The Power of Moderate Populism

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My positions are centrist: Secure borders. Safe & clean cities. Don’t bankrupt America with spending. Racism against any race is wrong. No sterilization below age of consent.
– Elon Musk, posting on X, March 21, 2024

What Elon Musk posted last month on the website formerly known as Twitter are moderate, centrist, common sense opinions. They are populist sentiments shared by millions of Americans. And as such, they leave Democrats vulnerable to a landslide-level repudiation of their political power.

The millions of people who have entered the U.S. illegally since Joe Biden took office have overwhelmed public services in major Democrat-run cities. It is clearly unsustainable and dangerous, and Americans are belatedly realizing it isn’t congressional inaction that caused the flood of new arrivals; it was a flurry of executive orders and statements from Biden that began the day he took office.

At the same time as immigrants poured into American cities by the millions, these same cities were already becoming ungovernable—virtually all of them ran by Democrats—thanks to progressive District Attorneys elected due to massive campaign contributions made by Democrat billionaires, along with “reforms” that gutted both the laws designed to control crime and the police departments needed to enforce those laws.

Americans have also been victims of the most severe bout of inflation since the 1970s and aren’t the least bit impressed when Biden and his followers claim the rate of inflation is coming down. Everything in America, from housing and rent to food, healthcare, tuition, and fuel, has gone up to household budget-breaking levels, and it doesn’t matter if that level isn’t rising as fast as it did. Prices need to come down, not go up at a lower rate of speed. Americans are looking for answers and have realized Democrats don’t have any.

As for “racism against any race is wrong,” that sort of sentiment used to be successfully disparaged by Democrats as an example of “coded racism” or a “racist dog whistle.” Not anymore. It’s become obvious that institutionalizing a race-based set of differing standards for college admissions and hiring decisions is harming everyone, including the people these preferences are designed to help. What once was quaintly referred to as “reverse discrimination” is coming to an end. It’s going to take a while, but it’s over.

Which brings us to “no sterilization below the age of consent.” Democrat strategists apparently thought that championing “gender confirmation surgery” for minors would unite the nation in shared hostility against “bigoted Republicans,” who subscribe to the antiquated notion that children and adolescents shouldn’t be permitted to make that decision and doctors shouldn’t be allowed to perform those procedures. This ploy worked for a while, but it doesn’t anymore. The tide has turned. They miscalculated and overreached. This, too, is over.

What Musk tweeted is an example of moderate populism. It’s not the more commonly heard “conservative populism,” even though most conservatives share these positions. This is an important distinction to make and to insist upon because it is difficult, if not impossible, to stereotype a moderate as an extremist and a danger to democracy.

There’s another moderate populist out there, with a public profile that exceeds even that of Elon Musk. That’s Donald Trump, of course. Thanks to Trump’s pugilistic persona, it’s harder to assert that he, too, is a moderate populist, which makes it all the more necessary to do so. Because if you evaluate Trump’s actions while in office and his core positions on the most important issues of our time, there is strong evidence that he is not the least bit extreme in his views.

The four positions that Trump has been consistent on for his entire political life concern immigration, trade, foreign policy, and environmentalism. For each of them, his positions are founded on common sense. Controlled, merit-based immigration. Reciprocity in trade. A foreign policy that relies on strategic and technological military supremacy as a deterrent and avoids costly, controversial foreign interventions and occupations. And an environmental policy that recognizes how excessive environmentalist regulations have hobbled America’s economy and are one of the primary reasons that prices for all of life’s essentials are not coming down.

With those as Trump’s most defining positions, why on earth wouldn’t a decisive majority of Americans want him running this country again instead of Joe Biden?

Trump voters have been tagged as stupid, dangerous simpletons, ready to vote for politicians that will plunge America into a new dark age. To reinforce this smear, MAGA voters are depicted as intolerant bigots, and news reports focus on the polarizing issues of transgenderism, sexism, and racism. But as Elon Musk has expressed, there are common sense, intellectually coherent positions on these issues that are best described as moderate populist and not extreme.

Further evidence of Trump’s moderate populist politics is found in his stance on abortion. Trump has correctly pointed out that support for very late-term abortions is an extremist position; they were arguably forbidden even under the Roe v. Wade decision. At the same time, Trump has stated that recent pro-life actions in Alabama and Arizona go too far. Finding common ground on the abortion issue is impossible. Trump’s position on abortion may infuriate principled opponents, but it is not extreme.

The real threat that Trump poses to the establishment is financial, involving immigration, trade, war, and “environmentalism.” Trump threatens the billionaires and corporations that are raking in billions on cheap labor, offshoring manufacturing, war profiteering, and overpriced products that would be affordable if environmental regulations hadn’t forced businesses to consolidate into oligopolies just to have the scale to comply.

This fact that Trump’s positions threaten powerful financial interests belies any claims that he or his supporters are right-wing extremists. Since when were right-wing extremists opposed to corporate power and foreign wars? Trump flipped that script, and, overnight, Democrats became the party of the plutocrats. Trump is a moderate populist; his positions literally define moderate populism.

The next time NPR inserts the adjective “right wing” before reporting on something Elon Musk has said or done, or the ominous phrase “threat to democracy” before reporting the latest news about Donald Trump, bear in mind who NPR represents, along with ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. They are wholly owned by American oligarchs, who have a vested interest in destroying populism in America, even if it is entirely moderate in tone and intent.

But populism, by its very nature, is not easily stopped. We may be thankful that populism, American style, still remains rooted in the best aspects of our character.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness. 

Governing by Hope Instead of Fear

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“A liberal program must also be a responsible program, a reasonable, rational, realistic program. We must know how much it will cost and where the money is coming from. Benefits must be measured against burdens. A program which pampers the people or threatens our solvency is as irresponsible as the one which ignores a vital need. But we will always remember that there is a difference between responsibility and timidity, and we are resolved to be governed more by our hopes than by our fears.”

Edmund G. “Pat” Brown
32nd Governor of California
First Inaugural Address, January 7, 1963

Even in California, most people forget that before there was Governor Jerry Brown, there was his father, Governor Pat Brown. Unlike his son, a Malthusian who ushered in California’s “era of limits,” the elder Brown was a Californian who, perhaps more than anyone else at the time, exercised the leadership and political will during the 1950s and 1960s that led to California building the finest universities, the best freeways, and the state water project, which in turn provided the foundation for broad middle-class prosperity that for a time was unequaled anywhere on earth.

Unfortunately, it is the ideology of the son rather than the father that has taken root in California and is spreading into the rest of America. It is an ideology of not only limits but also fear, division, and ultimately poverty and tyranny. It must be refuted, then banished. It is, to use an overused phrase, an existential threat threat to our democracy.

The challenge is daunting. Refuting a narrative that serves the interests of almost every powerful special interest in American society won’t happen overnight. But it is possible. This dark narrative has two fatal flaws. First, it is false. Second, the truth is positive and can be conveyed with hope and optimism. The challenges facing Americans today will be overcome, as they always have. As we move further into the 21st century, liberty and prosperity are enjoyed by more people in more places than ever before. By every metric of human achievement and quality of life, the world has never been better.

This fact—that almost anyone presented with a complete and objective assessment of life today compared to any other time in human history would choose to be alive right now—is a core premise that back in the Pat Brown era used to govern society. Everything we face today, every unsettling trend, disgraceful corruption, impossible odds, or misguided policies, and the tragic waste of time and money and opportunities that result, must be viewed and must be contended with from this core premise. The world has never been perfect. With wars, oppression, disease, and poverty, life has never been easy. But this era, despite ongoing calamities, is nonetheless a moment that, more than anything else, holds promise and possibilities that have no precedent and no equal.

This should be obvious, but it’s not. We are taught that the planet’s ecosystems are on the brink of collapse, that we must inoculate ourselves against myriad new diseases, and whenever told to do so, we must submit to isolation and quarantines. Without irony, we are taught that our democracy is imperiled and that we may have to use any undemocratic means necessary to protect and preserve it. For every major issue facing Americans, there is an alarming narrative we are urged to accept, and in every case, extraordinary measures are called for if we are to remain safe. Why is this, if the trajectory of humanity has the potential to be so positive? Why so much fear?

A friend of mine who, as a boy, fled with his family from Kazakhstan in the waning days of the USSR once said to me, “The safest place for anyone would be in prison.” I didn’t immediately understand what he meant because I took his statement literally, and an American prison is anything but a safe place. But he was speaking from his experience living under a regime that had turned their entire nation into a prison and their entire population into slaves. They had no human rights, but the rhetoric the regime utilized to justify their enslavement was the need to keep them safe.

Talk to immigrants from Eastern Europe who are old enough to remember the 1980s or prior decades. Ask them how they feel when they hear the government talk about keeping them safe. Power corrupts, and power is clever. No nation is immune. Not even ours. Those who have lived under tyranny and have been steeped in its deceptions and rationalizations are the first to recognize the deception.

Responding to the Narrative

The prevailing narrative in America and the messages from politicians and corporations alike are not taking our country in the right direction. In every case, the underlying appeal is to the desire for safety. We must be safe from climate change, bigotry, hate, malevolent foreign actors, and insurrectionists at home. But there are other values we can’t lose sight of in pursuit of safety. Appeals to our primal desire for safety can mask other motives, and some of the threats we’ve been told we must counter at all costs are overstated threats, if they are threats at all.

