California Flooding Continues, But We’re Still in a Drought

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AUDIO: As one storm after another pounds California, and millions of acre feet of floodwater run out to sea, officials still proclaim the state to be in a drought. Edward Ring with Kara McKinney on OANN’s Tipping Point.

California’s Mega Water Wasters

California’s Mega Water Wasters

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It’s illegal to serve drinking water in a California restaurant unless the customer asks for it. Billboards sponsored by the state urge residents to put a bucket in their shower to capture water for their gardens. These symbolic pittances, along with escalating restrictions on water use by farmers and households that are anything but trivial, are the products of a deeply flawed mentality governing water policy in California.

At the same time as government bureaucrats commit to ongoing water rationing, ferocious winter storms lash the state with hundreds of millions of acre-feet of precipitation. If this storm runoff were captured and stored, there would never be water scarcity again. But instead, it merely causes flooding and havoc, then runs into the vast Pacific Ocean. This is the story of California’s mega water wasters, one of the most delusional, self-righteous, destructive cults in the history of civilization.

In California, when it rains, it pours. So far in 2023, up and down the state, rain and snow are pouring down, one storm after another. Rainfall totals in the San Francisco Bay Area are an astonishing 600 percent of normal for this time of year. In almost every watershed throughout the state, total rainfall is well above normal, and in the Sierras, the all-important snowpack is now sitting at exactly 200 percent of normal.

With all this rain and snow, it might seem like California’s multiyear, devastating drought has come to a welcome and very wet end. But according to the experts, we can’t believe our lying eyes. When Politico reporters asked California’s state climatologist, Michael Anderson, if the drought was over, “in short, no,” was his answer. Anderson had just “had a conversation about that” with a UC San Diego water expert who had the temerity to suggest that California’s drought was over.

So, it’s raining and snowing like hell these days, with no end in sight, but we’re still in a drought. That’s the official line, and wavering is not allowed.

As reported by News 1 in Los Angeles, “Despite storms, state reservoirs aren’t likely to return to normal levels this year.” From NBC News: “California has been hammered with rain. It may not be enough to reverse its drought.” From Bloomberg: “California Deluge Is Still Far Too Little to End Drought’s Grip.”

Why California’s Man-Made Drought Will Continue

Despite experts predicting for years that Californians would need to rely less on a diminishing snowpack and more on harvesting water from storm runoff, the state has done little to prepare. Even if that isn’t a permanent new reality, it’s happened often enough in recent years to warrant adaptive measures. But here we are, in 2023, and when the rain stops, and if the snow melts prematurely, Californians will likely face another year of drought restrictions.

California has massive reservoirs, sufficient to supply the state through drought years, but state water managers won’t allow them to fill up in January. If they do, runoff from spring storms and melting snow may go straight over the spillways, causing flooding downstream. The assumption had always been that these reservoirs should be left half-empty throughout the winter to protect communities downstream from flooding, and would not be allowed to fill until May or June as the snow finally melted and the probability of large new storms was lower.

Knowing when to stop releasing and start saving water in California’s reservoirs requires knowing if more late spring storms are coming, and whether or not an early heat wave will send the snowpack cascading out of the mountains prematurely. This is impossible to predict, so California’s water managers err on the side of caution, and year after year, they let the water out.

The problem is compounded by environmentalist-inspired regulations, perpetually expanding, to leave a minimum flow in the rivers to protect fish. The result during dry years is that farmers and urban water agencies downstream from these depleted reservoirs are not permitted to withdraw water because the flow is necessary for the ecosystems. Never mind that in the days before dams, anadromous fish species simply stayed in the ocean in the years when the rivers ran dry.

However valid concerns over flooding and aquatic habitats may be, there are known solutions. But they face the gauntlet of obligatory, protracted, biased studies, endless environmentalist litigation, legislative indecision, hostile government bureaucracies, and powerful business and financial interests that profit from water scarcity.

Missed Opportunities

If downstream flooding is a concern, as it should be, there are remedies. One fix is to construct new dams upstream from existing flood control dams. The lower dam could then be used as it always has been, mostly for flood control, and the upper dam could be allowed to fill.

But in the face of relentless pressure from environmentalists, two major dams that might have fulfilled these criteria were never built. On the North Fork of the American River, the proposed Auburn Dam would have stored 2.3 million acre-feet of water and would have been upstream from the existing Folsom Reservoir, which could then have been used exclusively for flood control. Environmentalists declared filling the Auburn Canyon would be an ecological catastrophe, and the Auburn Dam project died.

Also killed by environmentalists was the Temperance Flat Reservoir, which would have been upstream from the existing Millerton Reservoir on the San Joaquin River. Temperance Flat, which could have been filled up by the torrential rains that have already blown through California this year would have stored another 1.3 million acre-feet.

Another way to reserve runoff without compromising flood controls is to build off-stream reservoirs. These are constructed in arid valleys with minimal runoff and no major rivers, but they are pumped full using water taken from California’s rivers and aqueducts during storms. Only one major off-stream reservoir exists in California, the massive San Luis Reservoir, with a capacity to hold 2 million acre-feet, even though dozens of promising locations were identified during the heyday of the California Water Project in the 1950s and ’60s.

As it is, a few major off-stream reservoirs are still being considered, but they’re not getting anywhere despite the will of the people.

California’s voters in 2014 overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, a water bond that would have funded the proposed Sites Project, an off-stream reservoir originally planned to hold 2 million-acre feet. But Sites remains tied up in litigation, endless planning, and only half-hearted and belated efforts by the state to secure matching federal funds.

