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It has been, for a very long time, conventional wisdom that as goes California, so goes the rest of the nation.  In a bizarre, but utterly predictable, twist this remains true, but only for the very worst and most destructive ideas and policies, many of which are adopted wholesale by the Harris/Biden/Whoever Administration—Joe Biden, Temporary President.  Actually, the Administration is instrumental in arranging many of them, with the obvious expectation they will be imposed on an unwilling, and increasingly angry, nation.

The bizarre manifestations of wokeness, destructive not only individually but to the nation, are playing out in the People’s Republic of California, a one-party, socialist state that is fast driving over the cliff of communism into the chasm of despair.  OK.  No more tired metaphors; I promise.  This is good only in that the rest of the nation can see what to avoid, though California’s leaders remain stupidly smug in the expectation they’ll spread their contagion everywhere.  Their brilliant policies, they think, are the inevitable wave of the future.

What they’re incapable of understanding is they are able to focus on the manifestations of terminal wokeness because until recently, America was the most advanced and prosperous nation in the world—in history really.  To their horror, Donald Trump, despite their best efforts to destroy him, and in only four years, brought America to an economic and national security pinnacle. Joe Biden essentially destroyed it in only 9 months, but D/S/Cs still don’t understand two fundamental realities:

1) Focusing on woke nonsense is possible only because, until recently, America really was the most prosperous and secure nation in the world.

2) That prosperity gave the self-imagined elite the leisure and license to ignore reality, to try to make and impose their own, which is what being woke essentially is.

Let us, gentle readers, consider some telling examples, beginning with this from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Walgreens said Tuesday that it will close five stores in San Francisco in November, citing the company’s concerns over retail theft in the city.

‘Organized retail crime continues to be a challenge facing retailers across San Francisco, and we are not immune to that,’ Walgreens spokesperson Phil Caruso said in a statement.

This will bring the total of Walgreen’s stores closed in SF over the last five years to 22.  Real reality: allow criminals to get away with crimes and you’ll get more of them—crimes and criminals–many, many more, and worse crimes to boot.  Woke reality: criminals aren’t responsible for their crimes.  They’re forced to commit them because of racism, homelessness, sexism, transphobia, etc.  So California not only decriminalized shoplifting below nearly $1000 dollars per incident, prosecutors won’t prosecute most crimes in general.

Here’s an education blast from the San Francisco Examiner:

The San Francisco Unified School District has been a slow-motion car crash for years.

Declining enrollment, unhappy parents and school board meetings that drone aimlessly into the night? Yep, that sounds like the SFUSD.

But recently we came upon two tipping point moments that we can’t ignore.

First, for all the exasperation about the district, last week’s news had to shock even jaded critics.

The state of California announced that the SFUSD budget was so deep in the red that the state is likely going to take over. This as the district predicts deficits over $100 million, beginning in 2022.

They’ve recently lost 3500 students.  Californians, unable to change the suicidal politics of their state at the ballot box are voting with their feet.  They’re taking their kids out of woke, dangerous schools and taking their families to free states.  By all means, take the link and read the rest.  Take all of the links.

In my Second Civil War series, I write about the possibility of secession and civil war.  As The Hill notes, Californians have been individually seceding for years, and more will as soon as they can manage it:

More than half of the residents living in the San Francisco Bay Area say they are considering moving out of the area permanently, according to a poll from Joint Venture Silicon Valley released Monday.

The survey of voters in five Bay Area Counties found that 56 percent of respondents said they were likely to leave the region within ‘the next few years,’ a higher percentage than in any of the think tank’s previous polling.

A separate 44 percent said they were unlikely to leave, with 14 percent of these people saying they want to move but could not.

Hmmmm.  If that many people are so upset with CA they’re going to leave, why can’t they just change the political nature of the state by voting?  Because the electoral system is rigged?

Let’s visit The Hill once again where we see Gavin Newsom, acting on a new infusion of woke arrogance, continuing to destroy California with woke virtue signaling:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill on Saturday that moves to ban gas-powered lawn equipment in the state — including lawn mowers and leaf blowers — in an effort to limit air pollution.

The bill directs state regulators to stop selling gas-powered equipment that has small off-road engines by Jan. 1, 2024, or once the California Air Resources Board says such a law is ‘feasible,’ whichever date comes later.

The law also calls for new portable gas-powered generators to be zero-emission by 2028, according to the Los Angeles Times. That deadline, however, could be pushed back by the state board.

This is part and parcel of CA’s push to totally eliminate internal combustion engines—cars, trucks, etc.—in just a few years.  They’re all going to be replaced by electric vehicles.  Sure, they cost twice as much and more than conventional vehicles, and the gap between the very wealthy and the working poor is greater in California than any other state, but hey, woke reality beats real reality any day!  This would all but eliminate the lawn care and landscaping professions.  They could not possibly carry enough batteries to power all the equipment they need on a daily basis, and as you’ll see in a moment, there isn’t nearly enough electricity to recharge, overnight, all the batteries that will be necessary.  This would also eliminate the small ATV industry, and all gas powered portable generators, which cannot possibly be “zero emission” by any date.  And about from where that electricity is going to come:

In August 2020, hundreds of thousands of California residents experienced rolling electricity blackouts during a heat wave that maxed out the state’s energy grid.

The California Independent System Operator issues flex alerts asking consumers to cut back on electricity usage and move electricity usage to off-peak hours, typically after 9 p.m. There were 5 flex alerts issued in 2020 and there have been 8 in 2021, according to CAISO records.

