Gilbert T. Sewall

California’s derelict legions are everywhere — under bridges, near railroad tracks, blocking off-ramps and weaving unsteadily across busy avenues on bicycles.  The soft-woke rich can no longer hide in luxe enclaves. Taxpayers are fleeing the troubled state, hundreds of thousands of them since 2020. California’s fabled quality of life is taking a rapid dive, yet the cost of housing, already outlandish, goes up and up. Five years ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Martin v. Boise, declaring that municipal laws, “prohibiting sleeping outside against homeless individuals with no access to alternative shelter,” violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, thus voiding local vagrancy laws.

What possesses a great nation’s government to suddenly make transsexuality the center of its civil rights, education and juvenile health agenda? A recent White House proposal to adjust Title IX would make across-the-board school and college sports bans a civil rights violation. Sidestepping any conclusive ruling, the Supreme Court the same day allowed a twelve-year-old West Virginia transgender girl to continue competing on her middle school track and cross-country teams while legal battles work their way through lower courts. About two-thirds of Americans oppose transgendered athletics. Critics argue that they destroy women’s sports and mock Title IX’s original intent.

Remember three years ago this month when shoppers were emptying supermarket shelves and locking themselves down inside? The masking of America was beginning — and for some it has never ended. On March 4, California’s governor Gavin Newsom terminated a three-year Covid state of emergency. His Department of Public Health will end mask requirements in medical facilities, prisons and homeless shelters beginning April 3. The nation’s official public health emergency will end on May 11. Blue-state and federal authorities are having a hard time letting go of the crisis. With the end of California’s rules, the city of San Francisco — bless its heart — has instated its own mandatory masking.

California senator Dianne Feinstein, eighty-nine, whose mental decline has long been an open secret, announced her 2024 retirement last week. This comes on the heels of a stinging Sacramento Bee editorial withholding endorsement for her replacement and an accelerating race for her seat. Senator Feinstein has no public plans to resign. She says she will serve out her full term, preventing an appointment by Governor Gavin Newsom. Efforts to force her out of office early will persist. When Feinstein ran for the Senate in 2018, she obtained just 54 percent of the primary vote against fellow Democrat Kevin de León, a widely despised figure in California politics, now clinging to his Los Angeles city council seat after being exposed as a cutthroat diversity fraud.

No doubt California’s extreme weather makes for dramatic television, and for climate eschatologists it stirs up another round of end-times unease. California cliffs tumbling onto highways and sinkholes appearing out of nowhere have been all over the news. Lowland and flood plains are underwater up and down the state. Dry creeks have been raging torrents. One Guardian headline goes, “California’s rainstorm hell ‘among the most deadly disasters in our history.’” California governor Gavin Newsom tweets, “California is proof that the climate crisis is real and we have to take it seriously.” Both the media and Governor Newsom should get a grip. There is no evidence that climate change is to blame for these heavy rains. California has long suffered from extreme weather.

A secret hour-long recording of an October 2021 meeting of Los Angeles city politicos surfaced last week, as California’s midterm election ballots arrived in the mail. Taking the city and nation by storm, the leaked audio exposed the cutthroat racial politics and deceit of elected officials who pretend to be tribunes of diversity. Los Angeles city council president Nury Martinez, councilman Kevin de León, and Ron Herrera, head of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, were caught red-handed, plotting to increase Latino political power through proposed re-districting. Amid talking about who’ll help and hinder la raza, Martinez stated in Spanish that white, gay council member Mike Bonin’s adopted black child had acted “like a little monkey" at a parade.

In a primetime television address on September 1, President Joe Biden declared that a large share of the nation’s voters threatened the “very soul of America.” This creepy, unprecedented presidential alert opened the midterm elections, which are now going into their mail-in phase. Waving his arms, the presidential simulacrum barked imprecations at teleprompters. His spooky, dark, red-and-blue tableau with stiff Marines in parade dress was ominous and intentionally staged. To hear a president talk and act this way was one of the political shocks of a lifetime. Make America Great Again Republicans, it was indicated, constituted an enemy within, Merrick Garland’s domestic terrorists writ large. Be very afraid.

On August 9, a crazy homeless woman riled by community activists stormed a Los Angeles city council meeting, shouting obscenities and threats at members, closing the assembly down. A proposed ban on homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools had been on the table. For the city’s extremists, ‘criminalising homelessness’ is cause for mayhem. Last week, a thuggish mob shut an entire downtown Los Angeles street after midnight, ransacking a 7-Eleven and injuring the sole cashier. Residents citywide fear a future of unprosecuted criminal raids, ‘street takeovers’, and organised looting. Central Los Angeles is awash in homicides, break-ins, carjacks, shoplifting, and vandalism.

As the war on normal escalates, and a silent majority nationwide grows weary of blue-state chaos, GOP opportunities in the midterm elections and 2024 are vast. But Donald J. Trump and his client army stand in the way of broad Republican victories, impeding the revival of values — freedom, faith, and family — they brandish exclusively as their own. Trump empowers the progressive left. Red-Meat Republicans and Devil-Trump Democrats are locked in a never-ending scorpion dance. For many voters, especially women, Trump’s astonishing boorishness preempts policy evaluation. The nation is the loser. Nonetheless, Donald J. Trump has millions of devotees who — fed up with gilded deceit and leftist disdain — like his crazy.