JOEL KOTKIN AND MARSHALL TOPLANSKY: Engineered California.

“Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.”

—Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi,” 1970

Nothing so illustrates the mindset of green politics, particularly in California, as the word “natural,” which is taken to mean unspoiled, pure, and better than the workings of man. Yet few places are as fundamentally artificial, if measured by its dependency on human intervention, as California.

So why do California’s progressives, and so many others, yearn for what the historian Leo Marx dubbed the “pastoral ideal”? Much has to do with the state’s rapid population growth from 1.5 million in 1900 to nearly 40 million today, which resulted in a regime of environmental rapine that many still living experienced.

California would not exist in anything like its modern form without massive engineering. Largely dominated by desert, flammable, dry chaparral and high mountains, California depends on human-created technology to bring water to its bone-dry coast. It taps distant dams for the bulk of its electricity and food and would have never grown its population without this manufactured transformation of its natural environment. “Science,” as the University of California’s second president, Daniel Coit Gilman, put it, “is the mother of California.”

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Equally missing is a clear appreciation of the economic effects of the state’s green policies. Historically, California’s public works—the freeways, aqueduct, power stations—were designed to grow the opportunity horizon for the majority by boosting the economy, creating opportunities for new production, and forging new communities. The current policy agenda, in contrast, has proven catastrophic for many middle and working class families.

Attorney Jennifer Hernandez has demonstrated in a recent report for the Breakthrough Institute what she calls “the green Jim Crow.“ Pushed by overwhelmingly white billionaires, these policies have escalated housing and energy prices, driving jobs and people out of the state. This has hurt minorities in particular, she claims, “deepening the state’s shameful legacy of racial injustice.”

Read the whole thing.

Found via Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger John Schroeder, who writes, “The modern environmental movement is built on false philosophical premises – that mankind is apart from nature, that nature is static, and many others. What I find most fascinating about all this, is the adoption of such false philosophical premises is rooted in a presumption of god-like status for mankind. For Christians, seeking such a status is the very root and beginning of the concept of sin.”

NEVER LET THE CRISIS YOU’RE PLANNING GO TO WASTE: Biden says U.S. needs more funding for next pandemic.

BREAKING: The Gun Bill Just Dropped. It’s the GOP’s First Step to Blowing Slam-Dunk Midterms.

THE ATLANTIC MORPHED INTO THE BABYLON BEE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: In Defense of Naked Joe Biden.

HEH, INDEED:

OUT ON A LIMB: WHO chief ‘believes Covid DID leak from Wuhan lab’ after a ‘catastrophic accident’ in 2019 despite publicly maintaining ‘all hypotheses remain on the table.’

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After ‘Lightyear’ Bombs, Disney Quietly Cancels Their Upcoming Movie ‘Brokeback Woody.’

IT’S COME TO THIS: Christian policeman faces disciplinary action in Australia after posting ‘there are 2’ genders.

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: The coming blackouts. Do NOT say you were not warned.

KINSLEY GAFFE:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

KAMALA IS A COP: Kamala Harris’s zombie disinformation board — A bad idea that won’t go away.

GET WOKE…: Disney Stock Has Tumbled Nearly 50 Percent as Audiences Turn Away.

TUCKER CARLSON: “We’re scarred by what we saw last week. It’ll be a long time before we can revisit the Capitol again. It’s going to take a lot of therapy before we can recapture the carefree innocence Stephen Colbert stole from us.”

#HIMTOO? Oscar-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis arrested in Italy on sexual assault charges. “Haggis, 69, wrote ‘Million Dollar Baby’ and co-wrote and directed crime drama ‘Crash.’ He won two Oscars for ‘Crash’ — one for ‘Best Picture’ and one for ‘Best Original Screenplay.’ In 2018 he denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by four women, including two who accused him of rape.”

DEMOCRAT MAYOR SUCKER PUNCHED TO THE GROUND AT JUNETEENTH EVENT:

NEWS YOU CAN USE: When Asked ‘What Are Your Pronouns,’ Don’t Answer.

The redefining of “man,” “woman,” “boy” and “girl” around sex-related stereotypes has serious real-world implications. The rejection of these stereotypes is now commonly viewed as a medical condition (gender dysphoria) to be treated with puberty blockers (for children), cross-sex hormones and surgeries that result in permanent sterility and consign patients to a lifetime of medical bills. The redefinition is also threatening the safety of women in prisons, as well as compromising the safety, fairness and dignity of women and girls in sports, as males who simply “identify” as girls or women are allowed access to these protected spaces.

The effort to resist gender ideology is reality’s last stand. We simply can’t ignore fundamental realities of our biology and expect positive outcomes for society. Pronoun rituals are extremely effective at normalizing and institutionalizing the abolition of biological sex in favor of gender identity. These rituals take advantage of people’s confusion and compassion to achieve compliance. But the time for politeness has long passed. The only proper response to the question “What are your pronouns?” is to reject the premise and refuse to answer.

