The “Reparations” Scam

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California is considering paying “reparations” to black Californians who are directly descended from enslaved people, which may surprise most Californians. After all, slavery was never legal in the Golden State.

Governor Gavin Newsom, heedless of the fiasco he’s inviting, formed a “Reparations Task Force,” no doubt with his future presidential aspirations in mind. The task force issued an interim report in June, detailing California’s “historyof slavery and racism and recommending ways the Legislature might begin a process of redress for Black Californians, including proposals to offer housing grants, free tuition, and to raise the minimum wage.”

To understand how slavery is applicable to California, one must sift through the report’s 500 pages of convoluted logic common to the victim industry in America. According to the report:

“In 1883, the Supreme Court interpreted the 13th Amendment as empowering Congress ‘to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States.’ However, throughout the rest of American history, instead of abolishing the ‘badges and incidents of slavery,’ the United States federal, state and local governments, including California, perpetuated and created new iterations of these ‘badges and incidents.’ The resulting harms have been innumerable and have snowballed over generations. Today, 160 years after the abolition of slavery, its badges and incidents remain embedded in the political, legal, health, financial, educational, cultural, environmental, social, and economic systems of the United States of America. Racist, false, and harmful stereotypes created to support slavery continue to physically and mentally harm African Americans today.”

In other words, the task force is not recommending reparations for slavery, but rather for discrimination.

And how do task force members recommend California pay for its mistakes?

The task force’s preliminary findings identify a “housing wealth gap” and recommend granting $223,239 to every black Californian who is descended from slaves, at a cost to California taxpayers of $501 billion.

But this doesn’t take into account possible additional reparations for “unpaid prison labor and years of lost income [while in prison],“ or “disproportionate health outcomes,” including shorter life expectancies which the group’s economic consultants estimated to be worth $127,226 per year. And this is not a complete list of the “injustices” and “harms” the task force is considering.

Practical suggestions from the task force as to how reparations might be implemented will have to wait until at least June 2023. More “racial and financial data” needs to be gathered from the state’s Department of Justice to “make more accurate calculations.” But, along with “a formal apology,” the task force has preliminarily recommended cash payments, free college tuition, and zero-interest housing loans.

The phony sanctimony attendant to the professional grifters peddling this nonsense is breathtaking.

In predictably fawning coverage by the Los Angeles Times, the vice chairman of the state “task force” charged with coming up with reparation ideas said “the process came down to three ‘A’s’—admitting the problems of the past; atoning for them by identifying appropriate reparations; and acting on that information in a unified way to make sure state legislators, who would finalize a program, follow through and get the work done.”

Certainly, one of those three “A’s”—admitting the problems of the past—is healthy enough. There has been racism and discrimination in America’s past, just as there has been racism and discrimination in the past of every nation. Any decent person with a sense of history should acknowledge the past and abhor racist or discriminatory behavior. It’s the “atone” and “act” parts of the three “A’s,” however, where problems surface. Big problems.

For starters, if California is offering reparations for racial discrimination, why not offer them to every group that ever suffered discrimination based on their race or ethnicity throughout California’s history? Why not Hispanics or Native Americans? What about the Chinese workers who built much of California’s early infrastructure, or the descendants of Japanese Americans living in California who had their assets confiscated and were relocated to internment camps during World War II?

One might argue black citizens were victims of more discrimination than Native Americans, Hispanics, or Asians, but as any serious student of California history knows, that would not be an easy argument to make.

The biggest problem with “reparations” for black Californians is that we’ve already tried it, through the state’s welfare system that has caused significant damage to black families. How does welfare help the black community or the black family, if, as conservative Larry Elder puts it, “you have replaced the father with a welfare check”?

Thanks to welfare and other entitlements that made a black male breadwinner unnecessary, over 70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Multiple generations of alienated black men have grown up in homes without a strong male role model and have turned to gangs, drugs, and crime. Today, black men are overrepresented in every category of crime in America, and welfare, i.e., reparations, are the reason why.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that proponents of reparations are in denial of this basic truth: When you take away the incentive for people to work and support their families, you foment chaos in families and communities.

Activists who demand reparations ignore these truths because they are part of what we may as well dub the “antiracism industrial complex.” Like every parasitic coalition of special interests that benefit by exploiting the cause of those groups they’re supposedly trying to help, this is a profitable con.

So far, whenever reparations have been tried to atone for racism and discrimination—not just welfare, but affirmative action—they have proven counterproductive. The welfare state fostered by the Great Society programs of the 1960s contributed massively to government dependency and black student underachievement. Affirmative action has undermined the immutable standards necessary for a society to thrive as a competitive meritocracy.

The consequences of affirmative action are as damaging to black communities as welfare is. The evolution of affirmative action into “equity” where proportional representation by race and ethnicity is demanded in everything—hiring, promotions, admissions, contracts, and even household wealth—is a mortal threat to the social and economic health of America. And both affirmative action and “equity” provide cover for the one place left in California where systemic racism still exists: the failing public schools in disadvantaged black neighborhoods.

If the task force really wanted to do something to help the black community, it would start with improving California’s K-12 public schools and addressing the failure of politicians beholden to the teachers’ unions to enact any real education reform. The task force recommendations include adopting a “K-12 Black Studies curriculum that introduces students to concepts of race and racial identity.” But nowhere to be found is any call to action for California’s schools to be held accountable for the fact that 84 percent of black students did not meet grade-level math standards on the state’s student assessment tests this year.

Anyone believing a handout of a half-trillion or more to 2.2 million black Californians is going to improve race relations is delusional. But it will ultimately be harmful to blacks themselves. Nobody ever felt better about their lives, or improved their lives, by getting something for nothing.

The reality for blacks in America today is that if they are willing to work hard, study to acquire marketable job skills, and reject the woke narrative that only puts a chip on the shoulders of all who ascribe to it, they have opportunities that equal if not exceed those of anyone else.

Unfortunately, you will never hear that hard and helpful truth expressed by anyone participating on the Reparations Task Force, or anyone else whose career may depend on denying it.

There is no chance that California’s reparations task force’s scheme can be carried out equitably, nor any possibility it will do anything but cause harm to race relations and the black community. This is what Gavin Newsom is flirting with. But as it lurches forward, with Newsom’s fingerprints all over it, it may help him win an early 2024 primary in a Southern state. Perhaps that’s all that matters.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Election Results Here at Last; California’s GOP Still in Decline

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On December 16, nearly 40 days after the November mid-term elections, California’s Secretary of State finally released the “Statement of Vote.” This document is the official and final record of the winners and losers. What is belatedly certain is what we knew all along. California’s GOP did not arrest the catastrophic slide that defines its performance so far in the 21st century.

Before covering what by any objective standard was a dismal performance overall, it is appropriate to highlight a few bright spots. California’s GOP delegation to the U.S. Congress increased from 11 members to 12, although the real turnaround, or perhaps “mini-turnaround” is more apt, was in 2020 when the GOP’s congressional caucus representing California had bounced back up to 11 from the rock-bottom 7 members that had survived the 2018 election.

With the single uptick logged this November, these 12 Republicans represent 23 percent of California’s 52 member Congressional delegation.

Notable in the GOP’s incremental gain this year was the victory of John Duarte, a newcomer to politics who in a fight for an open seat edged out the formidable Adam Gray, a moderate Democrat who had already served five terms in the state assembly. In a bruising fight, Duarte edged Gray by 564 votes in the 13th District, where 43 percent of voters are registered Democrats, versus only 28 percent registered Republicans.

Gaining one seat in the U.S. Congress was the one welcome bit of contradictory data in what was otherwise a complete downward slide. The GOP remained excluded from all eight higher offices, where the margins of victory for the Democratic candidates were ridiculous – Governor 59.2%, Lt. Governor 59.7%, Secretary of State 60.1%, Controller 55.3%, Treasurer 58.8%, Attorney General 59.1%, Insurance Commissioner 59.9%, and Superintendent of Public Instruction 63.7%.

