Governor Newsom's latest shutdown order closes down small businesses and warns residents to stay at home if their area's number of available beds in intensive care units drops below 15%.

“By invoking a Stay at Home Order for regions where ICU capacity falls below 15 percent, we can flatten the curve as we’ve done before and reduce stress on our health care system," Governor Newsom, fresh from partying at the French Laundry, declared.

Spring had given way to summer and then to autumn and winter, and California Democrats are still using the pretext of preserving “ICU capacity” and “flattening the curve”. The rationale of shutting down an entire state, not so much for the sake of stopping the virus, but for keeping enough beds open in intensive care units, never made much sense even back then.

It’s insane now.

What did Governor Newsom and California Democrats do to increase ICU capacity?

In April, California had 7,345 ICU beds. Now, in December, it has 7,881.

In under eight months, the wealthiest state only managed to add 536 ICU beds. Or 7%.

In April, Newsom was bragging that California was so prepared that it began donating hundreds of ventilators to other states.

“Let me just make this clear, we are preparing for a scenario where we need 50,000 beds," he boasted.

Fast forward to December and the entire state has to be shut down (except for certain privileged industries, like Hollywood) because Newsom only managed to increase ICU capacity by 7%.

In June, the Democrat State Senate proposed a $200 billion budget. By the summer, California had received $71 billion from the federal government. So much federal money poured into the corrupt Democrat machine that the state’s auditor warned it was at high risk for fraud and waste.

In March, Newsom had announced that $500 million would be spent to do everything from increasing bed capacity to buying medical equipment to protecting nursing home residents.

And, of course, the top priority in California, care for the homeless.

Later, $600 million in federal funding would be spent on yet more housing for the homeless.

By the spring, California hospitals were claiming $14 billion in losses because they had to clear out the hospitals and postpone elective surgeries to maintain enough beds. Some of those elective surgeries were actually urgent and the death toll from postponing them is unknown.

That same policy led to Governor Newsom signing an order, which was described by nursing home advocates as a “death sentence”, forcing skilled nursing facilities to accept infected patients. So far, 6,709 coronavirus deaths have taken place at California nursing homes.

Nursing home patients have accounted for 34% of coronavirus deaths in California.

And, after all that, Governor Newsom has done next to nothing to increase ICU bed capacity while imposing another series of lockdowns, businesses going out of business, and people who can’t feed their families, while Newsom lectures them like children about washing their hands.

Democrats keep claiming that the shutdowns are happening because people don’t follow the rules. But their own metric, ICU capacity, makes it abundantly clear that they failed miserably.

Governor Newsom and the Democrats based everything around ICU capacity, and gifted with incomprehensible amounts of money and the better part of a year, they only raised it by 7%.

It’s almost as if they wanted a pretext for another shutdown. Or they’re corrupt and incompetent.

This is after all the same Democrat government that was spending $746,000 per unit on housing for the homeless after raking in billions to solve the problem of housing the homeless. It’s also the same government that does nothing to increase water capacity, but regularly declares a drought, reduces power capacity to save the planet, and then lets the blackouts roll.

But, unlike California’s refusal to do anything about the water and power situation, there’s no environmental pretext for doing so little to increase ICU capacity. Not a public one anyway.

Nor has the media found the time to actually cover that obscenely absurd 7% number.

But it has plenty of time to cover every single viral video of a person walking into a store without a mask, and every sanctimonious politician’s speech about the importance of masks.

When Governor Newsom and local Democrats claim that businesses have to shut down and children can’t play on playgrounds because of ICU capacity, no one in the media asks why, after all those billions of dollars, the state only added an average of 67 ICU beds a month.

Every California government agency tells the public to wear a mask more times a day than that.

The same Democrat politicians who kept warning that California would have to shut down if it hit ICU capacity did little to actually boost that capacity. It’s almost as if they wanted the shutdown.

California Democrats would rather pay out billions in unemployment than actually have thriving small businesses employing workers. That’s not a conspiracy theory: it’s a policy choice.

Just like letting Hollywood film crews eat outdoors while shutting down local restaurants, or keeping playgrounds closed and tennis courts open, or closing churches and synagogues while keeping pot dispensaries open, and keeping schools closed while BLM riots get a pass.

And these are policy choices that they should be held accountable for.

Once California Democrats made ICU capacity into the metric for a shutdown, they had the responsibility to increase that capacity. Instead they spent eight months shaking their fingers in the faces of the public, while partying at the French Laundry behind their backs.

Meanwhile they blew through the equivalent of Turkey’s national budget with little to show for it.

Californians, like people living under blue state rule around the country, were told that they had to flatten the curve to be free. Thousands of nursing home residents became human sacrifices to free up hospital beds for infected patients and maintain the metrics of ICU capacity.

But it wasn’t the public that failed to protect ICU capacity: it was Newsom and the Democrats.

Governor Newsom and Democrats keep trying to blame the lockdowns on the “irresponsible behavior” of the public. They were the ones who had month after month to prepare for a surge that they knew was coming, and all they have to show for it is a 7% increase in ICU beds.

Now they’re shutting down the state because it’s not meeting an artificial metric that they put into place and then did next to nothing to address while blowing through billions in cash.

It’s the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Except the grasshopper is bankrupting the ant.

The ICU capacity metric was built to fail. Just like California’s water and power, the ruling Democrats create disasters, and respond with rationing and misery, while blaming the public.

When there is a dry winter, as this one is likely to be, they don’t take the blame for failing to build dams, instead they blame the public for using too much water. When blackouts take down power across entire neighborhoods, they don’t take the blame for reducing reliable power sources and replacing them with worthless solar and wind boondoggles, instead they blame the public for not caring about the planet by running air conditioners in 110 degree weather.

Now, after almost a year of this circus, the same gang of corrupt clowns who did next to nothing to increase ICU capacity are blaming the shutdown on Californians not wearing enough masks.

California Democrats have stolen and squandered the natural wealth of an incredible state, and whenever a disaster happens, they scold the public for not being willing enough to live in misery.

The latest lockdowns may be flattening another curve: tolerance for these corrupt lying scolds.

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah has two major symbols: the menorah and the dreidel.

The menorah, a candelabra with eight branches, and one light above, memorializes the liberation of the Temple from the religious persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Syrian-Greek ruler who had outlawed Judaism, and the other a spinning top recollects how Jewish children learning the word of G-d in the banned ‘hedge schools’ of ancient Israel would take out tops and pretend to be playing games when Antiochus’ inspectors arrived.

American Jewish children had lit menorahs and spun their dreidels for generations without imagining that an Antiochus would arise in America. Let alone that he would arise in New York.

In 2020, Chanukah came early when another abominable tyrant, fresh from killing 11,000 nursing home residents by forcing facilities to accept infected coronavirus patients, decided to adopt the medieval habit of blaming the virus on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. A swarm of inspectors from every department were sent out to schools and then to the hidden schools.

And in 21st century America, children huddled in basements, afraid to make a noise, and then, if Cuomo’s men found them, were ready to claim that they weren’t in school, just playing games.

A month before Chanukah and Christmas, the Supreme Court's conservative justices, three of them appointed by President Trump, delivered a Christmas present in Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo and a Chanukah present in Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo. Like his Syrian-Greek predecessor, Cuomo furiously raged at the restraint imposed on his power.

Cuomo’s hatred for religion is driven by the same mad idolization that had led Antiochus to take Epiphanes, ‘the visible god’, as part of his name. Antiochus had put idols in the temple, Cuomo had placed his self-idolizing coronavirus memoir into the windows of every bookstore.

That egotistical hatred of a G-d that isn’t a culture war idol, that isn’t named Cuomo, Obama, or Ginsberg, is why the battle for religious freedom is far from over in this longest of Chanukahs.

When the pandemic lockdowns arrived, I was still completing the mourning year for my mother. In Jewish tradition, losing a parent ushers in a year of grief. I did not listen to music or attend parties, and I spent an hour each day traveling to synagogue to lead prayer services in her memory. The recital of the Kaddish, praising G-d, is said to uplift the souls of the deceased.

And then all the synagogues were forced to close.