There aren’t words to describe, much less contain the outrage that anyone who’s realized “safety” is often a smokescreen to hide an agenda-driven transition from being free to being controlled in everything you do, from every economic transaction you make to the food you eat, where you live, where you go, how you manage your health, and how you raise your children. But mere outrage is a fatally flawed approach.

An iconic American short story is “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” written in 1936 by Stephen Vincent Benét. It’s a story about a man, Jabez Stone, who, in desperate circumstances, made a bargain with the Devil. In exchange for seven years of good fortune, he sold his soul. At the end of seven years, terrified of what was about to happen to him, he talked a young attorney, Daniel Webster, into negotiating with the Devil on his behalf. In the story, Webster is not yet the famous statesman and orator that history remembers, but he agrees to help and convinces the Devil to allow a trial where he can argue Jabez Stone’s case. At first, it doesn’t go well.

As part of the deal, the Devil is permitted to choose the judge and jury, and into the room come the ghosts of infamous traitors and murderers, all of them rising from Hell to participate in the trial. After enduring continuous setbacks during the prosecution’s arguments, all of them unfair, and after becoming furious with frustration, it’s finally Daniel Webster’s turn to speak for the defense.

“But before he started, he looked over the judge and jury for a moment, such being his custom. And he noticed the glitter in their eyes was twice as strong as before, and they all leaned forward. Like hounds, just before they get the fox, they looked, and the blue mist of evil in the room thickened as he watched them. Then he saw what he’d been about to do, and he wiped his forehead, as man might who’s just escaped falling into a pit in the dark. For it was him they’d come for, not only Jabez Stone. He read it in the glitter of their eyes and in the way the stranger hid his mouth with one hand. And if he fought them with their own weapons, he’d fall into their power; he knew that, though he couldn’t have told you how. It was his own anger and horror that burned in their eyes, and he’d have to wipe that out or the case was lost.”

The rest of the story is a terrific parable, a testament to the power of empathy over hate. By the time Daniel Webster finished talking, it was nearly morning, and a jury of the damned had defied the Devil himself to acquit Jabez Stone. Daniel Webster had spoken to this jury without rancor, appealing to their humanity and touching the vestiges of goodness that were still inside of each of them. With this authentic gesture of controlled passion and respectful reason instead of mere confrontation, he accomplished what was otherwise impossible.

That is an inspiring story that we don’t have to entirely assimilate in order for it to benefit our cause. We’re not dealing with a jury of the damned, although it can feel that way when we confront the seeming unanimity and power of the opposition. We are trying to convince the living, and most of them harbor intentions that are entirely innocent. They believe they are doing good. They believe the causes they support are going to do good and that the politicians they vote for represent, at the very least, the best choices possible. And it is here that our message must take root, and it can because it is a message of hope and optimism. The prevailing narrative in America today is based on fear. It is pessimistic about the future and cynical about people. It is the precise opposite of what anyone challenging this narrative should project.

Along with well-founded optimism must come humility. We don’t have all the answers. We don’t have any special insight into the future, apart from the fact that we have looked at data and trends and have concluded that the future can indeed be very bright. But how exactly we get to that future is uncertain. And here again, we have an advantage over the opposition, because while we don’t have their certainty—you will go solar and ration water, and you will like it—we have faith in the power of human ingenuity, operating in a free country, to solve any challenge, no matter how daunting.

In that spirit, and while believing the future can be great, at times we will inevitably realize that, in some detail or on some issue, we’ve been on the wrong track. That’s not something to take lightly, but it, too, is unavoidable. We will commit errors of judgement and a few factual errors, and this brings up another point worth mentioning. When we support things that are supported by every establishment institution, it doesn’t hurt so much to make a mistake. You’re part of a team of pundits, analysts, and scientists who have all come to similar conclusions. You’re fighting for the winning team; you meant well, and flawed or not, your arguments are building the edifice of the narrative. If you make a mistake, you will move on, with your reputation and the credibility of your ideas most likely intact.

But when you’re part of the contrarian resistance—the true “resistance,” by the way—anything you miss will be seized on by the opposition. If you make a mistake, you will do it as part of a small, fledgling team comprised of underfunded and maligned fellows on the outside looking in. When you make an assertion that is proven false, even when your error is unintentional, you’ve let down a group that has nothing to spare, and you’ve damaged the cause. And regardless, we have to try. Because the prevailing narrative, and often the facts used to support it, are misguided.

The Heresy of Optimism

There is a profound heresy in asserting that we are not in a climate crisis, that there are not too many people on earth, and that it is possible to achieve sustainable abundance of affordable energy and water. There is even heresy in suggesting that American history is mostly good and that the American people today are already the most inclusive, tolerant, and welcoming society in human history. There is heresy in saying everything is going to be okay if we just preserve individual freedom and protect private property.

And there is heresy—here is where it gets complicated—in claiming labels such as right-wing and left-wing are increasingly obsolete. We want private property and capitalism, but we reject and must regulate oligopoly and crony capitalism. We want privatization wherever possible, but recognize that sometimes public utilities cannot deliver efficiency and affordable abundance without intervention and funding from the government. To be more specific, and to be shamelessly heretical, we don’t want the government to pick winners, but nonetheless, sometimes we have to.

As it is, for example, the government has decided to subsidize offshore wind and high-speed rail, which are both guaranteed to be economic drains in perpetuity, while, considering their cost, offering almost nothing of value towards solving our energy or transportation requirements. But perhaps government should be subsidizing practical water infrastructure projects and upgrades to our freeways. In California and elsewhere, they did that in the 1950s and 1960s, and we are still reaping the benefits today. We have to wade into the waters of picking winners, or the winners will be picked for us. And the winners that the prevailing narrative wants to pick are not winners at all. They’re epic losers, set to waste trillions.

Which brings us back to California, but, to echo a truism that is no less true despite being parroted endlessly, as goes California, so goes America. And as goes America, so goes the world. When the purveyors of the prevailing narrative claim California must set an example for the world, they’re not exactly correct. California doesn’t have to set an example for the world. But California is setting an example for the world, and it’s a bad example. Nobody in the world wants to live under a regime where everything is monitored, micromanaged, controlled, and rationed. Yet that is exactly where we’re headed in California. That is the world we must oppose, with rational arguments fortified with optimism and empathy.

Over the past fifty years, California has shifted 180 degrees from being a welcoming, affordable place to a state where the population is hyper-regulated and overtaxed, enduring a punitive cost of living where productive and law-abiding citizens are treated with hostility. This hostility may not be overt, although it often is, but the impact is unmitigated and repellent. California has become a place where no rational person would want to put down roots. The only thing left in California that is undeniably friendly—most of the time—is the weather, and that’s simply not enough.

This explains why people born there are forced to leave California. One recent exile actually chastised me for still living there. My state taxes, he said, are supporting a regime and a culture that is using its power—i.e., Silicon Valley technology and Hollywood influencers—to export a narrative that will destroy Western civilization.

The counterargument to this accusation? Stay here and fight. And to fight, we must reject the Malthusian mentality first institutionalized in California by Governor Jerry Brown and adhere instead to the words of his progenitor in life and in politics, Governor Pat Brown, who said “we are resolved to be governed more by our hopes than by our fears.”

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Our Perilous, Magnificent, Perilous Future

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The establishment narrative in the United States is pathologically negative, with its centerpiece being the climate “crisis.” A generation of America’s youth has been indoctrinated to believe the planet’s ecosystems are on the brink of catastrophic collapse, bringing with it chaos and doom. As if that weren’t enough, Americans are perpetually inundated with panic over disease, racism, gender bigotry, capitalist oppression, and the terrifying rise of white supremacist Nazis. And all of this, every bit of it, is overstated hyperbole, if not complete bunk.

The hidden agenda behind all this doom and panic isn’t really hidden anymore. This is a power grab. A venal consensus among America’s wealthiest elites to further centralize their own power and control. The dynamics of this are well understood by anyone who has already had their Red Pill moment. The over-the-top and coordinated media attacks on Trump, commencing in 2015 and escalating every year, opened the eyes of millions. Additional millions awakened during the COVID lockdown, as everything from school curricula to mainstream public health advice was often revealed to be indifferent, if not destructive, to the interests of normal Americans. Now questioning everything, the momentum of America’s electorate today is in the direction of sanity.

For this reason, we may hope that as the narrative is debunked, the agenda will dissipate as well. Maybe we won’t have another lockdown. Maybe “15-minute cities” won’t turn into high-tech prisons. Maybe rural America and a decentralized farm economy will not only survive but recover their vitality. Maybe we will have school choice, and maybe anonymous cash will survive. Maybe we won’t destroy our energy independence; maybe we won’t end up eating bugs instead of beef. Losing our freedom and prosperity is not inevitable.

But to improve chances for a fundamental realignment of the American electorate—a virtuous cascade of landslide elections—there is a weapon available to Americans fighting the elitist takeover of our institutions that isn’t being wielded nearly enough. Optimism in every permutation imaginable. Joy, anticipation, and unshakable confidence in the future. There are powerful, data-driven counterarguments, based on genuine scientific skepticism, that refute the entire pathologically negative establishment narrative, and those counterarguments must be heard. They must be heard without reservations and without respite. They are the fuel of persuasion. They are contagious. They are transformative.

The world is not in the midst of a climate crisis. There is nothing happening with climate and weather in the world that cannot be addressed through normal investments and adaptation. America is the most inclusive, welcoming nation in the history of civilization. Capitalism, when competition is preserved and monopolies are contained, is the most uplifting economic model ever conceived. Despite the tragic reality of ongoing conflict and hardship around the world, overall there has never been less poverty, disease, and war than today.

To believe that the future may just be more wonderful than we could ever imagine is not fantasy; it is an informed and realistic perspective. And it completely disarms the manipulative narrative of fear. No, we aren’t all in terrible danger, and therefore, no, we don’t have to give up our prosperity and our freedom.

Uncertainty and Peril, Boundless Possibilities

If growing resistance to the doom narrative promulgated by America’s elites may undermine that narrative, destroying it entirely requires an alternative vision. And to do this requires not only the emotions of persuasion—optimism, joy, anticipation, and confidence—but also an embrace of the innovative spirit that has been hijacked by doomers. Technology is not our enemy; its threat is found in the motivations of the people who wield it. The freedom-loving optimist must be willing to wade into the weeds of technology policy. In those weeds, our destiny and our future are going to be decided.

Because the climate “crisis” is the foundational premise upon which America’s elites are systematically implementing a technology-driven police state characterized by perpetual monitoring and rationing of virtually all activity—our food, water, transportation, homes, and businesses—it is there we may focus on critical technology decisions and tradeoffs that are being decided right now.

For example, how renewable energy is sourced and delivered can vary greatly depending on whether it is centralized or decentralized. In California, the state legislature has recently reduced financial incentives for residential rooftop photovoltaics. But that action does not eliminate subsidies; it only means that California’s beleaguered taxpayers and ratepayers will transfer even more billions to giant centralized wind farms and utility-scale photovoltaic installations. Nor is this about practicality. Decentralized photovoltaic systems generate power where it is consumed, reducing the need for massive investment in new high-voltage transmission lines to deliver electricity from remote renewable energy generation sites onto the grid.

Similarly, California’s state legislature forces taxpayers and ratepayers to subsidize utility scale battery farms to buffer and store the intermittent power generated by solar and wind farms. But by adding vehicle-to-grid technology to California’s privately owned EVs, if only 10 percent of California’s automobiles were EVs (a realistic niche), they would be capable of storing over 30 gigawatt-hours of electricity per day. They could be driven to work, charged from the grid during the day when surplus solar power is currently wasted, then plugged in at night to collect surplus wind energy and power residences without relying on grid electricity.

These choices aren’t meant to suggest that renewables can replace coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric power. They can’t, and they shouldn’t. But if renewables are to remain one part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, then how they are implemented matters a great deal. The choice to decentralize solar, wind, and battery assets into the hands of millions of private small property owners can potentially save billions in subsidies while also distributing ownership.

Another example of how new technology can be channeled in extremely productive ways, or not, concerns food production. We’ve all heard the nightmare scenarios whereby mass food production may transition to protein based on bug tissue or “cultivated meat.” But there are other innovations that ought to have universal appeal. Indoor agriculture, where food is grown in a controlled indoor environment, offers an opportunity to avoid use of pesticides and herbicides. High-value crops, including tomatoes and most other vegetables, can be grown indoors, creating what may be an opportunity for small, decentralized indoor farmers to compete with agribusiness.

It isn’t possible to predict what innovations are coming, much less prescribe in advance the strategies that will be necessary to mitigate the ones that are awful and promote the ones that are awesome. This is why, for example, mandating a massive transition to EVs and “net-zero” risks draining hundreds of billions out of the economy, on the backs of working families, when in a few years a solid-state battery or a breakthrough in solar concentrator technology will render these massive investments in today’s EV and photovoltaic technology completely obsolete. California’s current policies, ironically, betray a lack of faith in the power of innovation.

It isn’t a huge stretch to move from not only believing that civilization isn’t already doomed to also believing we can develop and manage new technology in ways that are almost all going to be good for humanity. And the danger only gets worse—much worse—if we withdraw from the fight.

Human progress has always fitfully advanced, with setbacks along the way that at times lasted for centuries. That doesn’t have to be our fate in this era. We may cure disease, eliminate hunger and poverty, negotiate peace, explore space, extend life, deliver inexhaustible energy and abundant water, nurture wilderness and wildlife, and preserve a decentralized economy where wealth and ownership are broadly distributed among a population in which the vast majority of people enjoy middle-class lifestyles. Things may actually just get better and better. It is possible. It is a choice.

We must find this vision, embrace it, negotiate its particulars, and fight for it. Or it will be defined for us by people who have demonstrated no wish to share the wondrous products of innovation that are just around the corner.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How Another Newsom Recall Effort Helps America

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California isn’t as bad as millions of people outside the state have been led to believe. No, not every downtown street is awash in homeless drug addicts, schizophrenics, and predators. No, not every retail shopping district has crumbled under the onslaught of brazen shoplifters and smash-and-grab gangs. And despite almost every major “news” network in the nation pretending that an allegedly unprecedented onslaught of bomb cyclones is literally washing the entire state into the Pacific Ocean, overall California still has the best weather in the world.

Nonetheless, California is broken. Even if you aren’t one of the millions of Californians who doesn’t have to step over syringes and feces day after day merely to walk your children to school or get to work and back, and even if you aren’t one of the hundreds of thousands of business owners who no longer has a business or one of their employees who no longer has a job, California is broken.

For the vast majority of people living there, just surviving in California is a challenge. The median home price is nine times the median household income, and the prices of gasoline and utilities are the highest in the nation. California also has the highest tax rates, while it has among the worst public schools, the worst crime, the worst roads, water rationing, energy shortages, and a housing shortage. Pay all that money, for that, and go broke. Welcome to California.

California also has a brutal, overwhelming, complicated array of laws and regulations, worse than any other state. California also has the highest number of regulatory agencies. These agencies write and enforce rules that not only change all the time but are often in conflict with each other. Businesspeople in California have to choose which laws to break because total compliance is impossible. Chief Executive magazine has ranked California as the worst state for business for the last 19 years in a row, which is as long as they have been doing the rankings. Give the best years of your life, bet your fortune on being an independent entrepreneur, and endure nothing but harassment from your own government. Welcome to California.

Another Newsom Recall

This is the context in which yet another attempt to recall Governor Gavin Newsom was launched this past Monday, February 26, by the same team that successfully qualified a gubernatorial recall back in 2021, forcing a special election.

Newsom deserves it. He’s been on the road, barnstorming America, hoping to convince a critical mass of liberal voters that preserving the right to on-demand, late-term abortions is the most important issue of our time and that, as U.S. President-in-Waiting, he is their savior and protector. Meanwhile, the citizens of his own state desperately cope with an economy that’s breaking them, caused by a hostile, indifferent, incompetent, bloated network of state and local governments, all of them hijacked by special interests, all of them controlled by Democrats, with their absentee leader, Gavin Newsom, presiding over the whole failed, misanthropic mess.

Along with a broken economy, Newsom and the political machine that made him have done a superb job of rigging elections to prevent any return to sanity or humanity. Automatic voter registration, mailed ballots, and ballot harvesting, paid for by donations from leftist billionaires and public sector unions, all ensure that hand-picked and housebroken candidates continue to win elections all the way from local water board up to and including the governor.

But there’s still the recall. It’s the last viable avenue for grassroots activism to make a difference in California. Citizen democracy in California was once robust but has been deliberately diminished. Ballot initiatives where citizens can enact annoying laws like the legendary Proposition 13, which forbids rampant escalation in property tax rates, have been all but eviscerated thanks to “reforms” passed by the state legislature in recent years. But while initiatives have been safely regulated to the point where only billionaires, multinational corporations, and government unions retain the financial throw weight now required to get them qualified for a state ballot, the simple recall remains viable for the common activist.

The secret to the ongoing viability of recalls in California, at least until a few more “reforms” come down from a state legislature that is determined to preserve their absolute one-party rule, is that the petition verbiage needed to qualify a recall can fit onto one page, which means it can be mailed inexpensively to, for example, households where at least two registered Republicans live. Packaged with clear instructions to voters on how to sign the petition, a reply envelope, and an added form to make a donation, signature gathering for recall campaigns using direct mail can be self-sustaining. The horror!

Win or Lose, an Attempt to Recall Newsom Helps Republicans Everywhere

If this latest attempt to recall Newsom succeeds in forcing him to again defend himself in a special election, but he survives the recall attempt, it will nonetheless be a win for Republicans all over America. Democrats in California are the ATM machine for Democrats in the rest of the nation. Every dollar that is spent defending Newsom on his home turf is a dollar that isn’t exported to swing congressional districts across America. They’re not small dollars.

In opposition to the 2021 attempt to recall Newsom, the governor’s allies raised over $88 million. The recall committees altogether spent not quite $21 million. Depending on whether you consider the gross or the net amount, that is at least $67 million in campaign contributions that did not go off to bolster campaigns for Democrats in other states.