In the State Assembly, where all 80 seats were up for grabs, the GOP minority shrank from 19 seats to 18 seats, and in the Senate, where 40 seats were contested, the GOP minority shrank from 9 seats to 8 seats. It really can’t get much worse. The GOP controls 23 percent of the seats in the Assembly, and a mere 20 percent of the seats in the Senate. California is a one party state.

To put this unrelenting century-to-date GOP slide into context, in 2000 the GOP held 30 seats in the State Assembly, 14 seats in the State Senate, and 20 seats in the U.S. Congress. That’s still pretty bad, but if, for example, you hold 14 seats in the 40 seat State Senate, and 30 seats in the Assembly, your minorities are 35 percent and 38 percent, respectively. This means that in 2000, in both houses of the state legislature, the Republicans could prevent the Democrats from exercising the prerogatives of a two-thirds majority. Today, the GOP isn’t even within striking distance of regaining a one-third share of seats. They would have to gain 9 seats in the Assembly and 5 seats in the Senate.

If the entire story of the last two decades weren’t steady decline, picking up enough seats to acquire a one-third share in both houses might seem more likely, but another trend belies much hope. The GOP’s share of registered voters also shows a perfect record of step-by-step decline. From 35 percent in 2000 to 34 percent by 2006, then down to 31 percent in 2008, dropping to 29 percent in 2012, 28 percent in 2014, 26 percent in 2016, and since then plateaued at 24 percent. Less than one in four registered voters in California are Republicans.

One might see good news insofar as at a glance, at least 24 percent roughly mirrors the share of seats California’s Republicans occupy in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress, but that misses what is perhaps the most discouraging fact of all; Democratic candidates are securing the support of the vast majority of independent voters in the state. Democrats represent a commanding 47 percent of registered voters, but the other 29 percent are independents. In most races, for every independent voter a Republican attracts, the Democrats are attracting two or three.

The story gets even worse when taking into account the growth in the absolute number of California’s registered voters this century. In 2000, there were 15.7 million registered voters, and 5.4 million were Republicans. In 2022, the total number of registered voters had swelled to 21.9 million, and – get ready – 5.2 million were Republicans. The quantity of registered Republicans in California has declined over the past twenty years, while at the same time, the Democrats increased their registrants by over 3 million, from 7.1 million in 2000 to 10.3 million in 2022.

The failure of California’s Republican party, according to apologists for its slide into oblivion, is attributable to everything except their own leadership and management. The impossible stigma of Trump. The lingering stain of Prop. 187 all the way back in 1994, approved by voters, that denied state funded healthcare to illegal immigrants except in emergency cases. The unforgivable sin of Prop. 8, approved as well by voters in 2008, which banned gay marriage. Ever since these propositions were supported, mostly by Republicans, the GOP has been mercilessly portrayed by every Democrat, every liberal educator, and every major media property as both racist and homophobic. It has worked. A generation over voters have come of age since 2000, thoroughly indoctrinated to despise Republicans.

Excuses abound. Democrats in California now wield a political machine funded by public sector unions and abetted by every wealthy individual and powerful institution in the state, including major corporations ran by directors that would be out of their minds to challenge the narrative. This machine, this political juggernaut, has now seized upon climate change, a woman’s right to choose, and, of course, gender politics in all of its bizarre permutations, as further examples of Republican barbarism.

Topping off all these excuses for failure is the demographic trope. More than ever, California is now a minority-majority state, and minorities don’t vote Republican. Between 2000 and 2020, Hispanics increased from 32 percent of the state’s total population to 39 percent, while non-Hispanic whites dropped from 40 percent to 35 percent. Asians went from 11 percent up to 15 percent, and African Americans dropped marginally from 6 percent to 5 percent.

This is all daunting and sounds convincing, particularly when it is being recited by people whose jobs depend on making the case that they confront impossible circumstances that are beyond their control. But it’s old news. And for anyone serious about bringing vitality back to the California GOP, it’s irrelevant. The failures of the Democrats in every metric that matters to voters is a fact that supersedes all of the California GOP’s supposedly disqualifying history or demographic headwinds, all stereotypes and fearmongering, all indoctrination, and all the money and professional messaging the machine can muster.

In public education, transportation, water, energy, housing, homelessness, crime, forest management, cost-of-living, high taxes, and – coming soon – another round of budget deficits, the Democrats have made a mess. That levels the playing field. Republicans will start winning again when they have the courage to promote solutions that match the scale of the problems. That will not arise from the brainy recesses of well heeled consultancies and tepid focus groups. It will arise from new leaders who aren’t afraid to challenge fundamental premises and offer uncompromising alternatives.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Wasteland of Leftist Compassion

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Compassion is one of the greatest of human virtues. But effective compassion comes with an obligation to do more than merely what feels good and sounds good. Public policies motivated by compassion must also take into account the full complexity of the challenge, the unintended consequences, the reality of human nature, and strike a balance between what is desired and what is possible. Often the most beneficial expressions of compassion seem tough and punitive, yet are the ones that offer more lasting and comprehensive solutions. Without taking a balanced and holistic approach to compassion, public policy is hijacked by special interests who reap perpetual profit from working on a problem that never goes away. For them, ineffective compassion is good business. But it leaves behind a wasteland.

In American politics, if envy and resentment are the currency of the Left, driving their attacks on privilege and their demands for equity, then compassion is the gold that backs that currency. Emotional appeals to voters and politicians to display compassion are the means by which the Left claims the moral high ground. And in those appeals, and the misguided policies that result, entire industries are created. Industries populated by individuals whose careers depend on perpetuating the fraud.

In many cases, the consequences of unbalanced compassion is obvious, as anyone can see if they visit the coastal cities of California. It was compassion that motivated state legislators to decriminalize hard drug addiction, now dubbed “substance use disorder.” Compassion was the moral justification to empty California’s prisons, and downgrade property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Compassion compelled politicians and judges to rewrite laws that kept mentally ill people safely off the streets.

Compassion was the bludgeon that beat down objections to the disastrous “housing first” rule, which denies funding for drug treatment or job training until free housing – with no conditions for entry – are provided to homeless people. And “compassion” pressured local and state authorities to forego inexpensive shelters in favor of more “equitable” apartment complexes, brand new and located in expensive neighborhoods, at a cost of over a half-million per unit.

None of this is compassionate, of course. The result of these failed policies are hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans, prey for criminals, desperate for drugs, many of them psychotic, waiting for free housing that costs so much only a few get built. They wait, untreated, unaccountable, dying on the streets. The cities they’ve overran have been financially ruined, as billions are squandered on compassion-driven policies that merely make the problems of crime and homelessness worse, and entire neighborhoods have become unsanitary and unsafe.

Destroying Rural Landscapes and Livelihoods

Misguided compassion isn’t limited to a few blue cities, however. It has been weaponized to destroy rural America as well, and again, California provides the cautionary example. Through manipulative appeals to compassion for wildlife and trees, politicians have been pressured into regulating California’s annual timber harvest down to less than one quarter what it was as recently as the 1990s. At the same time, and for similar compassionate reasons, Californians have become extremely adept at preventing and extinguishing wildfires, while making it nearly impossible to do controlled burns, mechanical thinning of undergrowth, or graze livestock in the forests.

Here again, the consequences of compassion are devastating. California’s forests are tinderboxes, with trees that are on average at least five times as dense as they’ve been for millennia, along with overgrown underbrush that small, natural fires used to keep in check. When superfires rage through these forests, wreaking a level of destruction with no precedent in history, don’t blame climate change. Blame misguided compassion, causing policy decisions that had precisely the opposite impact from what was intended.

Compassion ran amok is also at work in California’s rivers. The reason native Salmon remain endangered has little to do with dams and reservoirs blocking their passage to spawning grounds. Every year, nine fish hatcheries operated by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, along with a few more operated by federal agencies, harvest salmon eggs and hatch millions of salmon fry. Once they get big enough the young salmon are released into the rivers where they are promptly eaten by striped bass, a voracious nonnative species. But striped bass also require compassion.

This is misguided compassion at its worst. It is a no-win scenario. Instead of declaring open season on striped bass, whereby anglers would quickly reduce their population to levels no longer constituting a genocidal threat to salmon, or accepting the demise of the salmon, wildlife biologists in California are exploring ways to redesign and micromanage riparian environments to facilitate salmon and bass living together. Altering aquatic vegetation, and carefully timing stream and river volume and temperature, are ways the biologists are attempting this compassionate ecological compromise. Unsurprisingly, it’s not working. But it has created a lot of jobs.

