s forests burn like hell, year after year. One could go on.

Perhaps California’s weather and scenery will keep the super rich around. Perhaps California’s generous social benefits and decriminalization of petty theft and public intoxication will guarantee a growing population of indigent. But the middle class and the small businesses are leaving. That’s a problem for everyone, including those who can afford to stay.

While the wealthy contribute 40 percent of all tax revenues to the state’s general fund, it is the middle class and small businesses that pay most of the other 60 percent. With every moving van that heads east, more of that burden transfers to the wealthy. They had better hope their gambit has paid off, and their new friends in Washington DC are generous indeed.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Big Tech’s War on Free Speech

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On January 8, in the wake of the protests two days earlier at the U.S. Capitol that left five dead and derailed congressional debate over election fraud, Twitter and Facebook permanently banned President Trump from their platforms. Jack Dorsey, the scruffy billionaire CEO of Twitter, apparently banned Trump while vacationing in French Polynesia.

This action by Twitter and Facebook, while shocking, should not surprise anyone. This is the latest salvo in a war that began the day Trump declared his candidacy. In a series of calculated escalations that will be recounted here, Big Tech has achieved something that would have been unthinkable four years ago, the cancellation of a U.S. President.

Twitter, in a statement said “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Surprisingly, because this is rarely done by any of the social media platforms when they ban someone, Twitter identified two tweets made by the President on January 8 that resulted in their decision to ban him.

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

And, shortly after that:

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

What? That’s it?

Reading Twitter’s explanations for why these tweets were so dangerous that they closed his account offers a fresh view into the leftist mind. This is a mentality where thoughts they disagree with are not merely disagreeable, they are “violent.” In their overview, key points they make about these two tweets include the following arguments:

That Trump is not attending the inauguration implies he believes the election result is illegitimate, and that Trump is “disavowing” his commitment to an orderly transition. But Trump, along with millions of voters and thousands of witnesses, have a right to believe the election result was illegitimate. And not attending the inauguration can be as much an indication he wants to preserve an “orderly transition” as it might indicate the opposite. It gets worse. Twitter goes on to claim that by saying he will not attend, Trump is encouraging people to violently disrupt the inauguration.

Twitter then claims Trump’s use of the words “American Patriots” is meant to support violent acts, that Trump’s saying his supporters have a “giant voice” and “will not be disrespected” is “as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an orderly transition.” Finally, Twitter claims “plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off Twitter,” which somehow, according to Twitter, is linked to Trump’s offending tweets.

Facebook’s newsroom also released a statement on January 7 explaining their deplatforming of the President. Facebook owns Instagram, so they cancelled Trump’s accounts on both platforms. Their explanation was less specific, stating “We believe the risks of allowing President Trump to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great, so we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely.”

There is simply no logic to these assertions. Trump’s speech on January 6 (read transcript), and his tweets before and after that, did not include calls to violence. Trump’s enemies in big tech made gratuitous inferences because silencing Trump is part of their ongoing campaign to silence any dissent to the leftist corporate state, of which they are an integral part.

The Big Tech War Against Conservatives Started in 2016

Big tech’s war on right-of-center free speech started in earnest in late 2016 when, against all expectations, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton and became president elect. Realizing that Trump supporters had utilized social media more effectively than Clinton supporters, Big Tech’s response was to begin deplatforming influential right wing content producers. As the 2018 mid-term elections loomed, their work became urgent.

Alex Jones and his “Infowars” website is a good case study in the tactics used to reduce his impact. In the month of November 2016, Jones attracted 125 million video views. By July 2018 that number had been cut to 25 million views. According to Advertising Age, the decline was because the platforms that drove viewers to InfoWars, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube search, “clearly were trying to reduce his impact.” But this wasn’t good enough. Jones had to be silenced.

For the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, Alex Jones “Infowars” was expelled from Apple podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6th, Twitter followed suit. On September 8th, Apple banned Alex Jones InfoWars app from its App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, wiped out.