Meanwhile, other badly needed off-stream reservoir proposals are getting nowhere. The Pacheco Reservoir, which would provide essential backup storage for urban water agencies serving Silicon Valley, is tied up in environmentalist litigation and funding controversy. The Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir, designed to serve farmers in the upper San Joaquin Valley, is barely out of the concept stage, but the day it becomes anything more than a dream it is sure to end up with environmentalist lawsuits that will tie it up in knots.

Even if all these reservoirs were built and allowed to fill, how much of the subsequently released water would be untouchable and reserved exclusively for aquatic ecosystem health? It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the environmentalist mantra—and one never effectively challenged in California—goes something like this: “The more water you leave in the river, the better, and the only truly acceptable management strategy is to leave all the water in the river.” This is a recipe for perpetual water scarcity, and that’s exactly what we’ve got.

Unless it rains all winter and well into the spring, and perhaps even if it does, millions of acres of farmland will be taken out of production, and urban residents will be required to kill their lawns and take short showers. The absurdity of this policy in action can be seen in how water is currently managed in the biggest hydraulic choke point in the state, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In just the first two weeks of this year, over 3 million acre-feet of fresh water have passed through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and flowed into the San Francisco Bay, but of that, only 260,000 acre-feet has been diverted by the state and federal pumps into the aqueducts Californians depend on to deliver water to reservoirs in southern and central California. This is only two-thirds of their pumping capacity, which in any case is grossly inadequate and hasn’t been upgraded in over 50 years.

There is no rational justification for this. This volume of water has not swept through the Delta since the floods of 2017. Moving a much higher percentage of this much floodwater into southbound aqueducts and aquifers cannot possibly harm Delta ecosystems, when the remaining flow is still more water than the Delta and San Francisco Bay estuaries have seen in several years. Where is the hardware? Where is the will?

Why isn’t it possible, when levees throughout the Delta region are currently failing from flooding rivers, for existing infrastructure to be used to move desperately needed water south to badly depleted storage facilities?

Practical Solutions Encounter Endless Delays and Obstacles

The solutions to flooding and the solutions to drought have a compelling symmetry. If you solve one, you have probably also solved the other. California could have all the water it needs through smart investment in infrastructure. The system of dams and aqueducts built 50 years ago still holds up remarkably well, and upgrading and adding to those assets to meet 21st-century requirements is well within the technical and financial capacity of Californians. The problem is all political.

New and innovative proposals permitting more fresh water withdrawals from the Delta even during periods of reduced precipitation should be evaluated and fast-tracked. For example, the San Joaquin Valley Blueprintproposes to install perforated pipes into engineered channels with the Delta to divert additional tens of thousands of acre-feet per day without disrupting currents or harming fish populations.

Along with more surface storage, California’s capacious aquifers can store millions of acre-feet of runoff. While percolation basins permit slow recharge of groundwater, recently discovered underground flumes in the Central Valley could allow rapid water diversions into underground storage. It is estimated there are over 100 million acre-feet of available underground storage capacity in California’s Central Valley aquifers, and possibly much more.

Across California’s cities, a recent study by the Pacific Institute claims up to 3 million acre-feet of urban storm runoff can be harvested and treated every year, equaling nearly 50 percent of California’s total urban water demand.

Desalination plants, which could deliver hundreds of thousands of acre-feet each year to California’s arid coastal cities regardless of drought conditions, are perhaps the most fiercely opposed of any project by environmentalists. Despite successful installations from Israel to Australia and from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, only one major desalination plant ever got past the activists in California: the Carlsbad plant just north of San Diego.

There are plenty of ways to solve California’s new set of water challenges, and there is plenty of money to get it done. What is lacking is the will to legislate remedies to the many bureaucratic and litigious obstacles, so Californians can plan and complete these projects in years instead of decades.

California’s Animist Hoi Polloi and Their Enablers

If you want to characterize the mentality of California’s elites, it’s easy enough to encapsulate in a few phrases: “This land belongs to the wildlife, and humans are intruders.”

This is more than an ideology. It is the official state religion of California. It requires its practitioners to worship the earth and the animals, and place these creatures above themselves. It is the animist antithesis of Christianity, which enjoins humanity to worship God and to steward the earth.

This would explain why California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, with wolves reintroduced into California, is now considering petitions to reintroduce grizzly bears. It would explain why ranchers are prohibited from shooting coyotes that threaten their livestock. They can’t even kill wild boar, an introduced species of uncommon intelligence and destructiveness. By the time you get the permit, your calves are dead.

This animist religion is why, to return to the subject of water management in California, you can’t declare open season on striped bass, an alien predator that is killing far more salmon than altered river habitat. Enabled by sport fishing associations that want to keep the bass large and plentiful, water experts are designing contorted schemesto micromanage river flow and temperature in order to maximize the salmons’ chances against the bass.

Water for salmon, salmon for bass, trophy bass for anglers, a dustbowl for farmers, rationing for residents, and fully actualized animist activists. This is life in California under its chic green alternative religion. Animals are sacred, while humans are toxic and must be restricted and rationed.

To appreciate just how elitist and hypocritical this animist bias has become in California, consider the members of the California Coastal Commission. In May, commissioners voted unanimously to deny approval of a major new desalination plant in Southern California. One of the commissioners on this 12-member board has lived on a $35 million estate in Los Angeles’s tony Pacific Palisades. Sitting on over an acre of lush landscaping, this 11,000-square-foot home is part of a neighborhood sprinkled with the mansions of film executives and movie stars. Imagine how much water these households consume.