In the meantime, and despite decades of failure, the compassionate strategy is to require more water to run through California’s rivers during storms, and of the water that remains in reservoir storage, releases are timed to increase river flow and lower river temperature. One may wonder how this affects California’s farmers. That’s a good question. Farms are being systematically eliminated, as millions of acres of irrigated farmland come out of production to save the salmon.

Inviting Lawless Anarchy – Nowhere is Exempt

The worst compassionate overreach of all can be found in the story of what’s happening in California’s far north, where cartels have taken over most of the drug industry. A recent interview on California Insider with investigative reporter Jorge Ventura, “How Cartels Successfully Take Over Northern California,” offered a troubling peek into what’s happening in California’s far north. It should come as no surprise that international drug cartels, with billion dollar budgets and armies of hired killers, can overwhelm the resources of rural police and sheriff departments. But it is nonetheless surprising to see it happening in one of the most pristine corners of America.

In the name of compassion, the international border with Mexico has been thrown wide open, making it easy for cartels to import workers – dubbed “trimmigrants” because they’re put to work trimming marijuana buds. Mexican and Chinese gangs have set up operations in California’s northernmost counties, as well as Laotians. The Laotian story offers yet another twist on out-of-control compassion, because their leaders have cleverly purchased land on which to grow marijuana, since illegal cultivation on private land is now compassionately recategorized as a misdemeanor in California, whereas illegal grows on public land such as national forest land remain a felony.

These Laotian gangs have brought with them thousands of workers, and have illegally subdivided private parcels to house them. They have engaged in multiple title transfers to make it difficult to track down the property owners to enforce zoning regulations and code violations. These tactics, again, overwhelm the resources of a rural county’s code enforcement department, which may only employ one or two people. And when one county attempted to stop the gangs from illegally transporting water to irrigate their marijuana plants, the Laotians alleged the water was for their community, accused the county of racism, and with the help of a high priced San Francisco based attorney, got the charges dismissed.

In California’s far north, there is no end in sight. Compassionate environmentalists deny water to law-abiding farmers, while drug gangs steal it. These gangs include people of color, so compassion demands forbearance. Compassion for wildlife and trees prevents ranching or logging, depopulating the region of its productive ranchers and loggers, and even driving out the legal marijuana farmers. But illicit operations thrive. A recent comment by the inimitable character Beth on the series Yellowstone says it all: “They want the land. That’s all you have to understand.”

The environmentalist movement has been taken over as well by special interests who want the land. Once the cartels have driven out the productive residents of California’s far north, they’ll deal with the cartels. If that is an accurate portrayal of what is happening, this level of cynicism is treasonous. But what else explains the failure of state and federal authorities to end this anarchy?

Compassionate policies are meaningless or harmful if they aren’t validated by results and accountability. There are compassionate solutions to homelessness, just as there are compassionate solutions to wildlife management. But they require hard choices and they require compassion for everyone. There are the homeless, but also there are all those people who live and work among the homeless whose taxes pay for homeless programs. There are the animals and fishes, but also there are loggers and ranchers and farmers, and millions of people who rely on them.

Compassion is not compassion when it is manipulated to fulfill a corporate socialist agenda of turning America’s cities into high-tech pens for human livestock and depopulating rural areas. Every law, and every expenditure, promoted in the name of “compassion” must first be evaluated in this context. There are humane solutions to the challenges of housing, there are realistic solutions to environmental challenges. Finding them is hard, selling them to voters is even harder. But that is what true compassion requires.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Increased Supply Lowers Prices More Than Gas Tax Repeal

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California Assemblyman James Gallagher is one of the architects of The California Promise, a six point set of political priorities unveiled by the state’s Republican Party in October. First among these is “An Affordable California,” and first in that category is “Repeal Gas Tax.”

To emphasize this priority even further, on the top of the Assemblyman Gallagher’s home page a counter has been installed, showing how long it’s been “Since Newsom & Democrats Promised Gas Tax Relief.” As of this moment on the afternoon of December 8, that’s 274 days, 19 hours, 25 minutes, and 15 seconds.”

It would be great to have a gas tax holiday in California. It is a regressive tax that adds, per gallon, 54 cents in state excise tax, 23 cents for California’s cap-and-trade program, 18 cents for the state’s low-carbon fuel program, 2 cents for underground gas storage fees, plus state and local sales taxes. Altogether this equals, not including another 18.4 cents in federal excise tax, and give or take a few cents depending on local sales tax rates, $1.20 to the price of every gallon of gasoline you buy.

Nonetheless it is a mistake to put so much emphasis on a gas tax repeal. At a time when California’s much vaunted budget surplus has suddenly morphed into an estimated deficit of at least $25 billion in the next fiscal year, what was already a hard sell becomes impossible. Try to stop taxes from going up even further. For now, that will do.

Meanwhile, instead of focusing on eliminating taxes, why not focus on lowering the cost of goods that are being taxed?

For example, in 2017, when state gas taxes and fees already amounted to nearly $1.00 per gallon, you could purchase gasoline in Los Angeles for $2.86 per gallon. In 2015, gasoline prices were down as low as $2.58 per gallon in California. Instead of repealing the “gas tax,” which even if repealed would only apply to the state excise tax of $.54 cents per gallon, and would not take away the rest – the cap-and-trade fee, the low-carbon fee, the underground storage fee, or the sales taxes – why not focus on increasing production and thus increasing competition? Wouldn’t that lower prices?

Put another way, if lowering the cost-of-living, starting with gasoline, is a priority, why not fix the economic conditions that have in only five years accounted for over $2.50 per gallon of increased cost per gallon to the consumer, instead of the gas tax, which at best might take $.54 cents out of the cost per gallon?

Even more to the point, if this is all symbolic posturing on the part of the California GOP, which it most certainly is, and if the purpose for all this posturing is to expose the elitist disregard California’s Democrats have for normal hardworking Californians, then why not advance broader principles that voters, everywhere, might not only connect to why their gas is so expensive, but to why everything is so expensive?

California is not unaffordable because taxes are too high. The high taxes, and they are too high, only add insult to injury. The economic factors breaking Californians, however, are that Democrats have regulated the economy to a standstill, creating scarcity and driving up costs.

The real reason housing is unaffordable in California, to cite an example even more painful than the cost of gasoline, is because of California’s neglected water, energy, and transportation infrastructure, its decimated timber industry, its offshoring of the sources for every necessary building material, its punitive policies of urban containment, its protracted, capricious, and extortionate process to obtain building permits, and its ridiculously overwrought building codes.

All of this was engineered by Democrats. Unaffordable housing, along with unaffordable gasoline, is the result of political choices made in a one-party, Democrat ruled state. That is the message Gallagher and his fellow republicans need to send to voters.

California, of all states, is literally floating atop stupendous reserves of oil and gas. In the 1980s, California field production of crude oil per day stood at over 1.0 million barrels. Today, production is down to 330 thousand barrels per day. This despite the fact that onshore and offshore reserves of oil in California total an estimated 15 billion barrels. If there is any place on earth where these resources could be responsibly extracted, it’s here in California. But instead we send jobs and dollars to petro-dictatorships around the world.

There’s no good reason for this. In 2021, foreign suppliers accounted for 56 percent of the oil refined in California. The entire energy strategy of California’s state legislature is flawed. Simply mandating a phase in of increasingly advanced hybrid vehicles could allow the state to maintain its desired downward trend in oil consumption. This would take pressure off the state’s utilities to double production of electricity – something they have absolutely no idea how to accomplish while conforming to “renewables” mandates.

California’s Republican state legislators, who as of 2023 will account for a mere 27 out of 120 seats, cannot possibly expect to push through legislation opposed by Democrats. But they do have an opportunity to make a lot of noise, and they have very little to lose. They should be demanding, if anything, that California’s refineries apply their windfall profits to increasing capacity. They should be demanding and defining policies that will offer a roadmap to energy companies once again drilling here in California for more oil and gas. When supply rises, prices fall.

