No earthquake has yet sent California crashing into the sea, but the state continues to radically fall off the Left edge of mainland U.S. culture.
Two more items in the news today show this trend.
First comes word that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed legislation literally barring presidential candidates, such as Donald Trump, from the state’s primary ballot if they do not release their tax returns.
Yes, you read that correctly. California lawmakers are going to deny their own citizens the opportunity to vote for the presidential candidate of their choice based on a burdensome, privacy-invading requirement applicable nowhere else in the country. Sure, some of us may think the presidency is such a unique office that public transparency should be served via the release of a president’s tax returns. But for one state to insist on it, thus denying tens of millions of its own citizens the chance to make the most important vote they can cast, is outrageously undemocratic.
Even the numbers-crunching pundit Nate Silver, nobody’s idea of a conservative or a Trump fan, said this is “a terrible, anti-democratic idea and California should be embarrassed.”
Secondly, not content with trashing democracy, California, through its education department, is attacking capitalism as well. As noted in a Wall Street Journal column by longtime education reformer Williamson Evers, the state’s draft “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” which is self-defined as the “xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity,” describes capitalism “as a ‘form of power and oppression,’ alongside ‘patriarchy,’ ‘racism,’ ‘white supremacy’ and ‘ableism.’”
Amid a document full of loony lingo such as “positionalities,” “hybridities,” “nepantlas,” “misogynoir,” and “cis-heteropatriarchy,” the document all but glorifies Puerto Rican terrorists, convicted cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur, and other radicals, while somehow teaching mathematics in the context of “social justice.”
In sum, the curriculum effectively teaches that the entire economic system is benighted, violent change is valid, and America is evil.
Combined, these education standards and the assault on democratic choice amount to a self-parody of anti-American lunacy. If Californians don’t watch out, their next stop may be Venezuela.
