America’s Future Cities – Boom or Doom?

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As the virulence of the COVID pandemic subsided in 2020, a new phrase, “urban doom loop,” became a common way to describe the failure of America’s downtowns to recover economically. The concept is simple enough. As occupancy in downtown buildings declines, businesses that service those occupants decline, tax revenues decline, services are cut, thus causing still more businesses and commuters to relocate. This leads to a downward spiral.

COVID made everything worse. Concern about transmission meant that nobody wanted to get into light-rail cars or board buses. Over a year of veritable lockdown starved downtown businesses that catered to office workers. The explosion of online shopping drove countless retail establishments out of business. And the serendipitous (if you want to call it that) arrival of remote work as a completely viable alternative to most office jobs meant people didn’t have to commute downtown anymore.

In the aftermath of COVID the wreckage is everywhere. Notwithstanding political mistakes that make it harder for police to deter crime and manage homelessness, cities with depleted budgets have compounded that problem by reducing their police forces. Mass transit services, along with downtown parks, alleys and sidewalks are now overrun with criminals and homeless. Downtowns are not only economically depressed, they’re dangerous.

In March 2023 the Brookings Institution published a report “Breaking the ‘urban doom loop’: The future of downtowns is shared prosperity.” In that report, “shared prosperity” is presented as a solution that rejects the “false dichotomy” of cities v. suburbs. They argue that a robust downtown is “extremely important to their regional economy.” But their argument is thin, because it rests almost entirely on data that shows downtowns having a much higher “ratio of land area to tax assessed value.”

So what? Is it axiomatic that because real estate is worth more  in dense downtowns, that compels us to increase the density of downtowns still further? Can downtowns be saved in this manner? Why not decentralize our urban landscape?

The authors of “Breaking the urban doom loop” are correct that downtowns are in more trouble than ever. California’s big downtowns have been gutted. Crime, retail failures, commercial vacancies, and a collapse in mass transit ridership have put them into obvious decline. The commercial office vacancy rate in Los Angeles is 22.5 percent, in San Francisco it is 32 percent. Both are record highs. Making matters much worse, as commercial leases expire they can no longer be renewed at the favorable ultra-low rates granted up until a few years ago. Many landlords will just hand the property over to the lender, leaving them with underwater assets and few options. That, too, will have a negative ripple effect. Conditions could get much worse before they begin to improve.

A common solution proposed, which on the surface makes compelling sense, is to convert empty commercial space into apartments. Why not? We have vacant space and we have a housing shortage. But it’s harder than it sounds. It isn’t enough to urgently lift regulatory obstacles and rezone. The conversions have to make financial sense, and in most cases, they don’t. Commercial offices, for example, typically only have one restroom per floor. This means that converting a high-rise or mid-rise building into a residential tower will require drilling holes for the bathroom plumbing through every floor in multiple places, from top to bottom, an extremely expensive job.

Notwithstanding the hard construction costs involved in conversion, which must be amortized, is the hard reality that except in the most high-end, gentrified echelons of urban residential real estate, the market price per square foot of leased commercial space greatly exceeds what the market will bear for residential space. Putting people into converted office buildings is a process that will require billions in government subsidies, if it is to happen at all. It’s a good idea, but it might not be economically feasible except in limited circumstances.

We’ve already seen what billions in misguided subsidies has done to our cities. Just this year, total spending on homeless programs in Los Angeles County will exceed $3 billion. Massive spending pursuant to the “housing first” ideology, whereby the “unhoused” must be offered “permanent supportive housing” before they can be treated for addiction, or trained for jobs, has turned the Southern California coast into a magnet for America’s unhoused.

Every year, California’s population of unhoused grows, despite record spending. Once again, solutions sound simple on the surface: we have vacant commercial and retail space, and we have an unhoused population. Voila. But the end result of this strategy would be downtowns that are still business wastelands, now filled with housing projects for the indigent. This is not a recipe that will turn the doom loop into a boom loop.

Before considering the whole “false dichotomy” between downtown development and suburban neighborhood development, two cold facts must be recognized. First, California’s laws that incentivize crime, substance abuse and vagrancy have to change. Police have to be allowed to prosecute individuals for these infractions, or the streets will never be safe. If these infractions were prosecuted and offenders were jailed for an appropriate period of time, it would immediately deter a high percentage of these activities. Suddenly the streets would be safer, unhoused people with options would exercise them and get off the streets, and police budgets would become manageable because deterrence would result in less need for law enforcement.

Second, the cost of housing, whether it is for low income working families, or unhoused individuals and families, is prohibitive in areas with high real estate values. It is also economically prohibitive in most cases to convert commercial space into unsubsidized market housing. These two facts lead to an uncomfortable conclusion that challenges the core premise of urban planners today, which is that higher downtown population densities are preferable.

You cannot create a chic, culturally rich downtown while at the same time filling your hotels and formerly commercial high rises with people who don’t work and aren’t sober. You will bankrupt your civic budget and you will scare away anyone with money and options. Successful downtowns, because they are beautiful and culturally rich, and because they host fabulously expensive buildings on the most expensive class of real estate there is, are by definition exclusive.

Despite these daunting reality checks, the preference for density over suburban expansion has become a quasi-religion among urban planners. It has spawned a robust industry of politically connected developers that collect subsidies and construct low-income and homeless housing in urban centers. And one of the central tenants supporting this religion is the conventional wisdom, allegedly beyond all debate, that higher density cities have less impact on the environment.

To understand this mentality, a 2005 study by the prestigious International Institute for Environment and Development called “The eco-city: ten key transport and planning dimensions for sustainable city development” offers an in-depth look. Their premise is clear enough, “the value systems and underlying processes of urban governance and planning need to be reformed to reflect a sustainability agenda.” In a lengthy analysis, they list several principles to realize this new vision.

Central to this vision of an “eco-city” is density, “a compact, mixed-use urban form,” where “freeway and road infrastructure are de-emphasized in favor of transit, walking, and cycling, and “the central city are human centers that absorb a high percentage of population growth.” The study goes on to decry “the negative consequences of low-density urban development,” and is rife with the usual paeans to inclusivity, walkability, and diversity, along with the obligatory condemnation of “NIMBYs” getting in the way of enlightened progress.

In the eyes of the densification lobby, Asian cities are held up as an example to emulate. According to the 2005 study, they have an average population density of nearly 40,000 people per square mile. That compares to San Francisco currently at just over 19,000 people per square mile, and the city of Los Angeles at nearly 9,000 people per square mile. But is the primary urban planning objective of higher density truly justifiable? Does it truly conform to the realities of economic geography and the obligations of environmental responsibility?

According to a recent, and very contrarian study, “The Next American Cities,” published by the Urban Reform Institute, the answer to that question is emphatically no. In a thorough discussion of every possible objection to urban expansion, co-authors Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox take to pieces the density arguments. Some of them should be self-evident by now.

For example, work from home technology has matured, with the pandemic constituting its shakedown cruise. Over 50% of the entire U.S. workforce was able to work remotely during the pandemic, up from only 7% pre-pandemic, and it is currently estimated that even with the pandemic over the at-home workforce may not shrink below one-third of the workforce. This is a seismic shift. Downtown commercial real estate cannot recover from this unless either the overall metropolitan population of potential downtown commuters increases enough to make up for the loss, or something lures people back into the office. It also means that pressure on access roads will be permanently reduced as there are fewer commuters.

There’s another trend, however, decades in the making, that will not abate, which is the fact that jobs and people are migrating to suburbs. In town centers, industrial parks and dedicated campuses, employers continue to relocate to where people live. This decentralization may depopulate downtowns, but it’s following the job market and invigorating satellite cities. And what about the impact of “sprawl” on the environment?

The first thing to realize here is that California, a vast state, is nonetheless the most densely populated in its urban areas. Over 94% of California’s population lives in urban areas, which occupy barely 5% of its land area. This fact, a result of relatively late settlement, combined with remarkable investments in infrastructure back in the 1950s and 1960s to bring water and power to attractive coastal areas, means California is already at the front of America’s forced-density pack. This means there is an incredible amount of land still available for development. The numbers are inescapable.

If California added 10-million new residents, increasing its population from nearly 40 million to 50 million, and every one of those new residents lived in four-person households on quarter-acre lots, with an equal amount of land set aside for schools, parks, roads, and retail and commercial centers, it would only consume 2,000 square miles, a mere 1.5-percent of California’s total land area. To put this in perspective, California has 25,000 square miles of unirrigated rangeland used for cattle ranching. Less than 10 percent of that land could be covered with new suburbs accommodating 10 million people living in single family homes on spacious lots. Why not?

