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.

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.

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.

A week before issuing a statewide mask mandate and a few weeks after trying to ban Thanksgiving, Governor Newsom attended a dinner party, maskless, for a lobbyist.

The size of the party, a dozen people, contravened, Newsom’s own Thanksgiving crackdown limiting gathering sizes and urging members of different households not to mingle. The photos also contravened Newsom’s 93 to wear a mask at dinner between bites.

"COVID-19 has NOT gone away. Take the new case rates seriously. We cannot let our guard down," Newsom had urged on Twitter. "Wear a mask, limit mixing with those you don't live with, and physically distance."

Photos of the dinner party showed no social distancing, no mask wearing, and no precautions.

Those attending the party included not only Newsom, but top California Medical Association officials. The CMA had lobbied to suspend “non-urgent” and “non-essential” procedures. It had also cheered Newsom’s mask mandate warning that “anti-science extremists” were “putting public health at risk” in an ad campaign released earlier this summer by the association.

The anti-science extremists apparently include the CEO of the California Medical Association.

Newsom’s dinner party comes after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser violated her own quarantine, traveling to Delaware for Biden’s election party, one of the “high-risk” states, while partying with Democrat political operatives, before returning home and then refusing to quarantine.

Bowser claimed that she didn’t have to follow her own rules because it was “official business”.

The coronavirus is presumably obliging enough not to infect politicians who are traveling on official business to party with fellow Democrats, but knows to infect people at Trump rallies.

In Chicago, Mayor Lightfoot told residents to “cancel traditional Thanksgiving plans”, after joining a massive crowd celebrating Biden’s claim to have won the 2020 presidentia election.

“There are times when we actually do need to have relief and come together, and I felt like that was one of those times. That crowd was gathered whether I was there or not,” Lightfoot argued.

Of course all of this isn’t really news.

Governor Whitmer’s husband was already caught demanding his boat, Governor Pritzker’s family was caught traveling around the country, Governor Murphy was caught dining indoors, Governor Cuomo didn’t bother social distancing or wearing a mask at a Sharpton event, Mayor Lightfoot was caught getting a haircut, and Speaker Pelosi was caught at a hair salon.

Senator Dianne Feinstein was caught repeatedly not using a mask, and Senator Kamala Harris had no problem piling into an elevator with her entire staff. All this is just business as usual.

Even without listing the numerous Black Lives Matter marches and Biden victory parties, or the Women’s March in D.C., it’s all too obvious that Democrat leaders don’t follow the rules.

And that leads to one of two inevitable conclusions.

Either Democrat leaders are suicidal or the mask and lockdown regimen doesn’t work.

But what absolutely cannot be true is the media narrative that Democrats are following science and should be trusted to lead us through the pandemic using a regime of lockdowns and masks.

The same Democrat leadership lecturing us that masks save lives goes maskless whenever it can. And that might be forgivable if they weren’t constantly pretending that the only people not wearing masks are Republican scofflaws who are endangering all of us with their selfishness.

The only thing more unforgivable than corruption is hypocrisy.

But the fundamental question is why Governor Newsom, Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bowser, Mayor Lightfoot, and so many others are casually violating their own restrictions and guidelines.

If Governor Newsom truly believed, as he tweeted, “Wear your mask. Physically distance. Do not let your guard down. Your actions could literally save lives”, would he have joined a crowded party at the French Laundry for a lobbyist and adviser, without doing any of these things?

The only two rational conclusions are that Governor Newsom has no regard for his own life (we already know that he, like most Democrat governors on this list, has no regard for human life when he ordered skilled nursing facilities to accept coronavirus patients in a cruel act that one geriatric doctor compared to, “premeditated murder”) or he doesn’t believe his own guidance.

Are Democrat leaders particularly suicidal? That seems unlikely.

Newsom, Cuomo, Murphy, Whitmer, and Pritzker, not to mention Pelosi, Feinstein, Bowser, and Lightfoot, can be accused of many things, but a wilful disregard for their lives isn’t one of them.

That leaves us with the cold hard reality that they don’t believe the things that they’re telling us.

