Tag: George Gascon

Dark Palms

Our Long Winter continues…

Engaging Los Angeles politics as a citizen or homeowner is to face the limits of patience. I offer a small illustrative example from the Special Election in District 6 to replace Nury Martinez:

Dakota Smith of the Times asked the candidates in a recent forum what the proper staffing level of LAPD should be. Who says we’re not talking about public safety? See, the box is being checked. Look!  

In an exercise of pure conjecture, the progressives proffered fake numbers: 9700, 9200, 8500, abolition. None of it mattered. Left unaddressed was the wee inability of the LAPD currently to recruit at all.  We are losing 50 officers a month to attrition. The recent Academy class was 27, a number only achieved under relaxed physical standards and lenient background screens following a billboard and online recruiting drive.

So, having installed a Soros D.A. and a Police Chief who banned the Blue Lives Matter flag from all precincts and tolerated a Mayor who literally kneeled before BLM and called them murderers, having de-criminalized theft, assault and civic disorder, having emptied the jails and closed four prisons; having incentivized miscreants to refuse handcuffs and turn any garden variety police encounter into a Jerry Springer-like throwdown for the benefit of social media, Los Angeles is discovering fewer and fewer are willing to sign up and now draws an academy class of 5’3″ single mothers and middle-aged recovered alcoholic ex-cops from the Midwest looking to put hay in the barn for retirement.  Six foot 23 year olds with proper upper body strength and cardio fitness? Not so much.

In a reasonable media environment the obvious question would be, if the veterans are taking early retirement or transferring to Idaho and young, fit men are not replacing them, what policy changes do you intend to make?  But our world is not reasonable and the Times does not ask. Instead the candidates are invited to play rotisserie baseball and everyone gets a pass.

So let me be the one to say it: an inverted recruitment curve is a bit like eating the seed corn. A city might get away with it for a few years, but the remorseless mathematics of scarcity take over.  Los Angeles has reached the inflection point of triaging 911 calls for lack of personnel. Is the iceberg next?

Thomas Andrews, in life as in film, could have been undone by pride as the ships designer. Instead of denying the obvious to save face for a few hours, he persuaded people to board the life boats immediately, sparing hundreds of lives.

This might be a good time to ask: who is our Thomas Andrews?  Where is is he? She? They? Public safety is the first obligation of the state. Without it, there is no commerce. Reduced commerce, lower tax base. Fewer stores and restaurants call into question the price point for houses. Zillow beckons. Starlink. Amazon. The frontier. The next great American metropolis may prove a virtual one, where people live on farms and trade direct to consumer  beef for solar panels.

I’m an urban guy. I kind of liked my city. In 2019.

Is there no one running for office or holding a position of influence willing to acknowledge our bulkheads have been breached?  Perhaps not yet five, but do we really want to put ourselves to the test?

Chola With A Louis Vuitton Bag

Cruella De Nury, before the fall

In 1987 Ruth Galanter was nearly murdered by a transient on her front porch in Venice weeks before a special election for city council. In a moment of public sympathy, she would become the last non-machine candidate to gain office in Los Angeles at any level, for the next 35 years.

Elections have become entirely pro-forma. The Democratic Party selects the candidate internally, funds her lavishly against token opposition, do-gooders and neighborhood gadflies who offer themselves as road kill so Angelenos can tell ourselves we are not North Korea.

Termed limited pols leapfrog to a different legislative body representing the same district, from city council, to state assembly, to Congress, and back, inverting the normal democratic arrangements of selection.

Hertz Jong-Un and Hertz Jong-Il

As an illustration of dynastic politics, here’s my state Senator Bob Hertzberg, at a staged photo op with his son Daniel and hand-picked replacement. Bob is rotating over to the Board of Supervisors next year. Daniel is rotating into Dad’s warmed legislative seat. Do I have a choice in the matter? Depends on how we define “choice”.  If Twitter de-platforms me, I have the choice to build my own social media network. It’s a free country and nothing but a billion dollars in capital is standing in my way.

Thus we have been governed in my beloved Los Angeles, long before Mrs. U and I arrived with our possessions piled in the back of my pickup truck like the Clampetts.