Probably the most significant finding reported in the Urban Reform Institute’s study was the clear preference of families, seniors, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans and the foreign born to live in single-family detached homes, located in suburbs and exurbs. As the study scrupulously documents, more than 80 percent of the nation’s metropolitan population now live in suburbs and exurbs, capping a growth trend that has been consistent for over 50 years. And the general preference for more space has only accelerated since the pandemic.

Arguments in favor of more suburban development are comprehensive. There is plenty of available land. The transportation impact is overstated due to remote work and jobs following people to suburbs. Cars are becoming emissions free and autonomous, greatly reducing their impact on the environment. The cost per square foot to construct housing in the urban core is far greater than in suburbs both because the real estate is more costly, and because multi-story residential structures have a much higher per square foot construction cost than wood framed or pre-fab single and two story single family homes.

Low density, leafy suburbs have a lower per capita heat island impact than dense cities. Energy and water efficiency can be practiced in single family homes just as effectively as they can be practiced in urban high rises. Irrigated residential landscaping can be a ecologically healthy asset, beneficial for the environment. And the vast majority of Americans prefer living in detached homes in suburban communities. Higher density is fine to the degree that people want it and the market creates it – but it shouldn’t be the goal of policy makers to force it.

Ultimately the objections to suburbs must be evaluated in terms of what special interests have a stake in these policy decisions. Environmentalists may hold every acre of greenfield in sacred esteem, but if that value were prevalent and determinative in previous decades, urban civilization would not exist. Cities and suburbs alike, and the infrastructure necessary to supply them with water, energy, transportation, food and waste management, have an inevitable footprint. It isn’t at all clear that concentrating humans in city centers is ecologically preferable, even if the formidable economic obstacles could be overcome. But policies to cordon off and densify California’s cities is not happening merely to protect the environment.

When the supply of land is artificially constrained, property values go up, which increases property tax revenues to existing public sector jurisdictions. Building new cities on raw land reallocates these tax revenues to new cities. Similarly, when home building is excessively regulated to the point where affordable housing can no longer be profitably constructed and sold at market prices, politically connected developers collect billions from the government to build subsidized housing.

And if water and energy consumption is rationed, it relieves the obligation of the government to facilitate new investments in water and energy supply infrastructure despite its feasibility and sustainability. That money can instead go to failed social programs such as ultra-expensive public housing projects, and to higher wages and benefits for government employees. And it would be remiss to not point out that expensive renewable energy allows public utilities, which earn profit on a capped percent of revenue, to greatly increase their absolute profits because they are selling the same quantity of electricity at much higher prices.

These are some of the darker possible motivations underlying the densification lobby and the power behind it. There is a lot of money to be made by cramming people into smaller spaces. But under scrutiny, densification does not have a significant ecological benefit, and it comes with a costly price both economically and in terms of how it degrades the quality of life and limits the choices for millions of families.

Instead of rescuing our downtowns through further densification, why not de-densify them? Clear the streets and make them safe again by putting homeless into dedicated shelters using popup tents on inexpensive industrial land, and put lawbreakers in jail. In both cases, it may be the first chance they’ve ever had to recover their dignity and restart their lives. This will save billions of dollars when compared to the “permanent supportive housing” scam.

Create new spaces and new opportunities in the middle of central downtowns by demolishing commercial and residential buildings that are no longer economically viable. Central downtowns cannot be recreated as they were. They are not doomed, but they are morphing again and reinventing them must accept the overall reality of decentralization. By embracing a strategy of decentralization, ironically, downtown real estate may come down enough in value that downtowns can once again become cultural magnets, if not commercial magnets, because the so-called Bohemian “cultural creatives” will be once again able to afford to live and congregate there. More density and less density can actually coexist at the same time.

To make it all work, the trend in state infrastructure policies must be reversed, to deregulate energy and water development so private companies can afford to build new supply infrastructure, with public funds making up the difference. At the same time, the state must reverse course and deregulate and encourage new suburbs on the open periphery of urban areas, so as to vastly increase the supply of homes, which will make them as affordable today as they were in the 1950s. It can be done. Housing markets are regional, so home values won’t moderate unless the state allows suburban construction as well as urban projects.

This is the contrarian, people-centric urban vision that utterly defies the common orthodoxy. It is needed now more than ever. It will usher in the shared prosperity of a metropolitan mega-boom that benefits everyone.

Christianity and the Globalist Agenda

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When God tells you what to do you cannot hesitate.
– “Vampiro,” played by Bill Camp, in the Movie “Sound of Freedom“

The power of these 10 words threatens the most powerful individuals and institutions on the planet, and what might otherwise be their total control over governments. These words express a principle that an authoritarian government cannot tolerate. They proclaim “Government is not the ultimate sovereign. God is the ultimate sovereign. And if you challenge my God and make me choose, I will obey God, and I will defy you.”

There’s plenty out there to defy these days. One big piece at a time, the whole world is coming under the control of fewer and fewer people. That is inherently suspect, but their avowed and allegedly benign objectives make matters far worse.

Just two hedge funds, Vanguard and Blackrock, with combined assets well over $20 trillion, are the biggest shareholders in 88 percent of the companies on the S&P 500. These massive wealth managers work in concert with the World Economic Forum, the World Federation of Advertisers, and other transnational institutions to, as Ben Shapiro documents in a must-watch video, “create a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce approved narratives.”

And what is the purpose and objective of these narratives? In a 30,000 word essay, “The China Convergence” published earlier this month on Substack, author N.S. Lyons writes: “The less the people are willing and able to practice self-governance individually and collectively, the more formal rules and systems of external authority will step in to micromanage what they want and how they behave.”

From these two sources, one succinct and the other comprehensive, both scrupulously documented, ample evidence is offered to help explain why Christianity is a threat to the narrative. Christians not only fail to recognize government as the ultimate authority in their lives, they are self-governing. They don’t need to be micromanaged. And on every issue of consequence, issues that will determine our identity and our destiny, they don’t accept the narrative.

The obvious clash between Christians and the globalist narrative is over how to define morality. But acrimonious debates over abortion and sexuality aren’t what makes Christians a threat. It’s that when Christians believe something is wrong, they will take action to change it. As the approved narrative aims increasingly to divide people by race and gender, at the same time as it aims to convince individuals to indulge decadence, depravity, indolence, victimhood, and general selfishness, Christians see this for what it is: the destruction of a culture and the erasure of a free people.

Hence the overwrought scorn brought down by the approved narrative onto the movie “Sound of Freedom.” From Rolling Stone, “The QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer.” From The Economist, “Turning the culture war into profit.” From USA Today, “a recruiting tool for the far right.” From People, “creative liberties” taken by the film included “scenes in which children are held against their will within shipping containers.” Creative liberties? It happens all the time! And from state-funded NPR, “QAnon supporters are promoting ‘Sound of Freedom.'”

This derision obscures establishment fear. Child trafficking, like sex changes on kids and radical gender indoctrination in elementary schools, crosses a red line for Christians. And they are not going to back down. Nor are these examples the only areas where Christians are ready to fight.

The extreme environmentalist agenda, a fundamental part of the approved narrative, is guaranteed to convert the vast majority of humanity into second class creatures. It not only condemns humanity to be reduced to the status of livestock, it puts the interests of plants and animals in front of the interests of people. Christians are as willing as anyone to strive for balance between nature and civilization, but Christianity explicitly rejects the primacy of “Gaia”: In Genesis 1:28, it reads “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Extreme environmentalism is a false religion, and Christians will never submit to it.

If the approved narrative relies on extreme environmentalism as the state religion that provides the alleged moral justification to effectively enslave the vast majority of humanity, the ultimate technology to enforce the lockdown is Central Bank Digital Currency. Christian scripture is so explicit on this phenomenon it might even make an agnostic think twice. Here is a modern translation of Revelation, 13:17: “Then it compels all, small and great, rich and poor, free men and slaves, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads. The purpose of this is that no one should be able to buy or sell unless he bears the mark.” Cash is freedom.

Secular conservatives recognize the power of devout Christians as indispensable allies, and even after decades of negative indoctrination, Christianity remains the dominant faith in America. Despite statistics demonstrating a decline in America’s “shrinking Christian majority,” even among Americans in their 20s, more than half still identify as Christian. Overall, two-thirds of Americans, over 220 million people, identify as Christian. What percentage of them are devout Christians? What percentage of them will become more devout as they recognize the hidden agenda behind the approved narrative, and see the decadence rolling out now in plain sight?

Christianity in America may have declined in recent decades, but that decline may be over. Moreover, with America’s fertility rate for devout Christians holding at 2.4, while only 1.3 for the irreligious, the long-term demographic ascendancy of Christians is inevitable. No wonder the culture seeks to stigmatize Christians. Their only hope is to convert millions of young Christians to atheism. But that trend, as well, may have already peaked. An authentic youthful rebel in 2023 America turns toward Christianity, not away from it. And in any case, watch the Christian resistance grow the first time, and every time, the government turns off digital money to enforce a carbon ration.