Some of the violations of guidance meant to stop the spread of the virus can be dismissed as selfishness that doesn’t directly put Whitmer or Pritzker at risk. But when Newsom and Cuomo, among others, casually hang out in close proximity without masks, there’s only one conclusion.

They don’t practice this stuff because they don’t think it works.

What do they know that we don’t? Mostly, that nothing they’re doing will really make a difference, but that they need to be seen to be doing something. This is a common problem in politics. President Trump suffered from poor ratings on the coronavirus because, while his administration did practical things behind the scenes, it didn’t impose abusive mandates.

Like the kind that Biden ran on.

People expect medicine that really works to taste bitter and any real approach to a crisis to cause pain. That’s why we have to take off our shoes and belts when we fly even though the TSA has not stopped a single terrorist attack after all these years of airport shoelessness.

But the TSA was never meant to stop terrorism. It was there to show that the government was taking the problem seriously. And the more miserable flying became, the tighter the security.

There’s a term for that sort of thing: security theater. And there’s a term for what we’re doing now: medical theater. All of these are subsidiaries of political theater in which governments and politicians pretend to be doing things even though they know none of it really matters.

Congress spends a lot of its time holding entirely useless hearings that only exist so that its members can tweet about how seriously they’re taking the thing that the hearing is about.

Governor Cuomo mismanaged the coronavirus in the worst way possible, lying to the public, sending thousands of infected patients into nursing homes, imposing lockdowns and bragging his way through innumerable press conferences, before illegally scapegoating Orthodox Jews for the virus ahead of the second wave, but never missed a press opportunity or book deal.

That’s why his coronavirus leadership book hit the bestseller lists ahead of the morgues.

Democrat politicians know exactly how to navigate the pandemic, not to save lives, but to maximize their approval ratings, book sales, and potential presidential runs down the road. It doesn’t matter how many people die. Arguably more people dying in your state is better.

Just ask Cuomo who still holds down a nationwide championship in coronavirus corpses.

What is really important in any crisis is to be seen taking it very seriously by holding constant press conferences and imposing pain, lockdowns, restrictions, mandates, on the public. The more people suffer, the more a politician must get credit for doing everything to fight the virus.

The governors know that what they’re doing isn’t working and they don’t know what does. Their strategy isn’t to protect the people in their states, but to protect their political careers.

To find out what people really believe, don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.

Governor Newsom knew, before imposing his statewide mask mandate, that masks don’t work. If he thought they did, he would have been wearing one while hanging out with his pals. But to a lot of people, masks provide a sense of control and so politicians happily mandate masks.

Newsom, Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, and the rest of the gubernatorial gang don’t have a plan to deal with the virus. Their only plan is to wait it out and come out looking good. That’s why they wear masks in front of the camera and then take them off the first chance they get.

They’re not leaders, they’re politicians, with no clue what to do in a real crisis. Except lie.

As winter is upon us, there are only two possible explanations why so many governors repeatedly violate the rules that they tell us mean the difference between life and death.

Either they’re suicidal or they’re lying to us.

Since none of them have yet grasped a noose, put shotguns in their ears, or plunged needles filled with uncut heroin in their veins, they’re not suicidal. They are corrupt and incompetent. And while they destroy the lives and livelihoods of millions, they go on partying behind closed doors.

The end of what law enforcement had called the most imminent Islamic terrorist plot since September 11 came when Gregory Vernon Patterson left his cell phone behind at a gas station.

Patterson and his roommate, Levar Haley Washington, had joined Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, a prison Islamic terror group, and had been conducting a robbery spree to finance terror plots against the LAX airport, the National Guard, and local synagogues during the High Holy days.

The shotgun robberies by the organization, whose name meant the Association of True Islam, were going well. The gang of criminal Jihadis had pulled off eleven gas station robberies in LA and Orange County to raise funds for their terror spree until Patterson dropped his phone during a robbery at a gas station in Torrance. The phone led authorities to the South Central apartment being used by Patterson and Washington where they found Bin Laden posters and a target list.

The target list included LAX which was convenient because Patterson already worked there.

Washington and Patterson were busted while trying to rob another gas station in Fullerton.

