October 16, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

        When Big Brother Reigns Supreme:  

          The California Example

 

Friends,

I had just written my essay, “New Study Finds White Rice to be Racist,” when I spotted a news article out of California. While my piece on white rice was only satire, that article from the Far Left Coast reported on something that actually has occurred, a new law passed by the lunatics in the California legislature and signed by that equally lunatic Governor Gavin Newsom. The “White Rice is Racist” piece was picked up by the Abbeville Institute (October 5, 2021), and, sure enough, even though I indicated with a note at the end that it was satire, which I thought obvious from the text, several friends wrote me thinking that what I recounted was, in fact, really happening. But the California news, on the other hand, is true.

It seems the aberrations and excesses of “wokeness” and “anti-racism” have become so extreme that almost any account, including the most insanely ridiculous, is now not only imaginable, but entirely possible in our fatally sick society. Indeed, the land of “nuts, flakes, and fruits” (AKA California) had done it once again.

Woke Governor Newsome inked new legislation which will ban all off-road gas-powered engines by January 1, 2024.

Let me repeat that and let it sink in: Governor Newsome inked a new law which will ban all off-road gas-powered engines by January 1, 2024.

Newsome added in a press release (October 9): “In a time when the state and country are more divided than ever, this legislative session reminds us what we can accomplish together. I am thankful for our partners in the state Legislature who furthered our efforts to tackle the state’s most persistent challenges – together, we took action to address those challenges head-on, implementing historic legislation and the California Comeback Plan to hit fast forward on our state’s recovery. What we’re doing here in California is unprecedented in both nature and scale. We will come back from this pandemic stronger than ever before.”

Think of the consequences for small business, specifically for landscape operations and for merchandisers of gas-powered equipment. All of them will have to either purchase (or sell) new, expensive battery-run equipment or have present machinery completely retrofitted if they hope to survive. And many simply will not make the transition.

The vice-president of the National Association of Landscape Professionals, Andrew Bray, responded, declaring “companies are going to have to completely retrofit their entire workshops to be able to handle this massive change in voltage so they’re going to be charged every day,” according to a Los Angeles Times report. The expense will be exorbitant.

In addition to increased costs,  “a three-person landscaping crew will need to carry 30 to 40 fully charged batteries to power its equipment during a full day’s work,” according to Bray.

The new law is expected to affect nearly 50,000 small businesses, according to The Washington Examiner. It noted that California’s budget includes $30 million for professional landscapers and gardeners to quit using gas-powered equipment, but that it would not be enough to cover the full costs.

But there will be additional consequences for millions of other Californians who purchase gas-powered lawn tractors and mowers, and gas trimmers. They will be effectively banned, forcing users to purchase in most cases far less effective battery-operated devices.  Welcome to California!

And what about other gas-powered vehicles, the ATVs and off-road motorcycles? Will we now see new, special “off-road enforcement” agents of government snooping around to make certain that we don’t violate Newsome’s new law? Will we go to jail for running our lawn mowers?

Of course, the Nancy Pelosis and Adam Schiffs who live in those enclosed mega-mansions in high-rent districts of the state and, in fact, couldn’t give a damn about the rapidly shrinking middle class in the state, won’t suffer. They won’t feel the pain or see the changes, since they hire dirt poor Mexican immigrants, recipients of California’s over-extended and welcoming “safety net.”

And they won’t notice that thousands of middle class Californians, some of whom whose families have been there since the 1848 Gold Rush, are now packing up their depleted bags and moving to Arizona, Texas, or maybe Idaho. In fact, California is fast becoming a state with essentially just two classes: a super-rich leftist elite and millions of poor Hispanics who flock to the state for its generous, immigrant-oriented benefits.

I have a good friend who went to California in 1987; he began a catering business and built it into a going concern. Yet, he is not wealthy by California standards. His very modest home—about the size of mine—is now on the market for a couple of million inflated dollars. He is moving his entire operation to Phoenix, and inviting his employees and their families to go with him. He’s had enough of “the greening of the Golden State” with its insanely high taxes and insurance rates, rampant crime even in the once-quiet neighborhood where he lives, the multitude of regulations that suppress and destroy small business and individual enterprise, extremist environmental legislation which has had horrendous effects, and “woke” and failing schools. California’s leaders are turning the state into a virtual authoritarian oligarchy…. In other words, an emerging “animal farm” which makes George Orwell’s dystopian novels seem tame, where the horrid face of “Big Brother” now appears in the person of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and Adam Schiff, and brags: “What we’re doing here in California is unprecedented in both nature and scale.”

Indeed. Last December I authored a column, “Triumph of the Pod People,” which was then picked up by LewRockwell.com and widely-diffused. The leftist elites and governing and managerial class in California are effectively “possessed,” in some ways far worse than Linda Blair was in that classic 1973 film, “The Exorcist.” Such folks are, as I wrote back on December 2, 2020, our present-day version of “pod people,” a “race of nomadic extraterrestrial parasites from a dying planet” (who show up in 1956’s cult movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”).  They appear as humans in nearly every way, but in fact they are possessed, warped and intellectually disfigured. They are an alien population, intent on destroying our culture and civilization, and replacing it with something far worse than that old form of decrepit Communism, which at least, even with its barbarities, had some roots in human history.

Our modern pod people—not just in California, but now spread out across the nation, in Congress, in the schools, in entertainment, perhaps now occupying the house of a neighbor—cannot be dealt with like traditional opponents. Collaboration with them, uniting with them becomes practically impossible, for they have but one motive and goal: our extinction. And they will accomplish that by any means available. And they are ceaseless and boundless in their efforts.

In the end, we must either separate ourselves from them, cordon them off (or ourselves off), or there will be an internecine bloodbath which will make the Indonesian purge of the country’s Communist Party (1965-1966), in which over one million Reds were executed by the army, seem like child’s play.

Efforts to parlay and collaborate are futile and always end by our side losing. In the end, there is no unity between good and evil, between light and darkness.

And the sooner we learn that, the better.