In a dark time when the New York Post dispatches undercover investigators to do Cuomo’s work for him and spy on Jewish weddings, when the media breathlessly digs up tales of secret prayer gatherings (“Post the names and addresses, expose them,” a quote in one Los Angeles article read, “If you have information and say nothing then you could be endangering lives”), few dare to speak of the underground prayer railroad. But what more needs to be said of the state of 21st century America than that there were underground churches and synagogues.

My mother was born in the Soviet Union. As a teenager, she had terrified her parents, who had witnessed their family members being imprisoned and executed, by rejecting Communism. After being expelled from school and barred from higher education, she had joined the Jewish underground networks that had gathered together in homes to sing Jewish songs, to illegally copy Hebrew dictionaries, commemorate the Holocaust, and covertly bake Matza for Passover.

Americans tend to think of such a loss of freedom as an alien and unimaginable state. This year taught us how thin the line that divides us from the age of Antiochus or the age of Stalin really is.

For now, the synagogues are open again and many of the religious schools in Los Angeles are teaching students though some, in an echo of the dreidel, are operating officially as day camps.

The Supreme Court decision that halted some of the declarations by the modern Antiochus and his Democrat peers that religion, unlike cannabis dispensaries and film shoots, is non-essential, would not have happened if President Trump and Senate Republicans hadn’t put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. When religious freedom hangs by the fraying thread of a single justice, even as Democrats plot to seize Georgia Senate seats and pack the court, then it’s hardly there even if for the moment some of the worst Democrat depredations were halted.

The tragic truth is that if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were alive today, Chanukah would be cancelled. It would be cancelled with the connivance of her, and of Justice Breyer and Justice Kagan, much as Christmas would be cancelled with the connivance of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor. The irony of Tikkunolamists of Jewish descent lighting a menorah shaped like Ginsburg, to honor an activist who would have cancelled Chanukah escapes them, much as the problem with sacrificing pigs in the temple baffled Antiochus’ Jewish collaborators

Tikkunolamism is the modern Hellenism, a militant pagan secularism that idolizes utopian culture heroes while disdaining the intangible idea of the holy presence of an unseen G-d.

Antiochus placed idols in the temple and ordered that pigs be sacrificed because he only understood religion as power. To defile something sacred was to wield power over it. In their culture wars, leftists follow the same obsessive pattern of degradation, using elephant dung and urine on Christian symbols, draping naked women in the symbols of the Jewish faith, ridiculing Chanukah in the pages of the New York Times, and making the menorah into a mockery.

And when that doesn’t work, there’s always compulsion under the guise of a greater good.

Antiochus had taken the surname Epiphanes, meaning ‘the visible god’, to mock the invisible G-d. But the power of G-d had made a mockery of his armies, his blasphemies, and his rule.

The power of Chanukah, and of faith, is in the unseen, from the force that caused a single flask of oil to burn in the Menorah for eight days, to the covert Torah being studied by the children as they pretended to spin a top, to the hidden omnipotent might of an unseen G-d.

And this year, the suppression of public prayers made us appreciate them all the more.

Religious freedom and all that comes with it is all too often taken for granted. It can be difficult to relate to our ancestors who sacrificed so much for their faith when we don’t need to sacrifice. When the mandates, decrees, and lockdowns came down, we saw the unseen, the preciousness and precariousness of our religious freedom, that we had taken for granted.

Out of the dark times, we experienced the smallest taste of what our ancestors had endured to keep the faith, and through that renewed the meaning to be found in holidays like Chanukah.

Religious people respond to religious persecution by seeing the unseen. It is the unseen that is the source of faith in a world that places its confidence in material power above all else. And the insights and the might of the unseen make a mockery of the worst of that blasphemous power.

Another Chanukah arrives in a world in which Antiochus can be found in Albany, New York, in which the synagogues and schools open today might be forced to be shut tomorrow, and in which the ideological faction that makes a point of defiling Chanukah along with most religion, which would close most houses of worship if it could, plots to lay claim to the White House.

When George Washington visited the family of a Jewish officer, a story relates that he told them of first encountering the Menorah in the hands of a Jewish soldier at Valley Forge.

"Perhaps we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. I rejoice in the Maccabees' success, though it is long past,'' Washington had supposedly said. "It pleases me to think that miracles still happen."

Even in the darkest period of a dark year, we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. Neither the trials nor the triumphs of faith are long past. And miracles still happen.

When California store owners turned to voters to criminalize shoplifting again with Proposition 20, they never had much of a chance once Patricia Quillin threw in $2 million against them.

When Quillin paid $1 million to support Proposition 16, Asian-American opponents of the proposition, which would legalize racial discrimination against them in the form of affirmative action, protested outside her husband’s job. Her husband is the CEO of Netflix.

Netflix doesn’t have to worry about shoplifters and doesn’t care about the stores that do. Quillin and her husband, Reed Hastings, who are white, also don’t have to worry about college admissions. Quillin’s Meadow Fund has poured money into various forms of pro-crime advocacy and the Netflix CEO’s wife claims to be very engaged with “racial justice”.

Even though Quillin and her husband live in Santa Cruz, she poured $1.5 million into the campaign to elect George Gascon, a Soros backed pro-crime DA candidate in LA. That’s along with the $4.5 million spent on funding various destructive propositions that hurt Californians.

Patricia Quillin is part of a fundraising phenomenon: the Woke Housewives of Silicon Valley.

MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, divorced him when his cheating scandal was exposed, and cashed in with a massive settlement. That money, from making warehouse workers pee in cups, made her one of the wealthiest women in the world, and she got woke and began making everyone else get woke.

Every time another small business goes under, Scott gets richer from her Amazon shares. And that money is used to bankroll radical political agendas. Or, as Scott put it in the inevitable Medium post, “opportunities that flowed from the mere chance of skin color, sexual orientation, gender, or zip code may have yielded resources that can be powerful levers for change.”

Despite her aspirations, Scott may be a terrible writer, but she could throw $1.7 billion at radical groups, including to the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella group that incorporates the violently racist Black Lives Matter Network linked to nationwide riots, and which supports BDS.

Scott was funding the racist movement destroying small businesses and making her richer.

Like Quillin, Scott is insulated from the negative consequences of her political activism, but not the positive ones. The destruction of small businesses has little impact on a streaming platform like Netflix and is a net benefit for Scott and her Amazon stock. Every time another store went up in flames, her ex-husband’s empire expanded leaving her with more money and power.

The Woke Housewives of Silicon Valley, whether or not they actually live there, have amassed enormous wealth with little responsibility or understanding of how the people they hurt live.

Scott has confined her $1.7 payout to identity politics and other causes that don’t touch on the sources of her wealth. In all her vast scope of institutional giveaways covering everything from lesbian rights to illegal migrants to Indian organizations, she isn’t funding any kind of workers' rights group whose advocacy would affect Amazon, its share price, and her net worth.

Another of the biggest woke housewives of Silicon Valley predates digital parvenus like Netflix and Amazon. Laurene Powell, the widow of Apple boss Steve Jobs, may not have as much money to burn as Scott, but her Emerson Collective has $1.8 billion in assets and a woke creed.

“I am doing this in honor of his work,” Powell claimed of her husband, but Jobs had no interest or involvement in politics. When Powell urged Jobs to meet Obama, he showed little interest, resulting in a five-day protocol standoff. The actual meeting led to Jobs blasting Obama over regulations and teachers’ unions, and telling him, “You’re headed for a one-term presidency.”

Powell isn’t spending her husband’s creative capital for him, but for her own lefty politics.

After her husband’s death, who had reportedly been a Reagan voter, Powell brought in a gaggle of Obama and Clinton operatives and staffers, and began building a radical political machine, pouring millions into Democrat political operations like Emerge and Priorities USA.

She’s a major funder of the pro-crime Marshall Project and has written editorials advocating for illegal migrants who, much like Apple’s China production, deprive Americans of jobs. One Emerson Collective fellow advocates for freeing criminals to “protect” them from the pandemic: a policy that has resulted in a horrifying year of nationwide murders, rapes, and robberies.