How can someone that fortunate, whose “water footprint” can’t possibly come anywhere close to the 42 gallons per person per day limit the state legislature has mandated to take effect by 2030, justify voting against a desalination plant that would have made life easier for hundreds of thousands of Californians? Here’s your answer:

According to the Coastal Commission’s voluminous report denying the desalination project: “The Regional Water Quality Control Board determined that Poseidon’s ongoing impacts to marine life would be equal to a loss of productivity from 423 acres of nearshore and estuarine waters.”

That’s the extent of it. A “loss of productivity” in an area of ocean less than one square mile in size. If you can’t do something that minimal in exchange for 56,000 acre-feet of guaranteed fresh water per year, you can’t do anything.

This antihuman religion and elitist hypocrisy infect thousands of influential Californians. But reforming the bureaucracies that are imposing water scarcity on millions of other Californians would require more than replacing the directors. Nearly every bureaucrat staffing these massive regulatory organizations is a product of a deep green, faith-based educational system that preached animism. Thoroughly indoctrinated, they care more about animals than they care about people.

Californians are squandering millions of acre-feet of storm runoff even as they face permanent water rationing. Until tens of millions of Californians stand up to the thousands of activist bureaucrats who wield power over their water and energy, and demand balanced policies that embrace abundance, nothing will change.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Future Cities Could Be Beacons of Innovation and Hope

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Futurist imaginings of what sort of world awaits humanity often embrace extreme scenarios, ranging from George Jetson’s utopia to George Orwell’s nightmare. They also tend to be wildly inaccurate. But cities throughout history, at least in hindsight, can be seen as the logical expressions of the culture, resources, and technology available to the people at each time and place. With that in mind, and with a resolve not to stray too far into the territory of unrealistic optimism or pessimism, it is possible to speculate on what urbanization may look like in the second half of this century.

To begin with, starting around 2050, urban development will enter a phase of refinement rather than expansion. By that time, human population is projected to have leveled off at around 10 billion, and also by that time, migration to cities may peak at around 80 percent of the population. Between now and 2050, urban areas will grow from housing 4.5 billion people to housing roughly 8 billion people. Navigating that expansion is one of the fundamental challenges of our time.

The news is mostly good, however, because it isn’t immutable resource constraints that can derail the expansion and improvement of cities over the next thirty years, only the political choices we make. Understanding that the availability of resources and the demands of civilization may line up favorably may make wise political choices more likely. Chief among them are how adequate land, water, energy and raw materials will be ensured. Land is perhaps the most fundamental of these, and two factors make it probable that land shall become more available and abundant, not less.

First, the ongoing, worldwide, and entirely voluntary migration of billions of people into cities, to access jobs, security, and cultural amenities, guarantees the depopulation of vast land areas. Over the next 30 years, the rural population on earth is actually projected to dramatically decline, from about 3.5 billion to 2.0 billion.

Adding to this, land use itself will shift away from agriculture, as technological advances will enable 10 billion people to obtain satisfactory nourishment with less farmland than 8 billion people require today. This will happen through a combination of higher crop yields, large scale aquaculture, and indoor agriculture. The only genuine threat to land availability in the 2nd half of this century is if land-based biofuel production continues to expand. That would be a catastrophe, but it is a political choice.

Water abundance is a challenge that is often cited as the looming and inevitable Malthusian check on humanity achieving universal prosperity, but that, too, is a political choice. Technology already exists to recycle urban wastewater, desalinate seawater, engineer interbasin transfers from water-rich regions to water-poor regions (Ubangi to Lake Chad, Bramaputra to Deccan Plateau, Ob-Irtusch to Aral Sea, etc.), and more efficiently harvest storm runoff. Apart from mustering the political will to undertake these projects, the energy required to pump and treat water is considered by some to be a prohibitive obstacle. But this pessimism rests on dubious premises.

To begin with, energy is not in short supply. For everyone on earth to consume one-half as much energy per capita as Americans do, global energy production has to double. That achievement, combined with improvements in energy efficiency, is about what we’re going to need by 2050. The good news is that proven reserves of so-called fossil fuels, at double the current rate of consumption, are sufficient to last about another 160 years. “Unproven” reserves of natural gas, oil, and coal, are estimated to be many times that.

The point here isn’t to defy the climate crisis consensus and advocate unrestricted development of fossil fuel. Rather, it’s a reminder that one of the most widely accepted Malthusian predictions, the “Hubbert’s Peak” theory of imminent and terminal decline of fossil fuel reserves, never happened. If energy abundance is achieved with nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion, factory produced biofuels, or via improving photovoltaic technologies, or even with satellite solar power stations, so much the better. But in the meantime, energy security and an expanding economy can be ensured using conventional fuel sources. One may hope that direct synthesis of CO2 exhaust into liquid fuel or inert solids is just around the corner, as recent reports suggest. Then we can get back to focusing on practical economic strategies and genuine environmental challenges. In the meantime, energy scarcity is a political choice, not an unyielding reality.

Sourcing raw materials for everything from megastructures to disposable packaging is an area of legitimate concern. There are hard limits on some of the most essential mineral resources, but there are also tantalizing new workarounds and innovations to compensate for scarcity. Most metals can be recycled, and even complex systems like batteries will be cost-effectively recycled once robotic technologies dramatically lower reprocessing costs.

One of the most promising alternative building materials is cross-laminated timber, a mature technology that is cost competitive with concrete and steel and in many applications a more appropriate choice. Cross-laminated timber, also known as mass timber, is now available to replace concrete panels and steel trusses, and is already used as the primary structural building material in high rise buildings around the world. Needless to say, mass timber is a renewable product, and well within the capacity of existing forests to sustainably deliver the necessary board feet.