The acts of suppression or outright deplatforming perpetrated by Big Tech on right-of-center content creators since 2018 are countless and global. They started with someone like Alex Jones, whose influence constituted a genuine threat, at the same time as his polarizing rhetoric meant a lot of people would think he deserved to be deplatformed. But by the middle of 2019, any outspoken foe of globalism with more than a few followers was at risk. An article published in July 2019 by the BBC made the establishment position embarrassingly plain on the threat represented by right-of-center narratives:

“The more mainstream these narratives become, the greater the tension will be over whether they really are extreme or whether they represent acceptable political discourse, and the views of a substantial number of real people.”

“These narratives.” That is the threat. What if “real people” don’t want open borders? What if they would like facts instead of lies regarding how immigration policies affect the economy and social cohesion? What if they want balanced opinions, or just want to hear the other side for a change, on the issues of multiculturalism, race, feminism, gender “equity” and social justice? What if “real people” sometimes find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if they believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or over climate change?

Big Tech’s War Escalated During the 2018 Midterm Elections

And then the midterms came. A great example of YouTube censorship, by now starting to become more brazen, was the treatment of a video debunking some preposterous claims made by Beto O’Rourke in a primary debate. O’Rourke, lying through his teeth, spewed out a torrent of falsehoods regarding rates of incarceration, hate crimes, school punishment, illegal immigrant crime rates, and the legacy of slavery. Meanwhile, a few days later, a right-of-center critic of O’Rourke, Vincent James O’Connor, posted a video on YouTube that refuted, using impeccable sources such as FBI crime statistics, every one of O’Rourke’s points.

This couldn’t be tolerated, and with no explanation, YouTube removed O’Connor’s video (his rebuttal to O’Rourke is summarized here). O’Rourke, back in mid-2019, was still a darling of the leftist establishment. YouTube protected him, without a shred of moral or legal justification to do so. More recently, unsurprisingly, YouTube deleted O’Connor’s channel altogether. He can still be found on BitChute and elsewhere.

According to the Los Angeles Times, by mid-October 2018, Facebook purged more than 800 accounts and pages pushing “political messages.” Matt Lamb, director of communications for Students for Life of America, provided dozens of examples of biased deplatforming in a guest editorial for USA Today titled, “Google, Twitter and Facebook should just be honest if they don’t like conservatives.”

By 2020 Big Tech Was in Open War Against the American Right

If the mid-term election’s round of cancellations was the prelude, actions during and since the 2020 election are the first main act. Big Tech’s actions were constant and consistent: If you challenge the establishment narrative, you will be banned. Here are just a few highlights:

In August they banned videos discussing alternative treatments for COVID-19, presumably because President Trump had promoted these treatments. This suppression is ongoing, and inexplicable. The damage to President Trump has been done. “Inject bleach into your arm,” and other distorted versions of what he really said are forever tagged to Trump, and Trump’s days in the White House are numbered. So what’s going on? Has Big Pharma joined up with Big Tech and Big Finance? It appears to be so.

In August Facebook threatened to cancel the Hodge Twins, brothers who committed the unforgivable crimes of being pro-Trump while Black, being not only persuasive but wickedly funny, and in the process amassing over 6 million followers. Facebook stopped short of deplatforming the Hodge’s, but it will be interesting to see how long these funny guys, who among other things sell t-shirts that say “Biden Sucks, Kamala Swallows” are going to last.

Sparing their enemies who were too popular to dare to cancel didn’t stop Facebook from ramping up manipulative, agenda driven content in their “information centers,” nor did it prevent them from hiring biased “fact checkers,” to help them justify new waves of cancellations.

In October, as early voting was well underway in several states, the New York Post published an expose linking Hunter Biden to unsavory deals with unsavory international businesses where he traded on his relationship with his father to enrich himself, and possibly also his father. Twitter blocked the URL to this story entirely, while Facebook “limited distribution” of the story. But while this was going on, the Big Tech platforms simultaneously engaged in a wholesale purge of the so-called “Q-Anon” accounts.