Christians recognize something the purveyors of the approved narrative only pretend to see, which is the existence of absolute good and absolute evil. The elites have done us all a favor, and perhaps committed a fatal error, by thinking humans were already so brainwashed they would believe it’s ok to tell five year old children they can choose their “gender,” or that it’s a healthy display of liberal tolerance to allow drag queens to twerk in front of elementary school children, or for doctors and “therapists” to coerce parents into having their pre-adolescent children castrated.

These things are abominations to Christians, along with pretty much anyone else with an ounce of common sense, and that they are institutionally promoted stimulates a more generalized skepticism of the approved narrative. It certainly calls into question the conventional wisdom that the approved narrative is “science based.” Under scrutiny, the entire narrative falls apart. No, we don’t want to live in techno-pens like human livestock to appease “Gaia.” No, we don’t want digital money that the government can track and turn off at will. Yes, we want to be free.

Christians are also a threat because they believe in an afterlife. They are not afraid to lose their possessions or even their lives, because they believe their experience in this world is only a preliminary to heaven. Animating to action a mere fraction of America’s Christians raises an army of millions. They have no fear, because they are God’s army.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How Unions Have Betrayed America

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Anyone suggesting there is no role for unions in America today might first consider a fact of history: over a century ago, when oligarchs and the companies they owned had treated workers as if they were livestock, reduced to living in squalid pens with rationed food and water, it was unions that organized these workers to resist. It was unions who gave these workers back their humanity, and negotiated collective bargaining agreements and laws that eliminated child labor, enforced workplace safety, established an 8 hour work day, paid overtime, health benefits, and retirement pensions.

Unions today operate in a very different America. But how big labor has adapted calls into question their commitment to helping all American workers have a chance at a middle class lifestyle. In critical areas affecting everyone trying to thrive in 21st century America, unions have betrayed the American worker. In particular, their failure to challenge the globalist agenda of open borders and environmentalist extremism has inverted their priorities, putting them into alignment with the corporations and oligarchs they once so nobly opposed. This betrayal is most exemplified in the agenda of unions that didn’t exist a century ago, America’s powerful unions of government employees.

Government Unions Control and Corrupt Public Services

A distinction must be made between public sector unions, and the now less influential private sector unions. Public sector unions today have embraced a potent blend of toxic ideologies, centered around woke politics and environmentalist extremism. The most powerful public sector unions, those representing teachers and school employees, have forced this ideology into the public schools. This has not only indoctrinated a generation of young voters to vote for leftists, it has left them without the literacy and numeracy necessary to more easily grasp the nihilistic essence of leftism.

In critical ways, government unions don’t even fulfil the basic definition of a union. They don’t negotiate with independent management, they “negotiate” with politicians they elect. In California, public sector unions collect and spend nearly $1.0 billion per year, applying at least one-third of that spending to explicitly political activities such as lobbying and campaign contributions. Another third is spent on allegedly nonpolitical activities such as public education which almost invariably has a political objective. Even in a state as big as California, spending $1.2 billion every election cycle will buy a lot of politicians and profoundly influence public opinion.

Government unions also don’t have to rely on the profitability of the enterprise they’re negotiating with. Unions have to be more reasonable when negotiating with private employers because they can go out of business. But government agencies just increase taxes, and in “information campaigns” using public money, abetted by public union money, more taxes and more borrowing are repeatedly sold to voters. In November 2022, in deep blue, union controlled California, taxpayers approved 92 bonds totaling $23 billion in new local government borrowing, and they approved 152 local tax increases, set to raise another $1.6 billion per year in perpetuity.

Government unions, contrary to the essential notion of a union, are not fighting power structures. They are the power, and they use it to further their agenda – higher pay and more workers, which in-turn means more government programs and higher taxes. And thanks to their ideological preferences, the programs they promote, such as inefficient renewable energy mandates and counterproductive policies towards crime and the unhoused, repeatedly fail and in so doing require even more spending. Thus for government unions, failure is success, because the remedy is always more government. But what about private sector unions?

How Private Sector Unions Betray the American Worker

The problem with private sector unions is not because they want to maintain and increase their wages and benefits. There are compelling reasons why private sector unions, properly regulated, ought to be a necessary counterweight to private corporate interests. The problem is that the American oligarchy, which intends to flatten the world, erase national sovereignty, obliterate the middle class, and abolish borders, cultures, cash, small businesses, medium size businesses, and decentralized private ownership, has coopted private sector unions.

When was the last time anyone heard the leader of a national labor organization call for controlled immigration, which is a certain way to keep upward pressure on wages? When in recent years have any private labor leaders called for anti-trust legislation against the handful of trillion dollar hedge funds that are buying up America’s housing stock to turn us into a nation of renters, or called for the breakup of the cartel that controls the nation’s food supply? Where were the unions, when the nation was in lockdown for nearly two years, devastating small businesses and driving households into crippling debt and bankruptcy?

America’s private sector unions are vocal proponents of every item on the leftist agenda, but they are not doing anything to help the vast majority of American workers, even as they engage in a handful of labor actions, scattered across the country. And what every defender of leftism and unions must understand is that there is no longer any significant functional difference between “leftist” state ownership and “right-wing” ownership by monopoly corporations that have coopted the state. One is called communism, the other fascism. They are both authoritarian political models that are founded on centralized control. What the American oligarchy has evolved into is soft fascism. Soft, because with the high-tech tools available today, mass persuasion is easy. And it is here, where private sector unions have committed perhaps the biggest betrayal of all.

Instead of recognizing the so-called Green New Deal, or Great Reset, as a corporate tool designed to transfer upward and further centralize wealth at the same time as it reduces ordinary workers into living in micromanaged pens with rationed food and water, unions endorse it. Their endorsement finds expression in their support for policies guaranteed to achieve this pernicious goal. They support hundreds of billions, and ultimately trillions, in government spending to build, for example, large-scale CO2 capture facilities, EV charging stations, and floating wind turbines. They support urban rezoning to construct high-rise apartments, and light rail mass transit. All of these projects are staggeringly expensive, and not one of them will yield practical economic benefits downstream. Union construction workers will get jobs, big civil engineering firms will get government contracts, but the ordinary American will pay for these projects at a price they can’t afford. It isn’t as if there aren’t obvious alternatives.

Private sector union leadership has abandoned a common sense principle of fundamental importance: how public infrastructure priorities are set determines whether or not ordinary Americans are able to achieve and maintain a middle class lifestyle. California’s bullet train project is a classic example. After over a decade of work and over $10 billion already spent, not a single track has been laid. The cost for the first segment, which transits the emptiest, flattest stretch of the entire planned line, is estimated to cost over $200 million per mile. The entire project is now projected to cost $130 billion, with no credible completion date, and it will always be an economic drain on Californians.

In order to follow the path of least resistance private sector unions in California support this fraud. It is make work, designed to appease unions while preventing their workers from completing projects that make economic sense: widening and upgrading roads and freeways, upgrading existing railroad lines, bringing California’s remarkable system of water storage and transport into the 21st century, building wastewater recycling and desalination plants, upgrading the state’s capacity to engage in oil extraction and refining, increasing natural gas drilling and upgrading the distribution pipelines, and building more nuclear power stations. Much of this work could be accomplished with private funds. But the unions, and the corporations with which they have made common cause, will not challenge the extreme environmentalists, or the oligarchy that finds them so useful.

Private sector unions are one of the last special interest groups left in America that still has the power to change national policy. As the nation slowly transitions into a technology driven police state, with a workforce disenfranchised and impoverished by “climate” mandates, mass immigration, and intelligent machines, the potential will grow for unions to exercise bipartisan appeal. The only question that remains is will any of them have the courage to fight the trend and challenge the power. Or will they continue to be part of the establishment they were meant to oppose.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Special Interests Prevent Solving Homelessness in California

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When deducting from the count those homeless individuals who at least have a roof over their heads, half of America’s so-called “unsheltered” homeless are living in California. It’s not hard to understand why. Along with the most hospitable weather on earth, California also is a welcoming place for drug addicts, petty thieves, and anyone else attracted to beachside living with free government food and not the slightest requirement to work.

Federal law doesn’t help. The disastrous “Housing First” rule, emanating from HUD during the Obama era, restricts use of federal funds to help the homeless to paying for housing to the exclusion of, for example, drug counseling and job training, until “supportive housing” is constructed for every homeless person – a moving target and an impossible goal.