Perpetual human innovation, whether it’s mass timber, or next-generation concrete using abundant desert sand, or, for low rise buildings, structural blocks with cores of hemp or straw, or virtually inexhaustible new minerals mined from the moon and the asteroids, will always ensure that when the political and economic environment is favors innovation, the collective lot of humanity will get better and better. So what will the cities look like in the 2nd half of the 21st century?

One may hope that as cities expand over the coming decades, then are refined as global population stabilizes after 2050, the process is organic and decentralized. This will not always be the case. An example of wealth fueled hubris might be found in “The Line,” brainchild of Saudi Crown Prince Bin Salmon. Envisioned as a single gargantuan building 600 feet wide, 1,500 feet tall, and 100 miles long, this monstrosity is planned to house over 9 million people. Built in a straight line, with a minimal cross-section, it is intended to be locally “walkable,” with quick access to any point along its length via its internal high-speed rail. Predictably, “it will run on 100% renewable energy.”

The Line may represent the antithesis of an organic evolution of cities into the future, but it nonetheless may be an authentic expression of the resources and technology currently available to the Saudi’s. It also speaks to the role that megastructures may play in expanding the capacity of cities to nearly double in population over the next few decades. And it brings up an interesting counter-argument to those who decry the inevitable densification of urban areas via so-called smart growth policies; the per capita quantity of personal interior space available to urban residents may increase, even if their access to personal outdoor space will decrease. This may not be a palatable tradeoff for some, but it is better than nothing, and megastructures will make it possible.

As the cities of the world expand upwards and outwards, governments and investors will have to cope with the privatization paradox, whereby private investment is always stimulated when there is scarcity. But when scarcity is reversed by new investment, there are often unpleasant consequences for the least privileged. This is seen in contemporary urban renewal. Poverty and disorder causes values to drop, this in-turn stimulates investment which causes values to soar, rendering housing unaffordable to the original residents. Imagine this process writ on a global scale. With massive investment and magnificent visions will come displacement. There is no orthodox answer to this paradox. A mixed-capitalist political economy may best manage the complexity, but along the way, epic fumbles are inevitable.

On par with the challenge of managing the economics of transitioning to global megacities is that of changing demographics. Birthrates in the developed world are below replacement levels and as access to healthcare, reduced infant mortality, education, prosperity, and female emancipation has proliferated across the developing world, this trend has emerged without exception. Once global population peaks at around 10 billion, it will begin to decline, and with that, the so-called population pyramid will invert. By 2100, according to current extrapolations, the worldwide population of youth will begin to be outnumbered by old people.

Intertwined with these economic and demographic challenge are cultural issues. Will cities arise in the developing world to keep pace with their ongoing rapid population growth, or will billions migrate into the cities of developed nations, as those nations are the first to enter into population decline? Can mass migration occur from developing nations into developed nations without inciting cultural conflict? Can construction regulations be calibrated sufficiently to enable private developers to make a profit while still meeting demand and offering affordable housing? That model has failed in California, a state where home ownership is out of reach for most residents, because excessive regulations and a failure to invest in infrastructure has created a politically contrived housing shortage. Can local communities and neighborhoods be preserved when high-density housing is built? Can the architecture of high-density housing avoid being aesthetically alienating?

Urban planners have a tumultuous century ahead. Cities must nearly double in capacity, then they must successfully accommodate an aging, declining population. The good news is that global resources are adequate, and rapid advances in robotics technology ensure there will not be shortages of workers, including caregivers. Good news for environmentalists is that the 22nd century will likely see a steady decline in total global population, shrinking the footprint of civilization.

Navigating the path to a future of peaceful, thriving megacities is fraught with peril. But the necessary preconditions for success are present. There is an opportunity for cities, through a process of perpetual refinement, to expand and innovate, delivering a quality of life that just gets better with every passing decade. Who knows; a hundred years from now, our lives may not be terribly different from the Jetsons. It is not merely a healthy emotional exercise to imagine a wondrous and bright future for humanity. Such a future is possible.

The second half of the 21st century can be defined by stability, abundance, enlightenment, and glorious, sprawling, glittering cities and suburbs. It can be remembered as a time when humans eradicated infectious disease, cured cancer, dramatically extended life expectancy, protected wildlife and wilderness, achieved universal literacy, brought freedom and opportunities to everyone on earth, and took the first bold steps towards becoming a multi-planet species.

There are plenty of difficult challenges facing humanity. But maybe, just maybe, we face a future that is dazzling beyond description.

An edited version of this article was published by the Pacific Research Institute.

Harvesting the Deluge is an Opportunity for Californians

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It doesn’t take a hydrologist to know Californians are getting an unusual amount of rain. Totals in the San Francisco Bay Area are an astonishing 600 percent of normal for this time of year. In almost every watershed throughout the state, total rainfall is well above normal, and in the Sierras, the all important snowpack is now sitting at exactly 200 percent of normal.

With this quantity of water already delivered from the sky, with so much more on the way, one might think that drought restrictions could be lifted. But not so fast. Despite predicting for years that Californians were going to need to rely less on a diminishing snowpack and more on harvesting water from storm runoff, the state has done little to take advantage of the new normal. When the rain stops and the snow melts prematurely, Californians will likely face another year of drought restrictions.