None of this is likely to affect Powell, who bought a 19th century mansion for $16 million in San Francisco's Russian Hill after her $60 million Paradise Cove Malibu estate burned, and had another mansion under construction in Silicon Valley. Cynics might speculate that the illegal aliens on whose behalf she spends so much time advocating might be helping lower costs.

Powell’s big corner of the sky is media, buying The Atlantic, and funding lefty publications like Mother Jones. Her Emerson Collective, a “social change organization” invests in Axios, and funds the Now This spam factory whose lefty agitprop is ubiquitous on social media. Emerson backs the Texas Observer, a lefty non-profit that advocates for illegals as a “newspaper”.

And she appears to have gotten even more explicitly into the fake news game by channeling money into ACRONYM, whose fake news site operation is controversial even on the Left for its sleazy strategy of creating lefty sites that pretend to be local news organizations.

While Quillin, Scott, and Powell are billionaires, not all the woke housewives of Silicon Valley can command billions. Some, like Karla Jurvetson, are mere millionaires.

When Democrat dot com donor Steve Jurvetson was caught up in rumors about extramarital affairs and sexual harassment, Karla dumped the Tesla board member and Theranos backer and took her money to militant ferminist organizations and the Elizabeth Warren campaign.

In 2018, Karla made it to 11 on the list of top federal donors, one space ahead of Scott's ex, Jeff Bezos. She donated $5.4 million in Baidu stock, a Chinese company entangled with the Communist Party, to Emily's List. Then she cut a $100,000 check to buy Elizabeth Warren the DNC voter file (split two ways to bypass FEC limits) and keep her message of socialism alive.

Karla ended up funding Warren’s Super PAC to the tune of $14.6 million. (You may recall that Warren hates Super PACs, but that’s just a reminder not to believe a single word she says.)

While funding Warren was a waste of all that Silicon Valley wealth, Karla invested over $1 million into Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight PAC voter fraud machine, which paid off in Georgia. And Karla, as Stacey’s biggest donor, may have gotten more done than Scott, Powell, or Quillin.

At least Karla didn’t send any Chinese Communist stock to rig the Georgia election.

Karla Jurvetson lives in Silicon Valley, not Georgia, but the one constant of the Woke Housewives of Silicon Valley is that they use their massive wealth to wreck other places, states they don’t live in and communities they don’t visit, to scold them for their political incorrectness.

The world, they think, ought to operate according to their politics and propriety, and they spend their money bullying, bribing, and funding the identity politics that play on their emotions.

Wokeness is a movement of white women who lack any sense of meaning or purpose. Devoid of religion and placing little value on family connections, they derive their worldview from the substitute religiosity of the old Marxist tropes about the oppressed and the oppressors, alternately thrilling and fulminating over the plight of illegal migrants and criminals, bleeding with empathy for transgender illegal alien serial rapists and Black Lives Matter rioters.

Meanwhile they carefully ignore the moral questions raised by the sources of their wealth.

Interviewers know to ask MacKenzie Scott about how hard it is to be a black man in America, a subject that she knows as much about as the topography of Mars, but not what it feels like to be an Amazon warehouse worker peeing into a cup to make her another twenty billion dollars.

They’ll ask Patricia Quillin about the same subject, a topic she knows even less about, but not about Netflix’s promotion of teenage suicide and pedophilia. And the resulting teen suicides.

Laurene Powell will be asked about the plight of illegal aliens, not of the employees at the companies that make Apple products committing suicide in droves.

Wokeness forgives a multitude of sins. Throw billions at race rioters and criminals, at illegal aliens and random identity politics causes, and you never have to look too hard in the mirror.

Unlike real religion, wokeness permits the lefty super-rich to evade a moral reckoning with their sins, using the rest of the country as scapegoats, punishing Asian-American students, shop owners, families living on the border or in ghettos, workers in the Rust Belt, for their own crimes.

The Woke Housewives of Silicon Valley are wrecking America in between chardonnay breaks. But there isn’t enough chardonnay or enough billions to escape the moral reckoning of the wreckage.

Obama is busy shilling for his book, A Promised Land, for which the American imprint of a subsidiary of a German publishing giant with a Nazi past, is paying him a fortune. And that means sitting down with his favorite shill, The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg, whose book was published by the same giant, for some pseudo-intellectual preening at America’s expense.

As usual, he has deep thoughts about why everyone who disagrees with him needs to shut up.

"The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this," Obama fussily declaims.
The corporate practices by Big Tech companies that shut down Biden scandals are already in place. Government regulations to get rid of free speech are new, but not new for Obama.

Obama had become infamous for having the producer of The Innocence of Muslims thrown into prison after the disaster in Benghazi. “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” Hillary Clinton would tell the father of one of the men killed there, as if a YouTube video had killed Americans and then dragged their bodies through the streets of Libya.

Obama's DOJ seized phone records from reporters, dug through their emails, and followed them around. But the whole point of Big Tech censorship is that Democrats avoid pesky constitutional issues by outsourcing the censorship to huge corporate monopolies. The practice of calling in CEOs to the Senate to berate them about insufficient censorship should raise some constitutional questions about an oligarchy colluding to suppress political speech.

But it hasn’t yet.

What would Obama's speech police look like? He has nothing to say about that, just more deep thoughts about how impossible it is to have a democracy if people keep disagreeing with you.

"If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work," he fumes.

But the whole point of a “marketplace of ideas” is that people decide that for themselves. If people don’t decide for themselves, there’s no marketplace of ideas, and no democracy. And in a democracy and a marketplace of ideas, people will disagree about what’s true or what isn’t.

If the government decides for people what’s true or false, then there’s no marketplace. Or rather there’s just the Soviet supermarket where there’s one option and you had better learn to like it.

The Democrat argument that a government and a society can’t function if people are allowed to choose ‘falsely’ has been widely accepted by an illiberal liberal elite who all sound like medieval theocrats or Communist bureaucrats musing about the impossibility of intellectual coexistence.

Obama, despite his Harvard and Yale backgrounds, his fondness for dropping “epistemological” right after “marketplace of ideas” has no actual idea what these terms mean. And doesn’t care.

The term “marketplace of ideas” comes from an opinion by Justice William O. Douglas in United States v. Rumely. The issue at stake had been an investigation of an anti-New Deal publisher by Senate Democrats who had demanded to know the names of those who bought his books.

“Respondent represents a segment of the American press. Some may like what his group publishes; others may disapprove,” Douglas wrote. “Like the publishers of newspapers, magazines, or books, this publisher bids for the minds of men in the market place of ideas.”

The First Amendment was based on "the confidence that the safety of society depends on the tolerance of government for hostile as well as friendly criticism, that in a community where men's minds are free, there must be room for the unorthodox as well as the orthodox views."

A marketplace of ideas requires trusting free minds to have different points of view.

What Obama is actually saying is that the whole concept of a marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. A marketplace of ideas doesn’t work because some people will draw conclusions he disagrees with. And democracy, which he defines as Democrat rule, can’t function that way.

"I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change. I can even accept somebody making an argument that, based on what I know about human nature, it’s too late to do anything serious about this," Obama rambles on. "I don’t know what to say if you simply say, ‘This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books.’”

“Where do I start trying to figure out where to do something?" he concludes.

It’s a remarkable admission for a law school graduate, a community organizer, a politician who got to the highest job in the land by promising to bring the country together, to confess that he has no idea how to talk to half the country and can’t imagine even figuring out how to do it.

The confession here is an extraordinary indictment not only of Obama, but of an entire political class which can’t even imagine how to talk to someone who disagrees with its premises.

What Obama is really saying is that he can discuss global warming with someone who agrees with his premise, but disagrees with his proposed solution, that is to say a fellow lefty. He can’t however even understand how to discuss the issue with someone who rejects his premise.

The marketplace of ideas, in Obama’s mind and that of his political class, is there so that smart progressives can discuss the best way to tackle global warming, racism, or socialized medicine.

The same lefty elite that elevated Obama is unable to understand how to talk to someone who rejects any of its premises, for example, that America isn’t racist, that socialism isn’t the answer, or that its entire worldview is destructive and wrong. So it wants to censor it instead.