If federal funds weren’t enough incentive to reject a more holistic approach to reducing homelessness, there are a series of 9th Circuit Court rulings, Martin vs Boise in particular, that prohibit enforcement of vagrancy laws unless sufficient shelter beds are available. And that ruling, instead of being challenged by beleaguered cities across California’s forgiving coast, has been parlayed by bureaucrats and “nonprofit” developers (with for-profit vendors and interlocking directorates) into the Homeless Industrial Complex, a vast parasitic empire where “permanent supportive housing” is constructed at an average cost well in excess of $500,000 per unit, at a rate that doesn’t begin to keep pace with the growth in the unsheltered population.

California’s state laws add fuel to the fire. There is Prop. 47, sold to voters in 2014 as somehow guaranteed to reduce crime merely by downgrading felony drug and property crimes to misdemeanors. On top of that came Prop. 57, approved by voters in 2016, abetted by AB 109, passed by the legislature in 2011, both of which released tens of thousands of “non-violent” criminals out of state prisons and county jails without the means to monitor and assist their transition back into society.

If all these enlightened steps successfully pushed by California’s policymakers and public influencers were designed to lower crime and restore order to chaotic streets, they have demonstrably had the opposite effect. From Arkansas to Atlanta and from New York City to Oklahoma, addicts and predators now follow the setting sun, to a land where anything goes.

It isn’t as if solutions to California’s homeless epidemic aren’t hiding in plain sight. Repeal Prop 47, Prop. 57 and AB 109, and watch tens of thousands of homeless suddenly find housing. Once vagrancy, drug use, and repetitive petty theft are once again made illegal and convictions carry consequences, it will no longer be possible to live on the Venice Beach boardwalk, perpetually high, scaring the straights and stealing whatever amenities aren’t provided for free by government “ambassadors.” Once the choice is “go to the shelter or go to jail,” the incentives will reverse, the number of remaining homeless will be magically reduced, and the remaining challenge will become more manageable.

As for California’s shelters, the new ones being built are grossly overpriced and sited in locations deliberately chosen to escalate costs based on the absurd premise that everyone deserves to live on the beach in Southern California regardless of their means. California might instead consider the example of how New York City has decided to handle their foreign refuge influx (thank you, Governor Abbot, for focusing the minds of NYC bureaucrats). In a rare display of cost-effective innovation, they have – virtually overnight – constructed an 84,000 square foot semi-permanent facility that can be expanded to house up to 1,000 refugees. The cost for this structure so far, already with a 500 person capacity is an astonishingly reasonable $325,000.

There is no reason the City of Los Angeles, as well as the County of Los Angeles, cannot erect similar shelters on less expensive real estate in the city or rural areas of the county. These shelters can be built on one of the county’s estimated 14,000 government owned properties, or if they cannot be located on land outside of residential neighborhoods, land can be purchased in areas with lower cost rural real estate. As for families with children, huge, beautiful all-weather tents cost under $1,000 each. Why aren’t solutions like this being tested?

There’s plenty of money. In fact, there is a stupefying amount of money, almost none of it being spent wisely. Last year the County of Los Angeles spent “over $1.0 billion” on homeless programs. The City of Los Angeles is planning to spend $1.3 billion this year on homeless programs. The other 87 cities in Los Angeles County are surely also allocating substantial funds for the homeless. It is reasonable to estimate over $3.0 billion will be spent this year, overall, by local governments in Los Angeles County to assist what at last count were 75,000 homeless, 55,000 of them unsheltered. That’s $40,000 per person. The cost for a structure like what NYC has come up with for their refugees? Less than $200 per person. That’s a lot of money left over for security, operations, food, health care, job training, and drug counseling.

Anyone expecting to see California’s state and local governments do anything sensible, however, is ignoring the momentum of history and the magnitude of the corruption that grips the state with an implacable and irresistible tenacity evocative of a Burmese python squeezing the life out of a rabbit. Passed by the state legislator and on deck to be sold to voters in March 2024 is the proposed Amendment 2, which will take away the right for local governments anywhere in the state to reject welfare housing projects in their neighborhoods. Piling on, the state legislature is also offering California’s spring primary voters the proposed Amendment 10, championed by the smart money favorite to be U.S. president in another 18 months, Governor Newsom. Amendment 10 will declare all Californians to have an inalienable “right to housing.” Imagine the implementation of this beast.

Pigs already at the trough of the homeless industrial complex must be slavering in anticipation. But what about deregulating the most over-regulated housing market in America, the real reason housing is unaffordable in California? Not a chance. Better to tamper with the state constitution, so the government and their cronies can continue to handle California’s shortage of housing and surplus of homeless. They’ve done everything so well so far.

Not to be outdone, the City of Los Angeles, blessed with a city council so hard-left that they would make Nicolás Maduro blush, has come up with the “Responsible Hotel Ordinance,” a measure that would “require hotel operators to report to the city, every day, the number of vacant rooms at their establishments so the city can send homeless people over to the hotels to stay in the rooms that night.” The cost? Paid by the taxpayers. The impact on tourists and conventioneers? Tough. After all, these are mere “quality of life” inconveniences, the price of privilege.

One might argue that rounding up the unsheltered and herding them into tents is inhumane. They would be wrong. Spending obscene amounts of money on overbuilt, overpriced, inappropriately located “supportive housing,” while addicts are left on the street to die and predators terrorize cherished public venues; that is inhumane. Build the tents, move them in, and use the piles of suddenly available cash to help them recover their sobriety, their sanity, their skills, their dignity, and their lives.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in City Journal.

Turning California Purple

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California is the epicenter of Democratic power in the United States. The ultra-blue state backs up its progressive agenda with a state legislature that commands a Democrat “mega” majority in both the State Assembly (62-18) and the State Senate (32-8). Every higher office in the state, from Governor down to State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is occupied by Democratic politicians. California’s last Republican governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger, a RINO whose legacy includes his 2006 signing of the Global Warming Solutions Act, an authoritarian, economic power grab that has further concentrated the wealth and all but destroyed upward mobility in the once golden state.

By now every American who values their political and financial freedom should know that what happens in California does not stay in California. At $3.6 trillion, the state’s GDP is not only by far the largest in America, but the wealth imbalance in the state – only edged by New York among among large states – spells even more billions for California’s plutocrats. There are an estimated 186 billionaires living in California, almost all of them Democrats. As Mark Zuckerberg proved when he deployed over $400 million to “get-out-the-vote” in Democrat-heavy urban precincts in crucial swing states, California’s billionaires aren’t shy about using their financial clout to buy national elections.

And then there is the music and entertainment industry, still centered in California, along with all the new high-tech giants that have come to dominate communications and online finance in America: Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, and PayPal. Elon Musk may have disrupted the space with his purchase of Twitter, and there are a few other mavericks left in Silicon Valley, but it’s not the haven of free thinking it once was. California’s once eccentric, individualist culture has given way to compliance. In the epic – and very recent – shift by Democrats from antiwar, anti-corporate, pro free-speech zealots into pro-war, pro-corporate, anti free-speech zealotry, Silicon Valley has led the way, abandoning everything it once represented.

Can Conservatives Ever Win Again in California?

The one-sided war being fought by conservatives in California ought to animate every conservative in America. It isn’t as if there isn’t a conservative base. In 2020, six million Californians voted for Donald Trump, up from 4.5 million four years earlier. This total exceeded that of any other state, narrowly beating #2 Florida (5.3 million) and #3 Texas (5.2 million). This total also exceeded the entire Republican registration in California at the time, 5.3 million. California may be a Democratic stronghold, but there are millions of Californians who’ve had it with Democratic rule. With crime, homelessness, violence, and the cost-of-living all rising since November 2020, one would think Democrats would be starting to lose their grip. So why aren’t they?

To answer this question, it’s useful to compare registration by party in California today to where it was ten years ago, and then identify geographically where the Democrats have increased their numbers, as well as the places where they have lost ground. In October 2022 there were 10.3 million registered Democrats in California, and 5.2 million registered Republicans. Ten years earlier, there were only 7.9 million registered Democrats in California, and 5.4 million registered Republicans. It isn’t hard to see that trend. Democrats went from having a 14 percent registration advantage over Republicans ten years ago to having a 23 point advantage today. Statewide, that is an insurmountable barrier. But what about individual counties? Were Republicans successful in any of them?

The answer to this is unequivocal, and revealing, because it echoes what is in store for the rest of the country if the Democrats – and the RINOs – aren’t stopped. California’s Republicans gained ground in 16 of the state’s 58 counties. All of them are rural, all of them are geographically huge, and none of them have populations big enough to matter in a statewide election. In Lassen County, for example, there was a 15 percent shift, increasing the Republican advantage in that county to an overwhelming 39 percent. But there are only 21,984 eligible voters in the entire county. In all 16 counties combined that were Republican ascendant in California, the net number of new Republican voters totaled a mere 32,822. This in a state with 21.9 million registered voters.