It didn’t have to be this way. In 2014 voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, a water bond that would have funded the sort of water storage projects that we could use right now. But that was over 8 years ago, and not one project has started construction. The proposed Sites Reservoir, an offstream facility originally planned to hold two million acre feet, remains tied up in litigation, endless planning, and only half-hearted and belated efforts by the state to secure matching federal funds. The proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir, which would have held 1.5 million acre feet and which would have been built upstream from an existing reservoir, was killed by state bureaucrats in defiance of the will of the voters.

But even if these reservoirs were built, would they have been filled? In just the first eight days of 2022, over 1.5 million acre feet of runoff has flowed through the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, but of that, only 138,000 acre feet has been diverted by the state and federal pumps into the aqueducts we depend on to deliver water to reservoirs in southern and central California. This is less than half what these pumps are capable of moving south.

Californians should be asking why, when levees throughout the Delta region are currently failing from flooding rivers, it isn’t possible for existing infrastructure to be used to move desperately needed water south to badly depleted storage facilities?

The solutions to flooding and the solutions to drought have a compelling symmetry. If you solve one, you have probably also solved the other. New proposals that would permit more fresh water withdrawals from the Delta even during periods of reduced precipitation should be evaluated and fast tracked. For example, the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint proposes to install perforated pipes into engineered channels to divert tens of thousands of acre feet per day without disrupting currents or harming fish populations.

Along with more surface storage, California’s capacious aquifers offer the means to store millions of acre feet of runoff. While percolation basins permit slow recharge of groundwater, recently discovered underground flumes hold the potential to allow rapid diversions of water into underground storage.

Across California’s cities, a recent study by the Pacific Institute claims up to 3.0 million acre feet of storm runoff can be harvested and treated every year, an amount equal to nearly 50 percent of California’s total urban water demand.

There are plenty of ways to solve California’s new set of water challenges, and there is plenty of money to get it done. What is lacking is the will to legislate remedies to the many bureaucratic and litigious obstacles, so Californians can plan and complete these projects in years instead of decades.

This article originally appeared in the print edition of the Orange County Register.

How Individuals Can Realign America

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King Theoden: What can men do against such reckless hate?
Lord Aragorn: Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.
– Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, 2002

We live in tumultuous and often troubling times, but that does not make them unique. The ordeals and challenges we face are as old as our species: war, famine, disease, poverty, hate, mass psychosis, greed, brutality, tyranny. Nature is often cruel, and the human capacity to inflict harm on other humans is bottomless.

What is perhaps unique about today, however, is the pace of change and the global scale of its impact. In less than a generation, a communications and information revolution has transformed the lives of 8 billion people. We now stand on the threshold of conquering disease, eliminating poverty, exploiting the resources of outer space, extending our lifespans, and all the while, everyone on earth is witnessing this progress and wanting their share.

This is the truly novel and mostly hopeful context of the age in which we live. But as incredible new wealth and new ways to wield power are created and growing in exponential increments, like moths to a flame, ambitious souls are trying to grab as much of that wealth and power they can. Some hope this competition will naturally evolve for the greater good of everyone. Others, true to the darker side of human nature, just want to use it for themselves.

How do we face the challenges of our time? How do we do good? How do we cope with evil? What do we do with the time that is given us? What can individual Americans do?

First we must recognize that if American society is losing its traditions and splintering into polarized factions, it isn’t all happening by accident. If chaos alone governed our destiny, why is it that  every institution we used to trust, in lockstep, is promoting so many obvious lies? No objective and informed person can fail to at least question, if not completely reject, premises these institutions relentlessly promote:

Human civilization is unsustainable. We are running out of fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel will destroy the planet. Renewable energy is clean. Renewable energy is the only acceptable option. White people are inherently racist and enjoy unwarranted privileges. Mathematics are racist. The nuclear family is oppressive. People can choose their genders. Men can have babies, and women can have penises.

Each of these premises is not only false, but, if accepted, will wreak destruction on America and the world.

Yet these foundational lies inform every manner of mainstream public communications, from news, entertainment, education, and public policy debate, to social media discourse and search engine results. The truths that must replace these lies, in similar fashion, constitute the foundation of a resistance:

Humanity can flourish. Fossil fuel does not create an existential threat to the planet, and there’s plenty of it. Renewable energy is not cleaner or more sustainable than fossil fuel or nuclear power. White people are not inherently racist. Providing equal opportunity to earn success in a colorblind society is the only equitable way to allocate privileges. Math is not racist. The nuclear family with a father and a mother is the optimal way to raise children to become healthy, happy and productive adults. Sex is immutable. Women have babies, and men have penises.

Is that clear enough?

Asserting these truths has a virtue that the other side, for all its power, cannot match: They’re true. They’re backed up by data, experience, science, and common sense. That’s why despite odds that often seem hopeless, it is still possible to rally the American people and politically realign the nation. There’s a gravity to truth. It flows downhill like a river. Lies, on the other hand, require continuous effort to uphold. Truth, as it applies to these fundamental premises, also has the virtue of being uplifting and optimistic.

It’s a relief and a breath of fresh air to hear someone explain that we’re not all about to die in a climate cataclysm, that there are plenty of energy resources, that prosperity is an eminently possible choice, that America has created the most inclusive society in the history of the world, and that it’s OK to be white, black, brown, or whatever, it’s OK to be colorblind, and it’s OK to have a traditional family and teach traditional values and norms to your children.

The venues for asserting truth to power are many and the opportunities are poorly exploited. Here are some of the many ways to change your community and change the nation.