That was the mindset of the New Dealers that Justice William O. Douglas had criticised when he coined the term, “marketplace of ideas” and warned of the “menace of the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line" should Democrats continue pursuing their efforts to get around the law to censor the opposition.

A marketplace of ideas is a place where people disagree not just about the details of an approved worldview, but about the worldviews themselves. A marketplace of ideas that encompasses only a party platform is not a marketplace, it’s a socialist dumpster.

The trouble with Douglas’ metaphor for a socialist is right there in the concept.

Justice Douglas was using the metaphor of the free market, but the New Dealers and the Old Dealer socialists of today don’t believe in a free market. When Obama thinks of a marketplace, he thinks of the Obamacare marketplace which offered a variety of similar options that adhered to the same set of government regulations overseen by his administration. His marketplace of ideas are minor variations on the same thing that have already been cleared and approved.

But that’s not a marketplace of ideas. It’s a socialist distribution point of talking points.

Ideas are big things. A marketplace of ideas is full of stalls that challenge each other’s premises. And that’s what Obama and his allies are trying to censor out of existence by any means.

Obama’s argument, that some things should not be discussed or debated, would strike a sympathetic chord with many readers of The Atlantic, a publication subsidized by Steve Jobs’ widow, a major lefty donor, and the rest of the media landscape, but it doesn’t work for a country. It’s all very well for Manhattanites and San Franciscans to declare that they can’t even understand how to talk to Alabamans and Alaskans and shouldn’t even have to try.

And then someone like President Trump comes down an escalator and their entire world shakes. Their polls keep being proven wrong and new movements arise that they don’t understand. All their philosophizing about “democracy” and the “marketplace of ideas” is an echo chamber that shuts out much of the country and then tries to shut it down.

And the only way to really do that is through escalating levels of force and then violence.

Sharing a country with people whose premises you disagree with and whose worldviews you can’t even grasp is challenging. That was why America was such a bold experiment. And why Obama’s pathetic blotivations are an embarrassment to its greatness and its noble heritage.

There’s no challenge in running a country where everyone agrees. And Obama isn’t interested in challenges. Neither are the Democrats still reeling from an electoral beating. If they had paid closer attention, the Latino voters in Texas and Florida who turned them down, the black and Jewish voters who came out for President Trump, wouldn’t have come as such a shock.

The problem with echo chambers is that you have no idea what’s going on outside them.

Just ask King George III, the kings of France, or Czar Nicholas II. The virtue of a free country is that elections and arguments break up echo chambers. A marketplace of ideas may be discordant, chaotic, and include views that are false or terrible, but it keeps a society fresh and dynamic, instead of allowing it to ossify into an inbred oligarchy echoing its own idiocy.

Just ask Obama. But don’t expect him to understand the question or a marketplace of ideas.

A socialism of ideas is as doomed as any other kind of socialism. When an oligarchy tries to choke the life out of the marketplace of ideas, it destroys the society and its own future.

The National Association of Realtors claims to have 1.4 million members. There will be fewer members before long as the association begins purging conservative real estate agents.

At the center of the storm was an addition to Article 10 which covers various forms of discrimination. But unlike all the previous sections which addressed how real estate professionals interacted with customers, Article 10-5 is catchall cancel culture that controls what real estate agents say on social media on their own private accounts and in their free time.
This goes far beyond being made to bake a cake. Even if you’re at home and you post something opposed to gay marriage or illegal migration, you can lose your business.

As the NAR claims, a realtor's "speech and conduct reflect on the REALTOR® organization whether said publicly on a business social media profile, or privately on a personal one."

When you’re a real estate agent, you no longer have the right to personal opinions.

Article 10-5 immediately transformed 1.4 million people into subordinates at the mercy of NAR brass who have the authority to determine what political or religious views they can hold.

"It means that we never take our hands off, no matter where we are, no matter what we do, we are always licensed and we are always a member of the National Association of Realtors,” New York State Association of Realtors President Jennifer Stevenson warned.

Never taking your “hands off” is endemic to socialist tyrannies and has no place in America.

Jennifer is a Democrat donor. The NAR’s PAC directs a majority of its cash to Democrats. That included $3,000 to subsidize the bigotry of Rep. Ilhan Omar and $5,000 to Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

But that’s the kind of hatred that the National Association of Realtors is comfortable subsidizing.

“No matter where we are,” means never being able to say anything that offends someone like Jennifer without fear of being sanctioned, fired, or losing your business. Jennifer, an NAR board member, and others will be looking over your shoulder every time you post anything on Facebook. Any leftist offended by anything an NAR member posts has an easy recourse.

"Doesn’t this mean that if I post my opinion online and someone doesn’t agree with it, that I can lose my membership and be forced out of the business?" the NAR FAQ asks.

The answer is yes. Anyone can bring an “ethics” complaint which will lead to a “hearing” with “witnesses” and “counsel”. Posting that illegal migration is wrong or that Islamic terrorism is a threat can now lead to a real estate agent facing a hearing. And if they lose that hearing, then not only will they be expelled from the NAR, but the state real estate licensing authority will be told that the agent violated the "public trust" which can lead to the loss of their license.

Say the wrong thing on Facebook and lose your license, your business, and your livelihood.

The NAR is wrongly characterizing personal views that are privately expressed as “discriminating”, treating it as a violation of “ethics” in a commercial enterprise, and then reporting it to state licensing authorities as a violation of the “public trust”.

This is cancel culture on a national level by one of the country’s most abusive organizations which had already been sued by the Department of Justice for multiple antitrust violations.

What constitutes saying the wrong thing?

Article 10-5 bans “harassing speech, hate speech, epithets, or slurs based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

In an era when supporting President Trump is considered “hate speech”, how are these terms going to be defined? Exhibit 2 of Appendix XIII to Part Four of Article 10-5 of the NAR has an easy answer. Everything that some leftist doesn’t like now violates the NAR’s rules.

Hate speech is any speech that is "intended to insult, offend" because of "some trait". Any remarks that can be seen as "disparaging" or "shaming", or can be characterized as a form of "innuendo", about a protected group is covered under "epithets". That would cover the use of the term “illegal alien”, any discussion about Islamic terrorism, or transgender compulsion.

Harassment, for example, includes "inappropriate conduct, comment, display, action, or gesture based on another person’s sex, color, race, religion, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and any other protected characteristic." And that in turn includes, "negative stereotyping" and "the display or circulation of written or graphic material that denigrates or shows hostility toward an individual or group."

That would, as a practical matter, include the Bible. And certainly particular Bible verses.

The National Association of Realtors has, for all intents and purposes, made quoting Bible verses on a private Facebook profile into an ethical violation leading to a hearing and expulsion.

The NAR board falsely claimed that these speech codes stem from fair housing legal obligations. They do not. Worse still, the NAR’s insistence that, “disparaging a particular protected class is evidence of one’s inability to treat them equally” is a troubling argument that would bar traditional Christians and Jews from membership in the National Association of Realtors. Likewise, Americans who oppose illegal migration, would also be banned.

Article 10-5 claims to be fighting discrimination, but is actually licensing discrimination against 200 million Americans, a much larger class than the ones the NAR claims to be protecting.

The NAR argues that, “bias against protected classes revealed through the public posting of hate speech could result in REALTORS® not taking clients from certain protected classes or not treating them equally, which would lead to violations of the Fair Housing Act.” What this really means is that real estate agents are being sanctioned for discrimination that never actually took place while assuming, for example, that because a traditional Christian or Jew opposes gay marriage that they would be presumed to discriminate against gay or lesbian customers.

Barring traditional religious people from a profession because they are presumed to biased is a bias and a much more egregious form of discrimination than the one it claims to be remedying.

The National Association of Realtors is imposing a political and religious test on members. It has moved the bar from policing interactions with customers to policing personal beliefs.

This is fundamentally un-American. Article 10-5 is McCarthyism wrapped in buzzwords.

Around the same time that the NAR was rolling out its speech codes, the Justice Department sued the group for multiple antitrust violations accusing it of anti-competitive behavior.