This pattern is felt around the U.S. Rural counties are Republican, urban counties are Democrat. In California, 25 counties have a Republican voter advantage. Every one of them is sparsely populated and rural. In actual numbers, the amount by which registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in these counties amounts to 144,235 votes. In state politics, they are powerless.

Being powerless has consequences. These counties are red and getting redder because their economy, which relies on ranching, farming, mining, and timber harvesting, has been under relentless and escalating attack for decades. Using state and federal environmentalist laws and regulations, often dropping eye-watering “grants” to enlist the support and unique legal standing of Native American tribal nations for additional leverage, a coalition of state agencies and billionaire supported “nonprofits” have been waging lawfare against every facet of their lives. Whether it’s dam removal, closing another sawmill or mine, rolling back the timber harvests to a fraction of their historical size (the real reason for California’s catastrophic fires), denying farmers their water allocations, cancelling property insurance in the pristine “urban/wildland interface,” exercising eminent domain to expand protected “green spaces,” or prohibiting ranchers from shooting wolves that prey on their livestock and are now threatening their children, California’s rural population is being driven off their land and out of their homes. This litany of abuse barely scratches the surface. The onslaught is endless.

In general, Republicans in California have failed to increase their registered voter numbers, actually losing 124,514 voters between 2012 and 2022, while during that same period Democrats increased their numbers by 2,316,836. California’s registered Republicans, statewide, are down by 2 percent over the past decade, while Democrats are up by an astonishing 29 percent. What happened?

California’s Urban Democrat Dominance is Coming to America

In a nutshell, California’s Republicans get shellacked by Democrats in every heavily populated county, starting with Los Angeles, and it’s getting worse every election cycle. Already a Democratic stronghold ten years ago, the Democratic voter advantage in Los Angeles County increased by 644,133 between 2012 and 2022. In the once solidly red Orange County, 242,315 voters shifted their allegiance to Democrats, giving that county a 4 percent Democrat advantage for the first time in modern history. The story is the same up and down the state; the big counties, already blue, got bluer still. San Diego went from a purplish 1 percent Democrat advantage to a decisive 15 percent Democrat edge. Big Santa Clara County, home of the Silicon Valley, went from 24 percent advantage Democrats to 35 percent. Without exception, Democrats wield a crushing advantage in California’s populous coastal counties.

This ought to be inexplicable. As California’s rural population endures a withering attack by Democrats that threatens their very existence, it isn’t as if California’s cities are getting a pass. As noted, crime, homelessness, violence, and an unaffordable cost-of-living disproportionately afflict the cities. Add to that worthless, failing schools, and escalating episodes of energy and water rationing, and you ought to have a recipe for Democratic political oblivion.

The problem is California’s GOP offers no solutions. Conservatives correctly complain about a biased media, as well as a lack of donor support to even remotely approach financial parity in campaign funds. They cite legacy stigmas still effectively exploited by Democrats, such as the GOP supported initiative all the way back 1994 that banned public benefits for illegal immigrants, or the 2008 initiative that banned gay marriage. Both of these were approved by voters, but the first, which is still used to tag California’s Republicans as racist, was overturned in court. The second, still used as evidence of Republican homophobia, was ignored by then state Attorney General Jerry Brown. And then there’s Trump, and according to Democrats, if you don’t like Trump, you don’t vote Republican in California. All of these factors are indeed disadvantages. But they don’t mean Republicans can’t win.

The reason all of these supposed fatal obstacles to a Republican resurgence in California are merely excuses for failure is because for every flaw facing a Republican, there is a flaw of equal weight pulling down Democrats. Most voters in California are now registered independents. Neither party is popular. What California’s Republicans need are messages that matter, and politicians with the charisma to communicate them. They’d better get busy.

It is important to note that California, a vast state, is nonetheless the most densely populated in its urban areas. Over 94 percent of California’s population lives in urban areas, which occupy barely 5 percent of its land area. This fact, a result of relatively late settlement, combined with remarkable investments in infrastructure back in the 1950s and 1960s to bring water and power to attractive coastal areas, puts California at the front of the forced-density pack. The agenda of Democrats, integral to the Green New Deal, is to densify every urban area in America, while simultaneously depopulating rural areas. Voters are being herded into urban areas controlled by Democratic political machines, fueled by public sector unions, billionaire supported nonprofits with armies of semi-professional militant activists, and grasping businesspeople desperate to get their hands on public money and public contracts.

How to Beat the Urban Political Machine

The key to winning back California, along with saving the nation, is to recognize the foundation of Democrat power is also its ultimate weakness. Democratic messaging relies on the politics of race and gender redress to overcome oppression, and politically contrived scarcity in order to save the planet. Their remedies are to abandon meritocracy and impose rationing on every essential good including housing, energy, water and transportation. These are false premises with destructive consequences. This destruction is manifested in every pathology afflicting California’s cities.

Convincing voters to fix California can rest on three messages that transcend identity, income, and in some cases even ideology:

Reduce crime and homelessness.

Restore quality education.

Lower the cost-of-living.

For each of these issues, there are specific policies that can be advocated without equivocation or compromise.

To reduce crime in California, repeal Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot initiative which downgraded penalties for drug possession and petty theft. To reduce homelessness, start constructing inexpensive shelters in inexpensive parts of California’s cities, instead of continuing to pay corrupt, politically connected developers to build “permanent supportive housing” on beachfront property at an average cost of $500,000 to $1.0 million per unit (yes, that is really happening).

To restore quality education, refuse to negotiate with the teachers union, end unreasonable restrictions on charter schools, bring discipline and standardized tests back to public schools, and implement vouchers or education savings accounts to give parents the option to send their children to private schools.

To lower the cost-of-living, deregulate the housing market, end the war on natural gas and nuclear power, and cancel the “bullet train” in order to invest the money instead in infrastructure projects that yield practical value and long-term economic returns.

That’s the message, and those are the policies behind the message. But who will carry that message? Who will fight for those policies? And more to the point, who will do more than just run another bait-and-switch, straight out of the RINO playbook, talking up these points to get elected then do absolutely nothing once in office?

Supporters of President Trump will accurately claim he would support all of these policies. And it would be a mistake to write Trump’s chances off in California if things get much worse, and if he were to decide to make it a priority to campaign in the state. But in a gubernatorial race what California needs is someone who can expose the woke and green foundations of Democratic policies as extreme, and do so in a way that embraces the inevitable controversy but deflects counter-accusations of extremism.

Someone like Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, could come to California and would not be tripped up by the biased media. Ramaswamy would rhetorically destroy, relying on facts and logic, any politician the Democrats might select to oppose him. Trump’s gift to America is the ongoing transformation of the Republican party into a party representing working people who are having their ability to achieve and maintain financial independence taken away from them in the name of woke and green ideals. Trump has exposed this as a special interest driven fraud. Ramaswamy’s gift is to embody a future for the Republican party that recognizes and extends Trump’s peeling away the Democrat façade, as well as mirror and extend Trump’s policy solutions.

California will turn purple, and then red, if and only if the Republicans still standing in that state decide to espouse a message, and policies, that attack the heart of the Democrat agenda. Instead of fighting an incremental, defensive battle, they must insist, without reservations, on tougher penalties for repeat drug and theft crimes, immediate transfer of homeless to popup, cost-effective shelters, school choice and restoring school discipline, standardized tests and teacher accountability in public schools, and radical deregulation of environmentalist laws that have crippled California’s housing, timber, food, cattle, natural gas, and nuclear power industries.

That agenda will save California, and nothing else will. It has the virtue of being the truth, ready for anyone with the courage to wield it against a corrupt political machine that runs on lies. This truth has the added benefit of offering anyone willing to listen to it a vision of a bright future in a state that works again, where people are safe, can pay their bills, and rely on a good education for their children.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How the Establishment Uses “Hate and Fear” to Manipulate Voters

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Hate and fear might as well be the GOP’s motto. And while there was a time when a liberal like me saying that would be accurately labeled hyperbolic, that time has passed. Show me what, aside from hate and fear, the modern Republican Party is all about.
Columnist Rex Huppke, writing for USA Today, July 16, 2023

Huppke’s comment is something we hear all the time. The campaign to dehumanize MAGA Republicans as hatemongers and fearmongers is a staple of the liberal media, is the playbook for Democrat politicians all the way up to President Biden, and is supported by almost the entire academic community. This dehumanization campaign isn’t restricted to Democrats. Establishment Republicans either equivocate, or explicitly join Democrats in demonizing MAGA Republicans.