How You Can Change the World

Pack public meetings: Leftist activists who show up, without exception, to loudly push their agendas at city council meetings are sending a message: Vote for what we want or we will continue to disrupt everything you do, including every public meeting where you appear and including any attempt you make to get reelected. Packing public meetings also helps a biased media spread the perception that there is grassroots support for a policy, even if there isn’t. Elected officials and appointees to governing boards are reluctant to vote for anything that violates the sentiment of the boisterous crowd packing a meeting. If you don’t show up, you lose.

Litigate: Using lawfare to derail common sense public policies has been used by the establishment Left for decades. Litigation is one of the primary reasons we can’t get the homeless epidemic under control, or build new water projects or oil pipelines, or any other badly needed infrastructure. Litigation has been the synergistic partner to regulatory bureaucracies, where the activists sue the agency, the agency immediately settles, paying the activist law firm a massive penalty fee and layering new regulations onto the American people.

Litigation has been used to compromise American elections, where to eliminate “voter suppression,” countless loopholes have been blown through election integrity up to and including not even having to produce a valid ID in order to vote. Litigation has been used by the Left to expand every well intentioned bit of legislation or regulatory decree from a nuisance into a monster. It’s a racket. Fight fire with fire. Sue.

Participate in grassroots election campaigns: An obscure and very close election, belatedly called on December 1 in deep blue California exemplifies how good candidates can beat the odds. In the seventh assembly district, where registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by six points, political newcomer Josh Hoover overcame a five-term incumbent Democrat despite being outspent four-to-one. His secret? What limited resources his campaign had were spent primarily on mobilizing volunteers to knock on doors, send texts, and make phone calls.

Hoover already had name recognition, because voting households had been saturated with television ads and mailed flyers demonizing him. This meant when voters met the candidate in person, or met his volunteers, they already knew him, and could immediately tell he was a good candidate with good ideas, that he was the underdog, and that his opponent had nothing to offer apart from a dirty campaign.

Get involved in local campaigns: It’s hard for one person to change the outcome of a national election. But the concerted efforts of just a few individuals can make the difference in a race for city council or school board. If you’ve had it with how your city is managing the homeless crisis or how your school board is failing to manage the left-wing agenda of the local teachers’ union, then get involved. If you don’t want to run for local office, help a local candidate. In many of these races, just a few more people walking precincts can change the outcome. It happens all the time. As local victories build up, these winning politicians gain experience to take the good fight to races for higher office. When it comes to local elections, one person can make a difference.

Support ballot initiatives and recalls: On September 14, 2021 Americans witnessed an unusual political event. In solidly Democratic California, of all places, Governor Gavin Newsom had to take time off from pursuing his dream of becoming the 47th U.S. president to fight for his political life. Fueled by a relative pittance in donations but an abundance of passion, a grassroots army, easily a hundred thousand strong, circulated petitions to recall the governor, submitted over 2.1 million signatures, and forced a special election. Newsom and allied committees opposing the recall were forced to spend $92 million to defend his seat.

If a strong enough contender had surfaced, Newsom would have lost. Initiatives and recalls are expressions of direct democracy with decisive power. In an age when petitions can be downloaded from a website, printed at home, signed and returned, the power of local and state ballot initiatives can be exploited far more often and at far less cost than is currently done. Find a cause, and start a committee. You will give them a scare. You will drain their resources. You might win.

Listen to what nonpolitical people want: Most Americans have a vague sense they’re being fed a pack of lies by a government run by special interests, but unless they’re among the minority of Americans who have made politics one of their top priorities in life, they don’t realize the extent of the danger or the depth of the lies. For these Americans, the last thing the Right needs to do is come across as even angrier and more extreme than the leftist machine they oppose. There are issues that animate the hard Left and the hard Right, and it’s an existential battle. But the derivatives of that battle are playing out in the issues that everyone cares about.

It isn’t necessary to explain—truthfully or not—that evil forces are behind the push to replace math instruction with queer theory. It’s more productive to calmly ask “don’t you think it’s better if we prioritize reading, writing and arithmetic in K-12 schools, and keep sex education age appropriate and subject to parental consent?” Similarly, it isn’t necessary to explain—truthfully or not—that the entire “climate change” narrative of doom is a plot by a fascist oligarchy to conquer the world. It’s more productive to simply explain that renewables aren’t ready for prime time, and conventional energy is the only way civilization can thrive.

Find new allies: Probably the most important missing partner in reforming the American establishment and realigning American politics are labor unions. This deserves closer examination. As it is, the prevailing special interests in America are hedge funds, technology corporations, and pharmaceutical companies, in that order, with most of corporate American falling in right behind them. These special interests now completely control the Democratic Party and most of the Republican Party.

Historically, however, labor unions controlled the Democratic Party. What has happened to labor unions in the past 50 years, and especially in this century, is their original charter—to protect the American worker—has been supplanted by a veneer of internationalism, i.e., protect all workers of the world, eliminate racism, and stop climate change, while behind that veneer is a desperate compromise.

Unwilling to submit to the optics of supporting populist Republicans, or to support the anti-establishment substance of America First policies, union leaders in America have joined forces with the neoliberal, globalist uniparty. Open borders and energy poverty are policies they now accept, and an impoverished and disenfranchised American workforce is the consequence. If labor unions were true to their membership, they would return to their roots and demand regulated borders and deregulated energy and infrastructure development. Don’t give up on labor unions.

Boycott woke corporations: There are several lists of so-called woke companies that pander to the activist Left. While high profile examples include Disney and the NBA, it is important to also look for the companies that express their wokeness in ways that directly harm the economy. For example, the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria being used by the Left to judge companies is designed to eviscerate America’s energy economy.