Patterson told cops that robbing gas stations was “part of a jihad against the U.S., particularly against American oil companies who are stealing from our countries” and that he wanted to die for Allah. The gas station robberies had been meant to raise money to buy weapons and to provide training to Patterson, who had no criminal record, in how to be a terrorist.

The Bay Area has the single largest concentration of ‘green’ businesses in the country. It was also the first to feel California’s rolling outages caused by the state’s messy infrastructure of solar panels and wind turbines, faulty and erratic, tied together by ‘virtual power plants’.

The real color of ‘green energy’ is black.

The Bay Area and surrounding areas are ground zero for the massive graft and grift of ‘green energy’ businesses with companies selling, reselling, manufacturing, consulting, certifying and investing in the bubble crowded in skyscrapers and office parks next to each other. And some of those ‘green’ businesses went dark when a wind farm failed and the power outages rolled out.

The real victims of the evening outages in northern California were senior citizens tethered to breathing machines who sat in the dark, watching the remaining battery power and hoping they would survive, families taking the elevator down only to be trapped inside, restaurants, already battered by lockdowns and riots, losing power and watching food go bad and customers leave.

Dave Patrick Underwood, an African-American Federal Protective Service officer, was shot and killed at the Ronald V. Dellums Building during the radical riots in Oakland, California. A building named after Congressman Dellums is burdened with its own weight of historical complicity in leftist atrocities.

"Let me commend your pastor, Jim Jones, for the dedication he is showing to his community and surrounding areas," Congressman Dellums once wrote. "And also for impact he makes on members of his congregation."

At Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery, some distance from the riots, a plaque over a mass grave reads, “In memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy". The names on the plaque include that of Jim Jones.

Jones, who called cops “pigs” and posed with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, told his mostly black followers to die horrifyingly of cyanide poisoning to resist the racism of the United States of America.

The white leftist who claimed to uphold the value of black lives killed hundreds of black people.



Radicals call for a reckoning with America’s history. But they have not reckoned with their own history that played out much more recently than 1619. 1970s Jonestown has become their model for America.

Jonestown is much more relevant to what is going on in America now than the current revisionist history of Jamestown embraced by the radicals. And there is no more obvious barometer for the lost reckoning than the plaque which lists Jones as one of the victims of a tragedy, instead of a mass murderer. Calling the socialist massacre a tragedy suggests that Jonestown, like the USSR, was a noble cause that failed.

Talk to lefties of a certain age about Jonestown and they’ll mumble about CIA mind control experiments and FBI COINTELPRO operations against activists who wanted to bring about social change. The mass grave in Oakland, like the mass graves in Cambodia, the USSR, and Communist China, are uncomfortable realities. And while mainstream media narratives don’t go that far, they erase what Jones stood for.

The mad mob scenes in Oakland and across California with the power of the Democrat establishment behind them, the viral videos of white millennials kneeling and confessing their privilege, are the People's Temple writ large on a nation. Jones, the son of a Klansman, who was inspired by a Communist-allied cult to build a following as a Marxist preacher of interracial brotherhood, joining the California Democrat establishment before going down in flames, has once again become the future.

Jones ran a leftist cult of white leaders who called themselves black and exploited their mostly black congregation, endorsing the Black Panthers and other black nationalist terror groups, while serving as a core political organization for California Democrats, including former Governor Jerry Brown.

The stain of Jim Jones is still all over California. A generation of California Democrat leaders either allied with Jones or were mentored by Jones’ political allies like Willie Brown. That includes both Senator Kamala Harris and Governor Newsom. That’s why, decades later, California is still stuck in Jonestown.

Jim Jones is "what you should see every day when you look in the mirror", Governor Jerry Brown gushed. It's not what we see. But it's what Brown saw. And what so many Democrats see.

"Revisiting Peoples Temple's goals of apostolic socialism and racial reconciliation offer important insights for understanding the group's legacy that can contribute insight into ways of solving ongoing social problems related to poverty and racial inequality in the United State," David Feltmate, an associate professor of Sociology at Auburn University, has argued.

Such calls are not unique. Like lefty histories of the USSR, historians, academics, and even PBS, seek to extract Jones’ good politics from his bad ending while refusing to recognize that they are intertwined.