Until now.

Enter the black swan. Changito-gate.  If you’ve been anywhere near media this week, you already know the jist.

Nury Martinez, my Nury, longtime foil of Mr. UpintheValley, has been elevated overnight to national villain status -Trumpified- and is on the chopping block along with Kevin DeLeon.  The White House itself just called for her resignation.   Suddenly, Van Nuys is the center of American politics. Who knew?

Lost in the woke posturing is the actual scandal of the recordings: pols carving up their own districts, hand selecting voters. Also, the obsession with assets, like the airport and the Budweiser brewery, which can be leveraged for donations. You have to squint pretty hard to find the outrage over that. But “negrito”? Oof. Ecstasies of sanctimony. To the guillotine with her! But first, everyone must listen to the Oaxacan Peoples Band bleat discordantly in front of City Hall in response to being insulted as short, dark and feo by la Nury who is now somewhere in seclusion, sprouting a white streak in her hair and gassing puppies.

Here’s the thing. Black people call Asian merchants Ling-Ling and white folks Opie and Becky, and do so without apology. People on the alt-right refer to Central Americans as squatemalans. Butch gays refer to swishy gays as extra. Mestizo culture has an elaborate pecking order based on skin tone, with Jorge Ramos and the pneumatic telenovela blondes at the top and Oaxacans off-screen, sitting at home watching. White people have constructed a caste system based on educational pedigree and cultural signifiers that places The New Yorker subscribers at one end and Southern Baptists at the other.

In unfiltered settings people always tell on themselves.

Spike Lee nailed intra-ethnic insults around the time Ruth Galanter was elected. Watching this clip is to pay a visit was a whole other America, refreshingly truthful. Also an entirely different Spike. I kinda miss that guy.

Assume all ostentatious offense to be cover for other things.

The real question would be who made the recording and sat on it for a year? Qui bono, who was the Brutus in the room? Gil Cedillo, already a lame duck  (and whose comments are the least damaging) has the least to lose.  But I don’t think it was him. What does he have to gain? It’s a murky play.

I think it was a staffer. With a socialist agenda.

Here’s who has an entire city to gain: the DSA cadres in waiting. Changito was not first black swan of 2022. In July, baby socialist Eunisses Hernandez eliminated Cedillo in the primary on a platform of police and prison abolition and a permanent extension of the eviction moratorium.  She prevailed by several hundred votes corralled by activist ballot harvesters after Election Day. It’s called E+7 voting, and it was quietly enacted this year. Get used to it, all close races will be decided this way going forward.

That’s one seat. They already have Nithya Raman in district 4. There’s two. Hugo Soto-Martinez is running in CD13. Erin Darling on the Westside. That’s four. Kenneth Mejia, twice endorsed by the Times, is the odds on favorite to be Controller.  Add two special elections next year for the Martinez and DeLeon seats and that’s a potentially solid caucus for Venezuelan governance. No evictions. No law enforcement. Fungible private property rights.

Rick Caruso, here is your moment. If you really want to be mayor, defy expectations and side with the principles of privacy and free speech, and remind the city that no one is a virgin. Predictably, he is calling for resignations all around. His plan for winning the Latino vote is to demand Latinos surrender 3/4 of their representation on the City Council in the name of cancel culture.

Billionaires, hacks and socialists. Given the choice, I might stick with the hacks, grasping self-interest, potty mouth and all.

Photo credit: CBSNews and CalMatters

Sorosville, Year Three

From the Summer of 2021 to this…

Through a quirk of fate I once knew Dennis Peron, the man who did more than anyone to legalize marijuana in California. I knew him in San Francisco as a gadfly from the neighborhood, circulating his petitions for a doomed cause. Cannabis was just one of those things destined to be illegal in 1996. Maybe not a felony, but something on the other side of the law, like numbers running.

Suddenly one day Dennis had an office on Market Street and America’s first medical dispensary, operating on a speakeasy basis. He invited me to his office for a chat.  The gadfly persona was no more.  George Soros was backing him, he announced. The future was neatly laid out. HIV, very much a lethal pestilence at the time, demanded medical marijuana on compassionate grounds could not be denied. Once medical cannabis could be cultivated and exchanged there would be simply no way to stop full legalization for recreational purposes. Only a question of when.

