BEHOLD THE MONSTER YOU CREATED:
Let us also not forget that you supported the Occupy takeovers of yester-decade. You supported the state rotunda takeovers by unionized thugs. You supported the BLM riots. You supported the CHAZ in Seattle and similar secessionist movements in other cities. You supported the attacks on churches and pregnancy centers after the Dobbs ruling. You supported the Stalinist show trial against Brett Kavanaugh, as well as the mob that tried to storm the Supreme Court to prevent his swearing-in.
You supported the attack by James Hodgkinson against Republican congressmen playing baseball. You supported the attack on Rand Paul by his neighbor. You supported the campus attacks against conservative speakers and activists. You supported every random street attack against anyone wearing a MAGA hat.
You supported every act of violence, censorship, social coercion, government repression, and outright insurrection so long as it was seen as beneficial to advancing your agenda and, more importantly, as long as it never affected you personally. These shock troops are disciples of the secular religion that you — yes, you, traditional liberals — have propagated for decades. With your winks and nods, you have taught them that trampling other people’s rights in pursuit of your cause du jour is both permissible and preferable.
And the entire time, you told us that “this is what democracy looks like.”
You are who Lenin accurately referred to as “useful idiots.” But I’m not so sure that you still support what democracy “looks like,” now that it “looks like” it has reached your front yard. When they scream that they want to burn the entire country to the ground, they mean exactly that. The monster that you constructed, animated, fed, riled up, and let roam free to dispatch your political enemies is now peering through your bay window, staring at you with a ravenous look in its eyes that evinces neither “solidary” nor “inclusion” with you.
Frankenstein’s monster always comes home to his castle.
Like the New York Times deigning to report on Rev. Wright on September 24th 2008 and Hunter’s laptop in 2022, the Gray Lady’s Nicholas Kristof is finally noting that there might be an aura of a penumbra of an issue with his fellow leftists’ governing style: What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?
Why does Democratic Party governance seem less effective on the West Coast than on the East Coast?
Sometimes I wonder if the West is less serious about policy than the East and less focused on relying on the most rigorous evidence. There’s some evidence for that. But I’m not sure, for it’s also true that West Coast states have managed to innovate exceptionally well in some domains. Oregon pioneered “death with dignity” through physician-assisted suicide and led the way to vote by mail, an important step for democracy. California has some of the smartest gun safety laws in America, championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. As a result, California has a firearms death rate 40 percent below the national average.
So my take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.
I ran for governor in Oregon two years ago (I was ousted from the ballot by Oregon’s then-secretary of state, who said I didn’t meet the residency requirement). While running, I’d meet groups of liberal donors in Portland, as the city’s problems cast a shadow over all of us; we’d all be wondering nervously if our catalytic converters were in the process of being stolen. The undercurrent in such a liberal gathering would be the failures of Republicans — but Portland was one mess we couldn’t blame on Republicans, because there simply aren’t many Republicans in Portland. This was our liberal mess.
Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.
For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.
“The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has been representing and championing Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than in actual results.”
Of course, leftists have been doing an excellent job running Manhattan into the ground since 2014. As Karol Markowicz asks in the New York Post: Protesters are harassing Jews every day in NYC, when will pols protect them?