Here’s how much of a difference this money can make. In November 2022, the median amount of money raised by an incumbent U.S. Congressman in a battleground district (rated as “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report) was $5.5 million. This means $67 million would cover 100 percent of the campaign expenses in 12 close congressional races. We may assume median spending for congressional seats will be higher in 2024 than in 2022. But in 2024 congressional races in swing districts, where funding is already flowing in from around the nation, it’s reasonable to assume $67 million will go a long way. If a Newsom recall is qualified for the California ballot this year, that money is going to stay home. Successfully placing a Newsom recall on the ballot during this critical election year in California is going to damage the Democrat’s plan to recapture control of the U.S. Congress. It matters that much.

And who can be certain Newsom will survive a recall this time? As California rolls predictably into another spending deficit, California’s public institutions will falter even more. Fed-up voters may finally see past Newsom’s slick pompadour and telegenic smile and realize that all his blather about the threats of MAGA and the climate “crisis” were just distractions. They’ll connect the dots at last. It’s impossible to live here, and Newsom and his Democrats are the reason why.

Ultimately, rescuing California will depend on finding new candidates with the common sense and charisma to offer obvious solutions to voters: prosecuting criminals again, enabling school choice, and deregulating the housing and energy industries. Subjecting Newsom to a recall election will therefore also provide a forum for aspirants to replace Newsom. They will have a chance to explain their vision and offer voters an alternative to the corrupt, punitive governance that has made their lives far too difficult for far too long.

Win or lose, getting a Newsom recall effort onto the state ballot this year will force the governor to defend a record he can’t defend. At a critical time, it will spotlight the failures of his administration and his party. It will force Democratic donors to divert what might easily be up to $100 million away from close races in the rest of the nation. It will bring national attention to the failed one-party state called California and remind independent voters all over the country that the obsessions of social liberals may not be more important than retaining the ability to earn a living under a business-friendly government. And it will provide an opportunity for new candidates to get visibility for themselves and their ideas well in advance of California’s 2026 gubernatorial election, when Newsom will be termed out even if he survives this latest assault.

In short, trying yet again to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom is a healthy expression of democracy. Bring it on.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Irreconcilable Differences – California’s GOP Falters Within

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Two very different visions for California. Steve Garvey, the leading Republican, is too conservative for California. He voted for Trump, twice, and supported Republicans for years.
– Adam Schiff campaign ad, February 2024

Usually, whenever you hear anything coming from Congressman Adam Schiff, a creature of the D.C. swamp for nearly 25 years, it’s likely the exact opposite is true. But he’s right about one thing: there are two very different visions for California. They couldn’t be further apart.

Democrats want California’s public schools to remain in the iron grip of left-wing teachers’ unions. They want to continue to enforce racist policies in defiance of even California’s voters, who in November 2020 decisively rejected their attempt to repeal affirmative action. They want to force Californians to pay the highest prices in the United States for rationed energy and water. They resist laws that might once again make crime illegal in this once safe state, and they want to continue to give politically connected developers tens of billions of dollars to construct housing for the homeless, a policy guaranteed to keep the vast majority on the street to die slow deaths. There’s much more. The system is set up to reward indolence and resentment. Hard workers are dupes.

The State of California is a textbook example of what happens when leftist oligarchs, environmentalist extremists, academic socialists, corporatists and crony capitalists, labor unions (mostly in the public sector), ambulance-chasing trial lawyers, and a media best described collectively as negligent, lazy cowards all join hands and decide to loot the middle class. The people being driven out of California are variously described by Democrats as too privileged, too independent, too unsustainable, recalcitrant, troglodytic, superseded, irrelevant, unwanted, and guilty by reason of whiteness. The attitude of California’s upper class towards the people whose hard work built the state is either hurry up and die or get lost and good riddance.

California is fast becoming a feudal economy, with the aforementioned upper class doling out alms to a dependent lower class that reliably votes for them in exchange for more promises. The middle class and any chance for ordinary people to attain financial independence are being systematically destroyed under the guise of climate and equity. This political economy is fast being exported to the rest of the United States and, by extension, everywhere else in the world where a pesky, resource-guzzling middle class has arisen.

Schiff got something else right in his presumptuous ad. He correctly calculated that uttering the name “Trump” and associating his Republican opponent with Trump and MAGA policies would be the most effective way to undermine that opponent. And in that comment, Schiff also inadvertently touched on the problem that is killing California’s Republican Party. To Trump or not to Trump. To MAGA or not to MAGA.

Irreconcilable Differences?

The schism in California’s Republican Party precedes Trump. The party has been split on how to handle social issues and immigration policy for decades. Democrats have successfully stigmatized all Republicans as race bigots ever since the party supported Prop. 187 in 1994, which would have prevented illegal immigrants from receiving public healthcare services, and as gender bigots ever since Prop. 8 in 2008, which banned gay marriage. California’s voters, by the way, approved both of these measures.

When Trump came along, however, the Democrats were able to hold him before gullible voters as the personification of racism and bigotry. Trump’s pugilistic spontaneity played into the hands of Democratic candidates and campaign consultants who, already armed with far more money than Republicans could ever hope to raise, simply tagged every Republican candidate with guilt by association, and their candidates kept on winning. In 2016, the GOP still controlled a dismal 25 out of 80 seats in the State Assembly. By 2022, that number had declined to only 18 GOP seats. Similarly, in 2016, the GOP controlled 13 of the 40 seats in the State Senate, and by 2022, that number had fallen to only eight GOP seats.

This is the quandary that California’s state GOP leadership confronts. Trump earned 6.0 million votes in California in 2020, up from 3.9 million in 2016. Trump earned substantially more votes in California than the 4.8 million registered Republicans in the state at that time. But despite having a solid base in the increasingly polarized state, Trump is represented by Democrats as a toxic brand, which condemns GOP party leadership and any politician not residing in one of the diminishing number of safe Republican districts to either publicly renounce him or have no chance of being elected.

How do you turn this around if you can’t unite? Republican registration in California is up slightly since 2020, increasing to 5.3 million. But Democratic registration, thanks to a system saturated with money and set up to sweep in every holder of a driver’s license and every college student, has surged since 2020 from 8.9 million to 10.6 million. You may call this the product of voter fraud, or just call it what is beyond debate, the product of a nearly omnipotent political machine. Whatever it is, it rolls on, saving people from the Trump boogeyman. Many of these registered Democrats can perhaps be forgiven because they have never heard the other side of the story.

A state party and its candidates can afford to be disunited when they have billions to play with. That would be California’s Democrats. Regardless of how you may assess their unity or lack of unity, they’re loaded. Adam Schiff, as a candidate still in primary season, already has $35 million stockpiled for his campaign. His principle primary rival among the Democrats, Katie Porter, has $13 million on hand. Which brings us to Steve Garvey, the Republican, who, according to his own campaign consultants, has raised a whopping $1.2 million through the end of January. You can’t run a campaign for U.S. Senate in California, with 39 million people and 7 major media markets, on $1.2 million. And it gets worse.

Two GOP Candidates, Two Strategies

For several years, a solid GOP candidate has quietly earned credibility among California’s grassroots voters through smart, resourceful campaigning, thoughtful policy positions, an articulate delivery, and an uncompromising stance on the issues that matter to conservatives. I asked Eric Early, also running for U.S. Senate, what happened. In California’s top-two primary, if Republicans split the vote, Californians will have a choice between two Democrats in November.

Early explained his reasons for entering the race. At the time he declared, there were no other Republicans considering running who might have a chance to make it through the primaries, while at the same time, three competitive Democrats (Schiff, Porter, and Barbara Lee) had already lined up. With the possibility that these three Democrats would split their party’s votes, Early saw an opportunity to capture votes from a unified GOP and advance to the general election.

Steve Garvey belatedly decided to become a candidate after polling showed Early to actually hold a lead against the other three Democrats. He was recruited because of his name recognition, although one must realize that Garvey’s celebrity status is tempered by the fact that he retired from baseball nearly 40 years ago. Garvey was a big star in his day, but if you’re under the age of 60, or even if you’re over 60 but never followed baseball, he is pretty much an unknown.

Perhaps Garvey’s appeal lies in his potential to raise big bucks from donors who themselves fall into his favored category—old baseball fans living in Southern California. That slice of California’s electorate probably does have a disproportionate ability to pony up cash for the candidate of their choice. But how’s that working out so far? Will anyone bet the ballpark on Garvey?

So far, Garvey is doing as good a job as can be expected of walking a difficult tightrope. If he falls off to one side, it will be because he didn’t sufficiently renounce membership of the Trump cult and hence lost every moderate voter. If he falls off to the other side, it will be because, in the process of distancing himself from Trump, he failed to rise above the vapid clichés and grasping RINO pablum that have by now completely alienated California’s conservative grassroots. Embrace Trump, lose the moderates. Reject Trump, lose the GOP grassroots, six million strong.