If all you consume is establishment media, you may be forgiven for thinking that all these Q related content creators do is accuse the Democratic party of being Satan worshipers who eat babies and sexually abuse children.

In fact, what the Q websites were doing, and still are doing in the online backwaters to which they have been driven, are investigating suppressed evidence of corruption throughout the federal government and powerful institutions in international business and finance. Needless to say, also targets of the Q collective’s investigations include the Bidens and the Clintons. The Q investigators are a threat. That is why they have been censored.

Over a few days in mid October, YouTube banned over 30 major Q related channels, and hundreds of minor ones. They also took on some thorns in their side that weren’t Q related, largest of which was Mouthy Buddha, an insouciant rebel channel that had earned over 10 million subscribers. Gone. Overnight. But it wasn’t until after the election of November 3 that Big Tech stepped up their censorship game even further.

“Election Misinformation” – Carte Blanche to Censor

By now everyone has seen the post-election “warnings” on Twitter. They started with a simple sentence they would paste under any posts that question the integrity of the voting, which read “this claim about election fraud is disputed.” Users who wanted to reply, retweet or like any such posts would have to click twice, first seeing a dedicated page presenting Twitter’s arguments against claims of election fraud, then only after clicking through that page were they allowed to log their reaction. But this wasn’t enough.

Twitter’s more recent attempts to manipulate election related posts moves from an annoying inconvenience to outright censorship, with a new warning that read “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence.”

It was almost as if Twitter was trying to establish a precedent. First Facebook says that this belief – that the election was not secure and fraud may have changed the outcome – is misinformation that will incite violence, and then if there is violence, Facebook will say they were right, and now they have to censor even more people. And that’s what happened, and that’s exactly what they did. President Trump is far from the only victim of the massive purge that’s happening right now, across all platforms. Here are just a few examples.

In just the last few hours, Twitter banned the account of the Trump campaign’s digital director, Gary Coby, accusing him of letting Trump use his account. At the same time, conservatives on Twitter are reporting they’re losing tens of thousands of followers: Brian Kilmeade “lost 30K followers in 4 hours,” Terrence K Williams “I lost 100,000 followers,” Omar Navarro “Lost 28K followers in one day, Dave Rubin “I’ve lost over 35K followers on this authoritarian shitscape in the last 48 hours,” Kristy Swanson “Lost another 20,000 followers overnight,” Rachel Campos-Duffy “I lost 8K followers in 24 hours, Michael Malice “just lost 200 followers in the last 5 minutes,” Byron York “now down nearly 29,000.”

Facebook and Instagram have just banned journalist Elijah Schaffer, an utterly harmless investigator who was known for his revealing interviews with leftist demonstrators. As is typical when this happens, Facebook offered no explanation for their action. In another significant development, Brandon Straka’s #WalkAway movement, with over 500,000 members, has just been banned from Facebook. Not only was Straka’s campaign account removed, but his personal account along with the accounts of every member of his team.

Straka, an inspiring leader who launched the “#WalkAway” movement to welcome former liberals like himself, who realized they had been abandoned by the takeover of the Democratic party by the leftist corporate establishment, will probably get his account reinstated. His persona is too popular, his support too broad, his message and his tone too defensible, for the ban to stand. But the fact that it happened at all is further evidence of Big Tech arrogance.

Reactions to the Great Purge

Just to underscore how alienated the American right in general, and Trump supporters in particular, have become, consider this reaction from Reuters: “Facebook and Twitter crackdown around Capitol siege is too little, too late.” They’re not kidding. The general argument in the Reuters report seems to be “we can’t just ban extreme hate speech and overt calls to violence, because people just adapt with speech that doesn’t sound hateful and doesn’t overtly call for violence, so therefore we have to ban everybody.” They don’t exactly say that in the article, but that’s the logical inference. And the actions of Big Tech since the events of January 6 bear this out.