We know how this turned out. Today you can buy flower with the ease of a trip to 7-11 or have it delivered to your house by app. All perfectly ordinary, but back in the mid-90s, not even the most starry-eyed optimistic stoner would have predicted it. Nor the iPhone, nor Instagram.

No one saw it coming, but a billionaire made it happen. It had a salutary effect on Soros, who has since made himself the franchisee of urban chaos, through his army of woke prosecutors, installed city by city, one seven figure check at a time.

We are re-learning civilization requires handcuffs.  It’s hard to believe now but Broken Windows policing was once as settled a political issue as we had in America, so completely transformative of the urban landscape you couldn’t campaign against it, even in Los Angeles.

An entire generation came of age with no living memory of street crime. Now that they’ve tasted it, people are ready to take corrective measures.

George Gascon, Soros’ handpicked prima donna, was a dead D.A. walking, next in line after Chesa Boudin for a public auto-da-fe.

The voters of Los Angeles County submitted 715,833 signatures in support of his recall, where 566,857 were required.

Carlos Gonzalez, SF Chronicle

Yet here he is this week, smiling and dapper, having tap-danced his way around his reckoning at the polls.

How did this happen?  In secret, courtesy of Dean Logan, Registrar of Voters, who managed to disqualify 195,000, or 27%, of the signatures away from the eyes of Recall Committee observers, who were banned from the building on the grounds it was not an election but a signature verification process.

For perspective, L.A. county rejected 1% of mail-in ballots in the 2020 cycle due to non-matching signatures.

Dean Logan has a history. In 2004 he was the Director of Elections in Seattle during the Dino Rossi-Christine Gregoire gubernatorial race, in which Rossi prevailed by 261 votes, then 46 votes in the recount, and then in a second manual recount Logan “found” 573 votes for Gregoire, previously disqualified due to -wait for it- signature matching issues.

The blowback was so intense Logan was forced to resign. Because we can no longer have nice things, and because one can only fail upward in the administrative state, Los Angeles hired him soon after.

People living in saner American climes watch the clip above and express disbelief.  Why do we allow this to happen?  As though we have been taken over by a charm of beguiling whispered in Aramaic instead of the decidedly unsexy nuts and bolts of an election process where billionaires and bureaucrats call the shots.  If signature matching can be manipulated to elect favored candidates and disqualify recall petitions, the person making those decisions holds inordinate power in the new era of vote by mail.

It’s going to get stranger. We no longer have an Election Day. We have entered the era of E+7 voting.  Activist groups have a full calendar week beyond the election to harvest ballots, bring them to drop boxes without a chain of custody, under a verification process that remains opaque. This is how Eunisses Hernandez, police and prison abolitionist, prevailed in District 1 this summer. It’s how Karen Bass went from five points down on the night of the Mayoral primary on June 7 to a seven point lead over Rick Caruso a month later when the results were certified. Or ‘certified’.

Were they late-arriving ballots or last minute? Even the Times couldn’t decide the correct nomenclature for this new reality.

Who would have predicted San Francisco would red pill before L.A.? Stranger things.

A Postcard from Sorosville

So here’s a small data point in our current disintegration.  I ordered an item from Lululemon, a feminine wife-flattering thing.

Given the supply chain constraints, there was suspense as to whether it would arrive in time for Christmas, a tiny leaf floating in the River Ganges of holiday commerce from Groveport, Ohio to Hardin, MO to Mayfield, KS to Canyon, TX to Topock, AZ…dots on the railroad map, clocking in every 12 hours, before disappearing the night of Dec. 23rd at an undisclosed location on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

The shipping container, or its contents, never made it to the distribution hub. For eleven days, radio silence. Then an alert from FedEx the item was at long last on a delivery truck in Sun Valley.

Eleven days sounds to me like they sent a new package across the country. Theoretically, the shipping container itself could have been misrouted in the intermodal transport system.  I find this explanation on a low order of probability.

A differential diagnosis suggests it was waylaid by package pirates in Lincoln Heights. Or the other banditry choke point, outside Pomona.