There are certainly insights in Jones’ methodology of fleecing and humiliating wealthy white lefties, and exploiting elderly African-Americans who thought that the Peoples Temple would take care of them for the rest of their lives, only to be killed when the apostolic socialist cult collapsed under its own abuses.

All of that could have been avoided if the media hadn’t covered it up until one of their own got killed.

The Jonestown model is also the model for the Democrat Party which, like Jones, lures in upscale whites by playing on their idealism and guilt, humiliating them to keep them from seeing that the whole thing is a scam, and using the black people it lured in with promises of a social safety net to claim moral superiority. Add in a streak of terror and thuggery to keep everyone in line, along with a dash of sexual sadism to compromise and destroy the moral integrity of core cult members, and you have utopia.

Exploiting racism was central to the appeal of the Peoples Temple as it is to the Democrats.

The Peoples Temple used the moral drama of racism to create a racial conflict, playing on the guilt of white people and the fears of black people to divide them, threatening apocalypse and offering redemption through socialism. Racism was the source of Jones’ power. It was the primal sin and fear that he held over the heads of his followers to incite them to commit horrible crimes against each other.

And to stay silent while he committed even worse atrocities.

There is no meaningful reckoning that Americans can make with 1619, but it is vitally important that there be a reckoning with the seventies as Jonestown is becoming a statewide and nationwide model.

The latter-day Joneses promise redemption through socialism and twist America around the axis of race. Using the weight of racism, they are able to justify any crime and any abolition of rights in its name.

The ultimate victims of Jonestown were largely black. That’s also true of the Democrat Party.

Jim Jones was the first to turn racism into a religion. The end of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown are instructive now that racism has become the national religion of Jones’ Democrat Party. The cult leader had told his followers that God was socialism and that a man was as godly as he embodied socialism. And Jones was the ultimate divinity because he was the embodiment of the Principle of Socialism which alone could reconcile the races and all of humanity to paradise by becoming the gods of socialism.

“God was a liar. The snake told the truth,” Jones told his followers.

God told the truth. It’s the socialist snakes who always lie. Jim Jones promised his followers utopia, but he couldn’t deliver paradise. The people ate the poisonous apples, but never became as gods. Instead they tortured and killed, engaged in sexual debauchery of every variety, blackmailed and assassinated each other, and then died in terrible pain after first poisoning the elderly and then the children.

Also known as fighting for social justice, sexual liberation, euthanasia and abortion.

The Democrats and their media are telling the nation that burning and looting cities is the path to utopia. As Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts said, “America is burning, but that’s how forests grow." Jones would beat and sexually humiliate his followers during services and tell them that they were better people for it. But the only leaders who want to beat and burn aren’t going to utopia. They are ushering in the familiar hell on earth in whose cruel flames every utopian experiment ends.

A month before the mass deaths, a Soviet diplomat visited Jonestown and listened to the men, women, and children who would soon be dead serenade him with a rendition of, “I’m a socialist today, and I’m glad." Jonestown, like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, or Cuba, was doomed even if no outside forces had intervened. It was a failed experiment in utopianism that could only end one way.

The same is becoming increasingly true of the Democrat enclaves, including in California where Jones had the most success and enjoyed the political protection of top Democrats and every major paper.

The Jonestowning of America is an act of brutal power by the Joneses and of despair by their followers.

Like Jim Jones, the Democrats have no vision or hope to offer. Utopia has been replaced with pain and death. The screams of hate and the wrecked blocks in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are the nation’s Jonestowns. The country’s biggest cities have become failed experiments in social justice where the socialist cant is preached all the louder even as things only get worse.

As the end approached, Jones took refuge in paranoid delusions and apocalyptic conflicts, inventing enemies and lashing out at them to evade responsibility for his corruption and crimes. All the radicalized Democrats have to offer are apocalyptic visions of environmental armageddons and perpetual racial atonement in a country that was irredeemably evil even over a century before its birth. Hope. Change.

The arc of history points not to progress, but to Jonestown. The Joneses are torturing their followers with pandemic lockdowns, rioting, economic destruction, environmental impoverishment, and cultural collapse to sate their own sadistic impulses and to divert attention from the failures of their ideas.