At least one leftist institution has found its conscience, however. As reported in Newsweek, “A legislative counsel member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned Friday that the suspension of President Donald Trump’s social media accounts wielded ‘unchecked power,’ by Twitter and Facebook,” and that “the decision to suspend Trump from social media could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices.” It will be interesting to see if the ACLU, which back in 1978 defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, will return to their original principle of defending all speech.

Reaction on the right has been furious. Mega-pundits Rush Limbaugh, Dan Bongino, and Mark Levin have all just cancelled or deactivated their Twitter accounts. Donald Trump Jr., expecting to be banned from Twitter any day, said “Big tech is able to censor the President? Free speech is dead & controlled by leftist overlords.”

As quoted in Politico, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said “he was ‘more determined than ever‘ to repeal Section 230, a measure that protects internet platforms from lawsuits concerning third party content. But if platforms lose their immunity as platforms, things might get worse instead of better for free speech advocates. Not only would all platforms be forced to regulate speech more tightly than ever, but only the big platforms – the leftist giants – would have the financial resources to withstand the inevitable and unrelenting torrent of lawsuits. Better to just force platforms to adhere to Section 230, or break them up. The nuclear option of abolishing Section 230 protection could backfire in spectacular fashion.

Which leads us to an equally important form of censorship, which is occurring with or without Section 230. Connecting free speech to whether or not content platforms adhere to Section 230 doesn’t address the silencing and denial of service coming from other online service providers. Section 230 has no effect on what decisions are made by the banks, the app stores, the payment processors or crowd funding sites, or, for that matter, the ride sharing companies and online retailers. The war on right-of-center America is corporate, full-spectrum, and it has just begun.

Full Spectrum Cancellation is the Next Wave of Supression

A harbinger for how Big Tech would move beyond mere deplatforming to engage in full spectrum warfare against right-of-center content creators can be found in the case of Lana Lokteff, who is the host of Red Ice TV” along with her husband Henrik Palmgren. Lockteff’s channel has never engaged in hate speech nor has it ever issued calls to violence, even if what they’ve had to say doesn’t necessarily represent the mainstream right-wing.

But Big Tech’s war on Red Ice TV reaches way beyond just being deplatformed by YouTube, which occurred in October 2019. In subsequent months they have also been banned by PayPal, Braintree, Venmo, Zelle, iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Wells Fargo, Coinbase, Skrill, Pinterest and iHeartRadio. In August 2020, in a move that exemplifies how Big Finance is working in tandem with Big Tech, Red Ice TV actually ended up on the MATCH List, a blacklist maintained by the credit card processors, designed to thwart terrorists and drug cartels.

Think that can’t happen to you? What about Laura Loomer, a content creator who is critical of Islam and mass immigration, a Jewish American, and a recent GOP congressional candidate in Florida? As described in a scathing video released by a friend of Loomer, recently elected congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Loomer has been banned from banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Paypal, Venmo, GoFundMe, CashApp, Periscope, Uber, Uber Eats, Medium, Lyft, TeeSpring, and Chase. For what? Sharing her opinion?

Loomer’s work was interesting; hard to find these days. She often engaged in performative videos, such as one in which she arrived at Nancy Pelosi’s home late one night with two undocumented migrants, sit up a “sanctuary” on the front lawn, and invited Pelosi to offer them food and shelter. Controversial? Sure. But only an agenda-driven ideologue would consider this material that deserves the treatment Loomer’s received.

Equally ominous evidence of a full spectrum war on right-of-center content creators is the behavior of the hosting companies. On November 15, WordPress, which is a major website hosting service, kicked the Conservative Treehouse off its servers. Without providing specific reasons for their decision, WordPress gave the Conservative Treehouse until December 2 to find a new host. With between 500,000 and 1 million site visits per day, the Conservative Treehouse is not a lightweight. They found a new host. But what WordPress did was not unique, as evidenced by what Parler is going through right now.