This isn’t the first time that the NAR has been sued over antitrust violations, but it should lead to action, if not at a federal level, then at a state level. In some states, not being a member of the NAR makes being a real estate agent all but impossible. In many, it makes it difficult.

As a socialist oligarchy squeezes conservatives out of public life, elected officials should fight back before it’s too late against the powerful institutions which have taken over American life. These institutions, financial, academic, corporate, and trade associations are engaging in a sustained campaign of political and religious suppression under the guise of fighting against discrimination. This campaign is the greatest form of discrimination in America in generations.

The only way to stop the squeeze is to squeeze the squeezers. If there’s no room for conservatives in the NAR, there should be no room for the NAR in conservative states.

Of the 10 wealthiest men and women in America, 8 of them made their money in the tech industry. Of these, only 3 made their fortunes from companies that predated the internet era. The rest made it the 'new-fashioned' way, by developing and deploying internet platforms.

The great disruption of the internet made college dropouts into the wealthiest men in America, made the West Coast, for the first time, the equal of the East, and transformed the economy from manufacturing tangible items to reselling access to data and outsourcing manufacturing.

The men of the great disruption were libertarians, if not necessarily by politics then by cultural inclination. The original disrupters had been engineers and hackers who didn’t fit into conformist environments like IBM and were chasing the dream of doing their own thing. They set up shop in garages and basements, in small California, Oregon, and Washington towns, and a few cities, dressed casually, watched Star Trek, dreamed utopian ideals, and were bad at business.

The new disrupters were less interested in hardware or software applications than in using the power of the network to suck up the data of our interactions and turn it into a service. Their insights, building a search engine around link popularity, or a college face book by grabbing pictures of women, might be trivial, but were part of an emergent vision of the new data order.

The original disruptors had been concerned with empowering the end user to command the system, but the new disrupters were reversing the process that had taken users from terminals to personal computers, instead reducing a multitude of devices to terminals leaking data that made them easier to profitably manipulate. The early internet was empowering, but the internet of the Google, Amazon, and Facebook era is disempowering by design. It works by limiting your options and then using what it knows about you to push you in the direction it wants you to go.

Early computers had practically demanded programming skills. The new setup programs you.

As companies went public and college kids became billionaires, they stopped being disrupters and became concerned with maintaining the new order that they were building.

Every revolution ends with a pledge to make sure that no other revolution will happen again.

Google, whose empire was built on search because Yahoo, Netscape, Microsoft, and an array of other companies that allowed it to disrupt its way to power had failed to account for the importance of search, has spent a generation working its way from inside out, by building a browser and then an OS and devices, so that no upstart can do to it what it did to the industry.

The Google vision of its devices running its operating systems with its browser and search boxes built in is not disruptive: it’s the creation of a monopoly built to prevent another Google. Search, the core of Google’s business, is its worst maintained because having monopolized it, its focus is on expanding its hegemony outward to the farthest limits of the data economy.

The same is true of other Big Tech titans who exploited a niche, disrupted the existing setup, and then transformed their companies into the very thing they had been struggling against.

The Big Tech challenge was to manage the essential disruptiveness of the industry, stabilizing their power base, while finding other vulnerable points in the country to disrupt. And when there were fewer economic vulnerabilities to disrupt, they turned to the cultural and the political ones.

Like every past ruling class, the new one set out to remake the country in its own image by disrupting other sectors of society, some, such as politics, consciously, while others, such as culture, unconsciously, out of noblesse oblige, lust for power, and a sense of insecurity.

Every previous national transformation had come from ever narrower areas of the country and the great disruption had been the narrowest yet. The old visionary ideas of computer literacy, long since an outdated term, had given way to ‘learn to code’ as an obsolescence taunt. Most Americans would not be included in the revolution, not because they couldn’t be, but because the revolution was far too small to encompass more than a fraction of the population.

The economic momentum of the new disrupters was built on stock booms that were powered by the conviction of investors that these new titans would keep on growing until they took it all over. If investors thought otherwise, there would be 5 or 8 other wealthiest men in the United States. The vast frontiers of the computer revolution had passed through the range war stage and were gated off by giant monopolies using investor cash to strangle each other and their industry.

Compared to the challenge of disrupting the old economy, disrupting politics appeared simple, but the problem was that, unlike computers, the disrupters were also the thing they were disrupting. Society had no artificially neat separations between man and machine, code and flesh, and the disrupters were amplifying a cycle of disruption that was also disrupting them.

Big Tech had worked to exercise political power to stave off the very reaction it was inciting.

The disrupters turned leftward because from the commanding heights of the economy they tended to see society as a machine that was broken and needed fixing. Having few political ideas of their own, they adopted the leftist politics of their surrounding environment. Its reduction of society to a machine and men as moving parts in need of balancing out appealed to them.

The old disrupters had seen men and women on their own terms, struggling to reach their dreams, but that perspective, from the ground level of the world, had been lost to them.

The new disrupters could only envision their kind of world, diverse, urban, and with a mostly useless population whose grievances and inability to contribute to the new world order would have to be met with welfare checks and patient lessons on the dangers of intolerance.

And, most of all, control.

The original computer revolution had been built on freedom, but the titanic internet platforms depended on control. The control was meant to be unseen. The user would be manipulated into thinking it was his idea to click on that link, watch that show, search for that keyword, and buy that product by a series of invisible constraints and prompts to maintain the illusion of control.

The illusion of control, the myth of user agency, was at the heart of the new internet of platforms. The end user had never had less control over his virtual environment, even as it assured him that he could do anything he wanted. Once the user rebelled against the algorithm, the illusion of freedom collapsed leaving a choice between obedience or loss of access.

The system seemed to work as Big Tech amassed vast amounts of wealth and power, but on a social level, it was a disaster, albeit one that was invisible to the manipulators. In the tech industry, the engineers often don’t understand the end users. And vice versa. And the old conflict over system design was now playing out on the vast scale of human civilization.

The disrupters had broken the economy and the social system, and began trying to put it back together on their terms, buying up the media and elections, censoring the platforms they had built, bringing to an end the last of the open information frontier, and building a new order oriented around the technocratic imperatives of managing a global society. But the more they tried to control the human element, the more the societies began to fall apart and turn on them.

Greater control did not lead to greater trust, but an almost incoherent mistrust in which conspiracy theories became the one thing that everyone was coming to believe. The theories were mostly wrong, but in their own inchoate way, they were right because there was a loss of freedoms, because most of what the media broadcast was a lie, and there was an agenda, and though many of the conclusions were wrong, they were reacting to a real loss of agency.

Conspiracy theories thrive when people lose control over their lives, but can’t localize the blame. Big Tech built the conspiracy theories that it keeps trying to rein in by conspiring to control the public without understanding, as most tyrannies don’t, that it is the cause of its own problems.

The disrupters envision a society of useless people with few functions except binging Netflix originals and commenting on photos on Facebook to be subsidized with welfare checks so they can pay their subscription fees, click on ads, and buy Chinese junk from Amazon. But a welfare state is a signal that there is no future and it’s time to fight over the scraps that can be seized.

There’s no better formula for racial tensions, street violence, and bitter multicultural infighting than the combination of a welfare state and diversity. American diversity worked to the extent that there was upward mobility. When social mobility stalled, as it occasionally did in cities, brutal violence soon followed by people who had nowhere to go and nothing to live for.

The disrupters had wanted to find a middle ground short of full Marxism, but instead they were propelling the conditions for both leftist radicalism and a rightward reaction, while striving to hold on to their power and remake the world along the lines that they thought were best.

Their disruption of politics, childishly simple for men and women with enormous wealth and data insights, who could find a dozen ways to hack a system, didn’t move the country their way, but oscillated it back and forth between the extremes that were breaking it. Trying to control the country, they were crashing it instead, because organic life reacts, instead of waiting for input.

Unlike computers, organic life isn’t passive. And people are the least passive of all creatures.

The men and women who had been disrupters wanted a predictable world they could control, but were instead bringing into being an uncontrollable world that was reacting to their efforts, as society often does, the way that a body’s immune system reacts to a viral infection. Society was responding to Big Tech’s efforts at control by raising the temperature to kill the controlling virus.

