Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley writes that “in California, human beings come last.” Two slices:
As Los Angeles burned, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration plotted an elaborate rescue mission—for a supposed endangered form of trout. “One of our biggest concerns,” a state Department of Fish and Wildlife manager told the Los Angeles Times last week, is “losing that last population of fish.”
California progressives don’t believe in leaving any fish or wildlife species behind. Homo sapiens, meantime, are on their own. The state employs about 5,300 workers in conservation and wildlife protection vs. 570 in the fire agency’s wildland management. Every species needs a public advocate, even if it is a common nuisance.
Weeks before the fires, the iconic 110-year-old Santa Cruz Wharf collapsed into the ocean. The reason: The California Coastal Commission had delayed repairs so that they wouldn’t coincide with seagulls’ mating season. The commission noted that the birds were “sensitive during their reproductive life history phases” and repairs might “disturb nesting seabirds.”
The anecdote is illustrative of the daffy-duck environmental policies that have fueled L.A.’s fires. Many environmentalists don’t care about wildlife—they merely use species to restrict human activity.
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In a progressive dystopia, government is arbitrarily designating ecological winners and losers. A Yale School of the Environment article last summer laid out the “Grim Dilemma: Should We Kill One Owl Species to Save Another?” Extreme restrictions on human activity can be justified only as long as a species is deemed to be endangered, so it must be preserved at all costs, including human and other animal lives.
Another Wall Street Journal columnist, Matthew Hennessey, decries “Joe Biden’s legacy of deceit.” Two slices:
Now that the Biden presidency is ending, take a moment to reflect on a basic fact of American politics: Voters aren’t stupid. You can’t lie to them about what they can see with their own eyes and expect to get away with it. Not forever. Not even for very long.
The American people handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020 because they were exhausted after four years with Donald Trump. Mr. Biden could have given voters the return to normalcy they craved. Instead he took them for fools, lying to them repeatedly and brazenly. That will be his legacy.
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Maybe Mr. Biden lied to himself about his cognitive health. Maybe he believed the lies his team told him about his poll numbers and popularity. Maybe they all thought they were caught between Donald Trump and a hard place. But whoever came up with the idea to ask the American people to believe Mr. Biden could serve four more years as president should go straight to political jail.
Plenty of obvious falsehoods not mentioned here were retailed by Mr. Biden and Democratic partisans. The provenance of Hunter Biden’s laptop comes to mind. That and other cynical fibs will ultimately become footnotes to the story of the Biden presidency. The conspiracy to obscure the 46th president’s physical and mental decline will be all anyone really remembers.
Martin Gurri puts it this way: “Democrats need to find a way out of their house of mirrors.” A slice:
Democrats’ first step forward must be to acknowledge the scale of their repudiation by the voters. They failed to do this in 2016. Back then, they blamed Trump’s election on Facebook and fake news and the manipulations of that dark wizard, Vladimir Putin. The losers of 2016 absolved themselves from any responsibility for their defeat. Ever since, the Democrats have stumbled inside a house of mirrors, where wish is confused with reality and fatal errors appear as a mere failure to communicate. In that place of illusion, they embrace a mythology that elevates them into wondrous spirits—representatives of science, perpetual guardians of “our democracy,” saviors of a dying earth, adjudicators of perfect justice. By definition, only satanic forces could oppose such a chosen people. To abandon this mythology will be traumatic and identity-crushing.