All that’s left now is the grim death march through the opening of prisons, the normalization of crime, the Green New Deal, socialized medicine, and the random crises met with tyranny on the way to utopia. At the end, the men and women who had followed Jones realized that the promise of a socialist kingdom of heaven on earth was a lie. There was no food. Bibles were being torn up for toilet paper. The only escape from the misery was death. That is also the great leftist vision for western civilization.

When our civilization lies in ruin and daily life is a miserable horror, they expect us to be ready to die. Kill the elderly in the nursing homes. And then the children. Then everyone has to drink the Kool-Aid.

The progressive leaders will say that it’s an act of mercy and courageous idealism.

"There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wondered.

The Democrats have perfected Jones’ trick of using racial guilt to empower a white elite to carry out the socialist schemes that make them feel like gods even as they impoverish, enslave, and destroy. But, just like in Jonestown, all anyone has to do is look at the carnage and ask, “Is this progress? Where’s utopia?” Are the burning cities, the kneeling mobs, and the terrorized people really leading to utopia?

Jim Jones was the socialist son of a Klansman who exploited and killed hundreds of black people. The Democrats are the socialist party of the Klan who exploited and killed hundreds of thousands of black people. When the Democrats claim to care about black lives, they take them in horrifying numbers.

In April, Governor Gretchen Whitmer posed and primped on The Daily Show in a “That Woman from Michigan” t-shirt as a narcissistic slam at President Trump. That same month, that woman from Michigan issued an executive order, that the Daily Show and SNL didn’t mention, "protecting" residents of long-term care facilities, by forcing nursing homes to admit patients infected with the coronavirus.

Her order dictated that a "long-term care facility must not prohibit admission or readmission of a resident based on COVID-19 testing requirements or results" and told hospitals to discharge coronavirus patients back to the homes they had come from. Some nursing homes were designated as ‘hubs’ and coronavirus patients were transferred into them, even though these facilities had uninfected residents.

Despite claims that these ‘hubs’ would carefully separate infected and uninfected patients, that didn’t always happen. While there had been a plan to move coronavirus seniors to the 1,000 bed TCF Center in Detroit which was being used as an overflow hospital for coronavirus patients, they were instead sent to nursing homes. The TCF Center only ended up treating 39 patients before being mothballed.

As of now, at least 687 nursing home residents in Michigan have died in the pandemic and 290 coronavirus patients have been placed in Michigan nursing homes. These numbers are incomplete.

Next time, Governor Whitmer goes on the Daily Show, she can wear a new t-shirt, “Grandma Killer”.

 

In New York, Governor Cuomo’s Health Department had issued an order on March 25th to "expand hospital capacity" by forcing nursing homes to "comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals to NHs" and warned facilities that, "no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19."

It took over 5,000 deaths for Cuomo to partially reverse his grandma-killing policy which had killed 5% of residents of nursing homes in the state. It was a partial reversal, because nursing homes still couldn’t remove infected patients, but hospitals were no longer allowed to discharge infected patients to homes.

Cuomo has argued that no one should be prosecuted for nursing home deaths because they would have died anyway. “Older people… are going to die from this virus,” he argued, dismissing the outrage of the families of the dead. “I don't think there's any logical rationale to say that they would be alive today.”

"We've tried everything to keep it out of a nursing home, but it's virtually impossible," he falsely claimed.

His grandma-killing administration had tried everything, except providing protective equipment, not sending infected patients into nursing homes, or removing infected patients from nursing homes.

Cuomo had tried everything to stop killing grandmas, except not killing grandmas.

On March 31st, New Jersey Commissioner of Health Judith Persichilli issued an order stating that in order to achieve "the expedited receipt of patients/residents discharging from hospitals", "no patient/resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the post-acute care setting solely based on a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19." It was a virtual copy of the earlier New York State order.

New Jersey’s own nursing home death toll is approaching New York’s 5,000 death toll.

10,000 dead grandmas and grandpas haven’t dented the media’s adoration for Cuomo and Murphy. To paraphrase another leftist, a single dead grandma is a tragedy, 10,000 dead grandmas are a statistic.