And in the process it was wreaking the kind of havoc on society that a fever wreaks on the body.

The great disruption had interconnected the world in unprecedented ways. This vast interconnection had made the world more efficient in some ways, at the expense of becoming more interdependent and more vulnerable to disruptions. The internet had been built, in its earliest days, to allow the command and control functions of the military to survive a nuclear war. But the extension of the internet into everything made society less likely to survive.

What had been a means to an end had become its own end. Being online had become its own purpose. Big Tech companies existed to furnish that world with convenient services. The old hacker dream of a digital polis had become real and in its realization had killed the dream. A wired society wasn’t utopia, but a dystopia throbbing with the raw nerves of a lost frontier.

The disrupter elite were the first to leave their own digital prison, keeping their kids away from the services that had made them billionaires, and trying to disconnect from their connections. They took up eastern philosophies, hiked, bought homes in the woods in different states, and tried to get in touch with something real only to find that they carried the unreality inside.

Power is a practical and a philosophical problem. The old disrupters had mastered machines and then come to think of the world as a big machine. The new disrupters had layered machiavellian interfaces over that old heresy, making a collectivist machine with a human face. But the human face was stuck in the uncanny valley, both real and unreal, and so were they.

The new disrupters had reduced all of society to interfaces, external visual inputs that had originally been meant to allow the user to manipulate the world within the machine, but that had been reversed and were being used by the machine to manipulate the user. And in doing so, they had made the world an unreal place and raised generations of users to feel manipulated by an illusory world, lashing out with the one thing that no machine could cope with, unreason.

The great disruption of machines was meeting at last the great disruption of man. And society was shattering in the collision between the real and the unreal. It is no coincidence that the acolytes of the disrupters have adopted science as their slogan. They often claim to follow the science or the data, as if these were oracles instead of ideas only as valid as their proofs.

Human beings need to believe in things and commit to things, in order to feel real. And the men and women who built an unreal world had come to believe in that world as its own moral order. The world of the disrupters is not a world of science, no more than a warlord with a gun is an engineer because his power comes from a mechanical device, but it is a faith in the source of their power. And that power is disruption. It can in the end, like a gun, only disrupt.

The unreal disrupters of the real strive for control, but their control is, like everything about the unreal world they made, an illusion. They can disrupt what is real, but like all the disrupters of ideas who came before them, all that they replace it with is an unreality that does not stand. The revolutions collapse and what comes after them is not the future, but the return of the past.

Before Thanksgiving, Los Angeles imposed a curfew and, in a shocking oversight, asked Hollywood to follow it. While the entertainment industry isn't as big a part of the local economy as it would like you to think, its producers, directors, and stars provide a disproportionate share of the capital that the Democrats politicians who run the place use to get elected to higher office.

After ordering Hollywood to restrict filming to the same curfew as other businesses, a few hours later the order was withdrawn followed by a final plea to film shoots to “to voluntarily limit and/or avoid activities likely to invite a negative community response" which could "jeopardize community confidence in our ability to operate safely."

As if allowing movie studios to shoot around the clock while shutting down small businesses might "invite a negative community response" or raise questions about the corrupt system.

The film permit office now claims that “the State of California has viewed workers supporting the film, television and commercial production industry… as essential for the state’s critical infrastructure.”

What role does shooting movies play in the “critical infrastructure” of California? Money.

Not for the economy. In that regard, the entertainment industry is much less crucial than many of the industries that had been shut down by the lockdowns. With unemployment claims topping 8 million and California Democrat leaders fighting to eliminate freelance workers, that’s a drop in the bucket. If the crews in question were working in restaurants, they wouldn’t matter.

But the critical infrastructure that Hollywood funds is the political ambitions of the Democrats.

During the gubernatorial race, Hollywood poured millions into Newsom’s campaign, and celebrity fundraising helped put Garcetti into the mayor’s office. The Democrat with the biggest haul of industry cash usually wins. Your local pizza shop isn’t going to compete with that.

If only there were some sort of industry dedicated to exposing social injustice using art.

While restaurants spent a fortune prepping to meet the new regulations, only to be shut down anyway, the entertainment industry goes into a new lockdown with nothing to worry about.

All of this is happening under the watch of Muntu Davis, LA’s top health officer who was picked in the wake of the Black Lives Matter race riots to implement “equity”. Equity is now the top value at LA County's Department of Public Health which declares that it seeks to "ensure just systems, policies and practices". That means giving Disney a pass, but shutting down cafes.

This is what social justice lockdowns look like. Not just in LA, but across the country.

"New York City's economy is in a downturn, but film production has been a bright spot," a New York Times article chirps. Even while Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio targeted Chassidic Jews, ranting about weddings and synagogues, the entertainment industry and its allied media were exempted, and the accompanying rules were bent and broken.

Even while Democrat leaders were lecturing about the dangers of church and synagogue services, the Video Music Awards went on and celebrities were allowed to dodge curfew.

Since no election could go forward without Saturday Night Live, the high school talent show staffed by unfunny social justice activists, with occasional celebrity cameos, went forward, along with a live studio audience. Cuomo and De Blasio, not to mention the media, decided not to notice that SNL was flouting the rules by paying audience members so they counted as crew.

Having a live audience of Manhattanites to laugh when you howl insults at President Trump is an essential activity in New York. Unlike irresponsible, non-essential stuff like religious services.

As the New York Times notes, "The major studios... all report that they are full." 559 permits have been granted and 35 series are already filming in the city even though, as one studio boss notes, “one person every week or two test positive somewhere on the lot.” Unlike churches or synagogues, or weddings, these shoots are never described as superspreader events.

In a truly surreal scene, New Amsterdam, a TV drama, was caught filming outside Bellevue Hospital, blocking the path of real doctors and nurses, a population prone to infections. Even while Democrat leaders complain that there aren’t enough hospital beds, the NBC medical drama takes up space in and around hospitals while getting a free pass from the authorities.

The Times story noted that, “the large crew found it impossible to perfectly socially distance” and leaves it at that, while photos show no actual social distancing by the crews.

But the New York Times has its own Hollywood studio deals involving the 1619 Project.

Governor Cuomo is so dependent on entertainment industry cash that he flew out to California for fundraisers, including one organized in Beverly Hills by the MPAA featuring major studio heads with tickets going for as much as $50,000. This year, Cuomo held a fundraiser for his birthday featuring movie stars who praised him for protecting Hollywood's tax credits.

Those $420 million in tax credits are a net loss for the state, but a gain for Cuomo. That tops California’s film tax credit total of $330 million.

Cuomo had been insisting that the “state has no money”, and was threatening to cut first responders. He even tried to tax volunteers who came to help during the pandemic.

"We're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now," Cuomo falsely claimed. Then he called for maintaining the same insane level of Hollywood subsidies, and went further by making sure that only the big studios who fund his corrupt ambitions cash in on the $420 million.

After claiming that there would be no money to pay police, no money for anything, New York State kept the $420 million in subsidies but limited it to studios spending over $1 million.

The “state has no money” for cops and firefighters, but has $420 million for Hollywood.

Just to bring the corruption up to Chicago levels, Cuomo's proposal made sure that Saturday Night Live, but no new productions, would get access to the $420 million subsidy. If only there were some talented political satirists with a weekend show who could mock this crookedness.

Back in California, Disney's Captain Marvel got $20 million in tax credits in California. Netflix's 13 Reasons Why, which has been blamed for encouraging teenage suicide, vacuumed up over $40 million. You can’t expect one of the wealthiest companies in America to set off a spike in teenage suicides and promote pedophilia without some serious taxpayer subsidies.

When California and New York dole out $750 million in tax breaks to some of the wealthiest donors in a powerful industry who fund the political ambitions of top Democrats like Newsom and Cuomo, there’s no reason to expect their projects to be subjected to everyone else’s rules.

That’s why the order to limit film shoots to the 7 AM to 10 PM curfew was quickly pulled in LA. The county may be banning public gatherings, and destroying the last surviving small businesses who were on their last legs, but film shoots are back at half of pre-pandemic levels.

And that’s not just in America.