Choose your targets carefully, and attend to the big picture: The most influential woke institutions in the world are arguably Blackrock and Vanguard. Pick companies to boycott where there a movement has formed in order to leverage your impact. Consider investments in the growing non-ESG movement such as being pioneered by Vivek Ramaswamy’s new firm Strive. Never forget that as more Americans rebel, these boycotts will gather irresistible strength.

Become a prepper: This advice is offered in the broadest possible sense. Being a prepper doesn’t necessarily mean you have to hunker down in remote hills on a fortified compound. It can just mean you have prepared for possible hard times by stocking food, fuel and a means to defend your home at the very least against nongovernmental disorder, i.e., against mobs of rioters and looters. Knowing you and your family are prepared for difficult times makes it easier to participate in public activism, because you know you’ve already done everything you can in your private life.

Engage in peaceful protests: When the people who control the pumps that deliver water through aqueducts to farms and cities in Southern California are driving to work, on yet another day when those pumps are turned off so an endangered bait fish can survive, a fish that is being wiped out by non-native, introduced predator species more than by the pumps anyway, why aren’t ten thousand angry people lining the road outside the gates? Environmentalist extremists, along with social justice warriors, have engineered demonstrations to stop everything from pipelines in the Dakotas to desalination plants off the California Coast, so why aren’t the people whose lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by these policies also showing up and applying pressure? Organizing has never been easier. Do it.

Be a social media warrior: This is the easiest form of getting involved. It’s been justifiably satirized: the “activist,” sprawled on his couch with a bong and a laptop, poking keys and pretending he’s making a difference. But it’s naïve to think fighting online battles doesn’t matter, and misleading to think it’s easy to do this effectively. If tens of millions of people share news, promote values, and expose misdeeds online, the truth cannot be suppressed.

If tens of millions of people engage in activity reciprocal to how organized online mobs of left-wing activists behave, reporting every misleading message, vilifying every villain, exposing every decision maker that currently hides in bureaucratic anonymity, it will make a difference. If you can’t do anything else, learn everything you can about social media, set smart priorities to maximize your time, and get to work.

The tactics described here are only some of the ways to help keep America great. There are plenty of reasons to be hopeful about where America and the world is headed. And this optimism is yet another source of power. Optimism energizes activists and it attracts new recruits. Matching an optimistic attitude with proven tactics becomes a force very difficult to stop. Political realignment is possible in America. Every one of us can help make it happen.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Equity Paradox

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If a society strives to achieve “equity” for every citizen merely by providing equal opportunity, then it will have to accept unequal outcomes. If a society does not accept unequal outcomes, then it will have to provide unequal opportunities. That is a circle that cannot be squared. Societies must choose one or the other.

This paradox is denied by every major institution in America. Implicit in that denial is the fantasy that designing a society to favor certain groups in order to achieve equality of outcome will not fatally undermine the cohesion and vitality of the overall society. Theoretically, it might have worked several decades ago, when “disadvantaged” groups constituted a minute percentage of the American population. Offering special benefits and privileges to a small fraction of the population may have been a manageable burden. But today, the vast majority of Americans belong to a so-called “protected status group.”

The magnitude of this shift in just 6 decades bears enumeration. In 1960, at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, the population of the United States was 89 percent white. The social justice programs that were launched at that time, affirmative action and the war on poverty, had an impact – for good or ill – that was limited. If affirmative action released unqualified students into elite universities, or unqualified engineers and executives into upper management, it only represented a 10 percent displacement. If welfare and other programs initiated by the war on poverty destroyed the work ethic and broke up the families of the so-called beneficiaries, at least only 10 percent of the U.S. population was so victimized.

Today, almost everyone belongs to a protected status group. Social justice advocates now demand proportional representation be extended to include not only blacks, but all nonwhites, as well as all women. They demand this “equity” be applied to all university admissions, all hiring and promotions, all government contracts, and even in the quantity of criminal prosecutions and prison populations. For America’s black population, social justice advocates are now demanding, via direct “reparations” payments, a leveling of individual net worth. The only people left in the American population who are not protected and offered special privileges are nonHispanic white males. These men now constitute less than 30 percent of all Americans. Among minors, the percentage of nonHispanic white males in America is less than 25 percent.

How America moved from extending civil rights to a disenfranchised tenth of the population to extending special privileges to 75 percent of the population is a tale for the ages. It represents a shift from something that was noble and mildly disruptive into a movement today that is nefarious and catastrophically destructive.

Restoring Equality of Opportunity Requires Accepting Inequality of Outcome

The standard rhetoric of social justice warriors starts by pointing out disparities in group achievement and then immediately attributes those disparities to oppression. In almost every case, however, other causes can be identified for these disparities. Although you will never hear this from Democrat and RINO politicians pandering for votes, the supposed “gender gap” in pay between men and women has been thoroughly debunked. When taking into account hours worked per year, consecutive years in the workforce, the market value of the college majors earned, willingness to travel or relocate, the market value of the job choices made, and several other factors, women in America today actually make slightly more than men.

The incessant drumbeat to advance women over men extends to executive suites and boardrooms, where men still outnumber women. But is it sexism that has denied women proportional representation at the top, or the fact that significant percentages of women do not choose a path in life that requires these particular sacrifices? And why is that a bad thing?

While much of the alleged disproportionality in career outcomes between men and women is actually nonexistent, the disparities between whites and blacks are very real. Blacks have lower rates of high school or college graduation, lower household income, they have lower household net worth, and they have far higher rates of incarceration. But why?

