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| Victor Davis Hanson: California Is a Cruel Medieval State |
| 2020-03-10 |
| [American Greatness] One way of understanding California is simply to invert traditional morality. What for centuries would be considered selfish, callous, and greedy is now recalibrated as caring, empathetic, and generous. The current ethos of evaluating someone by his or her superficial appearance‐gender or race‐has returned to the premodern values of 19th-century California when race and gender calibrated careers. We don’t pay medieval priests for indulgences of our past and ongoing sin, but we do tweet out displays of our goodness as the penance price of acting amoral. A paradox ensues that Californians both have a high, indeed smug, view of themselves and yet do a lot of damage to their fellow human beings. Their haughtiness is based largely on the reality that Silicon Valley, sandwiched between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, became the birthplace of the global computer, internet, social media, and a high-tech revolution. For progressives who deprecate the capitalist lifestyle, having a lot of money still allows one to say one thing and live out the opposite. The state’s multi-trillion-dollar companies have hired tens of thousands of seven-figure, mid-level executives and computer experts who assume that life in the California coastal corridor is a birthright paradise. The resulting tax revenue bonanza to the state allows one-party-rule to rid California of the old bothersome Reagan-Deukmejian-Wilson working- and middle-classes by embracing not-in-my-backyard zoning, identity politics, anal-retentive regulations, steep tax rates, utopian green agendas, open borders, and decriminalization of things that used to be felony offenses. Indeed, the bigger and wealthier California became, the more the rich sought to privatize their lives and to give up on public services, the more the middle classes left the state, the more the poor from Mexico and Latin America crossed the southern border illegally, the more its schools deteriorated, and the more its infrastructure ossified and became decrepit, from century-old power transmission towers to pot-holed and jammed highways. The resulting medieval society is now one of a few thousand millionaires and millions of lower-middle-class wage earners as well as millions of abject peasants and poor serfs. Those on the bottom receive relatively generous subsidies to just get by. Over a quarter of the state’s population was not born in the United States. A fifth lives below the poverty line. One-third of welfare recipients in the United States live in California. These are statistics of which our moralists in Malibu or Mill Valley either are ignorant, or simply shrug that they don’t care. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #4 ^ "The Emerging Democratic Majority" strategy of Ruy Texeira. |
| Posted by: Lex 2020-03-10 13:59 |
| #3 If you think your state is immune to this bullshit, think again. California was flooded with illegal, illiterate immigrants from Mexico when Bill Clinton willfully and deliberately neglected border security. Clinton knew what he was doing. As Hanson notes, this was the state of Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian. Before them, Richard Nixon was elected to the Senate and went on to become President. But it's all over now. My point is, California was the first target of Clinton's policy to change America's demographics in such a way that Democrats will be the majority throughout our country. Further, as you can see in California, Democrats will destroy the moral fabric by legalizing hard drugs and the crimes that come with addiction such as vagrancy and theft. They'll raise taxes and herd the population into massive apartment blocks. Home ownership in the suburbs will be a thing of the past, just like the automobile. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2020-03-10 13:52 |
| #2 Per the California United Way, the real poverty rate in Kakistan is over thirty percent. It's about 25% in the coastal boomtowns and close to 40% inland. = Anschluss with Mexico. F--- these "sanctuary state" idiots. We are ruled by morons. |
| Posted by: Lex 2020-03-10 09:43 |
| #1 Spot on. Demographer and urban planning expert Joel Kotkin describes this phenomenon in the same way, as "The New Feudalism": a small, harried and shrinking bourgeoisie pressed from below by soon-to-be majority population of campesinos/Latino peasants and squeezed from above by a thin stratum of barons and government-employed virtue-signaling public-sector and academic "clerics." |
| Posted by: Lex 2020-03-10 09:40 |