Ninety containers are compromised (read: broken into) per day.

Union Pacific has made “over 100 arrests of active criminals vandalizing trains” in L.A. County. Per a special directive from D.A. George Gascon all were released within 24 hours. Of the arrests, none to date have resulted in court proceedings.

Add train robbery to the growing list of unenforced felonies in Sorosville.  A pry bar, bolt cutters and a willingness to climb a slow moving flat car and you too can be Butch Cassidy.

It’s baked into the price of everything we do now.  So let us break out the world’s tiniest violin for Mrs. UpintheValley’s late arriving gift.  As I said, a small thing, a mere data point in a sea of annoyance. There are families with real grief this week.

Sandra Shells, ER nurse, attacked without provocation at a bus stop at Union Station, succumbed to a brain bleed after her head struck the pavement.

Brianna, unrequited martyr?

Brianna Kupfer, an architecture grad student knifed to death in Croft House, an upscale boutique on La Brea Avenue, mid-afternoon.

Money was not a motive in either attack. Straight murder, nasty, brutish and pointless.

The killer, masked, backpack and hoodie, anonymous and indistinguishable from the army of shambling street people is as of this writing still at large. I will go on record now and predict he has been in custody and released without sentencing for other crimes in the past two years, probably more than once.

Brianna calls to mind Polly Klaas, all grown up. If ever there was a designated victim tailor-made to galvanize the public into a ferocious response it is she. If ever there was a face to push Westside liberals off the sidelines, to make them stakeholders in the unfolding tragedy they helped to set in motion, this is it.

I’m not sure it’s going to happen. Los Angeles of the 90s had the moral sense to boo Robert Shapiro at the Laker game during the O.J. trial, to vote for broken windows policing and three strikes laws.  It had a very different media. It didn’t have out of town billionaires writing checks to install our carpetbagging fashionista D.A.

The man in the tailored suit who swore an oath uphold the law had this to say: “The reality is that we go through these cycles, and we go through the cycles for a variety of reasons … In many ways we cannot prosecute our way out of social inequalities, income inequalities, the unhoused, the desperation that we have.” 

Prosecution is exactly how we rid ourselves of this scourge. Inequality, however defined, and housing status will be with us always.

Being right is of no use at the moment.  It has little persuasive value. It has no name in the street. Persuasion is in the hands of an ever smaller coterie of people who own/curate our media feed. They simply cannot afford to let Brianna become Polly.

Counterintuitively, working class strongholds like Van Nuys might be at an advantage right now. We’re not a soft target. We see you coming.

To Be A Good Witness

Dinnertime at Hot Wings. Fork it over.

The LAPD has a message for all of us: In the event of robbery, surrender your valuables.  “If you are being robbed, do not resist the robbery suspects; cooperate and comply with their demands. Be a good witness.”

This is not exactly helpful. What would you tell the police when they arrive? He was wearing a hoodie, officer… 

The Hoodie Posse is running California right now.  You have to admire the brazenness of walking into Home Depot en masse to steal hammers and crowbars…then moving on to the mall for the next robbery.

Thieves drive late model cars to the site of their crimes, double park in the street. Why wouldn’t you? George Gascon is not sending anyone to jail. He would rather police your language.  Don’t call them looters. Too much racial baggage.

There is a clear societal consensus against stealing, yet robbery is not enforced.

There is no consensus on vaccine mandates but they are enforced ruthlessly. Welcome to clown world.

“If you criticize me, you’re criticizing science,” declares Anthony Fauci, more than once. “Senators who ask questions are liars.”

Gavin Newsom has extended his ’emergency powers’ until March, making for two years of rule by administrative decree, unchallenged by the California legacy media or the legislature.

Everyone must get a booster, declared King Gavin, who rolled up his sleeve for the Moderna jab, then disappeared off the face of the earth for a week, failing to attend Cop26.  He resurfaced at the Ivy Getty wedding.

If you want to understand California in one frame, here it is.

The perpetrator was wearing a car salesman grin and a lot of hair product, officer.  He was accompanied by the Speaker of the House. The billionaires granddaughter was quite smashing. The gala was a paid for by fossil fuel wealth, passing down to the fourth generation. All the guests were given a tax cut from Nancy. No, seriously.