Publicly challenging fundamental premises of the Democrats, starting with their faith-based, utterly irrational belief that we can precipitously eliminate consumption of oil and gas, should be the mission of Republicans in Sacramento. GOP politicians should be openly defying the absurd premises that Democrats pass off as gospel, instead of trying to creatively navigate within their parameters.

At the same time, California’s GOP politicians should be espousing the principle of competition through deregulation as the only way to make California affordable again, because that’s the unassailable truth. Lowering one tax, temporarily, merely invites accusations – not entirely unfounded – of indifference to deficits. Lower spending, then lower taxes. But since you can’t do either, shout louder, hit harder, and aim for the heart, not the hair.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

Environmentally Friendly Delta Diversions

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When it comes to cost-effective ways to increase the supply of water to California’s cities and farms, every idea should be considered. The residential, commercial and industrial water requirements of California’s 40 million people add up to about 8 million acre feet of water per year. The nine million acres of irrigated farmland that produces the food they eat, requires another 30 million acre feet of water per year.

With droughts and increasing priority given to letting water stay in the rivers to maintain ecosystem health, this water supply is threatened. Water scarcity and water rationing, along with fallowing millions of acres of farmland, is the only answer California’s legislature seems to support. Efforts to increase the water supply have been incremental at best.

From a cost perspective, most supply solutions are financially viable, but nonetheless quite expensive. For example, only about one-third of California’s urban wastewater is recycled. Construction costs to upgrade every water treatment plant in the state that isn’t already turning sewage back into recycled water for landscaping or even for potable reuse would cost about $20 billion, and give back up to 2 million acre feet per year.

Desalination is another option, but is roughly twice as expensive as wastewater recycling. For an estimated construction cost of $20 billion, about one million acre feet of ocean water per year could be desalinated. While it is the most expensive option, desalination has the virtue of being a perennial supply of new water, impervious to drought. What other options are there?

In an era that may involve warmer and dryer winters, with less rain and less snowpack, it is necessary to more efficiently harvest runoff from the storms that do hit the state. The traditional way to do this is via reservoir storage, but in-stream reservoirs cannot be allowed to fill from early storm runoff, because that would take away their ability to prevent flooding if there are late spring storms. Then if late sprint storms don’t materialize, there’s inadequate reservoir storage and another water shortage.

Off-stream reservoirs, by contrast, don’t block the flow of a natural river. they are typically constructed in arid valleys, and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. Using the proposed Sites Reservoir as an example ($4.0 billion for an annual yield of 500,000 acre feet per year), off-stream reservoirs could capture and release one million acre feet per year for a construction cost of $8 billion. But where will the water come from?

A new proposal, the “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley,” is a work-in-progress, authored by a coalition of San Joaquin Valley community leaders. The centerpiece of this proposal is to construct what are essentially gigantic French Drains within channels created inside Delta Islands. By drawing fresh water from perforated pipes situated beneath a gravel bed in these channels, flood water could be safely harvested from the Delta during periods of excess storm runoff. Preliminary plans for this system estimate the cost at $500 million per 200-acre facility. The estimated capacity for two of these facilities would be 2 million acre-feet per year or more, at a cost of $1 billion.

The Blueprint also relies on construction of a central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the harvesting arrays in the Delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 million acre-feet. The projected cost for this canal, including connections to the Friant-Kern, Delta Mendota, and California aqueducts, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers, is $500 million.

This idea has extraordinary potential. Its preliminary construction cost estimate of $1.5 billion to harvest and recover 2.0 million acre feet per year of Delta runoff is a rough order of magnitude lower than any other possible solution.

Moreover, it may well be feasible to safely harvest more than 2.0 million acre feet from the Delta every year. An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called “uncaptured water,” which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. Quoting from the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” (italics added). The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

This is a very encouraging fact. Coming from some of the most respected water experts in California: The average quantity of “uncaptured water” flowing through the Delta that is “above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” averages 11.3 million acre-feet per year.

An environmentally friendly Delta diversion project has several appealing aspects. Unlike the Delta pumps, these extraction channels would not harm fish, nor would they alter the current of the Delta which causes salt water intrusion. Their high capacity may make building the controversial Delta Tunnel unnecessary. Storing high volumes of water in San Joaquin Valley aquifers with a known capacity in excess of Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined would take away the need for more reservoirs at the same time as it would make possible almost a limitless capacity to store water from wet years to use in dry years.

The solutions offered by the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint will benefit farmers, but they will also benefit every coastal urban water agency in the state. Many Southern California water agencies have banked water in Lake Mead, and with that lake at a historic low, they are unable to access that water. Having large scale water banking available just over the hill in the Central Valley is a much safer and practical option. The next step for this project is to build a demonstration facility. And here is where reality already intrudes.

Every water expert consulted for opinions on environmentally friendly Delta diversions had the same answer: It’s a good idea, but it will require 25 years of environmental studies, endless litigation, and there’s a good chance at the end of all that, it still won’t get built.

This is the problem. It has nothing to do with nature and droughts and climate change and wildlife protection. It has to do with a special interest juggernaut whose business model is built on obstructionism and conflict. It doesn’t even have to do with the staggering and unnecessarily inflated cost for any water project undertaken in California, because this state can easily afford any one of the above solutions. Those problems are manageable.

But until California’s politicians, from Gavin Newsom all the way down to an elected board director at the smallest water district in the state, stand up to environmentalist extremists and the scarcity profiteers who pull their strings, there will never again be enough water.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Tyranny of the Minority

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In the Federalist Papers, James Madison famously warned against the “tyranny of the majority,” but it is unlikely he could have envisioned what we face today. 21st century America is dissolving before our eyes, as our heritage and sovereignty is stolen by a tyrannical coalition of minorities. Not ethnic minorities – their American bequest is being stolen right alongside that of America’s shrinking white majority. Nobody is exempt, and everyone should unite to resist.

Minorities in this context refer to the elite vanguard of what Californian political writer Joel Kotkin has called the “Upstairs-Downstairs Coalition, a voting bloc that brings together the most destitute with the most privileged parts of our society.”

At the top of the top are a few thousand of the super rich. At the bottom are a few thousand hardened fanatics, many of them professionals. These two super-minorities, working in tandem, currently control the destiny of America. Expertly manipulating the voters in the upstairs-downstairs coalition, they’re actively destroying everything we love and everything we need.

The minority occupying the top position in the Upstairs-Downstairs coalition are the plutocrats who run America. A 2017 analysis identified the top 0.01 percent (one in ten-thousand Americans) have an average income of over $30 million per year. A 2019 Stanford study of the top 0.1 percent (one in one thousand Americans) control a total net worth equal to the entire cumulative net worth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans. At the pinnacle, however, are America’s billionaires, a scant 735 of them at last count.

This is a vanishingly small minority of people, less than one in every half-million Americans. But their influence is decisive. Every year, these billionaires and the corporations they control disburse billions – often getting tax deductions for doing so – to maintain standing armies of activist groups to conduct lawfare, fund civil disobedience, run massive propaganda campaigns, engage in targeted “get-out-the-vote” activities, prop up financially dependent media properties, and produce “expert” studies with paid-for ideas.

The minorities at both ends of this up-down coalition are groups identifiable not by their ethnicity or ideology, but by their behavior. In every case, they constitute a minute fraction of the population, but in the name of compassion, equity, diversity, and environmentalism they are undermining and, unless stopped, will destroy America.

The Weaponization of Mental Illness

Michael Shellenberger, a Californian and former progressive activist, has become one of America’s most astute critics of the failed policies that are sowing social and economic chaos across the nation. In a series of recent articles with self-explanatory titles – Infantilization Of The Apocalypse, The Quiet Desperation Of Woke Fanatics, Narcissism In Climate & Woke Victim Movements, and others, in reference to militant activists, he argues that “global elites are encouraging them, which is exceedingly dangerous and irresponsible.” He’s right.