Read the whole thing.

WE NEED MORE JUNETEENTHS: Anything that gets the federal government to stop ‘working.’

Sunday was Juneteenth, a day named in honor of an event that took place on June Nine-teenth (see what they did there?) but is being observed this year on June Twent-ieth (see what they didn’t do there?).

The name of this holiday is one of its least confusing attributes. Despite being identified as a nearly 160-year-old celebration — it commemorates June 19, 1865, when the last slaves in Texas were informed of their freedom — it was only recognized as a federal holiday last year. By President Joe Biden.

Why making Juneteenth a federal holiday didn’t occur to Barack Obama, our nation’s first black president, and why Biden coincidentally chose to make it one following the 2020 riots surrounding George Floyd’s death, is a mystery for the ages. Though CNN enlightens us, “the Black Lives Matter movement propelled Juneteenth into the national spotlight.”

Still though, there is a downside:

STAY TUNED: The Next War? “It is very likely the case that the next major war has started. No—I don’t mean the Russia-Ukraine War, which could yet spread to the rest of Europe if we’re unlucky. I mean the Israel-Iran War.”

HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER: Elon Musk Lays Off LGBTQ Employees At Tesla During Pride Month?!?!!?

In sharp contrast: Pride Month: Here’s How the Navy Is Training Sailors on Proper Gender Pronouns.

With Putin in Ukraine and the CCP looking at swallowing up Taiwan, I’m really glad the US Navy is focusing on the important issues right now.

IT’S A RIDDLE, WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY, INSIDE AN ENIGMA: California Democrats to investigate cause of high gas prices.

With California drivers paying more than $6 for a gallon of gas and state officials deadlocked for months over how to provide relief, lawmakers in the state Assembly on Monday announced they would investigate oil companies they say are “abusing a historic situation to suck profits from Californians’ wallets.”

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced a bipartisan committee to investigate gas price gouging, with plans to question oil companies, regulators and economists to find out why California’s gas prices are consistently the highest in the country.

California’s gas prices are currently the highest in the U.S., with the average price per gallon at $6.40 on Monday compared to the national average of $4.98.

“We have put ourselves in a situation because of our addiction to the gas-powered engine. Yet that is no excuse for the actions of those who pin California drivers down with a foot on our necks and a hand in our pockets,” Rendon said.

So Rendon will be blocking this, right? California gas tax rising July 1; GOP slams Newsom over lack of relief.

Evergreen:

ASHLEY BIDEN’S DIARY REVEALS JOE BIDEN MAY BE CREEPIER THAN WE THOUGHT:

Tucker Carlson opened his Friday show with a segment on Ashley Biden’s diary. The part of the diary discussed revealed that Joe Biden is creepier than we thought.

Ashley Biden is Joe Biden’s daughter. She inadvertently left her diary under the bed at a halfway house, and the lady who found the diary, Aimee Harris, sold the diary to the media. It was not stolen. But now, some of the revelations from the Daily Mail, which has a copy of the diary, are damning…and reveal definitively that Joe Biden should not be the President of the United States. An investigation should be warranted, but nothing is likely to happen. The Bidens are a protected family.

As with the Hunter story, the diary contents began to leak out when National File got a copy of the diary and exposed it under the title of “Biden Daughter’s Diary Details ‘Not Appropriate’ Showers With Joe As Child.”

Flashback: Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents, Book Claims.

MEANWHILE, IN GERMANY: Germany’s Die Linke (Left) party is in crisis.

Born in 2005 from the merger of an East-German left faction and a smaller West-German one, Die Linke’s support skyrocketed to 12 percent of the vote in 2009’s elections to the Bundestag, a level of support the party maintained for nearly a decade—to the alarm of the political establishment. More recently, however, the party’s electoral support and labor-union base have shrunk. In last year’s elections, Die Linke garnered less than 5 percent of ballots and lost nearly half its seats—its worst result ever. Its share of the union vote slid to 6 percent, down from 17 percent in 2009.

Until recently, Sahra Wagenknecht was one of Die Linke’s most prominent members. Catapulted to the Bundestag in 2009, she was a deputy leader of the party from 2010 to 2014. In the Bundestag, she served as parliamentary co-chairwoman of her party from 2015 to 2019 and as leader of the opposition (against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition) until 2017.

Wagenknecht announced her resignation as parliamentary leader in November 2019, citing burnout. Yet many believe her decision was at least partly motivated by the party becoming increasingly captured by the kind of “progressive neoliberalism” (to borrow Nancy Fraser’s term) that seems to have infected, to one degree or another, all Western left-wing parties, precipitating their decline.

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It’s no wonder, she argues, that “the left today no longer stands for justice in the eyes of many people, but above all for self-righteousness.” The instinctive repulsion many ordinary people feel for the left nowadays is, of course, one of the main reasons for its electoral decline. However, the truth is even more uncomfortable, Wagenknecht suggests: Lower-middle working classes today tend to overwhelmingly vote for right-wing figures and parties, such as France’s Marine Le Pen and Law and Justice in Poland, because the latter tend to offer more redistributive and pro-labor—that is, more “left-wing”—economic platforms than nominally left parties.