I’m making my witness. Am I cooperating enough?

The “vaccines” neither prevent transmission nor infection and lose efficacy after six months.  They no longer correlate with hospitalization or death rates. Why do we continue to refer to the jab as a vaccine?

Why do we yearn for the leash?  Why are so many of us acting like a conquered people?

We are living out a society-wide version of Flowers for Algernon, losing our collective intelligence, cognizant our maxims of prudence are slipping away, yet at the same time incapable of course correction.  So far.

Writing about diners surrendering their valuables table side without resistance and ending up writing about vaccine efficacy is very on brand for 2021.

It’s really about the loss of civic guardrails that maintain trust.   To ask these questions is my way of being a good witness.

The answer is not a booster shot.

To Ensure Domestic Tranquility

Here’s an anecdote from the 1980s.  My family drove to San Francisco to visit friends.  We parked across the street from said friends house, and while exchanging greetings on the front steps, we hear the sound of breaking glass.  We turn to see a perpetrator execute a smash-and-grab of my mothers purse from the back seat of our car which, being a country bumpkin from Mendocino County, she left in plain view.  Police were alerted, and a description given: “oh yeah we know exactly who he is. He’s been working this neighborhood for a month.”

Two weeks later my parents get a call from SFPD. They have him in custody. Could you return to San Francisco to identify him? It’s very important we have an eyewitness. We need to put him away.  We can pay your mileage costs.

My parents demur. It’s a long drive.  Besides, it was only $20.  (Plus the window, of course, which they never fixed).  Also, he was (sotto voce) black,  putting them in rather a tight spot politically.

So no burdensome police lineup for my feckless parents ensconced in their  rural splendor with Third Reich demographics, $400/year property tax and robbery rate of .001%. From their hippie shire they eagerly voted for the lefty-ist candidates on the ballot, every time, and still do (except for Prop. 13 repeal).

But it was to be another decade of smash and grab for urban people, liberals included, until they voted for the restoration of order. For broken windows policing. For Three Strikes laws. For Anti-Gang injunctions. For prosecution of petty theft.  Leading the charge: middle-class black folk.

It was such a resounding success in achieving its policy goals Broken Windows was unassailable for twenty years. You could not run against it. Not in New York, not in L.A or anywhere between.  In the early 1990s you couldn’t sell a house South of the 10. Now they go in multiple offers.

For how much longer?

As self-parody it would be difficult to improve upon this. Kate Chatfield works in the SF District Attorney’s office under Chesa Boudin. Before Chesa was installed by George Soros, friend of the looter, Kate made a living suing police departments. Now on the other side of the table, she declines to prosecute “crime” and likens victims to the KKK.

They used to get it, even in SF. An ignored $20 purse snatch becomes a series of snatches and doesn’t stay a $20 problem for long. What happens to a city when ten people enter a store and each steal $950 worth of goods, in plain view of security, who are told to stand down for fear of lawsuits/bad press and who could be punched with impunity by the thieves since simple assault is no longer prosecuted? How long can stores remain open?

If you think this is only a question of property crime and hoping we can just eat the cost somehow in higher prices and ride it out, consider the above two minute cinema verite futurism.

Three hundred pounds, this guy. Multiple eyewitness. License plate. DNA.  Coverage on local news. No arrest.

Wait, what? Back up.

Police never caught him. She was the third woman this criminal mastermind assaulted is as many days, all from his vehicle.  A week later, his mother turned him in. How much shoe leather did they put in on this?  I’m afraid to know the answer.

Maybe Kate Chatfield is telling on herself with the Birth of a Nation reference.  That’s where this going, isn’t it? The logic of Critical Race Theory leads inevitably to the erosion of a rules based order, and a concomitant demand we make our skin color our uniform, all of us. Vigilante justice, the mirror image of looting, will be unavoidable.

But it won’t be white people, at least not in L.A.  Their wealth discriminates, so they don’t have to. Those who aren’t wealthy enough for safety have decamped for the exurbs, or the red states, or are planning to do so. Or they are single and childless and renting and will simply pull up stakes when the cost/benefit calculus turns unfavorable.