The Path to Reconciliation

Ultimately, what it takes for a candidate to walk this political tightrope, if that is even possible, is to reject Trump at the same time as you endorse, with no reservations, nearly every policy Trump stands for. The challenge, should one accept it as their only option, is to separate MAGA from Trump. Because the primary goals of MAGA are sound. They rest on several broad and coherent planks: Controlled, merit-based immigration. Fair, reciprocal trade with other nations. Pragmatic energy and infrastructure policies that balance the needs of people and the environment. Colorblind merit over mandated quotas based on race and gender. Law and order. More accountability and common sense in public education and less politicized curricula. And maintaining strategic and technological supremacy instead of engaging in regime change wars all over the world.

Those were Trump’s policies during his first presidency. They hold up to scrutiny. They are coherent. In the hands of the right U.S. Senate candidate, they are winning planks to loudly proclaim, even in California. A Machiavellian Democratic political consultant will effectively use Trump to stigmatize MAGA. But they cannot use MAGA, when it is accurately and resolutely articulated, to stigmatize every other Republican candidate on the ballot.

Eric Early, Garvey’s GOP rival who preceded him in announcing his candidacy, put it this way. “If we are going to go down in the general election, at least let’s not go down like a bunch of patsies. If we try to be Democrat-Lite, we lose. There is only one principled conservative in this race who will walk it and talk it. I won’t go down as just another patsy, hoping that the media will somehow take a liking to me.” Early describes the schism among Republicans as succinctly as it can be expressed, saying “there are Never Trumpers and there are Trump supporters.”

If you accept Early’s argument, then reconciling California’s GOP’s grassroots with its donors comes down to finding candidates that are not trying to be Democrat-Lite. MAGA policies offer a common-sense, surprisingly moderate, comprehensive, hopeful, constructive alternative to the mess Democrats have made of California. If all you can say is Democrats are bad, we’re not Democrats, and we disavow Trump, you have nothing to offer.

Unfortunately, for the last several years, in an attempt to attract donors, attract fair media coverage, and attract independent voters, California’s state GOP has fitfully navigated the precarious and irreconcilable political tightrope with donors and moderates on one side and their grassroots on the other. It has been an impossible journey that has only taken them backwards. At this point, with the registration gap widening, hopelessly outgunned financially, with no power whatsoever in the state legislature, and having alienated their own base, it’s time to recognize that the state party has lost its footing.

There is another way. Understanding MAGA, expressing MAGA, and persuasively making the case for MAGA right here in California, that is what still offers the GOP a path to unity, voters, donors, and victory.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Realigning California is not Impossible

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It’s no secret that California is a juggernaut, exercising influence in national politics even disproportionate to its status as the largest state. And it’s all bad news. From California comes progressive authoritarianism in all its toxic iterations: climate fascism, big tech censorship, Hollywood cultural propaganda, and billions in campaign contributions to Democrats in every state from New Hampshire to Hawaii.

Often lost in the chorus of condemnation coming from the American right is the fact that struggling within the one-party state called California is a beleaguered minority of GOP voters. A minority so sizable, in fact, that in the 2020 election, Donald Trump received 6 million votes in California, edging out Texas and Florida to have the most Trump voters in the country.

If you examine California’s political geography, a pattern emerges that is precisely the same as in most other states. The big cities, run by politicians typically controlled by public sector unions, are solid blue. But in the hinterlands, many rural counties are solidly Republican. The registration numbers reflect a sizable number of Republican voters, despite being not nearly enough to win statewide elections. The pattern is typically 60/40.

For example, in the 2022 elections for higher state office, Democrats swept the field. Newsom got 59.2  percent of the vote to be reelected governor. Eleni Kounalakis got 59.7 percent to win Lieutenant Governor. The down-ticket Democrat candidates for state office also all won; Secretary of State 60.1 percent, Controller 55.3 percent, Treasurer 58.8 percent, Attorney General 59.1 percent, Insurance Commissioner 59.9 percent, and Superintendent of Public Instruction 63.7 percent.

In the California State Legislature, it’s the same story. The Democratic candidates hold 32 of the 40 seats in the State Senate, and they hold 62 of the 80 seats in the State Assembly. Democrats exercise absolute power in California. But this disenfranchises a sizable minority, since 40 percent of voters can be relied on to vote against Democrats, and in California’s top two general election system, that means they’re voting for Republicans.

There are many ways to look at 40 percent. On one hand, you can consider it indicates landslide proportions, which it is, and give up. But if you take a good look at the mess Democrats have made of California, you might decide it’s entirely possible to swing an additional 10 percent of voters against Democrats and start winning elections. You’d be up against a powerful coalition of public sector unions, who are the top contributors to almost every Democrat that’s had a seat in the state legislature in at least the last 20 years. And you would find them allied with tech billionaires, Hollywood influencers, and an assortment of activist nonprofits and their affiliated PACs. Together, these special interests fuel an agenda that has turned California into a feudal society and stands poised to turn the rest of America into the same medieval mess.

This failure needs no explaining. Californians live with it every day. Tens of thousands of homeless, dying on the streets because politicians are too crooked and too cowardly to just round them up and get them sober, like they used to. Criminals openly looting and terrorizing citizens because prosecutors—elected by Democratic megadonors—have decided incarceration is not the answer. The highest taxes and most burdensome regulations, all for nothing, because California has unreliable energy, rationed water, unaffordable homes, terrible schools, and it’s not safe.

California today is run by this formidable coalition of special interests, more united and more powerful than their counterparts in other states, serving themselves and their donors. They win because, along with all that power and all that money, they sell a message that goes something like this: “Vote for us because Donald Trump will destroy democracy.” Meanwhile, compliant “news” networks associate any Republican with Trump—that is, when they’re not selling climate porn, systemic racism porn, pandemic porn, gender bigotry porn, and other distracting forms of fear-based propaganda.

Propaganda works, but it’s a dangerous game. One by one, people see through the lies. All they need is a wholesome alternative. A message of hope and an agenda to back it up. It isn’t enough to say that Democrats ruined the state, because Democrats have convinced voters that Republicans will ruin it even more.

These are serious disadvantages, but the only healthy approach is to consider them as excuses because Republicans can win in California if they focus on and offer solutions for just three huge things: education, public safety, and the cost of living. These solutions are known and rehashed so often you can’t enumerate them without being stamped as a wonk. Oh well. Here goes:

For education, streamline the process for new charter schools to be opened and for existing charter schools to stay open, implement universal education savings accounts, and reform public school union work rules so teachers can be hired, retained, and compensated based on their success in the classroom instead of based on seniority.

The biggest issue with public safety is to repeal the laws that downgraded penalties for drug and property crimes. Close behind is to insist that funds to help the unhoused go into erecting inexpensive tent cities on inexpensive land, with some of the savings going into mandatory drug treatment and job training. Break the homeless industrial complex which has wasted billions only to make the problem worse.

As for cost of living, candidates need to openly proclaim that the scarcity agenda imposed on Californians will not fix the climate, if there even is a “climate crisis.” Then they need to promise to repeal every law and regulation that unreasonably stifles private investment in new home construction, along with laws that restrict investment in practical energy and water supply solutions. They can begin by promising to repeal the California Environmental Quality Act and the Global Warming Solutions Act. And they can remind concerned voters that there will still be an overabundance of federal protections that will remain to safeguard the environment.

California just needs more candidates with the courage to stand firm on these three issues of universal and nonpartisan appeal and with the charisma to communicate the upside of these positions. The opportunity here is that if a few businesspeople, engineers, and other pragmatic, capable individuals were to step forward to run for office, they would dilute the inevitable attacks from the corrupt special interests that run California today. The more good candidates step up, the more will be willing to step up, because there will be strength in numbers.

Emphasizing tough solutions that will solve California’s three biggest problems will find growing support from an electorate that’s reaching the limit of its patience. With courage, optimism, and adherence to specific solutions, a team of like-minded politicians, sharing a unified message, will eventually realign California. The way things are, it may be just a matter of time.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

More Infrastructure is Key to Lowering Home Prices

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Housing. Shelter. Room at the Inn. A hearth and a home. From the moment neolithic humans emerged from caves to build structures in the open, atop a defensible hill or along a life giving river, having some place warm and dry to call home has been a primal necessity and a prerequisite for civilization.

This imperative is not lost on California’s legislators and elected executives, or its litigators and judges. In response to a chronic housing shortage in the state that has only worsened for the last several years, in the 2023 legislative session California’s state lawmakers approved and Governor Newsom signed a host of new laws designed to facilitate construction of new housing.

According to the law firm Holland & Knight, more than 32 new housing oriented statutes take effect on January 1st, 2024. There are 4 new laws to streamline the process of acquiring building permits, 7 that enact specific housing related exemptions to CEQA, 6 that impact “density, land use, and planning,” 3 that incentivize more construction of Accessory Dwelling Units, 2 designed to empower a greater role for state agencies to enforce housing law, 7 to reduce obstacles to construction of more affordable housing, 3 to reduce the required number of parking places to accompany new housing, and more.

If you’re a housing wonk, you may spend days analyzing these new statutes. But it doesn’t take an expert to identify a fundamental flaw in all this legislation, motivated perhaps in equal measure by good intentions and sops to subsidy guzzling politically connected developers who bankroll reelection campaigns. The flaw is simple: California’s state legislature created a housing shortage by engineering a regulatory environment that made it almost impossible for unsubsidized developers to build homes that people could afford. Instead of fixing that, they’re just imposing more laws and regulations.