A conservative alternative to Twitter, Parler has grown in less than two years from a start-up to a platform with over 10 million users. For a brief time on January 8, Parler’s website crashed and experienced timeouts caused by the flood of new users that were migrating to it from Twitter. Expected to add millions of users and one Trump endorsement short of becoming a mainstream competitor to Twitter, Parler attracted the attention of Big Tech. The attacks came quick.

First came threats from Apple and Google, demanding Parler moderate its content or see its app banned from both Apple and Google’s online app stores. Making good on its threat, mere hours later Google removed the Parler app from the Google Play Store, supposedly based on reports that Trump will join the platform. Meanwhile, Apple gave Parler only 24 hours to present them with a plan for how they will moderate their content – an impossible demand and one which Parler’s CEO John Matze has already rejected. But that’s just half the story.

Parler, as a website already fielding high volume traffic, uses Amazon servers to deliver fast, global coverage. There are only a handful of vendors in the world capable of offering hosting services to websites that generate traffic in the hundreds of millions and billions of transactions per month, and Amazon is one of them. But not for long. Amazon served notice to Parler that they will have to find a new hosting service by midnight on Sunday January 11 or they will go dark. Parler intends to make the transition, but the message is clear. Big Tech intends to control everything Americans think and say.

The Hypocrisy and the Power of Big Tech

It isn’t necessary to dwell on just how hypocritical this reaction to the events of January 6 in the nation’s capital has been. Everyone knows what happened should not have happened. Everyone knows it was wrong. And everyone paying attention knows that Trump didn’t encourage any of it. There’s a deeper problem, which is that the connectivity that social media enables is the reason people can organize and communicate with a speed and reach that was unthinkable even just ten years ago. That means flash mobs in the thousands, comprised of like-minded, potentially extremist individuals, can be mobilized and unleashed for pennies. How do you stop this, when it becomes destructive to lives and property?

This is a legitimate question. But where was Big Tech while BLM and Antifa protesters were (and still are) rampaging through the downtowns of dozens of American cities all summer long? Why weren’t the social media accounts managed by these groups turned off? Why weren’t the politicians and newscasters who encouraged this violence ejected from Twitter and Facebook? The reason is obvious; the leftist violence that burned down buildings, broke windows, looted businesses, costing billions of dollars and costing dozens of lives, was serving the agenda of the leftist corporate establishment. It served notice to every centrist or right-of-center politician, celebrity, business owner, or just plain ordinary voter in America: You reelect Trump, and we’re coming for you.

An American who just watches the supposedly unbiased legacy networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR, will never see what videographer Andy Ngo, has recorded and posted for months. Black clad Antifa cadres marching through the streets of America, beating up anyone they deem “fascist,” and fighting pitched battles night after night with police. Meanwhile, the ABC News Political Director Rick Klein, in a tweet he later deleted, wrote “Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part, cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.”

One of many eloquent responses to this outrageous hypocrisy comes from MRC TV’s Britt Hughes. In a blistering seven minute rant that anyone angry at the hypocrisy should watch just to let its cathartic eloquence sink in and sooth the nerves, Hughes covers all the bases, says everything that needs to be said, and helps her listeners feel like somebody got it all out and exposed the entire rotten leftist edifice of lies and gave it the withering sunshine it deserves.

Americans who supported President Trump for all the right reasons – his policies on trade, energy and the environment, immigration, foreign policy, deregulation, education, and free speech, to name a few – are in a fight for their lives. They are facing the most formidable assemblage of financial and media special interests in the history of the world. This is no exaggeration. Big Tech doesn’t just exercise overwhelming and unprecedented control over communications in America, these companies also wield stupefying financial power. A look at seven of the most influential proves this.

Just seven companies – Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Netflix – back in October of 2018 had total cash on hand of $386 billion, with a collective market value of $4.5 trillion. Then the pandemic came along, and even more commerce and communication was forced online. As of August 2020, less than two years later, these same companies had total cash-on-hand of $495 billion – that’s a half-trillion dollars in their checking accounts. Their cumulative market value had soared to $7.6 trillion, up 71 percent from just 22 months earlier.