To reverse this decline, Wagenknecht makes the case for what she calls “left conservatism”: a left that returns to its original mission of improving the lives of the working and middle classes but also understands that doing so means rejecting globalism—turning, instead, to the democratic nation-state as the only terrain on which it is possible to collectively challenge capitalism. Such a left appreciates that states should take care of the well-being of their own citizens, especially the most underprivileged, before they can for newcomers from far-flung places. Such a left, finally, recognizes people’s need for “recognition, belonging, and community.”

So a more nationalist-oriented socialism for Germany, then. What could possibly go wrong?

HOW TRAUMA BECAME A POLITICAL TOOL: The left’s new battleground is the psyche.

A culture that once avoided talk of mental health is now openly celebrating people who speak candidly about their psychic wounds—even or especially when they are the type of people who are known to us all because they perform labors that seem somewhat superhuman. When Olympic gymnast Simone Biles abruptly withdrew from several events at the 2021 Tokyo games, she cited the ongoing suffering she has experienced as a victim of sexual abuse. Nearly all the stories about her decision praised Biles for taking a mental-health break, even though it likely cost the Olympic team gold medals. Likewise, when the number-two ranked women’s tennis player, Naomi Osaka, withdrew from both Wimbledon and the French Open, claiming mental-health challenges, she was lionized for speaking out.

The word that is used to describe their pain is “trauma,” classically defined as a lingering and haunted response to a terrible experience such as assault, natural disaster, serious accident, or some other deeply disturbing event.

Experts praised both Biles and Osaka for putting “emotional wellness” ahead of everything else, but rather than acknowledge that athletes like them are the exception—since they had chosen to take on the mental and physical challenges that elite competition poses—experts used their experiences to argue that similar kinds of trauma were pervasive and growing. Trauma “has nefarious and wide-spread tentacles,” Margo Lindauer, associate clinical professor at Northeastern University, told one news outlet. “The impacts of trauma are ongoing and unexpected and can rear up in all sorts of different ways.”

Today, trauma diagnoses have moved far beyond the realm of individual clinical expertise to take on outsize significance as an explanation for a broad array of social, cultural, and political problems. A popular book about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 150 weeks. In it, the author explores the physiological and neurological impact of trauma on patients who had been clinically diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and he claims that therapies such as mindfulness yoga, art, and dance are effective in treating them.

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Today, trauma diagnoses have moved far beyond the realm of individual clinical expertise to take on outsize significance as an explanation for a broad array of social, cultural, and political problems. A popular book about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 150 weeks. In it, the author explores the physiological and neurological impact of trauma on patients who had been clinically diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and he claims that therapies such as mindfulness yoga, art, and dance are effective in treating them.

And speaking of Lorenz, she’s had quite a Sunday: Dad who barely survived COVID makes Taylor Lorenz look like even more of a jacka*s for shaming Matt Yglesias for ‘joking’ about catching COVID.

As Twitchy readers know, Taylor Lorenz went after Matt Yglesias for making light of his catching COVID because apparently when someone catches it they CAN NOT JOKE ABOUT IT because God forbid anyone cope with humor. We’re not entirely sure what bug crawled up her backside years ago but whatever it was, yikes.

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She went on to shame an actual COVID survivor, and not just any survivor but someone who was in a coma and has experienced life-changing effects from the virus she doesn’t want anyone joking about. User @Real_Life_Dad shared his experience with Lorenz perhaps in the hope that she’d figure out it’s ok to keep your sense of humor about well, any and everything. It’s how some of us actually get through the worst of times.

Ahem.

Lorenz replied with an all-time showstopper:

“Lateral ableism” — followed by a lateral mike drop:

To be fair, that’s setting the bar awfully low.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Biden says decision on gas tax holiday may come this week.

President Joe Biden said Monday that he’s considering a federal holiday on the gasoline tax, possibly saving U.S. consumers as much as 18.4 cents a gallon.

“Yes, I’m considering it,” Biden told reporters after taking a walk along the beach near his vacation home in Delaware. “I hope to have a decision based on the data — I’m looking for by the end of the week.”

The administration is increasingly looking for ways to spare the public from higher prices at the pump, which began to climb last year and surged after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Gas prices nationwide are averaging just under $5 a gallon, according to AAA.

Why would he do that? Biden calls paying higher taxes a patriotic act.

● Treasury Sec. Yellen says only way to fix energy crisis is to ‘move to renewables.’

● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?

● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep have called for higher gas taxes.

“We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden:  As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

UPDATE: Then-candidate Obama, on his way to becoming Biden’s boss for eight years, derided Hillary’s gas tax holiday ‘gimmick’ in 2008.

(Updated and bumped.)

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Los Angeles County somehow looks at reinstating mask mandates.