If Huppke’s self-described hyperbole typifies how housebroken establishment pundits attack MAGA Republicans, a more intellectual approach to sowing hatred and fear of MAGA Republicans is exemplified in the writings of an influential political commentator, Heather Cox Richardson, who earns an estimated $1.0 million per year from her Substack subscribers. When writing about alleged “messages of anti-inclusion and hate” proffered by the grassroots group Moms for Liberty, Richardson quoted Chris Rufo to make her point about a supposed “attack on democracy” coming from the American Right:

“Radical right activists like Rufo believe they must capture the central institutions of the U.S. and get rid of the tenets of democracy—individual rights, academic freedom, free markets, separation of church and state, equality before the law—in order to save the country.”

In an extensive body of work, Richardson’s consistent theme is that Republicans are dangerous extremists, relying on misinformation to spread hate and fear. While her tone is objective and she carefully avoids the appearance of hyperbole, her message is consistently biased. Richardson is not objective, or she would blend empathy with her criticism of right-of-center groups such as Moms for Liberty. Instead, Richardson is an active participant in a process of polarization, not mutual understanding.

What Richardson misses, perhaps willfully, is that the “central institutions” of the U.S. have already been “captured” by left-wing extremists, who use them as a platform to spread the most potently seductive blend of hatemongering and fearmongering in the history of propaganda. Equally significant, and also ignored by Richardson, is that America’s most powerful corporations and wealthiest individuals have, with rare exceptions, determined that embracing the leftist narrative offers them a path to more profit and more power.

How Democrats Sow Hatred and Fear

On a host of critical issues the pervasive reach of this narrative of fear and hate is omnipresent. The strategy is obvious: saturate the population with fear, then tacitly urge them to hate anyone who is allegedly responsible, and, crucially, hate anyone who attempts to diminish or deny the threat posed by whoever or whatever is so allegedly fearsome. The “climate emergency” is a perfect example.

When it comes to spreading fear, catastrophic floods, rising seas, deadly heat and raging fires are images that tap something primal in humans. All of these threats are now conveyed to the American public, nonstop, by every establishment institution. A normal heatwave is now “historic,” despite evidence to the contrary, and television screens show temperature maps smothered in red, as if the world was on fire. A powerful storm is now called a “bomb cyclone,” and whatever damage or death may result is blamed on “human caused climate change.” To cope, laws and regulations are demanded, and passed, that convey unprecedented new powers to government bureaucracies and politically connected corporations.

With the fear comes hate. Anyone questioning the climate crisis narrative is a right-wing extremist. The use of the word “denier” to describe a climate skeptic is a particularly effective choice, since it triggers associations with the commonly used term “holocaust denier,” used to describe anyone repugnant enough to deny the Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. In a classic and typical strategy of inversion, as well, climate skeptics are accused of being funded by fossil fuel companies. And this accusation sticks, despite the obvious fact that if supplies of the most indispensable fuel on earth are constrained, fossil fuel companies make more profit.

The militancy and fanaticism of climate alarmists is well documented and growing. But it isn’t love for the planet, much less people, that motivates them. It is obsessive anxiety, nurtured by fearmongers on the corporate, Democratic Left, who have captured America’s institutions and stoke that anxiety with every new storm and every hot day. And with existential anxiety comes hatred for anyone who would get in the way of whatever radical solutions might ease that anxiety.

Fearmongering from Democrats is everywhere. The “war on women.” “Systemic racism.” The “genocide against black men by police.” “Turning back the clock” on rights of women and minorities. And, of course the latest, the campaign to “erase” transsexuals.

The False Premises of Democratic Fearmongering

None of these claims have any solid basis in facts. Women have more rights in America than they ever have, anywhere in the world, today as well as throughout history. Systemic racism in its modern incarnation favors virtually anyone belonging to a “protected status group,” which in practice means anyone who is not a heterosexual white male.

The number of blacks killed each year at the hands of police is vanishingly small. Between 2015 and 2021, a total of 135 unarmed blacks were killed by police, an average of 19 per year. With more than 23 million black males living in the U.S., the chances of an unarmed black man in America dying at the hands of police in any given year is less than one in a million. In most of these cases there is an explanation for what happened, while some of these killings are clearly inexcusable and horribly wrong. But with over 1 million sworn police officers in the United States, some abuses are a statistical inevitability. That doesn’t justify them, but it is not evidence of an “epidemic of violence against black men,” much less “genocide.”

This doesn’t stop the Democratic hate machine. If you question the black genocide narrative, you are a racist. If you are a racist, you deserve to be hated.

As for “turning back the clock,” there is a gaping difference, completely ignored by Democrats, between trying to restore common sense, fairness, and sanity to America’s culture and American institutions, and going back to the 1950s, much less the 1850s. Moms for Liberty can be forgiven if they want to keep books written at the third grade level that offer graphic instructions on how to perform oral and anal sex, out of the libraries of elementary schools. Similarly, activists like Chris Rufo have a point when they suggest it might be a tragic mistake for America’s medical and psychiatric establishment to endorse hormone blockers and genitalia altering surgery on minors.

These people are not “haters.” They are fighting madness, curated by an establishment that has traded sanity and standards for a manipulated, collectively psychotic, fearful, hateful, and very useful Democrat mob.

Democrats (and RINOs) Are Corporate Puppets

The truth about climate, identity, and healthy morality doesn’t matter to Democrat leaders, and if all you care about is acquiring, keeping, and growing political and economic power, why should it? Fearmongering and hatemongering is the hard currency of Democrats. It is being used to purchase and transform a nation. Pundits like Rex Huppke traffic in this currency because it’s an easy schtick. It also pleases the corporations and oligarchs that pay Huppke. These special interests recognize how coopting the rhetoric of leftist fear and hate diffuses what until recently was a virulent leftist aversion to corporate power and private wealth. At the same time, they recognize how the green agenda and equity agenda will enable them to acquire still more power.

The biggest lie in American politics is that Democrats and RINOs care about the American people, especially the underdog or “disadvantaged.” They do not. Democrats have become a party controlled by transnational elites, multinational corporations, international banks, and supranational institutions. Worse, much worse, is the flawed, misanthropic agenda of this coalition: turning America into a technology driven police state, using environmentalism and “equity” as justification to level down and subdue the American people. And the psychological weapon to advance this agenda is to foment fear and hatred against whoever might expose the lie.

Partisan academics like Heather Cox Richardson hide the propagandistic essence of their work by adopting an intellectual tone, and selectively omitting relevant facts. But they, too, are feeding the fear and hate machine that defines corporate Leftism in America today. If Richardson, or Huppke, and all the other thousands of hacks who have climbed the greasy pole of leftist influencing truly cared about fighting hate and fear, they would look in the mirror. They might recognize that corruption and hate, sadly, can be found everywhere. Starting from that novel premise, from time to time they might honestly examine what merit and moral worth might be found in MAGA Republican populism, and what nihilistic madness might be found in their own backyards.

That would constitute balance. That would be a step towards reconciliation and unity. It might lead to a new political consensus that demands freedom be more than an illusion, and rejects a national policy of managed decline.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Why America is a Small Town

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AUDIO: What is it that made Jason Aldean’s recent video “Try That in a Small Town” so popular with half of America, and so infamous with the other half? – 10 minutes (segment begins at 2:00) on KNRS Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on the Rod Arquette Show.

Harvesting the Rain

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It never rains in California
But girl, don’t they warn ya?
It pours, man, it pours
–  It Never Rains in Southern California, by Albert Hammond, 1972

Anyone who has experienced traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway coming to a halt as torrential rain floods the lanes, pelting the windshield with drops so big and so plentiful that visibility is reduced to a few feet, knows the truth of Albert Hammond’s iconic hit. It doesn’t rain very often along the Southern California coast, but when those storms do come in, some of them are whoppers.

Nowadays, of course, we call them atmospheric rivers, an apt description. They originate in the tropical Pacific, where the warm ocean evaporates stupefying amounts of moisture. When a strong fast wind hits that airborne moisture just right, a few days later in faraway Los Angeles it will pour. And man, it pours. According to National Geographic, the average atmospheric river is about 500 miles wide and 1,200 miles long.

Some are much bigger, such as in the very wet winter of 2017, when an atmospheric river over 5,000 miles long dumped enough water to fill Lake Oroville in northern California to overflowing. The neglected spillway couldn’t handle the torrent that year and began to come apart, triggering the evacuation of 180,000 people.

In Los Angeles, where, in case you’ve been living on Mars, it poured like crazy this past winter, the phenomenon of atmospheric rivers is compounded by the tight geography of the watershed. From the 9,000 foot crest of the San Gabriel Mountains, an immovable object where rivers of rain make landfall, it is only 30 miles to the Long Beach Harbor, where the Los Angeles River meets the sea. There’s a reason the Los Angeles River was turned into a gigantic concrete culvert in a series of projects started in the 1930s and completed by 1960. Without that unobstructed channel, atmospheric rivers would routinely turn the City of Angels into a swamp.