This is what Americans who value free speech are up against. This is what Americans who want to resist leftist answers to the issues of  trade, energy and the environment, immigration, foreign policy, deregulation, and education are up against. The events of January 6 gave these companies, along with their other corporate and political partners on the Left, an excuse to clamp down harder and faster on free speech and on the people who still oppose their plans.

The only possible glimmer of hope in all this is the possibility they have not done “too little, too late,” but too much, too soon. They’ve shown their hand. Perhaps more people will Walk Away. Perhaps more people will take the Red Pill. Perhaps more people will realize that Trump wasn’t their enemy; that he was fighting for them; that he was fighting for all of us.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Delightfully Inclusive Media Version of America’s “Far Right”

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A recent post on Twitter by comedian Lou Perez suggests a hilariously subversive mind at work. In a retweet, he presents a chart that purports to quantify the height/income trade-offs that govern the attractiveness of the human male to the human female. Apparently, as Perez puts it in his summary tweet, “A man who is 5 feet 6 inches tall needs to earn an additional $175,000 per year to be as desirable as a man who is about 6 feet tall.”

Everything about this screams foul to the woke and sensitive crowd, starting with the presumption of a gender binary. The presumption of the male income being a predominant variable, rather than the female income. The inferred acceptance of the gender pay gap. The unconscious and toxic bias in favor of exclusionary heterosexual attraction. In terms of milking this for hilarity, Titania McGrath, who specializes in politically incorrect gender humor, could give Perez a run for the money.

And like McGrath, Perez has stepped on the toes of the woke many times. So many times, in fact, that he recently published a guest column in the Wall Street Journal entitled “How I Became a Far Right Radical.” Unlike the study correlating male attractiveness to male earnings, which was a serious but humorous bit of scholarship coming from the University of Chicago back in 2006, when scholars had more latitude than they do today, Perez has been tagged in a more recent, equally serious but utterly humorless study.

In this study, released in November, involving scholars from Harvard, Temple, and others, along with corporate collaborators including Microsoft, Perez was listed as a “far right radical.” Entitled “Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube,” the massive three year study followed the viewership patterns of over 300,000 unique YouTube users, who watched over 21 million videos on nearly three million unique YouTube channels in over 8 million sessions.

Wading through over 6,000 words of extremely dense academese, not including lengthy appendices, the general message of the study appears to be that “the far-right echo chamber is somewhat smaller than the left and centrist communities, it is rapidly growing in population size and watch time. Moreover, its users are more engaged and more likely to stay engaged in the future than users in other echo chambers, especially when they are exposed to bursts of content.”

But how did Perez, a funny guy, end up on the expansive list of “far right” YouTube channels listed in the concluding exhibits of this study? Apparently, as he explains in his WSJ column, for five years through October 2020, he was head writer and producer of a YouTube channel called “We the Internet TV.” As he puts it, “Our comedy channel made fun of everybody—left, right, center.” Material that earned Perez a Webby Award in 2017 became threatening enough by 2020 to earn him a place among America’s hard-core right wing.

How Perez expands on the fundamental dishonesty of this study that drags several hundred people into its net and tags them all as “far right” is worth repeating here. He explains that the words “fascism,” “racism” and “terrorism” are missing from the paper, even though those words are linked to the far right. But then, as he puts it, “I realized it was a smart (and cowardly) move on the part of the authors to leave them out: just use the umbrella term ‘far right’ and allow your readers to fill in the tacit isms. That way, you don’t risk being called out for labeling people who are not fascists, racists and terrorists as such. Instead, the study is peppered with nebulous adjectives like ‘extreme’ and ‘radical,’ which allow readers to see their own bogeymen.”

If you read the list of “far right” YouTube channels listed in the study you will immediately notice that hundreds of them have already been deplatformed by YouTube. And if you keep track of these channels, you will also notice there are many more that the scholars omitted. Where, for example, are the many “Q” channels? They’ve all now been banished to alternative platforms, but were all present, and popular, on YouTube during the period under analysis.