The UK has some of the most onerous lockdowns around, and its order shut down clothing stores, mobile phone shops, cafes, hotels, museums and “places of worship”, but left open "professional film and TV filming". Religion is non-essential, but television must go on.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the harm caused by the lockdowns to the livelihoods of tens of millions of people, but there’s been little discussion about who has been exempted from lockdown restrictions and their corrupt political and economic rationales.

The best leverage against lockdown self-righteousness is the exposure of the hypocritical and discriminatory treatment that closes small businesses while leaving giants like Amazon and Target, Disney and Netflix, wealthier than ever because of the lockdowns that benefit them.

The LA Film Office warned productions about a “negative community response”. It’s about time.

Last year, President Trump called Baltimore a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess".

Speaker Pelosi responded by calling Trump’s comments “racist attacks”. Vox claimed that Trump was using “racist tropes” and US News conducted a fact check accusing him of racism.

Now the rat race numbers are in. Orkin, the past control company, ratted out the "rattiest cities" and Baltimore has broken through into the top 10 for the first time. Like a rat clambering after a piece of moldy cheese, Charm City leaped up four places to be America’s 8th rattiest city.

Baltimore has never been able to deny that it’s a rat-infested hellhole. But Democrats and their media are good at deflecting with false accusations of racism and then changing the subject.

"If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone's, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land,” the Baltimore Sun had retorted in an editorial after President Trump’s criticism of the terrible conditions in the city.

But there’s one thing that the rattiest cities in America have in common. And it isn’t Trump.

In Chicago, rated as the rattiest city in the country six times in a row, 83% of residents, dead or alive, legal or illegal, human or rat, voted for Hillary. The last time Chicago had a Republican mayor was 1931 and the ratty city has no official Republican members on its city council.

It does however have multiple socialist city council members.

Despite promises by Democrat officials, the city’s rat problem only keeps getting worse.

In May, rat complaints nearly doubled even as officials insisted that there were no more rats.

“It doesn’t mean that there’s a lot more rats. People are seeing them, and they are calling,” Josie Cruz, the Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Rodent Control, argued.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel had created the bureau with 120 employees and a $10 million budget.

Cruz has been on this job for at least two decades and tens of thousands of rat complaints keep coming in. Chicago has tried dry ice, spears, and rat birth control. The one thing it hasn’t tried is getting rid of the Democrat rats that have burrowed deep into its municipal government.

The number of rat complaints in Chicago rose from 32,855 in 2014 to 50,963 in 2017. That’s 1,876 complaints for every 100,000 people. And since exterminator folklore has it that there are 10 rats you don’t see for every rat you do see, that means Chicago has half a million rats.

If they just registered to vote, the Democrats would never lose Illinois.

What makes Chicago so much more rat-infested than other cities? The answer lies with a corrupt Democrat system in which trash pickup and rodent removal was controlled by local aldermen who could use it for political patronage. The system was finally abandoned in 2013 but the rats had gotten too much of a head start and have burrowed throughout the city.

But that’s just what happens when a city votes for Democrats. First Democrats, then rats.

Hillary Clinton became the first Democrat to get over 70% of the vote in Los Angeles County. Not coincidentally, Los Angeles is once again in second place as the 2nd most rat infested hellhole in the nation. In New York City, Hillary Clinton won 79% of the vote. It’s unknown if the rats voted, but if they did it was probably as a bloc because the city is 3rd in the rat race.

The rat problem in Los Angeles and New York is easily traceable to its vagrant population.

Democrat politicians had embraced living on the street as a protected and subsidized activity. A typhus outbreak followed in Los Angeles. The disease, which is carried by fleas living on rats, centered around Skid Row, the epicenter of the city’s homeless population. The ban on evicting vagrants or preventing them from covering the streets in filth has been a boot for the rats.

And Los Angeles Democrats even took special steps to protect the rats by banning rat poison.

Like every other quality of life problem, New York City’s rat crisis turned critical under De Blasio.

According to Open the Books, there were 44,850 rat sightings in Brooklyn and 33,553 in Manhattan alone. Despite spending $32 million and a trap that drowns rats in liquor, there’s no end in sight. A 2014 study estimated that there were over 2 million rats in New York City. At the rate at which rats reproduce, there will soon be more rats than Democrats in the Big Apple.

In Washington D.C., the 4th rattiest city in America, Hillary Clinton won 86% of the vote. In San Francisco, the 5th rattiest city, 84% of residents voted for Hillary.

It's only fitting that the rats should be overrunning D.C.

When visiting the Lincoln Memorial before President Trump's inauguration, I saw a rat scurrying up the stairs. Even the Washington Post, the city's official rat paper, has run headlines like, "I saw 13 rats in 20 minutes. D.C., we have a rodent crisis."

Rat complaints in D.C. rose from 2,443 in 2014 to 4,097 in 2019.

Mayor Muriel Bowser responded with rat tours dubbed "Rat Walks". They haven’t helped.

To no one’s surprise, Capitol Hill has the third highest number of rat complaints in D.C.

Meanwhile, San Francisco had legalized public vagrancy, resulting in streets that were covered in human waste. Like Los Angeles, Democrats banned some forms of rat poison making it all but impossible to kill them. Exterminators are so in demand that they have waiting lists.

"Poop. Needles. Rats. Homeless camp pushes SF neighborhood to the edge," the San Francisco Chronicle headlined one story. And then there are San Fran locals like "rat girl" who breeds and releases hundreds of rats in the city.

No wonder, San Fran has as many rats as Democrats.

Detroit is once again the 6th rattiest city in America. Motor City rats are also car enthusiasts and have been known to crawl into cars, chew up the fuel injection system, or nest in the dashboard. One mechanic reported 15 cars damaged by rats in six weeks.

And that might not be the only thing the rats are chewing up.

Too many votes were registered in 37% of Detroit's precincts during the 2016 election, but it wasn't enough to hand Hillary a win in Michigan. This time out there might be more rats.

Philadelphia rose 3 places to become the 7th most rat-infested city in the country.

"They look like cats to me," one resident complained. Another neighborhood described “jumping rats” operating in broad daylight.

82% of Philadelphia residents voted for Hillary Clinton and only 15% for President Trump.

While there isn’t a firm statistical correlation between the number of rats per square mile and the number of votes cast for Democrats, any city infested with rats is also infested with Democrats.

And vice versa.

It’s no coincidence that the most rat-infested cities in the country are also the places where Hillary, and any Democrat with a pulse, will walk away with at least 70% of the vote.

Minneapolis, unsurprisingly, Denver, and Baltimore round out the rest of the top 10. What unites all of them is an unswerving allegiance to the Democrats and a massive rat problem. Of the 20 rattiest cities in America, only two have Republican mayors.

Baltimore does indeed have rats. It also has two kinds of elected Democrat officials: those who have already been convicted of a crime and those who have not. Charm City is unique in the number of city officials who have been arrested and tried for assorted forms of corruption.

As long as someone rats them out.

The Baltimore City Council consists entirely of Democrats. Baltimore's last Democrat mayor won three quarters of the vote. Baltimore's rat problem has been growing with its Democrat problem.

A Baltimore City Health Department report conceded that “the rodent infestation rate in Baltimore is six times the national average.” And, unlike other cities, Baltimore has mostly given up. Rats are the city’s unofficial mascot, showing up on souvenir t-shirts and sweatshirts.

From “Charm City” to The City That Reads” to “The Greatest City in America”, Baltimore has tried out many slogans. But there’s only one that really fits it.

Rat City.

Meanwhile the fallout from Mayor Pugh's arrest, conviction and sentencing on fraud and conspiracy charges, continues to reverberate through the Democrat establishment.

Rat City has many rats, but maybe they aren’t Baltimore’s biggest problem. Democrats are.

Baltimore is overrun by murders, rats, and rampant illiteracy. Then its art museum went woke.

Like a medieval monastery after the fall of Rome, the Baltimore Museum of Art is a relic of another time filled with the relics of another era. The Baltimorean merchants, bankers, and railroad tycoons who decided a century ago that their city needed an art museum to boost its civic pride are long gone and Charm City’s favorite work of art is its mascot: a giant rat.