Intermittent but ridiculously intense episodes of rain are California’s opportunity and curse. The curse is obvious. Even in California’s vast interior, where incoming storms hit the Sierra Nevada Mountains and are dispersed over a crest 430 miles long and descend through thousands of square miles of watershed, there are still disasters like the catastrophic levee break at Jones Island in 2004, or the near disaster at Lake Oroville in 2017. But in the packed coastal cities, there’s no margin for error.

The opportunity, however, is tantalizing. If Californians could somehow capture all this runoff, there would be abundant water in a state that has coped with chronic water shortages for several decades. A 2022 study by the Pacific Institute evaluated the opportunity to harvest storm runoff in California’s coastal cities. The authors concluded that California’s urban “stormwater capture potential is 580,000 AFY in a dry year to as much as 3.0 million AFY in a wet year.” The Pacific Institute based their estimates on the average amount of rainfall hitting California’s urban areas. But can engineers design systems to capture whatever the skies deliver?

Steve Sheldon, a director and former president of the Orange County Water District, used a metaphor to describe the challenge. “You can’t build a freeway with so many lanes that it is smooth flowing at 5 p.m. every day during rush hour,” he said, “it would be too big the rest of the time.” John Kennedy, OCWD’s executive director of engineering and water resources, was more explicit, saying “we would have to build billions of dollars of facilities that would only be used in very wet years.”

Kennedy emphasized how stormwater capture is very specific to each region, and in that regard, OCWD’s service area in the northern half of Orange County is fortunate. In an average year, they capture about 75,000 acre feet of baseflow from the Santa Ana River, in addition to harvesting another 55,000 acre feet of storm runoff.

So-called incidental percolation from rain contributes 60,000 acre feet per year to their groundwater basins, and the agency built the biggest water recycling plant on the West Coast, allowing it to reuse 130,000 acre feet of wastewater every year. With a total demand for water at 390,000 acre feet, OCWD only has to import 70,000 acre feet per year from the State Water Project, less than 20 percent.

Orange County also has the benefit of uncontaminated aquifers with an estimated storage capacity in excess of 60 million acre feet. The county is able to divert storm water into 1,500 acres of OCWD owned percolation ponds, where up to 2,500 acre feet per day will settle into underground aquifers. During heavy storm runoff this is only about 25 percent of what’s coming down the river, but it’s unlikely OCWD will be investing in more land for percolation ponds, considering they operate in some of the most densely populated, expensive real estate on Earth.

To capture more storm runoff, OCWD’s current approach is to create more opportunities for incidental percolation by encouraging conversion of impermeable surfaces to permeable surfaces. By doing this, the district estimates they can increase annual rainfall driven aquifer replenishment from 60,000 acre feet to 80,000 acre feet per year. This would lower their water importation requirement to 50,000 acre feet per year. If the California Coastal Commission had approved the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant, which was designed to produce 55,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, northern Orange County would be completely independent of imported water.

For an urban area on the relatively arid Southern California coast to achieve water independence is an extraordinary feat. While desalination and wastewater recycling ought to be part of a diverse and resilient portfolio of water supply infrastructure investments, the big numbers are still found in what falls out of the sky. Which brings us back to Los Angeles County. Can enough megatonnage of atmospheric river rainfall be harvested to slake the thirst of this megapolis?

It’s a tough problem. Not only because these intermittent deluges deliver torrents that are barely contained in a 400 foot wide and 35 foot deep concrete culvert they still call the Los Angeles River. Also, because it’s not just how much water has to be processed, it’s what’s in the water. Consider this excerpt from Los Angeles Waterkeeper, “LA’s water watchdog,” describing what happens during a major storm:

“In Los Angeles, our concretized LA River and all its tributaries turn into the city’s largest sewer, carrying pesticides and herbicides from our homes, oils, and grease from our roads, heavy metals and other toxins from Los Angeles’ businesses, and trash, bacteria, and other contaminants from local communities straight into our waterways.”

That’s quite a spew. In Orange County, runoff travels over less mileage of contaminated surfaces on its way to aquifer storage, and those contaminants are filtered as they percolate, diluted within the aquifer, then treated again when pumped up for use. Many of the aquifers in the Los Angeles Basin, on the other hand, are contaminated.

Despite the additional challenges, Los Angeles County is systematically pursuing many of the same strategies as Orange County, but on a much larger scale. On average the county has successfully harvested 200,000 acre feet per year of stormwater, about 15 percent of the total demand. In this most recent and rather extraordinary rainy season, LA County Public Works estimated that stormwater capture at groundwater recharge facilities totaled over 500,000 acre feet.

At the same time the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power has begun groundwater remediation with the ultimate goal of relying on these massive aquifers to store millions of acre feet of imported water, recycled wastewater and storm runoff. In the meantime, long-standing efforts are now accelerating to “unpave” the city, especially upstream where the runoff doesn’t hit as many surface contaminants.

The number of ways to increase the percentage of permeable surfaces in a city as big as Los Angeles is only limited by one’s imagination. Solid concrete driveways can be replaced with a durable combination of gravel and pavers. Underground culverts, surreptitious tributaries feeding the LA River can be “daylighted” and lined with plants that filter contaminants at the same time as the original pipe or concrete is replaced with gravel, allowing for percolation as well as runoff along the entire length.

Cisterns with permeable bottoms can be buried underground in parks. Fed by storm drains, they can fill up with storm runoff, then slowly empty as the water percolates. Along major watercourses, treatment wetlands and recharge basins can be integrated into neighborhood and regional parks.

It isn’t clear, even with all of this, whether or not Los Angeles can ever harvest all of its storm runoff, or, more to the point, can ever become water independent without relying on a combination of imported water and desalination. But over the next few decades, independence of imported water is exactly what they’re planning.

Through aggressive conservation programs, total water demand in Los Angeles County has dropped from nearly 2 million acre feet per year at its peak around 20 years ago to an estimated 1.35 million acre feet today. Bruce Reznik, executive director of the influential advocacy group LA Waterkeeper, claims additional conservation measures could bring total demand down to 1.12 million acre feet per year, a drop of another 17 percent. But where will the water come from?

Today, Los Angeles County already recycles 134,000 acre feet of wastewater per year, with plans to increase processing capacity to just over 500,000 acre feet. The county intends to double its stormwater harvesting to eventually average 270,000 acre feet per year. While most all of this stormwater is stored in aquifers, the county currently withdraws an additional 270,000 acre feet per year from aquifers through existing natural recharge.

The difference between total demand and the contributions from these various sources is made up for by imports from the State Water Project and the Colorado Aqueduct. Water imports into Los Angeles County have averaged around 800,000 acre feet per year in recent years, but with completion of planned projects and additional conservation those imports are projected to drop to well under 100,000 acre feet per year.

What California’s south coast cities are doing to achieve water independence is impressive, and stormwater capture is on track to become the primary source. In Orange County, between base-flow capture, storm-water capture and capture through natural percolation, 49 percent of their water comes from local rain. That total is estimated to increase to 54 percent. In Los Angeles County, harvesting local rain currently supplies 30 percent of their total demand, with that increasing to 48 percent when planned projects are completed.

There are obvious, life affirming synergies that come with many stormwater-harvesting projects. In South Los Angeles, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Park has a new turf soccer field that covers a filtration system that is fed by storm drains and directs water into an underground aquifer instead of straight to the river. Bringing back actual living grass playing fields – which percolate – instead of yet another toxic, fuming, volatilizing, plasticine heat-island generating outdoor rug, is a tremendous example of how retaining water and rewilding urban spaces are mutually reinforcing benefits.

These externalities point to a deeper question. When measured purely according to the value of the additional water captured, investments in stormwater harvesting quickly reach a point where, as Kennedy at OCWD put it, “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” But what if those investments are bringing the additional benefits of living systems that make a city a healthier and more alluring place for people and wildlife?

Positive externalities generate intriguing cost-benefit equations. How much is it worth to plant new green roofs on top of old concrete buildings? What about buildings designed strong enough to actually grow trees on their roofs? Notwithstanding how in Los Angeles those roofs would compete with helipads, swimming pools and the now ubiquitous solar panels, is the juice worth the squeeze?

In a provocative interview published in 2022 by the Yale School of the Environment, urban ecologist Eric Sanderson describes ways to “weave nature back into the urban fabric.” Sanderson’s ideas may be on the fringe of what is practical, but his concept is sound. Rewilding a city can introduce resiliency from storms and droughts, but also provides a deeper human benefit. Just like replacing concrete with mass timber, astroturf with grass, and underground culverts with daylighted streams, more nature, along with more nurturing architecture, are how cities become welcoming habitats instead of human warehouses.