There are plenty of things they could have done to rectify what has become a structural barrier to building affordable market housing. They could relax zoning laws that all but prohibit housing on open land outside of existing cities, instead of strengthening these defacto “greenbelt” cordons around every city. They could also mandate a cap on local building fees to some percent of a new home’s sale price, and they could restrict to county attorneys general and the state attorney general the ability to file CEQA lawsuits. These two steps, which are currently embodied in a ballot initiative that a pro-housing PAC – with the unsubtle name “Californians for Homeownership” – are attempting to qualify for the November 2024 ballot, would encourage more unsubsidized private sector developers to try to build and sell affordable homes while still making a profit. The state legislature has the power to do this without a ballot initiative, and they should.

Meanwhile, however, there is an even more fundamental obstacle to making housing affordable in California, and to explore the remedy is to challenge ideological schisms that limit innovation and impede consensus. California needs more energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. And even if they were not operating in a hyper-regulated environment, the job of upgrading and expanding infrastructure is beyond the capacity of private investment.

The economic argument goes something like this. The cost to build, for example, an aqueduct to transport winter floodwater from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to capacious and quick-charging storage aquifers in the San Joaquin Valley, is so great, that if 100 percent of the construction cost was paid for by a private company, the ratepayers who eventually consumed that stored water would pay a price too high for low to moderate income households to afford. Agricultural clients might be able to grow pistachios and almonds, which fetch a high price per pound, but tomatoes, which bring in less revenue per ton, would disappear from California’s fields. The principle expressed by these examples extends to all enabling infrastructure. When end-users have to pay too much for energy and water, the standard of living goes down, the cost of living goes up, and economic activity falters.

Californians thus have to answer a tough question: Do they want to businesses to leave and residents to struggle financially, or do they want to subsidize the cost of public works in order to bring down the amount that private partners have to recoup from ratepayers? In the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called Pat Brown Democrats answered this question unequivocally. The State of California built the most magnificent system of water storage and interbasin transfers in the world. It built the best network of universities in the world. And it built freeways and expressways that connected every corner of the state and facilitated an era of spectacular growth. There was surplus energy and water, the state was affordable, and millions of people moved here to follow their dreams.

That’s over now. What’s changed? It isn’t so much that Californians aren’t willing to spend massive amounts of public money on infrastructure. The problem is the choices they’re making are terrible. They’re not pouring hundreds of dollars into enabling infrastructure, but rather into disabling infrastructure. Instead of upgrading our natural gas pipelines, retrofitting our natural gas fired power plants with advanced combined cycle turbines, building an LNG terminal in Ventura County, and drilling for more – all activities that are so inherently profitable that the private sector could pay for nearly all of this expansion – instead the state legislature has declared war on natural gas, is bent on killing the industry, and is spending or planning to spend tens of billions to subsidize solar farms, battery farms, and offshore wind. These are all technologies that remain unproven at scale and may be obsolete within a decade or two. There’s more.

Instead of permitting desalination plants on the Southern California coast, plants that could be built with a minimal infusion of public funds, or developing creative ways to divert flood waters from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta while at the same time reinforcing century old levees, California’s state legislature is going to build a 45 mile long tunnel under the Delta to transport water from just one river, the Sacramento, to southbound aqueducts. The estimated cost for this gargantuan undertaking is $20 million.

Which brings to mind a third hideous example of hideous waste, High Speed Rail, which was sold to voters as a system that would get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours flat, and only cost $30 billion to build. Estimated travel time has inexplicably expanded to over four hours, and total estimated cost is now over $130 billion. Will it ever get built? Pat Brown Democrats would have upgraded our railroads, widened and resurfaced our freeways, maybe – gasp! – even built a few more freeways, and spent a fraction as much doing it.

Again. What happened? The problem isn’t necessarily that leaving projects to public agencies breeds inefficiency. It does. For that matter, in a hyper-regulated environment, which California certainly is, inefficiency and cronyism is bred into private sector corporations as well. But something bigger is at work, which might be properly described as the spirit of the time. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a consensus that California needed to grow, that development was a good thing, and the state government went to work to build practical energy, water and transportation infrastructure that made everything else possible. The farm economy grew. Suburbs expanded around the old cities, and homes were affordable. The state thrived.

The spirit of the time is very different now. The consensus among California’s elite is that the state has grown quite enough, at the same time as literally everything affecting land development, land management, or energy and water policy has to be evaluated through the filter of the climate crisis. Hence “renewables” to the exclusion of clean, ultra efficient advanced natural gas power. Hence water rationing instead of investment in practical water supply infrastructure. Hence trains, light rail, and high-density housing instead of new roads and new suburbs. No wonder everything costs so much.

What ought to be blatantly contradictory in all this is how counter the result is to all the human values that California’s elites purport to cherish. We need extensive infrastructure because it fosters private sector freedom and growth. When the public subsidizes energy and water infrastructure, and deregulates land development, ownership is decentralized. When infrastructure is inadequate and prices soar, the only winners are the corporations and rentiers, who invest in the artificially inflated assets and artificially overvalued commodities, making excessive profits as the consumers struggle.

And so then we come full circle. The state government, having failed to invest on the front end to make life’s essentials within the reach of ordinary Californian households, finds itself captured by politically connected corporations that prosper when prices are high, and at the same time finds itself now spending more public money merely to subsidize, in perpetuity, those millions of low and lower-middle-income households who can’t pay their rent or their mortgage. What great irony.

A condensed version of this article originally appeared on the website of the Pacific Research Institute.

The Intellectual Foundations of MAGA

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Republicans are dumb. They are easily led suckers, voting against their own best interests, manipulated by dangerous demagogues. This accusation is accepted as fact by most Democrat voters and is relentlessly reinforced by the media Democrats rely on. From MSNBC, Democratic strategist James Carville says Republicans “have a lot of stupid people that vote in their primaries.”  From New York Magazine, “Is DeSantis Just Not Dumb Enough for Republicans?” From Vanity Fair, “Is the Sheer Stupidity of Republican Politics Breaking Through?”

Even some conservative columnists can’t criticize the Democrats without taking a shot at those stupid Republicans. Daniel Henninger, writing for the Wall Street Journal, characterized national politics this year as “The Stupid Party vs. the Evil Party.” As for the leader of the Republican Party, we have this from The New Republic, “Trump Is an Extremely Dumb Fascist.” And as James Carville said, “When stupid people vote, you know who they nominate? Other stupid people.”

Rather than challenge the “stupid” stereotype, David Brooks, the New York Times’ thoroughly housebroken token conservative, has tried to contextualize it, recently stating on PBS Newshour that “this is a working class party,” referring to the Republican base in the Trump era.

The narrative is widespread and clear. Republican voters, MAGA voters in particular, are universally stigmatized by America’s mainstream thought leaders as uneducated rubes. As Obama once famously sneered, they are “clinging to their guns and religion.”

The perception being marketed as a truism in America is that MAGA Republicans are at best incapable of supporting a coherent national political agenda and, at worst, are willfully supporting dangerous policies that will put an end to democracy in America.

All of this is utterly false. There is a coherent intellectual and moral basis for the MAGA agenda, and there is basic agreement among MAGA Republicans over not only the broad themes but also many of the policy details that define that agenda.

Immigration policy is an obvious example where the MAGA position—restoring control of who enters the nation and basing legal immigration on merit—has a clarity that is completely lacking in the current de facto policy. Since Biden took office, nearly 8 million people have illegally crossed into America from Mexico, entering the country with minimal screening across a border that has been thrown wide open. Cities are going bankrupt trying to support them with food, shelter, healthcare, and education. At the same time, drugs pour across the open border, a primary cause of over 110,000 drug overdose deaths in 2023.

The MAGA position is both humane and realistic. It is impossible to admit everyone into the United States who wants to live here. There are an estimated 700 million people in the world who live in extreme poverty. An estimated 2 billion people live in conflict zones. Just allowing 10 percent of these people into the United States would nearly double our population. That’s the reality.

What is humane is to control the border and strictly regulate admittance to the U.S. so that people around the world will stop trying to get here. Then they would no longer be victims of human trafficking or risk dying during their trek. At the same time, fewer Americans would die of drug overdoses. While vigorous debate might take place over how many immigrants the U.S. should admit legally, under MAGA policies, whoever did immigrate would have skills that America needs. The MAGA strategy would be to use immigration to enhance America’s economy, bringing in people who will adopt our traditions and create wealth and opportunity for all Americans. A strong America will retain the capacity to be a force for stability around the world, offering an inspiring example of success for other nations to emulate.

Trade policy is another fundamental plank of the MAGA agenda. And here, the “free trade” mantra has been taken too far by both parties. America’s manufacturing capacity has been hollowed out, leaving the nation dependent on imports for vital medicines, finished goods, strategic minerals, even computer chips. For decades, as American companies have moved operations offshore to escape overzealous regulations and find cheap labor, millions of Americans have lost good jobs.

In fear of MAGA trade policies, there is a howling chorus of neoliberals claiming “protectionist” mandates will crash the global economy. The problem with this claim is that the global economy is already in danger of crashing. Nations have built their economies on the basis of exports to the U.S., and they need to rebalance their economies to develop domestic markets. And to stimulate an economy stripped of good jobs, America is about to hit $35 trillion just in federal government debt, well in excess of the nation’s entire GDP. Adding state and local government debt and unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, and public sector pensions will easily vault the estimated total government debt in America to over $160 trillion. It can’t go on.

