February 9, 2025

HOW IT STARTED: In Adam Carolla’s epic rant from a hotel room on January 8th as the Pacific Palisades Fire was rampaging through Los Angeles, he predicted:

You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all voted for Gavin Newsom, and now you fucking get what you get. now that your house is on fire. So here’s what’s going to happen. All these people who are deep blue Democrats are now going to have to pull a permit to rebuild, and they’re going to get the 28 year old bitch from the Coastal Commission telling them to go f*** off and then they’re going to vote for Trump or whoever’s Trumpian next. When they start getting the regulation, they’re going to go nuts. And when they start running into the bureaucracy and the red tape, they’re going to start going nuts and they’re going to vote for Rick Caruso next time.

How it’s going:

In his emailed daily Commentary newsletter on Thursday, Abe Greenwald noted:

Part of the fun of getting into conservative thought (particularly if you’re moving away from liberalism) is discovering that counterintuitive ideas can be morally sound and effective. For former liberals, this can strike with the force of epiphany. To take a basic example: reducing or reforming welfare. The intuitive approach is to provide those in need directly with the means to purchase goods and services. What you learn, however, is that this kind of assistance has the unintended consequence of creating a class of dependents who don’t find work or meaning in their lives. So the counterintuitive approach—reducing welfare and incentivizing productivity and responsibility—turns out actually to help people.

There many circumstances in which conservatives can make the case that counterintuitive policies have been or should be vindicated. Lowering taxes on high-income earners can increase tax revenues, giving excess foreign aid can hurt poorly governed countries, affirmative action can harm minority students, and so on.

It’s gripping when you first realize that doing the obvious thing isn’t the same as doing the right thing. But there’s a downside to embracing this two-step thinking: It’s a hard sell. You need to convince people to take an intellectual leap and forgo the quick fix.

* * * * * * * *

If you want to know why, for the first time in 30 years, more Americans identify as Republican than Democrat, it’s because Republicans have been given the easy task of asserting intuitive common sense in a country whose leaders got high on reality-altering theories. It’s now liberals who have to explain why, even though every instinct tells you its monstrous, its ultimately good to toy with children’s gender. Why your daughter should face-off against a boy on the playing field. Why, even though, we have a massive illegal-immigration crisis, it’s ultimately good to keep criminals in the country that they entered illegally. Why, it’s ultimately good to spend your money on a Peruvian transgender comic book.

If it was hard for conservatives to argue for worthy counterintuitive ideas, think how hard it is for liberals to argue for ruinous ones. Watching them try is as fun as discovering conservatism all over again.

Homeowners in Los Angeles looking to rebuild are really going to get it gooder and harder from Newsom, a reactionary environmentalist who hates all brands of Big Oil except Brylcreem. Will they continue to toe the party line? (If San Francisco over the last half century is any indication, of course they will. But 2025 is a reminder that there is an alternative.)

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll