When progressive icon and communist dictator Mao Zedong launched his so-called Great Leap Forward (and later his Cultural Revolution) in China, he was rumored to have invoked an old French saying about cracking a few eggs to make an omelet.
In the ensuing madness, millions of the demographically disfavored in China were put to death, or starved from Mao-caused famines. Engulfed by progressive hysteria, many farmers were told to don a surgeon’s smock, as they were now surgeons, whereas many real surgeons were stripped of their duties and ordered to work the collectivized farms.
Decades later, Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom of the progressive Obama administration proudly paraphrased Mao’s famous 1949 speech in Tiananmen Square, declaring, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun. We will attempt the power of persuasion, but we will not hesitate to use the persuasion of power.”
In modern America, the closest thing to Mao’s and Obama’s progressive utopia is to be found in the sad, debauched state of California.
In the wake of the latest devastating wildfires in southern California, it has been asked repeatedly: how can California’s voters continue to vote for the likes of DIE mayor Karen Bass, a dyed-in-the-wool racist who idolized Fidel Castro and shrugged off warnings of imminent fire danger in Los Angeles in order to go party in West Africa on the taxpayers’ dime?
Or Governor Gavin Newsom, an oily narcissist with tiny, delicate hands and wide hips, for whom everything is a performative virtue-signal to the progressive left, and who obsesses over the amount of melanin people have in their skin and their choice of bedroom partners?
Newsom and Bass think it’s more important to install a woefully unqualified but outspoken lesbian as fire chief rather than promote the best qualified applicant, whether it’s a lesbian, a black or Hispanic transgender, or (gasp) a straight white male. Recall how Mao told the farmers they were now doctors, and vice versa.
The death toll from the Los Angeles area fires is now in double digits, and because Newsom and Bass were well aware of the dangers for years but did nothing to prevent the catastrophe, a strong case can be made that both are legally culpable and guilty of negligent homicide.
Newsom’s decidedly unscientific fantasy about apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming (supposedly caused by the evils of greenhouse gases and capitalism) enables him to keep the lucrative, government- and activist-driven climate change grift alive. Thus, the smelt fish lives while people die in preventable, government-caused wildfires.
They die because Gavin Newsom keeps flushing trillions of gallons of rainwater out to sea rather than building up and maintaining California’s reservoirs to fight fires.
And much of the taxpayer money supposedly allocated for firefighting infrastructure instead goes to social engineering/DIE boondoggles or disappears as untraceable graft into the bank accounts of California’s well connected, super-rich progressive elite (both in and out of government).
What do ultra-left-wing progressive celebrities in the destroyed Pacific Palisades think of all this?
Karen Bass’s fellow Fidel Castro–admirer Steven Spielberg (who was as starstruck as any fanboy upon meeting The Maximum Leader) and actor/cabana boy Tom Hanks raise money and vote for moral monsters whose grifting and progressive policies lead inexorably to despair, destruction, and death. Spielberg’s and Hanks’s homes were spared.
But why do good people of high moral fiber, such as actor Anthony Hopkins, have to lose their homes on account of all this? Or the thousands of others who lost their precious houses and businesses, their lives permanently ripped asunder by California’s DIE-obsessed Überklasse?
What about the idealistic if misguided waitress in South Central L.A. who donated a hard-earned $50 to the Kamala Harris campaign, only to see Kamala give that money to billionaire Oprah Winfrey or other celebrities from the progressive Überklasse? Is there some cognitive dissonance for the waitress, or will she mindlessly vote for Karen Bass for mayor again and Kamala for governor in 2026?
How about the sexually confused UCLA gender studies major who can quote a quackademic like Howard Zinn or Ta-Nehisi Coates as readily as Matt Damon but who, like the baizuo Damon, would never be caught dead reading Heather Mac Donald or Chris Rufo of City Journal, or Dinesh D’Souza or Douglas Murray, assuming she/he/they/zir had ever even heard of such real and heavyweight scholars?
Progressives, whether rich or poor, white or black, famous or anonymous, refuse to abide ideas or facts with which they disagree, all the better to avoid any troublesome cognitive dissonance that forces them to re-examine their totalizing Manichean assumptions about the world and human nature.
Decades ago, crackpot progressive social theories like DIE, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Queer Studies, and their endless postmodern offshoots were confined to the eccentricities of the campus, with professors outside the STEM fields parroting academic nihilists like Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Bill Ayers, and Saul Alinsky.
Unfortunately, the woke mind virus, like the COVID virus, did not stay confined to the lab or the campus. It infected all of society, but especially California, and now it’s getting lots of people killed, whether the proximate source is Boeing, the district attorney’s office, the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, or the mayor’s office in Los Angeles.
For progressive true believers, Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass might represent the apotheosis of the progressive movement. For the reality-based, they are its nadir.
The authors are brothers and previous contributors to AT.
Image: Gavin Newsom. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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