No, the vigilantes will be the people who can’t back up.  Who are rooted to mortgages, to brick and mortar employment, kinship networks and parental obligation. People who won’t go back to the old country.   People who have ceded as much ground as they are going to and not an inch farther.

Latinos. Armenians. The people at Nolo’s Barbershop, where I get my haircuts.  Men who shook their heads at the obsequious news coverage of the George Floyd trial and clucked and spoke freely and didn’t care who heard.

I’m an urban guy. I can abide a certain degree of day to day friction, but I don’t want to live in a Los Angeles without handcuffs, and I definitely don’t wish to stay in the version of Los Angeles that comes after.

A Time for Re-Learning

A small but spirited Recall George Gascon rally took place at Topanga and Victory yesterday, in quiet response to the noisy lawlessness of 2021.

Is this the mustard seed of a Prop. 13-style rebellion? A beginning of the return to broken windows policing? Or a doomed last stand by a declining demographic? I have no idea. After the past year I can’t trust my political instincts when it comes to predicting events in Los Angeles.

Shootings are up 73%. We don’t enforce property crime or public nuisance crime at all, so any numbers on that front are meaningless. No one is allowed to say so, but there is a historical connection between the two.

We are in the midst of our Great Unlearning. Or Re-Learning, depending on your view.

Note, but a year ago Jackie Lacey was on the verge of reelection in the jungle primary for District Attorney -Gascon a distant second place with 28% of the vote- when BLM activists began showing up outside her Granada Hills house in the middle of the night, chanting, knocking on her door. After weeks of this, her husband David emerged at 4:30 AM flourishing a weapon, ordering everyone off his porch and property.   An orgy of sanctimonious media coverage ensued. Menacing! With a deadly weapon!  Jackie Lacey, Crenshaw raised, a member of that disappearing breed of law and order Democrat, was recast as Wife of Dirty Harry.  The Times saw to it she never recovered and now we have this George Soros-backed carpetbagger from San Francisco making decisions as to where the societal guardrails will be placed in L.A.   Apparently they will be in El Segundo.

The recall rally took place across the street from the now defunct Promenade at Woodland Hills. Which invites a question: what if the restoration of law and order that brought people back to the cities is destined to become an artifact of the 90’s, like the traditional indoor mall, or Dawson’s Creek?

The same tech companies that devoured the mall also de-platform critics of BLM.  Make of that what you will.

The final remaining tenant is the AMC theater. Like Macy’s, AMC may also be on its way to the graveyard of commerce.  You can stream unlimited programming, so there’s that.  But there also has been a decline in public decorum and fewer people willing to sit in close proximity with the unhousebroken.  Cinema is becoming either an evening of Netflix on the comfy couch or $30 tickets at iPic in a posh zip code far from the unruly.

I saw The Dark Knight here. A packed house and a most un-woke film. It was so much better as a bonding experience with strangers. We walked out of the theater together knowing we had been part of something special.

America was another country then. Same people, different set of rules.

I, For One, Welcome Our Corporate-Sponsored Overlords

Rich wypipo say, look at me

Would you be a cop today?  If you were a strapping young man or woman with a strong sense of civic duty, would you sign up for a career?  Would you encourage your child? If you were  already a cop, in say, Los Angeles, would you put in for a transfer to a rural jurisdiction or take early retirement? If you are mid-career and the rural departments are full up, and you’re stuck in LA waiting out your 20, how proactive are you going to be?  If theft under $1000, mugging and assault are now misdemeanors (provided no gun is used), how much effort are you going to exert chasing violators?

Police encounter uncooperative suspects in a state of acute drug intoxication every day.  There are protocols for this. Those protocols were followed in the case of George Floyd. Up until the last three minutes of the encounter, that is. The prosecution conceded as much at trial.  Now Derek Chauvin has been convicted of murder. Not negligence. Not a failure to exercise caution. Murder, of a man with advanced arterio-sclerosis and a lethal level of fentanyl in his system. A man who had overdosed on fentanyl several months prior and for which he was hospitalized for five days. A man who left two chewed fentanyl tablets in the back seat of the police car with his DNA on them.  Nine minutes with a knee across the shoulder blades is not going to induce cardiac arrest in a healthy person. Don’t believe me? Try it at home.