Restoring American manufacturing and reducing America’s trade deficit do not have to spell the end of free trade. But judicious use of tariffs, particularly on imported goods that are subsidized by their governments, and modifying the tax code to discourage American companies from divesting their American operations are elements of what MAGA adherents call fair trade. It can be free, but it also has to be fair. And again, if America doesn’t successfully navigate this rebalancing, the trade deficit and federal debt will crash the economy, dragging the world economy down with it.

One might at least consider the moral and intellectual worth of these economic arguments concerning trade and federal deficits, but not according to the Los Angeles Times. When MAGA Republicans dug in their heels over federal spending earlier this year, Jonah Goldberg, writing for the LA Times, said “the GOP’s stupidity and hypocrisy are showing.” But stupidity, Mr. Goldberg, is thinking that America’s debt binge can go on forever.

Examining what defines MAGA politics must include foreign wars. An illustrative example of how Americans are being trained to think was evident on CBS News last week, where in coverage of the war in Ukraine, the reporter displayed a map of Eastern Europe and said a Russian victory would “bring the Russians to NATO’s doorstep.”

For anyone slightly familiar with the last fifty years of European history, this remark is blatantly deceptive propaganda. In 1989, on the brink of its peaceful dissolution, the Soviet Union still controlled what was referred to as the Warsaw Pact, and the Central European borders of NATO stopped on the eastern frontier of West Germany and Austria. Yugoslavia and Finland were neutral. Since that time, NATO has expanded eastward to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (formerly Czechoslovakia), Romania, Bulgaria, parts of the former Yugoslavia, and East Germany (reunited with Germany). Ukraine, which might have remained neutral, was never on “NATO’s doorstep.” The doorstep was moved east. Acknowledging this does not equate to Russophilia. But it’s a pertinent fact that belongs in any honest discussion of the war over there today.

It would be foolish to suggest that America should abandon foreign entanglements altogether. But just as with free trade vs. fair trade, there is a long way to travel between frequent, expensive interventions with a devastating cost in human lives and “isolationist” foreign policy. If it is realistic and prudent for the U.S. to maintain a strategic and technological military supremacy over other major nations, then wouldn’t that goal be better served by not squandering resources on countless, endless, unresolvable conflicts everywhere on earth?

Why was it necessary to invade Iraq? We had the regime all bottled up, with no-fly zones north and south. About all Iraq still had left back in 2003 was the military wherewithal to serve as an effective regional counterweight to Iran. That would come in handy just now. Does anyone think people in the Middle East are better off since the U.S. and its allies went in and removed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or, for that matter, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya? The dead can’t answer. The living endure chaos and violence without end. Where is the moral worth in this outcome, or the brilliant strategy? The MAGA foreign policy would be to minimize foreign interventions, putting those resources instead into research and development to maintain a decisive technological edge. We cannot, and should not, try to do it all.

A final, fundamental pillar of MAGA concerns environmentalist extremism, which, even more than mass immigration, has crippled the ability of most Americans to afford a decent standard of living. Energy independence and cheap energy have been abandoned to be replaced with “renewable” wind and solar energy projects that degrade thousands of square miles from upstate New York to the California coast. Equally impractical and oppressive are environmentalist-inspired restrictions on not just drilling but mining, logging, farming, ranching, new roads, freeways, and housing. Every essential in America is artificially in scarce supply, and this is the real reason for inflation. There’s no end in sight. The MAGA policy would be to deregulate all of these essential industries, forcing corporations to compete again on price, and to redirect public investment into practical infrastructure and away from costly “green” solutions that are neither green nor solutions.

There is a common thread in all of these mainstream, uniparty, establishment policies that MAGA threatens. Money. American corporations and American billionaires make more money when there is unrestricted immigration. It drives down wages. More people in America also means more shortages—particularly as long as the U.S. remains in the grip of extreme environmentalists. More people and less home building means higher prices, making home ownership out of reach for more Americans. But it creates a tremendous opportunity for corporate investors to buy up the nation’s housing stock and turn America into a nation of renters. And the scarcer that housing gets, the better their real estate investments perform.

So-called “free trade” is also an obvious moneymaker for America’s multinational corporations and globalist billionaires. Moving America’s industrial base into nations with cheap labor and minimal regulations is extremely profitable for the movers. But it destroys the workers it leaves behind. As for foreign wars, one of America’s most respected presidents, Dwight David Eisenhower, warned the nation in his farewell address as president of the “military industrial complex.” His warnings are more relevant than ever.

MAGA voters have been tagged as stupid, dangerous simpletons, ready to vote for politicians that will plunge America into a new dark age. To reinforce this smear, MAGA voters are depicted as intolerant bigots, and news reports focus on the polarizing issues of abortion, transgenderism, sexism, racism, and gun violence, to name just some of the big ones. On these issues as well, the MAGA perspective is rooted not only in intellectual coherence, but also in common sense. But these issues, while also of critical importance to our future, are also a distraction, chosen to trigger an emotional response that dominates the psyche. The real threat that MAGA poses to the establishment is financial, involving immigration, trade, war, and “environmentalism.”

In all four cases, the MAGA position is founded on a solid intellectual and moral foundation, aspiring to the optimal well-being of all Americans and ultimately to the benefit of everyone else in the world as well. MAGA Republicans are not dumb.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Inherently Destructive Uniparty Agenda

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It’s easy enough to blame Democrats for everything, but as a rapidly increasing percentage of American voters have realized, Republicans share the blame. These politicians are controlled by their donors, and in America today, the big donors are in agreement regardless of which party or which candidate gets their money.

This, then, is what has become dubbed America’s uniparty. And while wealthy elites have always exercised disproportionate influence in American politics, and, for that matter, the politics of virtually every nation that has ever existed, what is happening in 21st century America is unique.

To begin with, for most of American history, elites have competed for political power and influence, with the differing agenda and interests preventing one faction from acquiring absolute power. But today, on the issues that will have the most profound impact on our future, America’s elites are perfectly aligned. Also today and without precedent in American history, the goals of America’s elites are in conflict with the interests of the American people.

There are two broad, interrelated areas where the uniparty consensus currently aims to break the American people, destroying our coherence as a nation along with our prosperity and individual freedom. They both relate to how we are handling immigration. America’s de facto immigration policy is to invite millions of people per year to enter the United States. Because this policy also effectively excludes immigrants who have the means and the integrity to attempt legal entry, the millions who cross our borders each year are the most desperate people from the most failed nations.

America’s immigration policy, in practice, admits people whose life experience is to barely survive in nations ruled by thugs and fanatics. They are accustomed to endemic corruption and extreme poverty. As for the small fraction of immigrants who enter the United States legally, the criteria for their admission is more of a lottery than a merit-based criteria that might arguably be in the national interest.

But immigration—even the uncontrolled, meritless, flagrantly illegal, massive wave that Americans are now experiencing—would probably not be enough to break our unity and our freedom. It would be a challenge, but absent two other nihilistic factors, both driven by America’s elites, we might eventually assimilate the new arrivals and continue to thrive as a nation.

The first of these factors is the obsessive promotion of the climate “crisis.” Anyone even slightly skeptical of the alleged urgency of this crisis can immediately see what’s really happening: blatant propaganda being sold to the American people in a coordinated fear campaign. In every classroom, every newscast, every political speech, and every corporate marketing blitz, the message is the same: adapt or die. And adaptation, expressed in countless laws and regulations from the local city council to the U.S. Congress, the federal alphabet agencies, and even the U.S. Supreme Court, is almost invariably the same: stop developing land, depopulate rural areas, densify the cities, and engineer scarcity of every essential resource—land, water, energy, and food.

If America’s population were stable, this cramdown would be tough. But when we push our existing population out of rural areas and into cities at the same time as we’re also directing millions of immigrants every year into our cities, at the same time as we’re preventing our cities from expanding outwards and preventing construction of new, cost-effective sources of fresh water and cheap energy, what might have been merely tough is instead a recipe for disaster.

This engineered scarcity makes the second nihilistic factor all the more destructive because it puts the entire population under financial stress, which is a precondition for civil unrest. The second factor pushed by America’s elites is an obsession with race, and the incessant message on that theme—white Americans are oppressors, colonizers, purveyors of systemic racism, perpetrators of unconscious racism, beneficiaries of unwarranted privilege. Insofar as an estimated 85 percent of first generation immigrants living in the U.S. are nonwhite—it’s probably much higher in the last few years—training them all to view white people as the enemy is, again, a recipe for disaster.

These two factors, representing the consensus policy of America’s elites, are both inherently destructive. You can’t fill a nation with new arrivals at the same time as you make it nearly impossible to build any new housing or enabling infrastructure. You can’t fill a nation with nonwhite immigrants at the same time as you teach them to view all white people as their enemy. You can’t do this unless you are consciously trying to destroy a country. And that is exactly what America’s elites are doing.

For America to remain a successful nation, to the extent that immigrants are expanding the population, we must expand our cities, expand our production of energy, and expand our industry and infrastructure to guarantee abundant, affordable essentials. And to the extent that immigrants to America are nonwhite, we must invite them to adopt our culture and encourage them to assimilate, instead of feeding them a pernicious lie by telling them they are living in a hostile, racist society.

Why have America’s elites, for the first time in American history, decided it is in their interests to destroy the nation that gave them the opportunity to rise to positions of power and wealth? Some of the reasons are understandable, even if they’re fatally flawed. Some of them truly believe there are Malthusian and ecological limits that prevent global prosperity. Lacking faith in the power of innovation and free enterprise, they make the decision that managed decline is the only equitable path for America.

Others among America’s elites have concluded that the detriments of European colonization have outweighed the benefits and therefore feel ethically and morally bound to deconstruct European civilization and culture. These people are perhaps projecting personal guilt at having unearned or fortuitously earned personal wealth and privilege. Or perhaps they hold a suppressed personal vendetta against the culture that gave them everything. And some of them, perhaps, are simply overwhelmed by misplaced, hyper-emotional compassion for the less fortunate and lack the clarity necessary to realize that the only path to an equitable society is via the implacable gauntlet of immutable, colorblind standards, and the only culture that has ever come close to achieving that optimum ideal is European.

But there’s another reason for America’s elites to agree on policies designed to destroy America. Pure, naked, unmitigated greed. Masquerading as concern for the planet and compassion for people of color, America is being broken as part of what leftists—before they were blinded by green and woke corporate marketing campaigns—used to deride as “trickle up” economics. It’s fairly obvious once you take off the green blinders.

When resources are unaffordable, thanks to a punitive regulatory environment, only the wealthiest, most powerful corporations can still compete. Drive small farmers out of business, cut production, consolidate ownership, and make more profit. This is happening in every industry, and its justification is purportedly to save the planet. As for the woke element, the synergy is absolute. Fill the nation with people for whom the impoverishment they experience in America is undreamed of bounty compared to where they came from. If they nonetheless struggle to afford the essentials offer them government benefits, and encourage them to vote for those politicians who not only demonize the privileged whites but also promise to keep the government benefits coming.

That’s what America’s uniparty stands for. Political fights over other issues, while of genuine urgency, must be recognized in many respects as distractions peripheral to fighting the overall plan. The contradictions inherent in green and woke policies, institutionalized today in America, cannot stand. They will be discredited and broken, or they will break us.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

An Economic Bill of Rights for the 21st Century

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Beginning April 1, the minimum wage for employees working in California’s fast food chains and health care industries will rise to $20 per hour and, in some cases, up to $23 per hour. Many employers managing independent restaurants, retail, and other industries will have to match the higher hourly rate to retain employees. And for hourly employees whose wages are indexed to the minimum wage, mostly in California’s unionized public sector, wages will rise proportionately.

There is no national consensus on the impact of minimum-wage laws. It is part of a much larger debate over what constitutes an optimal economic environment to enable, quoting from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “economic security and independence.”

In January 1944, in his State of the Union address, Roosevelt enumerated what has since been referred to as a “Second Bill of Rights.” Here it is:

1 – The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
2 – The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing and recreation;
3 – The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
4 – The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
5 – The right of every family to a decent home;
6 – The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
7 – The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment;
8 – The right to a good education.

For the American Left, this list hasn’t changed much over the past 80 years. From the Democratic Socialists, we have this 2012 list “A Social and Economic Bill of Rights.” From Bernie Sanders a few years ago, we have the following “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.”  An even more contemporary wish list comes from current presidential candidate, Democrat Marianne Williamson’s “Social and Economic Bill of Rights.”

The common thread in all these lists is the assumption that the government can make all of this happen. That hasn’t worked out in practice. Along the way towards fulfilling these objectives, rising government taxes and regulations managed to alienate a sufficient number of voters to prevent their achievement. And if history is any guide, every time governments seize sufficient power to reach for the quasi-utopian dream that socialists share, the dream has turned into a bloody nightmare. So what can be done?

In 1987, towards the end of his two-term presidency, at an Independence Day celebration at the Jefferson Memorial, Ronald Reagan unveiled his own version of “America’s Economic Bill of Rights.” Here it is:

1 – The  freedom to work.
2 – The  freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor.
3 – The  freedom to own and control one’s property.
4 – The  freedom to participate in a free market.

It isn’t a puzzle to recognize the difference in emphasis between Reagan’s Bill of Rights, which enumerates freedom from government, and Roosevelt’s version, which requires massive government programs.

In California, the Democratic state legislature has attempted to enforce Roosevelt’s first two “rights,” the right to a “remunerative job” and the right to “earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation,” by raising the minimum wage to more than twice the federal standard.

Doing this, of course, will eliminate jobs and increase the cost of living. Companies will either fold, cut jobs, or raise prices. Government agencies, already struggling with deficits, will have to contend with elevated payroll costs triggered by the minimum wage hike. All this means the recipients of pay increases will at best break even as they pay higher prices and higher taxes.

All this begs the question: If we agree on Roosevelt’s desired outcome and Reagan’s desired means, what government policies might achieve both? For nearly all of the outcomes on Roosevelt’s list, there is one economic variable that exercises a decisive influence: affordability. In Reagan’s estimation, the surest guarantee of affordability is to rely on the private sector.

Robert Reich, whose economic philosophy in general is a quintessential leftist blend of naivete, pandering opportunism, and big state solutions that will create more problems than they solve, does get some things right. He is quoted on the website “InequalityMedia.org,” which he co-founded, as saying, “In America, it’s expensive just to be alive.” He is correct. After listing a daunting number of reasons for this, mostly accurately, he goes on to state, “Jobs, the stock market, the GDP—don’t show how our economy is really doing, who is doing well, or the quality of our lives.”

Again, correct. And he’s on a roll. There’s more. Reich proceeds to describe how corporations are monopolizing their markets and how wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent. All true. But Reich’s solution, along with most of the American Left, is to blame corporations, impose more taxes and regulations on them, and use that to grow government.

It doesn’t work. Corporations pass the costs on to consumers, making life even more unaffordable, while the higher taxes and regulations eliminate smaller corporations which prevents them from growing and forcing monopoly corporations to compete with them. The answer from the Left grows government at the same time as it further centralizes private wealth, which in both cases breeds greater inefficiency. That is why corporations in America today overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, and it is why most Republicans are RINOs. They all follow the money, and the smart money knows that leftist rhetoric and leftist policies make them richer and stronger.

Ironically, it is America in the 1930s during FDR’s presidency and California in the 1960s when Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (Jerry Brown’s father) was governor that provide clues to how affordability can best be achieved through government policies. While there is plenty to criticize in both administrations, they both did something of surpassing, multi-generational benefit. They built infrastructure. Not nonsensical, pointless infrastructure. Actual practical public works that yield economic benefits to this day.

Between 1933 and 1939, FDR’s Public Works Administration built educational buildings, courthouses, city halls, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, roads, bridges, subways, dams, aqueducts, and rural electrification, among other things. To this day, Americans still use these public assets. Between 1959 and 1967, Pat Brown expanded the state’s public works projects to build new colleges and universities, freeways and expressways, and the California Water Project, which remains the most extensive system of water storage and distribution in the world. And to this day, Californians still benefit from these public assets.

Times are very different now. The consensus among America’s elite—with California driving the bandwagon—is that the state has grown quite enough, at the same time as literally everything affecting land development, land management, or energy and water policy has to be evaluated through the filter of the climate crisis. Hence “renewables” to the exclusion of clean, ultra-efficient, advanced natural gas power. Hence water rationing instead of investment in practical water supply infrastructure. Hence trains, light rail, and high-density housing instead of new roads and new suburbs. No wonder everything costs so much.

The paradox in all this is how the result is counter to all the human values that American culture purports to cherish. We need extensive infrastructure because it fosters private sector freedom and growth. When the public subsidizes energy and water infrastructure and deregulates land development, ownership is decentralized. When infrastructure is inadequate and prices soar, the only winners are corporations and rentiers, who invest in artificially inflated assets and artificially overvalued commodities, making excessive profits as consumers struggle.

The formula for economic security and independence for American citizens is not more regulations, more taxes, and more government. The irony that Leftists must face is that more regulations benefit corporate monopolies and stifle competition, and without competition between private corporations, the cost of living increases at a rate that can’t possibly be mitigated by government benefits and subsidies to households.

Similarly, right-of-center critics of big government must distinguish between obvious wasteful spending based on fraudulent premises, versus the government sharing the burden of construction costs for infrastructure assets that will yield economic dividends for generations. It isn’t enough to fight against the waste. It is necessary to correctly identify the investments we need in sensible infrastructure and fight for them.

There is a compelling libertarian argument in favor of government spending on infrastructure that provides clear and long-term benefits instead of a permanent drain. When federal and state governments fail to invest on the front end to make life’s essentials within the reach of ordinary households, they will end up spending more public money merely to subsidize, in perpetuity, those millions of low- and lower-middle-income households who can’t pay their rent or their mortgage.

An economic bill of rights for Americans today might include the following: the government will invest in infrastructure that lowers the cost of living, and it will deregulate essential industries to ensure competition between large and small corporations.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.