I think it is appropriate, when earned, to offer praise to elected and other government officials when they have acted in the defense of liberty. Sometimes it’s baby steps, sometimes it’s putting on the armor of liberty, and standing face to face with those who would destroy that strength of this country, that is, that unique form of American liberty that, while under attack in our modern era, has survived longer than any other country in any other time.
So first, to Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County — Thank you for announcing you would not make criminals of law abiding citizens. I represented Riverside County for 14 years in the Legislature. I know the people of that County, they are good people who struggle every day to make their life, and the lives of their family, better. Many of them spend hours a day on the freeway, abandoned by traffic planners in Sacramento and Riverside County government, just to get back and forth to work. They don’t deserve to face the threat of arrest for doing what is necessary to feed their family. More of the state’s Sheriffs should have the courage to do what you did, Sheriff Bianco.
To the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, thanks for the baby steps, but don’t fool yourselves, they were only baby steps. You should do what Yuba, Sutter and Modoc County did, ignore the Governor’s order. I congratulate you for standing up, like a baby, in a wobbly defense of liberty. It is deserving of praise because it was something.
Which leads to the theme of this article, the hypocrisy of our Arrogant-Lazy-Authoritarian-in-Chief (ALAIC), Gavin Newsom. The electrons had barely stopped flashing on his announcement that he needed federal money to “survive” the COVID-19 crisis (a crisis of his own creation) when he told Yuba, Sutter, and Modoc County that he would withhold “federal disaster aid” to those counties if they didn’t follow his orders. This is the same guy that complained that the Feds were wrong in withholding money because California became a “sanctuary state,” that is, a state acting in blatant disregard of long-standing, constitutionally enacted immigration laws. He gets upset because local officials stand up for long-standing, constitutionally protected individual rights and liberties, and choose to ignore his unconstitutional, ill-considered executive orders, orders never considered, debated, or enacted by the Legislature. Our ALAIC Newsom is operating our entire government by executive fiat, using the “emergency that never was” as the justification of those orders.
He once announced that “this administration practices what we preach,” yet every member of his administration, including the ALAIC Newsom, is getting their paycheck, and to protect that paycheck and their bureaucratic fiefdoms, they are demanding the federal government borrow money from me and my children to pay for their failure to properly address the COVID-19 situation.
They forcibly close down business, threaten the licenses to operate of those businesses, forcing the employees of those businesses, hundreds of thousands of people, onto the public dole, but continue to collect their paycheck. They force these business owners to lay off their employees, but lay off none of their own.
For the next year, all we are going to hear is how difficult it is going to be for the state government, how they are going to have to make difficult decisions, and how devastating the cuts will be to these necessary programs. Never forget, the deficit created by ALAIC’s orders was all so avoidable. Who will hold ALAIC Newsom accountable for his unconstitutional and unnecessary wielding of executive power? Certainly no one in the mainstream media. They are too busy being the propaganda arm of his authoritarian regime. Certainly not the Democrat-controlled Legislature. They are too busy practicing to be arrogant lazy authoritarians themselves, and protecting ALAIC Newsom from public criticism is the key to the maintenance of their power and position.
In 2017, I wrote a series of articles (check the Flash Report history), half satire and half dystopic, about California after it seceded from the US, as was being threatened by a group of citizens then. I joked about the wall that California would build around itself to keep its citizens in the state, after the state took control of every aspect of the lives of the citizens residing there. Illegal seizing of property, trampling of individual political and economic liberty, unchecked exercise of the power of government, hypocrisy of the left, living how they wished while they trampled on the economic well-being of everyone else. When I wrote those articles, I thought it could happen, but I thought I would have left California before it did. Boy, was I wrong