Co-opting potentially violent sociopaths, or as Shellenberger puts it, “weaponizing mental illness,” has long been a tool of authoritarian regimes. In the USSR during the Cold War, during the German Nazi era, and in police states throughout the 20th century, recruiting thugs and turning them on their own people was a common tactic, as it is still in Xi’s China today. What’s happening in America is only slightly more nuanced, and very effective.

To further explain who controls America’s current upstairs-downstairs coalition in a historical context, it is helpful to recognize the false dichotomy represented by the supposedly left-wing establishment Democrats and the supposedly right-wing establishment Republicans. “Establishment” is the key word here.

Gary Allen, in his 1971 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, blew up the traditional paradigm whereby the “Left” is communism and the “Right” is fascism. In what he suggested is a more accurate political spectrum, all forms of authoritarian government, communism, fascism, and socialism, are to one extreme, anarchy is to the other extreme, and in the center is a constitutional republic with limits on government power.

The importance of this distinction is that it explains how there can be a shared agenda between outwardly antagonistic capitalists and socialists. Allen writes, “The seeming paradox of rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.”

Pressure from Above, Pressure from Below

Allen describes the upstairs-downstairs coalition as “pressure from above, pressure from below,” writing “Radical movements are never successful unless they attract big money and/or outside support…the Left is controlled by its alleged enemy, the malefactors of great wealth.”

The hidden agenda is to sow chaos, triggering demands for more state control, allowing governments and corporations to further consolidate power and wealth. This agenda is proceeding on schedule.

The public agenda, incessantly marketed as something to be desired, is to erase America as we know it, replacing it with what is enthusiastically portrayed as a transnational, transhuman utopia. According to this vision, every person on earth will have achieved “equity,” i.e., equal outcomes, while at the same time, the footprint of human civilization will become ecologically benign and the planet will be saved.

This is an impossible charade. What they are actually imposing on the overwhelming majority of Americans is a terrifying dystopia. Private financial independence will become all but impossible, the economy will be centrally controlled, productivity will be rationed, and if anything, the health of planetary ecosystems will be worse instead of better.  But if you question any of it, you are a divisive bigot. But indoctrination campaigns escalate with every passing year.

For decades, intensifying with Obama’s presidency, establishment institutions in America have falsely condemned Americans as being racist and sexist, despite American culture for all its flaws being the most inclusive culture in the history of civilization. This ongoing propaganda war on social stability wasn’t enough, however, when starting in 2016 the MAGA movement began to attract Americans of all backgrounds. These MAGA Americans reject the narratives of systemic racism and sexism, and they reject climate doomsday scenarios.

To cope, the establishment began anointing the most troubled individuals among us as pioneering saints, destined to completely redefine normalcy. American culture is now at a tipping point, because American institutions are now opportunistically validating behaviors that are clearly destructive and obviously pathological.

The Useful Lunatics

The riots during the summer of 2020 highlighted the individuals who now constitute the vanguard of the downstairs cohort of the upstairs-downstairs coalition. For months on end, Antifa and BLM ringleaders, feted by the media and funded by plutocrats, orchestrated murderous rampages in dozens of cities. Looters and vandals were described by establishment press and politicians as “mostly peaceful,” and “victims of racism.”

Other members of the downstairs cohort include homeless drug addicts, psychopaths, and predators, who in their uncontained thousands have made life unpleasant, unsanitary, and dangerous for millions of people in cities and towns across America. But they are not held accountable for their actions. They are no longer arrested for vagrancy, public intoxication or even theft. In the name of compassion, these laws or no longer enforced. This only encourages and multiplies the worse elements, and further harms the genuine victims.

Climate militants, also a minute fraction of the population, have made common cause with BLM and Antifa militants. They commit acts of performative vandalism, their protests block freeways, they harass targeted politicians and executives, they have shut down energy pipelines, and their attacks on vital energy infrastructure are escalating. Their actions are encouraged by every mainstream institution in America, despite the destructive essence of their agenda.

No description of the activist minorities bent on erasing America as we know it would be complete without delving into the sexual revolution, which has taken a form that even hippies in the hedonistic late 1960s would scarcely recognize. Do you think women have penises, or that men menstruate? If you do not agree with those statements, American institutions ranging from Proctor and Gamble to the National Hockey League consider you to be a “divisive” individual, lacking empathy.

The preposterous extreme to which the woke gender warriors are trying to take America is incomprehensible to any sane person. Do you believe it’s appropriate for drag queens to recruit five year old children to learn how to twerk? Should states be boycott because their legislature had the courage to prohibit biological men from using a woman’s restroom, or participate in women’s sports? Do you object to hospital surgeons whacking the sexual organs off of children? Careful how you answer. Sanity is insurrectionary.

The public agenda of Antifa/BLM is “equity.” For the Homeless Industrial Complex, it’s compassion. For climate militants, it’s saving the earth. For gender warriors, it’s to end discrimination. But in all of these cases, the hidden agenda is to advance the power of the state, to divide and demoralize the population, to destroy conventional traditions and norms, and consolidate private property ownership in the hands of a small elite.

From outraged parents swarming in to be heard at school board meetings to individuals, everywhere, merely wanting to protect their families, their homes, and their businesses, those who defended order and normalcy are now the “divisive” ones. Worse, they are now deemed dangerous, and are condemned by nearly every influential institution in the country.

A few hundred super-rich elites and a powerful handful of woke and climate activist ringleaders are the minorities that now tyrannize America. They are not defined by conventional ideological definitions, or by their faith, or by their ethnicity. With money and fanaticism they control establishment institutions and grassroots armies. The wealthy faction is united by greed, the woke and climate populists by nihilistic hatred. It is an axis of evil.

This cannot stand. There are too few of them, and too many of us. Resist.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Creating Water Abundance in California

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“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.”
Ezekiel 47:9

Water is Life. For as long as there has been civilization, access to water has been an unyielding prerequisite. California is no exception. As its population grew, the state built one of the most remarkable systems of interbasin water transfers in the world. Every year, nearly 40 million acre feet of water is diverted from remote rivers and transported to magnificent coastal cities or used to irrigate rich farmland. But the whole system needs to be upgraded for the 21st century.

Here are some water projects that ought to be moving forward in California:

(1) Desalination at scale: There is only one major desalination plant in California, located just north of San Diego. At a total project cost of just over $1.0 billion, the Carlsbad Desalination Project went into operation in 2015 and desalinates 55 thousand acre feet of water per year. Desalination has the unique virtue of being an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. Every other water source, ultimately, depends on how much rain we get. In combination with wastewater recycling, building several more large desalination plants could enable California’s coastal cities to become nearly independent of imported water. Potential sites for their construction are already available.

New desalination plants could be co-located with existing natural gas power plants on the California coast, or co-locate with Diablo Canyon, or on the site of the former San Onofre nuclear power plant. These power plant sites have infrastructure already constructed that can be repurposed, reducing construction costs. Desalination construction costs about $20,000 per acre foot of annual capacity, which is grossly overpriced, thanks to gross overregulation and incessant litigation. Those excess costs are the result of political choices that the state legislature could fix. Desalination plants are getting built for one-fifth that amount in Israel today.

But even at inflated costs, having secure access to desalinated water would give urban water agencies negotiating leverage when purchasing imported water. And desalination plants can be designed to have a useful life that greatly exceeds the period of time needed to pay off the financing which represents about 70 percent of the annual cost for desalinated water.

The idea that desalination uses too much energy is a myth. It requires 400 megawatts of continuous power to desalinate 1 MAF per year of seawater. This is roughly equivalent to the cost to pump water from Northern California into the coastal cities of Southern California.

(2) Off-stream reservoirs: The virtue of an off-stream reservoir is that it will not block the flow of a natural river with a high dam. Instead, off-stream reservoirs are constructed in arid valleys and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. The water is then redirected to farms and cities as needed during the summer months. Here are three badly needed off-stream reservoirs:

The Pacheco Reservoir in Santa Clara County. This proposed reservoir – to be located in a remote valley that is watered by a small stream, but not a major river – will store water from the California Aqueduct for delivery to South SF Bay customers. At an estimated cost of $2.5 billion it will store 140,000 acre feet.