Does a city where a third of the population is functionally illiterate need a large collection of French impressionists? And does one of the nation’s murder capitals need Andy Warhol?

When the woke Visigoths took over the BMA, they came for the white men first. And the museum’s collection is full of the works of white men: precious and worthless both.

"At the BMA we have a singular vision for our immediate future, which is to put equity, diversity, and justice at the forefront of every decision," Christopher Bedford, the museum's very woke curator, declared.

Asma Naeem, a Pakistani immigrant and the BMA's new art curator, attacked a critic for not understanding the “equity-based vision, values and considerations that undergird our decision.”

Art, schmart. Who needs art when you’ve got the creative fires of social justice that made Soviet art into an influential movement that changed the world as we know it burning in your soy belly?

Bedford, who is an extremely white man, announced that the museum would no longer be buying art by white men this year. Between Rembrandt, Titian, and Durer, they've got too many.

“You don’t just purchase one painting by a female artist of color and hang it on the wall,” he insisted. “To rectify centuries of imbalance, you have to do something radical.”

Bedford had already begun purging the collection by putting seven major paintings on sale, including by Warhol, to buy “art” by “artists of color”. Since Bedford wouldn’t know art if it fell on his head, which at the BMA is a possibility, that part was easy. The rest was complicated.

Pesky questions about the sale reared their head, like did Bedford even have a right to sell the art. The sale or ‘deaccession’ as they call it in the art world, was happening under regulations meant to help museums deal with the pandemic. But the BMA wasn’t reacting to the Wuhan Virus, but the Woke Virus, and it wasn’t selling art because it needed money, it needed woke.

And it was unclear if the paintings had been gifted under conditions that would allow the sale.

Prominent voices in the art community, including former key figures at the BMA, protested. Sothebys blinked, announcing the auction would be postponed, and then unblinked, claiming that the postponement had been an error in which it confused an Islamic museum in Israel with the BMA. That’s the sort of natural mistake that happens at a major auction house all the time.

Finally, the BMA’s own board canceled the auction at the last minute blaming the public outcry.

More importantly, the Association of Art Museum Directors made it clear that the BMA was abusing its relaxed guidelines during the pandemic to do something pandemic-unrelated.

“Our vision and our goals have not changed,” the BMA unapologetically declared “It will take us longer to achieve them, but we will do so through all the means at our disposal.”

The BMA will lose $50 million with former board chairs pulling their donations in order to make $65 million. But it’s about the destructiveness of the act more than the actual money. How else can the BMA’s new leadership prove that they’re revolutionary visionaries than through a round of politically correct épater le bourgeois virtue signaling and racial divisiveness by a white man?

“The most important artists working today, in my view, are black Americans,” Bedford declared.

By “important”, Bedford and the museum of an illiterate city don’t mean talented or aesthetically pleasing. When your “lens” is social justice, then important means anti-American. And so the most important artists are the ones who have the most moral leverage for hating this country.

There are few aesthetics at stake in trading one set of nonsensical childish images for another, the broad abstract brushstrokes of Franz Kline’s Green Cross and the green finger painting splatters of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Painting, for Mark Bradford's hyperkinetically colorful visual gibberish, or Amy Sherald, who produced the notoriously terrible Michelle Obama portrait.

The art world dispensed with aesthetics and tradition, leaving nothing but abstract concepts.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is another scene on the woke battlefield, replacing abstract sneering at American culture and religion with abstractions that rage against America.

American wokeness is just pop Marxism. Our cultural revolution is a rerun of Russian and Chinese totalitarianism with corporate sponsors.

During the Bavarian Soviet Republic, there was an abortive attempt to set fire to the museums. The Russian Futurists declared in one of their manifestos that the creative works of the past had to be “thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity.” But all of this posturing ended with the Futurists and everyone else being forced to produce Socialist Realism for propaganda.

The only thing totalitarian regimes really want when it comes to art is mass communications.

The Baltimore Museum of Art, like many institutions public and private, is being reimagined as the projection of a new political order, each part of it meant to articulate a single ideology. The result isn’t an art museum, just as socialist realism’s propaganda posters weren’t art. Art, as a painting or a museum, is meant to inspire and reflect, while propaganda short circuits both.

Propagandists don’t want people to think. What they want is for them to agree.

In art, as in life, the initial revolutionary thrill of destroying the old gives way to the stultifying reality of the totalitarian order. Totalitarian revolutions don’t create, they destroy, and their only message is the familiar one from Shepard Fairey's old "Obey" giant stickers.

Fairey would become much more famous for creating the iconic Obama “Hope” poster.

"How did this work, no matter how righteous or well-intentioned, help George Floyd as he was pinned to the ground by a white man in a uniform, in broad daylight, surrounded by onlookers, as his life faded away over almost nine minutes?" Bedford demanded to know in the Baltimore Museum's new vision statement.

What Baltimore really needs is less traditional art and more art to inspire race riots.

Andy Warhol probably wasn’t much use to George Floyd on account of being dead. Floyd might have tried to hit the officer with a copy of Warhol’s The Last Supper, one of some hundred distotrted yellow reproductions of the famous painting, the BMA wanted to sell for $40 million.

None of the artists being sold off would have helped George Floyd because they’re also dead or fairly elderly. None of them are located in Minneapolis. The BMA’s largest Matisse collection in the world would have been even more useless as Matisse is dead and also not in Minneapolis.

Not to mention every BMA artist from Rembrandt to Picasso. If the purpose of art is to save career criminals high on drugs when they get into confrontations with police, then art is useless.

But that’s activism, not art. And when art melds with activism, it becomes propaganda.

What the BMA’s director was saying is that art is useless unless it’s agitprop. Nothing is of any value unless it serves the cause of Black Lives Matter. Or, as Stalin once put it, artists are the “engineers of souls”. Behind the feeble attempt at poetry was the reduction of art to machinery. Engineers were needed to service tractors and artists would have to service their operators. The goal of art, like farm equipment, was to keep the vast failing machine of socialism running.

Baltimore is almost as much of a disaster as the Soviet Union and needs its own propaganda.

The declaration that art is useless unless it serves a racial agenda is the familiar one of Socialist Realism which declared that art which doesn’t serve the working class is worthless.

Or as the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers declared, “the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism."

But the BMA credo has become that of American culture. Everything, from standup comedy to fashion to literature to journalism to education, must serve a single political purpose. If your comedy routine or your capri pants wouldn’t have saved George Floyd, they must do better.

Woke culture transformed comedy into hysterical political screeds (not in the funny sense) and everything else into a seesaw of pandering and indoctrination that conscends to minorities and badgers white people without ever creating anything of lasting value or merit because it exists purely for the needs of the moment. The irony of jettisoning Warhol for woke agitprop is that the woke art is as disposable as the commercial advertising culture that he was mocking. When everything is a slogan, then nothing has a message that lasts beyond momentary manipulation.

And an art museum, a university, or a national culture built on such things has no future.

Just ask the Soviets.

But Baltimore, like so many American cities, has no future. The old Baltimore that built the BMA envisioned a booming tomorrow and dug into its pockets to show it was as good as New York City. Where is Baltimore headed besides gangs murdering each other on broken streets, sewers full of dead rats, drug deals, corrupt politicians and mobs ravaging what’s left of the fallen city?

When you’re already broke, you might as well go woke. It makes the ride down more interesting.

The looting of the BMA is a perfect coda to a looted city. The old BMA was meant to inspire and some of the museum’s impressive art collection still can and does. But culture can’t thrive without a culture. The Greeks and Romans didn’t lack for great works of art, what they lacked at the end was the character and vision to sustain a culture that had been founded on great things.

An art museum in a national disaster of a city is little more than a medieval monastery holding on to some fragments of civilization while outside warlords and their mobs loot and pillage cities.

And the woke Visigoths have come for the museum even if they don’t understand what’s in it.

"Museums are not mausoleums or treasure houses," a letter co-written by Asma Naeem snippily concludes. Unfortunately, not for Naeem, but for the human race, the BMA is a treasure house of French art, one of the greatest such treasure houses in the country, that is now at risk.

The woke age is a dark age and the pillaging is underway.