Chauvin inspires little empathy from me. He was negligent. I worry about the badge, not the man. I worry about the thin blue line, forgive the cliche, separating civilization from barbarism.

What happens to police work now? For starters, physical contact with violent subjects will drop away to nothing.  Unless you’re charging at someone with a knife. Oh, wait…

Columbus, Ohio, the day the Chauvin verdict was read

After Chauvin, cops will no longer be proactive. They will drive by and wave. They will show up to take statements and file incident reports. Protection? Not so much. The broken-windows model, the one that transformed every shitty realm in LA, the policy which allowed the historical neighborhoods to rediscover their former glory, the policy that put equity into the hands of so many working class people, is now inoperative. We are entering the realm of No Handcuffs for Violent People.  How does this effect Van Nuys? Too early to tell.  How about the mortgage-holders in the neighborhoods in proximity to DTLA? Not good. Not good at all.

Mark Zuckerberg underwrites a private army worthy of Pablo Escobar. There are 6,000 security people on the Facebook payroll, $18 million per year dedicated to his detail alone. There is an escape chute in his office that goes to an underground garage and a waiting vehicle, staffed by ex-Secret Service and military people.  He maintains this posture of maximum deterrence while living in Palo Alto, the least diverse and safest city in California.  All while donating millions to the Racial Justice Accelerator Fund, which backs BLM, George Gascon, and various pro-crime initiatives, including the effort to de-felonize mugging and assault down here in L.A.  He’s not alone in this. Jack Dorsey, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mackenzie Scott, Dustin Moskowitz, Patty Quillan, all heavy donors to The Cause. (That’s Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix, if you were wondering)

The widow Jobs, and one of her many homes

Lets unpack this.  The wealthiest cohort in California is funding political street violence and altering laws that allow a very diverse population -lesbian Wiccan schoolteachers to chain-smoking Armenian bodyshop owners- to amicably share space.  Truly remarkable, when you think about it, 17 million people speaking 43 different languages can share L.A. roads every morning, conduct commerce, work amongst one other despite incompatible and mutually exclusive understandings of the cosmos, socialize and dine, with a minimum of friction. This is possible due to agreed upon societal guardrails, developed over centuries.  Los Angeles is the anti-Lebanon, the living rebuke to the idea Diversity+Proximity=War.

What if Palo Alto decides: let’s burn it all down in the name of perfection. That couldn’t really happen, right? Only in dystopian fiction…

Well….a small sliver of the population provides most of the funding for left wing causes. A handful of editors and producers at the Times and the networks set the narrative of our news feed. A microscopic percentage of the people who work in the entertainment industry decide what programs and films are greenlit. A tiny subset of administrators and admissions officers can impose Critical Race Theory on the education system by fiat, determining who is allowed to ascend into the professional classes. Five people and their advisors control the platforms on which freedom of speech is exercised in America and practically speaking, speech itself.

What if the Wuhan virus was the second most impactful event of 2020? What if the big reveal is just how small The Clerisy is and how ruthlessly it intends to impose its will?

Hello, 2021. Ready for more?

The Chauvin verdict was made with a rioters standing ready outside the courthouse, and racially motivated looting and arson taking place in Minneapolis.  With our very own Maxine Waters on the ground (behind police protection) calling for “confrontation” should the jury return a verdict for less than murder.  One is obliged to forget a whole lot of American history to believe this ends well.

Apple has an ongoing crowdsourced billboard campaign promoting the capabilities of the iPhone. This year, in keeping with the moment, they chose black photographers utilizing black subjects. Fair enough.  Take a look at the photo at the top of the page. This is what greets you as you enter West Hollywood, our most heavily looted neighborhood of 2020. This is not happenstance. TBWA/MediaArtsLab chose this photo out of countless others, and chose to place it at Doheny and Santa Monica, on behalf of the world’s third largest corporation and its major shareholder, Laurene Powell Jobs. This man, it says, has license to punch you.  Little people, take it and like it.