The Sites Reservoir north of the Delta. At an estimated cost of $4.0 billion, this off-stream reservoir will store 1.5 MAF, tapping storm runoff in the Sacramento River. In the proposal stage for decades, this reservoir has secured about half the funding needed for construction, but like all reservoir proposals, remains the target of vigorous opposition from environmentalists.

The Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir. This proposed off-stream reservoir will store 82,000 acre feet of water. It will collect water from the California Aqueduct. Estimated cost $500 million.

(3) Wastewater Recycling Projects: Construction of the proposed Carson water recycling plant in Los Angeles County needs to be fast-tracked, with immediate follow up to construct another one in order to recycle 100 percent of water imported into Los Angeles. At a projected cost of $3.4 billion, the Carson plant is currently planned to recycle 168,000 acre feet of water per year. This is just a fraction of the total available wastewater stream in the Los Angeles Basin.

The problem with treated wastewater, in the Santa Monica Bay and also in the San Francisco Bay, is primarily the negative impact excess nitrogen has on aquatic ecosystems. If all urban wastewater in California as recycled (if it isn’t already), that would add up to nearly 2 million acre feet per year to the water supply, as well as improve the health of aquatic ecosystems.

In Northern California, all of the wastewater recycling plants along the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta need to be upgraded. These urban areas cumulatively are probably contributing nearly one million acre feet per year of treated but nitrogen rich discharge into the San Francisco Bay. Upgrading these plants would not only proportionately reduce the amount of water these cities have to import from the State Water Project, Hetch Hetchy, and elsewhere, but, crucially, these upgrades would improve the water quality in the San Francisco Bay. This in turn would lessen the quantity of floodwater that must currently be allowed to flow through the bay to dilute and wash out the pollution coming from these treatment plants.

The estimated cost to upgrade all urban wastewater plants in California to reusable standards (either irrigation or indirect/direct potable reuse) is $20 billion. I expect the real number is higher. It must be done.

(4) Environmentally Friendly Delta Diversions to San Joaquin Valley Aquifers: An exciting new proposal, the “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley” is a work-in-progress, authored by a coalition of San Joaquin Valley community leaders. The centerpiece of this proposal is to construct what are essentially gigantic French Drains within channels created inside Delta Islands. By drawing fresh water from perforated pipes situated beneath a gravel bed in these channels, flood water could be safely harvested from the Delta during periods of excess storm runoff. Preliminary plans for this system estimate the cost at $500 million per 200 acre facility. The estimated capacity for two of these facilities would be 2 million acre feet per year or more, at a cost of $1.0 billion.

The Blueprint also relies on construction of a central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the harvesting arrays in the Delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 million acre feet. The projected cost for this canal, including connections to Friant-Kern, Delta Mendota, and California Aqueduct, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers, is $500 million.

These four projects have the potential to eliminate water scarcity in California forever. If Californians are destined to endure decade long droughts, where there is minimal snow and only a few big storms each year, these projects will ensure that sufficient water is harvested and stored to keep cities and farmland green.

These water projects aren’t the only desirable investments Californians should make to create water abundance. Also needed, for example, are facilities for harvesting urban storm runoff, and provisions to return some of this runoff to reservoir storage to maintain river flows. The Los Angeles River, for example, currently flows year round in the upper urban portion of the river, thanks to three wastewater treatment plants, which once upgraded, will no longer offer perennial outfall.

This evinces another crucial consideration; new water supply infrastructure, and water abundance, is also necessary to maintain ecosystem health. In barely two centuries, a civilization, now 40 million strong, has descended on what had been a nearly empty state. Massive civilization has a massive footprint, and nature in California will never be the same as it once was. Effectively nurturing the natural ecosystems of California requires recognizing they too require artificial, human inputs and human management. Against a backdrop of abundance, why shouldn’t desalinated water flow down a revitalized Los Angeles River? Why shouldn’t water stored in reservoirs guarantee perennial flows in the San Joaquin River?

It is possible to deliver 40 million acre feet per year to California’s cities and farms, while also diverting and releasing additional millions of acre feet every year to sustain flourishing aquatic ecosystems. Investing in water abundance, by upgrading California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century, can make this a reality.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

Looming Deficits Present Opportunity to Find Solutions for California

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Less than six months ago, California’s state legislature approved a record breaking $300 billion state budget. Within that total, and to finance most of the state’s ongoing operations, was a general fund allocation of $235 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023.

Record breaking budgets are nothing new. Only ten years ago, California’s general fund was $93 billion, which adjusted for inflation would be $118 billion in today’s dollars. Meanwhile, California’s population over the past ten years has only grown from 38 million to 39 million. This means that inflation adjusted per capita general fund spending in California has increased from $3,124 back in 2013, to $6,023 today. California’s state government is spending twice as much money today per resident as it did just ten years ago.

This explosion in spending has yielded dubious benefits. By nearly every measure, things are worse off today in California. Obvious examples include expensive and unreliable energy and water, failing schools, rising crime, unaffordable housing and college tuition, and an exploding homeless population, but that’s hardly the entirety of the worsening challenges facing Californians. The decade-long run of record tax revenue spawned an avalanche of new regulations, driving up prices, discouraging expansion of big business and driving small businesses under. Through its spending priorities California attracts the dependent and repels anyone striving for independence. It’s grotesquely inequitable.

This is the context in which to view the latest revenue projections coming from the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Analyst. The concern here should not be that our state budget for 2023-24 now faces a potential $24 billion deficit. The concern should focus on why there has been an explosion of state spending, yielding nothing but growing dysfunction.

As it is, LAO’s projection of a $24 billion deficit is a baseline case, relying on several assumptions that could go sideways, tumbling the actual deficit into much more troubling territory. For example, LAO acknowledges the likelihood of a deepening economic recession, but does not factor the impact of a recession into their tax revenue estimate. They write, “Were a recession to occur soon, revenue declines in the budget window very likely would be more severe than our outlook.” In the section of their analysis where LAO projects worst case scenarios, they project general fund revenue dropping as low as $180 billion in 2024-25, which based on merely maintaining the current general fund budget reflects a deficit of $55 billion.

If the events of the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that consequences of pivotal events are often only obvious in hindsight. In June of 2020, did anyone really think that COVID shutting down half the economy would lead to a boom in tech company valuations? Did anyone at that time realize how uniquely beneficial the tech stock boom would be to California’s state general fund tax revenue? It’s easy today to look back and recognize the chain of causes, but it wasn’t easy to predict them when the COVID ordeal first began. It’s also easy, and probably accurate, to say that over this time period, the state legislature’s blithe ambition to make sure spending kept pace with revenue growth was blissfully unaware of just how improbable and fleeting the gift was that they were squandering.

Another lesson from the past three years, however, is to be wary of excessive pessimism. Unsustainable economic models work until they don’t work, and as long as the US Dollar is the least afflicted currency in the world and the US is the most secure investment haven in the world, and as long as inflation continues to reliably erode the principal value of a nominally exploding federal debt, massive deficit spending to stimulate economic activity may remain a viable strategy. If only more of that spending would be invested in practical infrastructure. Nonetheless, this could go on for decades. It could take forms we can only imagine. We simply don’t know.

The question therefore isn’t how to cut spending and raise taxes in order to balance the budget. The likely truth is that California’s state legislature is going to muddle through one way or another. The prevailing question should be how does California’s state legislature start to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing with all that money? They’ve doubled per capita spending in the last ten years, and ordinary hard working Californians can’t afford to live here any more. Clearly, so far they’re doing everything wrong.

LAO warnings of an impending general fund deficit are a good time to not only talk about how California’s state legislature is on the wrong course, but exactly how it can change its course. If you want to realign the state’s politics, it isn’t enough to say taxes, crime, and prices for everything are too high, and educational achievement and the supply of housing are too low. Propose concrete solutions. Very few Californians would mind paying their taxes if the state was affordable and effectively addressing the challenges of crime, homelessness, education, housing, water, transportation, energy, and education.

Solutions exist, but lack politicians with the courage to promote them and the charisma to effectively convince voters of their efficacy.

Offer state vouchers to parents to use to send their children to any accredited school, public or private.

Rescue public education by replacing woke curricula with classical education would save billions and rescue a generation from a failing system.