But before New York and New Jersey had even made their move, Governor Tom Wolf’s grandma-killing administration had ordered Pennsylvania nursing homes to accept "readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital" in order to "alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings" including "patients who have had the COVID-19 virus."

Wolf’s Secretary of Health, Dr. Richard (Rachel) Levine, had transferred his own mother out of a nursing home and to a hotel.

“Dr. Levine has done a phenomenal job of making sure that we do what we need to do in keeping Pennsylvanians safe,” Governor Wolf insisted.

That phenomenal job amounts to 2,529 coronavirus deaths in nursing homes or 68% of the state's deaths.

On March 30th, Governor Newsom’s administration warned skilled nursing facilities that they "shall not refuse to admit or readmit a resident based on their status as a suspected or confirmed COVID-19 case."

“California’s directive is nothing less than a death sentence for countless residents," warned Patricia McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

“I’m not taking in a COVID-positive patient for the sole purpose of emptying one hospital bed. In two weeks, I’m sending them back 20 new patients,” Dr. Noah Marco, the Chief Medical Officer of the Los Angeles Jewish Home, said. Half of California's deaths, or 1,276, have occurred in nursing homes, though not all are the SNFs that were ordered to accept coronavirus patients.

Whitmer, Cuomo, Wolf, and Newsom have been widely praised by the media, even though their disastrous policies likely led to the deaths of thousands of senior citizens in nursing homes. There were states that got it right, protecting senior citizens by barring the transfer of coronavirus patients to nursing homes, requiring negative tests before a transfer, and creating separate facilities.

Cuomo, Wolf, Whitmer, and Newsom, not only failed to protect nursing home residents, but their forced readmission policy brought infected patients directly into nursing homes, leading to mass death.

5% of the residents in New York nursing homes are dead, that’s grandma-killing on a genocidal scale.

While New York had banned testing as a basis for nursing home admission, in Florida, a “COVID-19 test must be negative prior to transfer to a post-acute facility”.

Governor DeSantis noted that his ban on sending coronavirus patients to nursing homes is the reason why the nursing home death toll was 13 times higher in New York and 25 times higher in New Jersey.

The media falsely claims that after at least 12,000 dead grandmas and grandpas Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, and Newsom did a wonderful job, and DeSantis did a terrible one. Their measure of success isn’t in grandmas saved, but in small businesses shut down, people terrified, and government power made absolute.

And if the media gets to write the history of the pandemic, that is what our children will be taught.

They will learn that in an emergency, wise governors listening to learned experts deprived people of their civil liberties and stopped a catastrophe that could have been much worse. That revisionist history will become the model for handling future crises. A big lie paid for in countless thousands of lives.

The big lie must not be allowed to stand and the truth must shake our political system until it rings.

"Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Mother Nature, God?" Cuomo asked rhetorically.

Governor Cuomo says that no one should be prosecuted for the nursing home deaths. He’s wrong. The prosecutions should begin with him and tear through the bureaucrats who made and implemented those decisions. Millions of people trusted Cuomo and other Democrat officials to keep them safe. Instead they seized power, abused their authority, and killed enough grandmas to fill miles of cemetery.

The grandma-killing governors must be brought to justice.

When a violent thug was shot by a police officer in a small city in Missouri, the Obama administration came down on Ferguson with an iron fist. How is it possible that thousands of nursing home residents can die, that grandmothers and grandfathers, that 127 veterans in New Jersey’s state-run nursing homes, that 5% of New York’s nursing home population can perish with less care than the concern about a thug?

What do we amount to as a country if we not only let that happen, but let them get away with it?

Thousands of men and women who worked all their lives and paid their taxes, who raised families, who wanted to watch their grandchildren grow up, died in large enough numbers that their bodies piled up in sheds, and the same nation that ground to a halt for Michael Brown and Freddie Gray shrugs. Where is even a fraction of the outrage that has been lavished on Ahmaud Aubrey for those thousands of wrinkled men and women, black and white, gasping out their last breaths in nursing home beds?

Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, and Newsom did not believe that they were worth saving. If we do not speak the truth, if we do not fight for justice for them, then are we as a nation really worth saving?