Thoughts on…Everything - Part Quattro
“We’re not going to take it.
No, we’re not going to take it.
We’re not going to take it anymore.
We’ve got the right to choose and,
There ain’t no way we’ll lose it.
This is our life, this is our song.
We’ll fight the powers that be just,
Don’t pick our destiny cause,
You don’t know us,
You don’t belong.
We’re right, yeah!
We’re free, yeah!
We’ll fight, yeah!
You’ll see!”
Since this week’s blog is about California, I thought I would use the number four in the language that many in the California legislature want to become the official language of California. What better way to extinguish a culture than to change the language?
With that lead in, here’s this week’s topic:
The Oligarchy that Runs California: Have you noticed how authoritarian regimes like to use labels in their governance that sound Democratic? The People’s Republic of China. The Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Republic of Cuba. Of course, none of these are republics, or democratic or run by “the people”.
Similarly, Democrats in California are always talking about “saving” or “protecting” our democracy. The reality is that true democracy is the last thing they want. And they have pretty much already eliminated democracy in California. That is by design.
More about that in a moment. The oligarchy that runs California has three heads - The public employee unions, the Democratic Party leadership and finally the tech billionaires who like California and want to stay there. Virtually everything that happens in California happens because one, two or all three of these groups want it to happen. In my opinion, unions of government employees shouldn’t even exist. They extract money from workers and use it to support the candidates who will then decide their pay and benefits so they can recycle some of that money back to the candidates. It is corrupt in structure. They continually drive more taxes and spending for less work done by more employees. This hurts the general population for the benefit of the 3% who work for the state.
The Democratic Party leadership just loves power. Many of them have no real ideology (Gavin Newsom) or have no independent thought (Xavier Becerra) and they simply crave the power to control people’s lives and be dictatorial.
Then there are the tech billionaires. The unions and Democrats would ignore them if they could. But they can’t because they have too much money to be ignored. Most are leftists and support the leftist agenda on social issues, climate change, immigration and the like. But when the Democrats and unions veer into their lanes of technology innovation and money (like with the billionaire tax and bans on AI), then the tech titans fight back by throwing hundreds of millions into a pot to stop those things.
The oligarchy in California has retained power because, once they get control, they change the rules so they never lose control. 100% mail-in ballots with a legal prohibition on showing voter ID makes ballot harvesting (fraud) rampant and gives illegal aliens the vote. The left is very good at it because it is the system they designed. In my opinion, for a right-leaning candidate or initiative to win in California, they need to win the legitimate vote by 10 points or more to offset the fraudulent votes. That is hard to do in a state that leans left even when counting only the legitimate votes.
But there is much more to changing the rules than just elections so they retain power. The Attorney General selectively prosecutes only people on the right for crimes committed. They create thought crimes to keep people on the right from even expressing their thinking. They passed a “Ban Nick Shirley” law to stop investigative journalism of the rampant fraud in government. Next year, they are likely to subsidize leftist news outlets (like the LA Times and SF Chronicle) so they will effectively be state media. This is true Soviet stuff where you have state media that tells the public what the government wants it to hear and anyone presenting an alternate view is jailed. And of course the fraud itself is intentional and designed to ensure that the Democratic Party machine always has plenty of money recycled from taxpayers.
And you can’t count on state courts to stop any of this. The judges are part of the oligarchy and they will happily ignore a law as written to do “what is right”, since many of those laws are racist or nazi inspired or whatever.
I could go on. The reality is that California is not a democracy any more and is a totalitarian oligarchy. The only check on them is the federal government and the federal courts. But, that check and balance would go away under president Pete Buttigieg.
Those of you living in the other 49 states may be thinking “that’s terrible, but I don’t live there so why do I care?” First of all, California is still over 11% of the population of the U.S. and if it fails, it affects the national economy. By the way, the legal resident population of the state has fallen much more dramatically than that but the millions of sanctuary protected illegal aliens have kept the numbers up so that Newsom can claim that they are not losing as many people.
But secondly, Democrats all over the country see the California model as being something they can replicate other places. Hawaii, Oregon and Washington have already gone over. Once Dems got control of Minnesota, they installed the full California agenda in a single legislative session. Once they change all the rules, it is hard to get it back. Colorado is largely gone now too and of course the New England States and New York have been left leaning throughout my lifetime. Every conservative I know who was in New York now lives somewhere between Tennessee and Florida. And watch what Governor Spanberger is trying to do to make Virginia permanently blue.
No matter where you live, you are in jeopardy of that place becoming a dictatorial oligarchy. Wyoming, Alabama and Oklahoma may be pretty safe, mainly because lefties don’t want to live in those places. But everywhere else, there is danger.
Beware.
I know I’m being pretty negative about California’s future here. I want to be wrong, but I am of the belief that the state will continue to get worse in every metric until it becomes completely dystopian. Then maybe good sense will prevail and democracy will be reinstated.
This week’s song was the theme of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Rescue California” campaign during the recall of Grey Davis back in 2003. I was a central figure in that recall and his campaign. A few of you may remember a kick-off to that campaign at the Huntington Beach pier. Arnold was going to show up but he was late. The large crowd was getting restless. So, I stood up at the mike and sang this song as loud as I could, trying on my best Twisted Sister imitation.
We did “Rescue California” for a bit. It stopped getting worse and actually got better. There was hope. Then, it all started falling apart again after Arnold left office in 2010 and future recalls have failed for all the reasons I outlined above. No Republican has held statewide office since.
Will enough Californians decide “they ain’t gonna take it anymore”? Or will all the good ones leave so that it is a state of billionaires and people paid by the government (either through employment or handouts) and no one else? And can we stop this California disease from spreading further?
We shall see. As Twisted Sister says, we’re right, we’re free and we’ll fight. You’ll see.
In coming weeks, we still have these topics to discuss:
2026 Election
2028 Election
The Economy and the Everything Bubble
Anything else I think of between now and then.
Until next time, I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free
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