Fast track approval of nuclear power plants, natural gas fracking, and refinery expansions to force competition for energy and lower the prices for fuel and electricity.

Fund more water supply projects and practical freeway improvements, using tax and bond funds to yield long term economic dividends.

Approve housing developments in weeks instead of decades and reduce California’s absurdly overwritten building codes to lower the cost of housing.

Turn the timber industry loose again to thin California’s dangerously overgrown forests.

Build inexpensive minimum security facilities to incarcerate drug addicts and petty thieves to curb crime and end unsheltered homelessness. Use these facilities to teach inmates vocational skills so upon release they can fill hundreds of thousands of high paying construction jobs.

New solutions. An entire new alternative vision. This is the real discussion that California needs. Not just how to balance the budget. Rather, how to allocate the budget, and how to deregulate the economy. Where are politicians who are ready to step up with more than criticism of the failures of California’s one-party state, and offer solutions?

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Climate Skeptics Have Ready Allies in Africa

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So when you say stop to your fossil fuel, what’s the alternative?
– Fortune Charumbira, president of the Pan-African Parliament, November, 2022

his is a question without an answer. But for nearly three weeks in November, over 35,000 people including heads of state and the global corps d’elite, pretended they were solving what they claim is the most urgent crisis in the world—the climate emergency—while ignoring the only relevant question. What is a practical alternative to fossil fuel?

Also ignored at the latest U.N. Climate Change Conference, an event sponsored by some of the world’s biggest corporations and covered, uncritically, by the biggest media conglomerates on earth, was the primary reason for environmental challenges in the 21st century. It’s not fossil fuel. It’s population trends.

How patterns of population growth and population decline among the nations of the world intersect with the necessary trends in per capita energy use to eliminate global poverty is by far the most relevant variable affecting the future of humanity and the planet. But nothing in the program of COP27 explicitly focused on either of these genuinely existential challenges.

The imbalance in population demographics between wealthy nations, in which the native populations are failing to reproduce, and poor nations, which continue to explode in population, is easily apparent. The decline in birthrates in wealthy nations is well documented, even if it is rarely discussed. But what is almost never discussed, because it invites accusations of racism, is the unchecked population growth in nations that still have not managed to emerge from poverty.

Global Population Trends: Feast and Famine

According to the most recent World Bank data, the population of “low-income” nations has quintupled since 1960, whereas “high-income” nations have seen their populations over the same 61 years increase by only 60 percent. China’s population has more than doubled, and India’s population has tripled, while the population of the United States is up by 80 percent. But the most rapid population growth is in the Middle East and Africa.

These are nations that are the least equipped to handle massive population growth. The Middle Eastern nations have money but no water, the African nations have water but no money. In many cases, such as in Pakistan or any Sahelian nation in Africa, they don’t have nearly enough of either. But that isn’t stopping them from reproducing. In fact, thanks mostly to Western foreign aid, heavy on food and medicine, their populations continue to explode.

For example, Pakistan’s population has increased from 44 million in 1960 to 225 million today. Nigeria’s population has grown from 45 million people in 1960 to 211 million today. Sudan’s population is more than six times greater than it was in 1960, up to 45 million from only 7 million. Uganda’s population is up more than seven times, from 6 million in 1960 to 47 million today. And there is no end in sight.

In terms of current rates of population increase, the populations of Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, Angola, Uganda, Burundi, Chad, Gambia, Tanzania, Mali, Zambia, and Equatorial Guinea are all over three percent per year. At that rate, the populations of these nations will double in just 20 years. These are staggering numbers. Today, in Niger, the average woman of childbearing age has seven children. In Somalia, the Congo, Mali, and Chad, the average is six, and in Angola, Burundi, Nigeria, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Benin, Mozambique, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Senegal, South Sudan, and Zambia, the average is five children per woman. Today.

On the list from the World Bank of the most fertile nations as measured by births per woman of current childbearing age, the first 25 nations are all in Africa. At number 26 is the Solomon Islands at 4.3 children per woman. Of the top 50 nations in terms of current fertility, 39 of them are in Africa. The only nations of any size occupying the top 50, outside of African nations, are Afghanistan (28), Yemen (45), and Iraq (46). And for that matter, the only large African nations that are not in the top 50 are just outside that distinction; Zimbabwe at 52, Kenya at 53, Namibia at 55, and Egypt at 56. These nations all have female fertility still around 3.5 per woman. The only outliers are South Africa (85), Libya (98), and Tunisia (103).

The practical impact of these demographic facts is stupefying. Global population has just reached 8 billion. By 2050 it is expected to reach 9.7 billion. Africa, all by itself, is projected to account for 1.2 billion of that 1.7 billion increase. Every one of these African nations is riven with conflict or potential conflict. Some of them, such as Somalia, or any nation in the Sahel region, would be grievously challenged to support their existing population with the resources currently available in their nations, even if they were politically stable.

Meanwhile, nations experiencing population decline are invariably high-income nations with high rates of per capita energy consumption. High energy consumption enables prosperity, and with prosperity comes lower birth rates. The worldwide trend is unambiguous. Prosperous societies in Europe, North America, and East Asia are all experiencing population implosions. Italy and Greece have fertility rates of 1.3. Spain’s is 1.2. Throughout Europe the picture isn’t much better. Germany’s is 1.5, the U.K. is 1.6, and France’s is 1.8. Across the Atlantic, the United States is at 1.6. Japan is down at 1.3 and South Korea is at 0.8. These nations will either dramatically increase their birthrates, or admit millions of immigrants, or they will disappear.

This is the demographic reality in the world today. It’s feast or famine. The developed nations are dying, while Africa’s population is exploding. The biggest Asian nations, China (1.7 average births per woman) and India (2.2), are on the same trajectory as the developed nations, but their populations are so big, their immigration policies so restrictive, and their governments so nationalistic, it is unlikely they will substantially alter their demographics merely to keep their populations from declining.

There is a difference between thoughtlessly yielding to a Malthusian reflex by claiming all civilization is unsustainable and recognizing that, in some cases, population growth is unsustainable. African population growth is not sustainable at the current rate without major political and economic changes. The solution being implemented by the Western-led international community rests on dubious foundations.

The consensus of Western elites is to facilitate mass immigration into Western nations from every destitute country that is experiencing rapid population growth, under the pretext that developed nations have caused climate catastrophes which in turn has led to the hardships these nations are experiencing.

Lies Are the Consequences of Denial

This is a preposterous lie. An example of this lie, and there are countless examples, is how the recent flooding in Pakistan was reported as so terribly severe due to climate change. That is false. Yes, they had a lot of precipitation. But in 1960, with only one-fifth as many people living there, there would still have been forests to stabilize the hillsides and absorb runoff, there was a much smaller area covered with impervious surfaces because the cities were much smaller, there weren’t nearly as many people living in areas prone to flooding, and there was far less built out property to sustain damage.

Compounding this lie, however, is an even bigger lie, which is that it is possible to stop developing fossil fuel without destroying the global economy. The Western-dominated climate agenda, reinforced once again at COP27, is to require “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 per cent by 2030 relative to the 2019 level.” The COP27 “implementation plan” also calls for “about USD 4 trillion per year to be invested in renewable energy up until 2030 to be able to reach net zero emissions by 2050, and, furthermore, a global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investment of at least USD 4–6 trillion per year.”

Take a look at the presenters at COP27. Note their affiliations: international NGOs, investment banks, government agencies, renewable energy companies, service providers, consultants, carbon emissions trading firm executives, and professional activists. Imagine the slavering anticipation with which these ambitious individuals and the organizations they represent intend to grab their slice of $10 trillion a year.

These are the thought leaders whose marketing and propaganda stochastically nurture militant climate warriors who stage “die-ins” on the streets of European capitals, or throw milkshakes onto art masterpieces, or shut off energy pipelines, or occupy the offices of elected officials. These are the people who fund the studies that feed the doomsday narrative, amplified by activist journalists, and used to manipulate voting populations while terrifying a thoroughly indoctrinated generation of school children. Don’t expect these people to explore honest alternatives to their sanctimonious proclamations. Trillions of dollars are on the table.