Uh huh.  And when, exactly will all those electric vehicles and batteries for mowers, weed eaters, blowers, etc. be charged?  From where does electricity come, anyway?  Unicorn farts and fairy dust?  Does it just magically appear in outlets in the home?

On Friday, Sept. 10, the U.S. Department of Energy granted the state an emergency order to allow natural gas power plants to operate without pollution restrictions so that California can meet its energy obligations. The order is in effect until Nov. 9.

That’s bowing to real reality, which must have been terribly painful for CA politicians and bureaucrats.  The psychic agony must have been unbearable.  That’s a condition they can’t maintain for long:

At the same time, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, owned by Pacific Gas and Electric and located near Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, is in the middle of a decade-long decommissioning process that will take the state’s last nuclear power plant offline.  The regulatory licenses for reactor Unit 1 and Unit 2, which commenced operation in 1984 and 1985 will expire in November 2024 and August 2025, respectively.

Diablo Canyon is the state’s only operating nuclear power plant; three others are in various stages of being decommissioned. The plant provides about 9% of California’s power, according to the California Energy Commission, compared with 37% from natural gas, 33% from renewables, 13.5% from hydropower, and 3% from coal.

California is a strong advocate of clean energy. In 2018, the state passed a law requiring the state to operate with 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045.

‘Diablo can run for 80 years,’ Halpin told CNBC. ‘Its life is being cut short by at least 20 years and with a second license extension 40 years, or four decades.’

Uh-huh.  California just passed a law that will require far, far more electricity than California is currently capable of making–they can’t make enough now–and they’re unnecessarily closing a zero-emission power plant that makes 9% of their current electricity(?!).  They’re going to need a lot more unicorn farts and fairy dust.

As all sapient citizens know, cargo ships are anchored off the coast of California because the ports can’t unload them, creating massive, nationwide supply chain problems.  Our Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttegieg, has been on maternity leave since mid-August–no one noticed–and the Administration in general is clueless, though sock puppet Biden told us the other day, in a teleprompter reading, the ports are now going to be working 24/7 unloading ships.  It’s not California’s fault—except that it is:

credit: ibbusinessjournal.com

There is one very specific regional issue driving the problem.  Read on:

The trucking issue with California LA ports, ie the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) and the Port of Long Beach (POLB), is that all semi tractors have to be current with new California emissions standards.  As a consequence, that mean trucks cannot be older than 3 years if they are to pick up or deliver containers at those ports.  This issue wipes out approximately half of the fleet trucks used to move containers in/out of the port.  Operating the port 24/7 will not cure the issue, because all it does is pile up more containers that sit idle as they await a limited number of trucks to pick them up.  THIS is the central issue.

So let’s make sure we understand this: half the available tractor/trailers can’t transport goods out of the California ports due to California’s emissions laws.  So it doesn’t really matter if the ports are working 24/7; there aren’t going to be enough trucks to transport the containers beyond the docks.  It’s not just a California issue, though California is responsible; it affects every American.  Gee, I wonder why the media hasn’t reported this?

Leisure and License: Woke lunacy is an American disaster.  Nowhere else in the world is this sort of thing seen.  Nowhere else is it inflicted on people, certainly not to the out of control degree we see it in America.  Why not?  They have much more important priorities, such as putting food on the table and trying to obtain the other daily necessities of life.

Here’s the point, gentle readers.  Americans are patient people.  They’ll put up with a great deal of stupidity as long as their lives aren’t significantly disrupted, as long as they maintain most of their liberties, as long as they can continue to be left alone and can provide for their families.  That’s why woke lunatics have been able to wreak havoc for so long.  America is prosperous, and their insanity has not, until now, significantly disrupted the lives of most Americans.

That’s coming to an end.

Runaway inflation, 50% higher gas prices, supply chain disruptions, a projected 54% increase in heating costs this winter—it will surely be more next summer for cooling costs—shortages of all of the food and other items that make daily life not only comfortable but possible, an absentee Transportation Secretary far more interested in publicizing the wonders and superior morality of gayness than in doing his job (to be fair, he’s only competent to be gay), and much, much more and worse, will bring wokeness, and its acolytes, to an ugly, and well deserved, end.

Klain is Temporary President Biden’s Chief of Staff, and some think, the real president…

It’s hard to imagine a more tone deaf, revealing example of the self-imagined elite’s disdain for Normal Americans.  Nah.  I take that back.  They do it all the time.  It is the “high class” that are mostly unaffected by the insanity they impose on Normal Americans, people who have to work, raise families, and maintain America.  They may not have credentials, but they have knowledge, experience and ability.  Inflation barely, if at all, affects the well to do.  It ravages everyone else.

What happens when voting with one’s feet and moving to a free, prosperous state no longer makes much of a difference because every state is equally poor and miserable?  What happens when toilet paper isn’t even worth its weight in worthless US currency?  What happens when we no longer have the leisure and license to worry and legislate about the kinds of things that occupy the empty minds of California politicians, bureaucrats and educrats, when the bathroom toilet paper dispenser is empty and when we’re not sure if we’ll be able to find or afford steak–or hamburger—ever again?  What happens when people can’t afford to go out to eat?  What happens when Americans lose their patience with “high class problems,” and their anger at the wealthy, self-imagined elite runs out of control?

What happens when Americans have, at long last, been pushed too far?