And if the scholars who conducted this study were not being paid to offer a reductionist, biased message, they might acknowledge that the so-called far right YouTube channels they’ve identified constitute an incredibly diverse and inclusive list. As Perez puts it, “In the study’s view, former Evergreen College professor Bret Weinstein – a self-described progressive and Bernie Sanders supporter – is far-right too. Joining us are neuroscientist Sam Harris (a self-confessed liberal), podcast host Joe Rogan (who considers himself ‘pretty liberal’) and Bloggingheads.tv (whose regular contributors include Vox co-founder Ezra Klein ).”

Perez is right. If you read the list, dozens if not hundreds of names jump out that have no business being tagged as far right, unless “far right” simply means “free thinker.” Prager University, Ben Shapiro, Turning Point, Conversations with Bill Kristol. Really? Kristol’s neither a free thinker nor far right. Bill Kristol? Far right?

And then there are those genuine intellectuals, along with Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein, such as Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, who have never, ever engaged in “far right” rhetoric. Rather, they have followed truth into uncomfortable corners. And why, for that matter should the X22 Report or Black Pigeon Speaks, which delve into forbidden topics involving central banks but never engage in hate speech or calls to violence, be stigmatized as “far right.” Why should any of these four channels be banned from YouTube, a fate that has already befallen Molyneux and X22?

Even those website that might qualify as far right by most conventional standards, such as Vincent James Red Elephants or Lana Lokteff’s Red Ice TV, as well have never engaged in hate speech or calls to violence. Moreover, their acquaintance with facts, as opposed to propagandistic drivel, is far more finely developed in James and Lokteff than it is in, say, David Muir or Norah O’Donnell.

The sheer diversity of the channels listed as “far right” by these supposed scholars makes any attempt to generalize about them an exercise in misinformation. What these many people offer is interesting content. They offer thoughts unfettered by fears of having to be politically correct, and instead are typically inspired by what are harmless or even uplifting motives, ranging from an irreverent but clever joke, to explorations in how to build character, to love and concern for one’s heritage.

Mr. Perez appears more bemused than offended by his designation by these academic heavyweights as a member of the far right. That is an appropriate reaction. The “far right,” as defined by this impressive feat of academic hackery, is a huge and diverse group that like any large and diverse group includes a small percentage of scallywags, but for the most part are some of the most interesting and passionate people you’ll ever meet.

Ultimately, the purveyors of this study have provided us another place to look for the good guys. That was certainly not their intention, but we thank them for their service.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Big Tech Censorship Suppresses the Reopen California Movement

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“This isn’t just an event, this is a movement.”

That’s how Jack Frost, one of the organizers of the ReOpenCalNow conference, planned for this weekend, characterizes their effort. Presenters include a bipartisan group of politicians including Fiona Ma, California’s State Treasurer, a Democrat, and Congressman Tom McClintock, one of the most reliable conservative Republicans in America. Presenters also include sheriffs who will not enforce the lockdown, attorneys who are challenging the lockdown, and economists and businesspeople to explain how the consequences of the lockdown have been catastrophic for millions of Californians.

The conference will also feature presenters from the medical community, and for that, big tech has suppressed the organizers’ attempts to publicize the event. How they’re doing this offers an update on just how pervasive big tech suppression of dissent has become.

Because the ReOpenCalNow organizers are targeting a high level audience of policymakers, they assembled an email list of several thousand of California’s local elected officials. The list includes city council members, county supervisors, and members of school boards. Using MailChimp, they sent out three email blasts before receiving the following message:

“We received a direct complaint regarding a recent campaign sent from the account with the username ReOpen Cal Now. Direct complaints are serious because they indicate that a recipient contacted Mailchimp, our hosting facility, or a blocklisting agency about an unsolicited email.”

The MailChimp email went on to say:

“Because the content associated with your industry conflicts with our Acceptable Use Policy (mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use), Mailchimp is unable to serve as your email service provider and your account has been disabled.”

