KEEP ROCKIN’! L.A. Times Columnist To People Leaving California: Don’t ‘Insult’ The Hellhole On Your Way Out.
Are you packing up and leaving California because you can’t get a burger without having your car stolen?
Just remember to not insult California after the U-Haul hits the Nevada, Arizona or Oregon borders.
That’s the message that was published Saturday by Los Angeles Times’ (which laid off 20% of its workforce on Tuesday) letters editor Paul Thornton.
“To the people leaving California: May the road rise to meet you as you seek better lives in new places. Now, can you please extend some goodwill to those of us who remain?” Thornton wrote in Saturday’s column titled, “Commentary: If you want to leave, fine. But don’t insult California on the way out.”
As for the rest of flyover country, it’s apparently fair game at the L.A. Times (or what’s left of it) to make sclerotic comparisons of it to occupied Europe during WWII, complete with a photo atop the column of a Nazi with a machine gun: Commentary: What 2024 in America has in common with Norway in 1940.
I was sitting in our apartment in Glendale, but I may as well have been on another planet that day in 1993.
My grandmother, helping me with a sixth-grade report, was vividly recalling the depredations of the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II: the rationed bread filled with sawdust, the teachers disappeared from their classrooms, the tantrum she threw on a train to thwart her older sister’s arrest by a German officer. Decades after the war, these details came to her with riveting clarity, even though she was barely a teenager when the occupation ended in May 1945.
I recall plenty from that interview with my mor mor (Norwegian for “mother’s mother”), including harrowing tales of resistance. But in 2024, with American democracy frayed and misinformation running rampant, what haunts me more than anything she said is the story of her family’s utter disbelief when the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940.
Her story makes me wonder how we’ll react if America should tip into authoritarianism. Will we be able to recognize it?
—Paul Thorton, the L.A. Times, January 13th.
Related: Woke L.A. Times Columnist is Shown No Mercy After Announcing Her Layoff on Twitter.
Yo, @jeanguerre, who called me a “white supremacist,” you’ve been canned by the broke @latimes. Bet your equally bigoted, but black colleague, @Erika_D_Smith, who called me “the black face of white supremacy,” still has a job. She’d pull out the race card in a L.A. minute.#DEI pic.twitter.com/N3fAvUXxdt
— Larry Elder (@larryelder) January 24, 2024