Carnage at the Capitol: Five people, including a San Diego woman and a Capitol Police officer, are dead after rioters seized the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday in a scene that looked from some developing world dictatorship. We strongly condemn any violence or rioting, in all its forms, whether committed by MAGA or Black Lives Matter supporters.
President Trump, who fueled the riots, is facing potential impeachment. Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the nation’s leading conservative voice, called on the president to resign. In these fractured political times, everyone must come together to oppose violence and riots and recommit to fundamental principles of free speech and persuasion.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. Progressives will use this carnage as an excuse to further stifle free speech. The New York Times has published multiple pieces calling for stricter tech censorship in response to Wednesday’s events. And consider this recent headline from NBC: “Recall effort against California governor an attempt to 'destabilize the political system,' analysts say.”
See what they’re doing here? Now any speech that criticizes government officials can be turned into the moral and legal equivalent of a riot. If progressives can marginalize those who support limited government as dangerous radicals, they can clear the path of their biggest obstruction to implementing their political and cultural worldview.
As we recommit to rooting out political violence in all its forms, we must also guard against progressives conflating free speech and violence.
Even a political rally to reopen California is now off-limits? In his latest analysis, CPC contributor Edward Ring highlights Facebook and MailChimp's censorship of a Reopen Cal Now event this weekend:
Presenters include a bipartisan group of politicians including Fiona Ma, California’s State Treasurer, a Democrat, and Congressman Tom McClintock, one of the most reliable conservative Republicans in America. Presenters also include sheriffs who will not enforce the lockdown, attorneys who are challenging the lockdown, and economists and businesspeople to explain how the consequences of the lockdown have been catastrophic for millions of Californians.
The conference will also feature presenters from the medical community, and for that, big tech has suppressed the organizers’ attempts to publicize the event. How they’re doing this offers an update on just how pervasive big tech suppression of dissent has become.
Georgia on my mind: On Election Day 2020, incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue from Georgia won 49.7 percent of the vote, defeating his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff by 88,000 votes and coming a few thousand votes shy of reaching the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff election, ensuring divided government in Washington D.C., and protecting Californians from further government encroachment.
Perdue was blocked from winning an absolute majority partially due to an especially strong showing by the libertarian Senate candidate, Shane Hanzel, who received 115,000 votes.
With some outreach to these libertarian voters (whose candidate was excluded from the runoff election) and a forthright explanation of the importance of divided government, President Trump could have assured Perdue’s Senate runoff victory.
Instead, Trump spent more time attacking the Georgia Republican Governor and Secretary of State than Ossoff, a 33-year-old far-left liberal filmmaker who should have had no chance in the Peach State.
Fast-forward to Tuesday night, when Ossoff and fellow Democrat challenger, Preacher Raphael Warnock, pulled off one of the greatest political upsets in recent history -- a feat that would have been considered unthinkable a few months ago -- winning their races over the incumbents and handing one-party rule to federal Democrats.
What does this mean for California? Speaker Pelosi’s first act in the new Congress this week to eliminate gendered language like mother and daughter is just a palate cleanser for what the Democratic majority is about to shove down our throats.
Democrats will now easily be able to get their blue state bailout passed, rewarding California's government unions for their decades of outrageous compensation demands. Billions of taxpayer dollars will go almost directly to government union workers' pay and pensions.
Further, federal Democrats will now easily be able to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn Trump's recent executive orders that help businesses and provide environmental regulation clarity. With a bare majority, they can enact dramatic federal tax increases and reinstate of the SALT deduction, which will reward California's confiscatory tax system and make it easier for the state to further raise taxes.
If Senate Democrats eliminate the legislative filibuster, as they've indicated they will, that's when the real pain starts. The Green New Deal and government-run healthcare can be foisted upon the nation, hitting Californians especially hard because we already pay so much more for energy and healthcare. In fact, if the nation wants to know what's to come from the new Democrat majority, they just need to look to California.
All because Trump Republicans couldn't deliver a message in Georgia. Trump's gone, and it's time for those who believe in free markets and economic opportunity to move on.
Judge throws out San Diego pension reform on technicalities: In a 2012 ballot measure, San Diego residents voted to reform local pensions for new municipal hires. This week, a Superior Court judge ruled that the voters’ will should be invalidated over a technicality. With Tuesday's victory giving federal Democrats carte blanch to appoint whomever they'd like to the bench, expect many more judges who will give favorable rulings to government unions in the years to come.
Now there's an option four: Sue Shelley writes in the OC Register this week that reopening California is the best of the available options for the state to raise revenues:
As the pandemic drags on, local governments are looking at you, California taxpayer. People are shopping less, working less, earning less and running their businesses at a fraction of capacity. That means they’re paying less in sales taxes, income taxes and corporate taxes. Even gas tax revenue is hammered by the lockdown policy, as Californians replace commutes with Zoom links. What’s a starving local government to do? There are three options. They can cut spending, they can raise taxes or they can pressure the state to allow reopening.
This analysis needs updating based on Tuesday's election results. With Democrats enjoying one-party rule, they can simply turn on the money spigot and cover state and local deficits with printed money.
Leftists are relentless: Just two months after California defeated Prop 16, which would have reinstated affirmative action in the state, Chris Holden (D-Pasadena) introduced legislation this week to incorporate race and gender to determine California state workers' promotions. Outrageous. Progressives love to pay fealty to "democracy," but in reality they only seem to like it when it confirms their worldview.
The EDD boondoggle continues: The LA Timesreported this week: “A large number of Florida inmates, including a man sentenced to 20 years for second-degree murder, are among the thousands of out-of-state prisoners who have allegedly received California pandemic unemployment benefits, according to a December analysis commissioned by the state Employment Development Department and reviewed by The Times.” This is just the latest mismanagement of unemployment funds. If the government can't even distribute unemployment benefits, why do so many people have faith that it can achieve far more complex goals such as changing the climate?
Union leaders who call charter schools racist should look in the mirror: In his latest piece, CPC contributor Larry Sand critiques a New York Magazine review of charter schools by Diane Ravitch that points to a few circumstances of private school racial segregation. As Larry notes:
It’s typical that Ravitch, a teacher union zealot, does not acknowledge the racist history of labor unions in the U.S. Writing in Commentary in 1959, Herbert Hill asserts that in various industries “trade unions practice either total exclusion of the Negro, segregation (in the form of ‘Jim Crow’ locals, or ‘auxiliaries’), or enforce separate, racial seniority lines which limit Negro employment to menial and unskilled classifications… In the South, unions frequently acted to force Negroes out of jobs that had formerly been considered theirs.”
Check out Will Swaim’s classic National Reviewpiece about how the left tries to paint those who oppose government unions as racist.
We want fweedom: During his 2020 presidential campaign, President-elect Joe Biden somehow managed to dodge the overt plagiarism scandal that sunk his 1988 presidential effort. I guess the media didn't have time to write about it given how busy it was carrying his water. Or, perhaps, 32 years after his first presidential run, the statute of limitation on plagiarism has run out.
Now incoming Vice President Kamala Harris has a plagiarism scandal of her own. And the media is similarly ignoring it.
Harris has made much of her civil rights background as a child growing up in Oakland -- memorably attacking Joe Biden over this topic during one of the Democratic primary debates. One of her favorite stories is how she supposedly got separated from her stroller during a protest march with her parents. As she recounted for an Elle magazine cover story last fall: "My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing, and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’"
(Watch Harris tell this all-too-rehearsed story on C-SPAN HERE And HERE she is telling it to a sycophantic Jimmy Fallon. She also tells this tale in her 2010 book, "Smart on Crime" and her 2019 book "The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.")
The problem -- aside from needing some new material? The story is jacked from Martin Luther King.
As MLK recounts in a 1965 Playboy interview, "I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. 'What do you want?' the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, 'Fee-dom.’”
Kamala's origin story has plenty of skeletons in it. Her intimate relationship with a San Fran political power broker 31 years her senior that helped launch her political career is Exhibit A. Biting an anecdote from the King is just the latest one to be uncovered. It won't be the last.
Enjoyed this newsletter? Subscribe HERE. Donate HERE. Please forward this email to your friends.