And here is where the words of Fortune Charumbira, president of the Pan-African Parliament, carry profound meaning. African nations want to develop their ample reserves of natural gas and build a gas infrastructure to generate electricity and enable urban residents to cook meals with clean-burning gas. They want nuclear power plants. They want water projects to irrigate land and treat water that they can safely drink. Instead, at a cost that would have paid for all of that and then some, they’re going to get wind and solar farms.

The Rest of the World Rejects Western Energy Denialism

The established policy of wealthy European nations and the United States is to impoverish their citizens in order to develop “renewables.” At the same time, these nations will pressure Africans to renounce rapid economic development, triggering a massive diaspora, one that will make current migration pressures appear trivial by comparison. It will be interesting, to put it mildly, to wonder how long the citizens of either sphere will tolerate this. But meanwhile, the rest of the world is not going to stop developing nuclear power, gas, oil, or coal.

The biggest consumer of coal in the world, by far, is China. Consuming an estimated 86 exajoules of coal last year, the Chinese accounted for 54 percent of all coal consumption worldwide. In second place was India, at 13 percent of all global consumption of coal. The entire rest of the world only accounted for a third of all coal consumption. But why would nations like Pakistan, whose per capita energy consumption is only 1/16th as much as the average American, choose not to burn coal, the cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel?

When examining patterns of energy use by nation, it is obvious that renewables can’t possibly deliver the amount of energy nations are demanding. They cost too much, and the environmental penalty for digging up all the required minerals is far greater than simply developing more fossil fuels.

Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, is so energy poor that the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy doesn’t even track it individually. The only nations in Africa for which there is enough of an energy economy to track individually are South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria. For the remaining nations in Africa, BP estimates the per capita energy consumption at 2.42 gigajoules, compared to 279.89 for the United States. This is an incredible disparity. In 2021, the average American consumed 115 times as much energy as the average African.

The geniuses of COP27 want Africans to shut up, build windmills, stay poor, have lots of babies, and migrate to Western nations. That’s their solution to the very real challenge of energy, and the very overstated and exploited problem of climate change.

To quote out of context a famous Democratic politician known for his climate conformity, the Western elites who think Africans are going to accept energy poverty are going to “reap the whirlwind.” A productive strategy for anyone committed to energy sanity in the West is to recognize that Africans are also rejecting the COP27 narrative. Climate skeptics may rest assured that “allyship” with Africans like Fortune Charumbira will be of mutual benefit.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How to Unify the GOP and Realign America

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If Republicans hope to unify their party and realign American politics in their favor, they’ll have to do more than pour billions of dollars into television ads that highlight rampaging looters and the despairing jobless. They have to offer hope, tied to an achievable vision. Americans are ready for an alternative to Democratic fearmongering and stagnation. Give it to them.

Standing in the way of Republicans developing a comprehensive agenda they can agree on is the deepening rift within the party. On one side is the legacy party, represented by McConnell and Romney and other so-called moderate Republicans. Opposing them is the MAGA movement led by Donald Trump and backed up, among other things, by the Freedom Caucus which now constitutes a majority of the House Republicans.

The opportunity to heal this rift lies with the American voters themselves, whose sentiments on a few fundamental policy issues are coalescing into a consensus bigger than the political parties that supposedly speak for them. Embracing these unifying issues and emphasizing them will hand Republicans a populist bloc of voters that will include almost all grassroots Republicans, along with Independents and Democrats. It will attract voters irrespective of their income or group identity and it will cross ideological lines.

These core premises that might enable Republicans to realign American are on the issues of education, immigration, affirmative action, and climate change. In every case, powerful special interests among Democrats and Republicans will consider these policies, which have the potential to unify grassroots voters, to be mortal threats to their agenda. But only if they are promoted without compromise, and only by leaning in to the controversy and the heresy, will Republican politicians and their party acquire the credibility they’re going to need to be successful.

Success on these four issues will realign America, leaving the country far better positioned to address every other challenge. Restoring quality education will create high information voters and a skilled workforce. Merit based immigration and merit based college admissions and business hiring will build individual character and industrial competitiveness. Replacing the “climate agenda” with realistic energy and infrastructure policies will save small businesses, make America affordable again, reduce international tensions, disempower an out-of-control oligarchy, and even refocus attention on genuine environmental challenges. Specifics matter.

For example, in education policy, Republicans should stand for school choice, where parents receive annual payment vouchers they can redeem at public or private schools. And even more to the point, traditional public schools should be completely restructured, with curricula based on classical education methods that emphasize developing fundamental skills in math, reading and writing, as well as character development and a firm grounding in the virtues of Western Civilization.

With immigration, it isn’t enough to regain control of America’s borders, although that must happen before anything else. It is necessary to completely revamp America’s immigration policies to prioritize admission of people who bring skills that our nation needs. Most immigration into America should be based on merit. It is not possible for America to absorb the world’s poor. If altruism is a value Americans want to incorporate into foreign policy, than aid and investment in poverty stricken nations can help hundreds of millions of people far more cost-effectively than mass immigration.

Moral arguments can frame every plank of a coherent new Republican agenda. Rejecting the false premise that America is still an inherently racist nation is the moral justification for eliminating affirmative action and other supposedly anti-racist and anti-sexist policies that persist in American society. At the same time, however, Republicans must explain that meritocracy is the only possible way for a society to provide equal opportunities to everyone, and it is the only way to ensure that individuals will recognize hard work and learned competence as the path to success in life. Without meritocracy, the character of individuals and of society is corrupted. Meritocracy is tough, but there is no alternative.

The biggest threat to freedom, and the biggest false premise that Republicans must replace, is that climate change, caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, poses an existential threat to the planet. It does not. And in rejecting that premise, Republicans must replace it with a new premise: Oil, gas and coal, extracted and clean burning using the most advanced technologies, is the pathway to peace and prosperity, and is more sustainable and causes less harm than so-called renewables.

The climate agenda, pushed by nearly every politician in America, reduces the standard of living of all but the wealthiest Americans. Along with extremist environmentalism in general, it concentrates wealth in the hands of multi-national corporations and billionaires, and all but wipes out the middle class. Misguided, extreme environmentalist policies have already taken away the ability of ordinary Americans to purchase homes and build generational wealth. The regressive impact of environmentalist laws and regulations is an attack not so much on private property, as it is an attack focused on private property that isn’t owned by corporations and billionaires. Denying Americans ownership opportunities takes away the incentive to work hard and achieve. It is another way that meritocracy is undermined.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but they are probably the biggest issues for which there is the potential to unify a supermajority of Americans. Republicans have to embrace these four controversial premises without reservations: Classical education and school choice. Merit based immigration. Replacing affirmative action with meritocracy. And replacing climate change alarm with a commitment to prosperity through an all-of-the-above energy strategy that includes oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power.

President Trump is firmly in favor of all these policies. Republicans are challenged to find other leaders of national stature who will back them just as unequivocally. Without collective agreement on these basic and radically differentiating positions on the issues of education, immigration, meritocracy, and energy and the environment, Republicans are indeed merely RINOs, members of the uniparty, participating in the inexorable demise of a great nation.

The people who have supported Trump have supported these policies. They deserve leadership that demonstrates the courage to promote all of them, not just one or two of them. Voters should demand that Republican candidates answer four questions:

“Will you fight for (1) school choice and classical curricula in public schools, (2) secure borders and merit based immigration, (3) an end to race and gender based discrimination of all kinds, and (4) unrestricted development of clean fossil fuel and nuclear power?” There are plenty of other important issues, but these four are all profoundly disruptive while retaining the ability to attract American voters of all backgrounds and ideologies. If these four goals are fulfilled, many other issues will resolve themselves.

Leaders who commit to these four goals will be condemned just as Trump was condemned, even if their rhetoric is tactful and their logic impeccable. When that day comes, voters will realize that it has not been Trump’s personality that invited seven years of relentless attacks on him and all his supporters. It was the policies he fights for.

The power and promise of these ideas, expressed without reservations or compromise by a united Republican party, will attract majorities across all voting segments. When you realign the electorate, the entire biased and rigged system cannot stop the weight of the landslide.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.