MailChimp went on to reject all appeals, and it is clear that the reason they would not reinstate ReOpenCalNow’s account was not because of spam. The laws protecting people from receiving spam do not apply to publicly available emails of elected officials. Every email on the list compiled by ReOpenCalNow were publicly available and corresponded to an elected official.

Tab Berg, whose consulting firm Tab Communications is assisting ReOpenCalNow to publicize their event, explained that by using MailChimp before the account was disabled, he was able to quickly verify that only four people out of over 3,000 recipients marked the emails as spam, and only one recipient logged a complaint directly with MailChimp. This would not be enough to trigger a cancellation of service, even if the emails were not going to public officials. Once MailChimp was informed as to the public nature of the email list being used, the account would have been immediately reactivated on appeal. The reason MailChimp cancelled ReOpenCalifornia’s account is because information about alternative therapies for COVID-19 is the target of organized censorship.

Evidence to support this version of what happened is found in how ReOpenCalNow was treated when they attempted to start an account on another major platform, Mailer Lite. Their application generated an immediate rejection from MailerLite. They wrote:

“The approval team determined that your account violates paragraph 9. of our Terms of Use on appropriate content. We are sorry to disappoint you. I could not be of more help but thank you for understanding.”

When ReOpenCalNow appealed, noting that they are a non-profit educational group that hosts public policy conferences, and that the content clearly falls under 1st Amendment expression, they received a second rejection:

“Thank you for your interest in Mailerlite however, unfortunately, your website’s type of content is not permitted on our platform. You can read more about this in our Terms of Use here:
https://www.mailerlite.com/legal/terms-of-service. Due to the reason outlined above we were unable to approve your account.”

In Mailerlite’s terms of service, the following applicable provision is found: “You are also not allowed to send content that encourages discrimination, bullying or actions that could impose health-risk, such as anti-vaccination material.”

This coordinated exclusion of dissenting medical opinions on COVID-19 was further evidenced in Facebook’s refusal to permit paid ads from ReOpenCalNow. Their initial refusal was based on their recent policy – inconsistently applied – to stop accepting political ads. Upon appeal, ReOpenCalNow was told “your website contains dangerous content that violates Facebook’s terms of service.”

Dangerous content. That is how a website, and the conference it promotes, is considered by the biggest social media and email platforms in the world. A conference that is organized and features individuals with impeccable reputations and credentials who dare to question the political and medical response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Consider the primary transgression of the organizers: A panel scheduled for mid-day on January 9 that features four doctors, individuals with medical licenses, with extensive experience treating COVID-19 patients. Their crime? Claiming there are therapeutic early stage treatments for COVID-19 that yield a high percentage of cures.

What if these doctors are right? For that matter, what if they’re wrong? So what? Why is it that COVID-19 is arguably the first disease in history where the treatment opinions of licensed physicians are suppressed and their reputations are scandalized, and virtually no approved early stage treatments are even offered as alternatives? What’s going on?

What is happening to the organizers of ReOpenCalNow is emblematic of a large and multifaceted political sickness in California today. A grotesque misreading of medical data being used to justify a lockdown that has destroyed the livelihoods of millions while enriching a handful of gigantic corporations and their shareholders. In parallel, an organized suppression of treatment alternatives has occurred that quite possibly has cost thousands of lives.

This is a reflection of the arrogance of big tech, united with other powerful opportunistic special interests ranging from big pharma to a thoroughly corrupt political establishment. The consequences of mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overstated, and yet expert debate over what to do is denied by the platforms that once, in a better and very recent time, represented an explosion of freedom.

One may hope the organizers of the ReOpenCalNow event this weekend will livestream to multiple platforms. Online viewing is free to anyone who registers on their website, but should YouTube or Facebook take a predictable next step and deplatform them, there remains – at least for now – robust alternatives the organizers should consider: DLive, Rumble, BitChute and Odysee.

Movements survived and grew in the days before the internet by using actual, physical newsletters, phone calls, and in-person gatherings. Perhaps it will come to that again, unless such activity shall itself be deemed too “dangerous” by the powers that be.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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