The chief obstacle to black achievement is not racism. Rather, the primary barrier to black achievement in America is a thug culture that undermines if not terrorizes black communities, expressed in broken homes, substance abuse, gang violence, contempt for education, and rejection of law enforcement. What caused this, ironically, were earlier iterations of what is now called “equity,” that is, welfare programs that turned fathers and husbands into a liability.

Thanks to welfare and other entitlements that have made black men economically unnecessary for child rearing, over 70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Multiple generations of black men have subsequently been raised in homes without a strong male role model and have turned to gangs, drugs, and crime. Today, although blacks are barely 13 percent of the U.S. population, they committed an estimated 60 percent of the homicides in 2021, mostly against each other. Black perpetrators are overrepresented in every category of crime in America. Welfare and related entitlements, combined with failing public schools and low expectations, are the reason why.

This is the equity paradox in real life. Denying the paradox by abandoning the principle of offering equal opportunity, and instead leaping to merely making payments and extending privileges in order to provide equality of outcome, has not helped anyone. It has only caused grievous harm to the black community. Instead of recognizing this, social justice warriors, in pursuit of “equity,” are demanding more of the same.

The Tough and Virtuous Upside of a Colorblind and Genderblind Society

The terms “colorblind,” “assimilation,” and “meritocracy” are not code words for racism. They are noble concepts to live by. They are the inclusive premises of American civilization and America’s vitality, and they must be defended at all costs. It is inevitable that in a meritocracy, some groups will perform better than others. But in America today, this has little to do with race.

If white racism is so pervasive in America, how does one explain why Asian-Americans have demonstrated economic and academic achievements that outperform the white population?

The reason is simple. Asians in America were willing to support their own communities, embrace the values of hard work, education, and thrift, preserve intact nuclear families, and build generational wealth despite potentially being held back by discrimination. Over time, and in no small measure of irony, when it comes to admission to elite universities, Asians now find themselves, in many cases even more so than whites, victims of discrimination because they produce high academic achievers far in excess of their share of the population.

An extraordinarily accomplished Asian American, multi-millionaire entrepreneur and outspoken critic of woke culture, Vivek Ramaswamy, had this to say in a recent interview. “I don’t care what skin color you are, what language your parents spoke, what nation your parents came from, the reason immigrants come to this country is because they want to pursue excellence unapologetically, they want their kids to pursue excellence unapologetically, and right now in America we have this new anti-excellence culture that elevates victimhood, elevates mediocrity, and penalizes excellence itself. The idea that that math is racist is a racist thing to say, it assumes that people of certain races can’t do math well, when in fact it is the failure of our public schools to teach math in an equal way that is the actual problem that we should be talking about.”

Conservative pundit Larry Elder has put it more succinctly. “If you’re willing to spend two hours a day working on your jump shot,” he asks, “why aren’t you spending that much time working on algebra problems?”

Another purveyor of the tough love of meritocracy is Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, who argues in her book “The Diversity Delusion” that affirmative action not only embitters the many qualified whites and Asians who are pushed aside, but harms the supposed beneficiaries. In an interview presented by the Hoover Institution, she said:

“If our goal is to graduate more black scientists, racial preferences work against that goal. If those students admitted to Duke with over a standard deviation of gap in their incoming freshmen credentials had instead gone to North Carolina University, a perfectly respectable school, where they met the qualifications of their peers, they would stand much greater chance of graduating in good standing with a science degree.”

Instead, MacDonald argues, underqualified black college students either drop out or change from a STEM major to a watered down nontechnical major. MacDonald also alleges that a symbiotic relationship has formed between the racial preference beneficiaries and the diversity bureaucracy. As unqualified students are admitted, they can’t compete academically, and they start blaming phantom racism for their intellectual and psychological difficulties.

We are seeing this played out across academia and, more recently, it has become pervasive across corporate America as well. These institutions have been taken over by a gang of woke commissars, committed to imposing “equity” on American society. They are either in denial of the paradox it embodies, or they welcome the prospect of living in a nation where merit no longer matters, and equality of opportunity is erased in favor of “anti-racist” racism and “anti-sexist” sexism to achieve equality of outcome.

It’s tough to sell tough love – i.e., earn your success by competing against immutable standards that are the same for everyone – to a population that’s being spoon fed victim ideology and oppressor guilt from the day they’re born, but that’s what has to be done. One of the most compelling public intellectuals to get to the root of the problem is Jordan Peterson, who claims that what woke brigades characterize as a history of oppression and victimhood is in fact an inevitable and natural process common to all cultures. He identifies Western Civilization not as uniquely malevolent, but the opposite, because it recognizes the rights of individuals.

In recognition that you can have equal opportunity, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both, Peterson falls squarely on the side of equal opportunity. But equal opportunity is meaningless unless you reward merit, and when you reward merit, you must live with hierarchies of achievement; inequality. Quoting from a recent interview, Peterson says “hierarchies are based on competence, not arbitrary power. If they are not based on competence they are tyrannical and cannot be sustained.”

This is life in America today. A burgeoning tyranny, engineered by opportunists and fanatics that deny the equity paradox. This denial is a monstrous lie that will drive America to ruin. In pursuit of equality, America’s institutions no longer offer equal opportunity.

The rhetoric of victim and oppressor and the agenda of forced equity must be rejected on every front. Equal opportunity rewards excellence. Equal outcomes requires tyranny and is indifferent to excellence. From school board meetings to corporate conference rooms to cocktail parties, and everywhere else, the equity agenda must be openly and forcefully refuted.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.