The people designing the water future for California’s south coast cities are doing an impressive job, but they might wish to consider the positive externalities of surplus water. What if Los Angeles County planned to increase their water supply by 17 percent, instead of planning to reduce it by 17 percent? Both outcomes are well within the scope of feasibility, even if the more generous choice might cost more. But what is it worth, for example, to continue to use recycled wastewater to guarantee perennial flow in the Glendale Narrows?

It’s not just the kayakers who benefit. It’s the sightseeing public, the diners on the overlooking terraces, the grateful residents, the lucrative revitalized local culture. What is the economic and human benefit of creating a plethora of urban/wildland interfaces deep inside a city, using entirely artificial sources of water? How much water is actually lost, if after traversing the Narrows, this water finds its way back into spreading basins that double as birdwatching habitat? What if, in a prodigiously extravagant gesture, the entire Los Angeles River were to achieve perennial flow, all the way to the ocean, all year around?

Many of California’s most cherished natural assets are artifacts of human intervention. These managed gems can be enhanced, and new ones can be created, without attenuating the amenities that make life pleasant. It is not a zero sum game. It just depends on how you invest the money, how you design your monumental plumbing, how you harvest the pouring rain.

This article was originally published by the Pacific Research Institute.

Jason Aldean’s Primal Scream

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On July 13, 2023, a country western artist little known outside his genre stepped into the national spotlight when he released a video of a song that channeled the feelings of at least 100 million Americans. In less than a week it was ranked #1 on iTunes and as of July 25 it is the #1 trending music video on YouTube. But you won’t see it on Country Music Television, because it’s been banned.

By now the story line is well established. Jason Aldean, 46 years old, who already had 24 number 1 hits on the US country charts, has released a music video where against a backdrop of protests and rioting, he sings “don’t try that in a small town, see how far you make it down the road…” Reaction to Aldean’s alleged endorsement of vigilantism and allegedly coded racist undertones has been swift and unrelenting.

According to Variety, Aldean has released “the most contemptible country song of the decade.” From NPR, the song “contained lyrics that glorified gun violence and conveyed traditionally racist ideas.” From The Guardian, “lyrics threatening violence against protesters.” From the New Yorker, “the repellent ‘Try That in a Small Town,’ an ode to vigilantism.”

Mentioning Aldean in the New Yorker was just an aside in that magazine’s recent feature article entitled “Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville.” The article was a lengthy diatribe against “bro country” taking over the industry, dominated by “slick, hollow songs about trucks and beer, sung by interchangeable white hunks.” The article goes on to lionize an emerging counterculture, “made up of female songwriters, Black musicians, and queer artists.”

The myopia displayed by this writer is revealed in how she characterizes the industry. So-called Bro Country is commercially successful because it’s popular. People like it. The “new guard,” on the other hand, is propped up by producers and their corporate sponsors who are trying to bring woke culture to country music, presumably to transform its conservative audience into liberals who will vote for Democrats. Hence CMT bans Aldean’s song, but pushes drag queens and “nonbinary” artists to the top of their playlist. And nobody is buying it.

An influential music blog “Saving Country Music,” without explicitly praising or condemning Aldean’s song, explained its inevitability. “Country music is more conservative now than it was when academia and the media decided to target the genre after the election of Trump, believing the way to enact a blue wave among the electorate was to seed politically-motivated ‘journalists’ into the industry to larp as country fans… Activists would have been much better served leaving mainstream country music alone to continue to release pallid, soft, unimaginative, inoffensive, and apolitical songs to a passive listening audience… Instead, the media and academia disrespected country artists and their fans with their down-looking, arrogant ideas that they could mold their minds through the country art form. Now it’s officially backfired.”

What Aldean’s song represents, and the reason for its popularity, is much bigger than the song itself, or the artist who sings it. For every American who watched tens of thousands of violent mobs rampage across the nation in the summer of 2020, looting and burning, while police were prevented from rounding them up and prosecuting them, and for those Americans, to this day, who watch endless videos of smash-and-grab gangs, or brazen, unmolested shoplifters, or intimidating lunatics free to terrorize the streets, this song is a primal scream.

For every American who watched statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and countless other symbols of our heritage spat on, vandalized, toppled and smashed, this song is a primal scream.

Chris Willman, writing for Variety, claims “the most dangerous part of the video is how it conflates the act of protesting with violent crime.” But Willman misses the larger point. Of course protesting isn’t the same as violence, but the same mentality informs the leftist movement whether or not they graduate from peaceful protest to aggravated violence. They want to burn the country down. They hate us. They want to destroy us.

In a way the failure of authorities to contain the mobs of 2020, or the anarchists and psychopathic “unhoused” who have overwhelmed our cities, has done a favor for Americans who still love their country. They have sent us a clear message: We don’t care about you. We are going to use the “white supremacists are the true threat” mantra to turn America into a fascist police state, and these insane leftist mobs are our foot soldiers.

What the political pundits and corporate tastemakers don’t understand is that for tens of millions of listeners who love this song, America is a small town, smaller than ever now that every sensational moment in every corner of the nation goes viral in minutes. America has a culture and a story that is beautiful, but now the Left, abetted by globalist corporations that want to erase all nations and control the world, has proclaimed that America is irredeemably ugly. The town has been taken over by outlaws, who hate the people who built it.

If Aldean’s song taps resentment that has exploded in recent years, it’s well founded resentment. Millions of us have ancestors who died for religious freedom when they crossed the oceans centuries ago to settle here. Millions of us are descended from patriots who died to make us a free and independent nation, or from soldiers who died to free the slaves. Millions of us have parents and grandparents who died to save the world from genocidal Nazism. Over the past few decades, we have literally given our nation away to the world, welcoming over 45 million Americans who are foreign born.

And as we have thrown the doors open wide, and offered our freedom and prosperity to people from every corner of the earth, our government is teaching them to hate us. At the same time, our government has decriminalized crime, turned a blind eye to rivers of fentanyl and opium killing 100,000 Americans per year, addressed homelessness as a business opportunity for subsidized developers instead of deregulating the housing industry, have committed to the destruction of cheap energy, and are providing elementary school children with graphic sexual indoctrination while suggesting they can change their “gender.”

Felix Lace, still hanging on by his fingernails to a YouTube account with over a half-million subscribers, in a video posted on July 21, asked questions that can provide insight into the mentality of those alienated Americans who feel abandoned by the country of their birth.

“What should be loved? Consumerism? Endless wars? Debt? Those that hold the reins of power quite clearly do not care one iota toward their fellow countrymen. The west has become a business run by global financial cartels that use big tech, controlled media, and system journalists to crush anyone that questions the constantly changing cultural and moral landscape. And if that doesn’t work, they actively try to destroy those who express dissident views. We live in a society whose moral compass shifts on a dime, depending on the current flavor of oppression or deconstructionism. There are no constants, there are no concrete moral taboos. So why should anyone feel patriotic love for a country they can barely recognize one year to the next?”

The hypocrisy that fertilized the ground for Aldean’s song to take root is endless. A few years ago, a talented young country western singer, Morgan Wallen, was caught on video using the “N-word.” He didn’t use it disparagingly, or in a public forum. He used it playfully, late one night, describing one of his inebriated friends as a “pussy assed n—–.” He didn’t mean anything remotely harmful, but that didn’t stop the American cancellation and demonization machine from turning their full firepower onto him, doing everything possible to destroy his career.

It didn’t work. This talented, innocent man is more popular than ever. Why not? Deeming one word to be so sacred that context and intent is irrelevant, but only if you’re white, while black cultural icons use it incessantly, is not credible, and sends a toxic message: rules are for you, but not for them. “Zero tolerance,” selectively applied. Watching it used across the entire gamut of trivialities or spontaneous gaffes magnified into racist abominations turns good people into cynics.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing for the National Review, said “we need songs about virtue, not violence.” She evoked John Mellencamp’s tributes to small towns, sang in the 1980s. But the 1980s were halcyon years. Jean Lopez may be commended for appealing to love instead of violence. But the “townfolk” Aldean connects with today are everywhere, and they see chaos and hatred and violence descending on their neighborhoods, enforced by a government they no longer trust.

The reason Jason Aldean’s song is destined to be a cultural landmark is because Americans have had enough. Crime is crime. Competence is competence. Offensiveness is offensiveness. And “colorblind meritocracy” or “law enforcement” are not code words for racism. They are the only equitable ways to organize a society that values freedom and justice.

“Try that in a small town” reminds us just how outraged we should be. It is a primal scream, uttered from the depths of a culture edging closer to the ultimate choice: fight or die. Expect more of them, and it’s about time.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Why Abundance is Achievable and Sustainable

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AUDIO: At the Mesa Water District of Orange County’s Water Policy Dinner and Forum on June 22, 2023, keynote speaker Edward Ring was asked why abundance is “achievable and sustainable.” Here is his answer: