About Next Year… Through a Glass Darkly…

Instead of About Last Year, we thought the literal turning of the page on 2023 called for a look forward to 2024. 

2023 was good for some, not good for others, just like any year ever.

But it was so odd in so many ways it can be hoped that 2024 will be better for as many people as possible.

Except Gavin Newsom.  

And the Legislature. And the non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups that live off the taxpayer. And shoplifters. And the Chinese government. And the niggling nannies that populate the various sclerotic bureaucracies that are crushing California.

How can this be made to happen? Well, here are a few ideas that could get us started, followed by a few things to watch carefully in the coming months:

• Passage of a law that holds government agencies to the same standards as private businesses in regard to accounting and financial reporting. As we all know, bait and switch and absurdly fraudulent bonds and pilfered “lock boxes” have plagued California for years.  

But when a business borrows money or float bonds or stocks or what-have-you, there are strict rules they must follow when it comes to disclosing proper supportive information.  A company that raises funds under false pretenses – or uses said funds in a way not advertised (borrow a million to build a new HQ and instead take the money to Vegas, that kind of thing) can get in very very big trouble.  

Now, governments cannot.  They can lie to raise the funds and they can divert “for emergency purposes” as they see fit and, in the case of the water storage bond of a few years ago, they can just sit on it and ignore the reason they got the money in the first place.  This one change would save the taxpayer literally billions of dollars.  Chance of passage in 2024?  Exactly zero.  In the future?  We’ll see…

• Holding cities to the Boise decision regarding homelessness.  This federal case is oft-cited as the reason why the homeless population has exploded, with officials saying their hands are tied, they can’t just move people along anymore, that they’ll get sued (by the same advocacy groups they fund – such a vulturous circle,) and that doing anything different from what is (not) being done now is illegal.

That is simply not true and merely a cover for the literally deadly but extremely profitable political construct that exists around the issue now.

The Martin v. Boise case does not at all bar cities from enforcing existing laws, such as those that ban public urination, menacing, brandishing a weapon, assault, drug dealing, etc.  Nor do many of the rulings based on Boise.

That’s why some cities are death pits and some are not; that’s why in and around Los Angeles you can literally stand on one side of the street (in the city) in a fetid encampment and look over to the other side in another city and see exactly no homeless people.

Pushing cities like LA to actually follow the law and do what they are allowed to do and forcing them to drop the pedantic façade they hide their financially and politically-intentional inaction behind would be of incalculable benefit to everyone in the state – especially the homeless.  Chances of happening in 2024? Exactly zero. In the near future?  Well see…

• Killing high speed rail.  Now, we know the likelihood of this is the same as the likelihood of getting your mother-in-law out of what was supposed to be a man cave but turned into an apartment over the garage you have.  That being said, the absurdity of the project – https://thomas699.substack.com/p/biden-adds-cash-to-burning-pile-of – is just plain embarrassing.  It’s been so loopy for so long that even Newsom accidentally said so when he talked about – before being quickly and completely muzzled by the unions that gave him money – extricating the state from the project(?).  But the future may be dimmer– and brighter for anyone who thinks above their brain stem – for high speed rail come 2025.

• Tightening laws that govern non-profit political activity.  The “we’re just a happy non-profit doing good for everyone and have no agenda beyond helping” lie is becoming more obvious.  While technically non-profits and foundations are not allowed to spend a “substantial” potion of their funds on direct politics, they in fact do – https://thomas699.substack.com/p/loud-cash-quiet-power – by hiding it as outreach and community support.  

It also helps that the foundations are able to define “politics” as to not include things like ballot measures, propositions, “get out the vote” efforts targeted at communities that tend to vote one specific way, and voter “education” efforts that, also, target only demographic groups predisposed to vote in a certain way.

In other words, there is a reason the billions of dollars that are being spent are not spent randomly, as would be in a true “get everyone out to vote” effort. Putting aside the evil of ZuckBucks paying for election officials, the fact that foundations are allowed to use a definition of “political activity” that no one on the planet uses strikes at the very heart of the electoral system.

By removing these loopholes that foundations can and repeatedly do drive gold-plated cash spewing trucks through, at least that part of the existing power structure will be damaged.  Chance of happening before the November 2024 vote?  Less than zero.  In the future? Since they tend to be tied – both locally and nationally – very closely to whatever version of the deep state you may wish to consider, 2025 may also see an open window.

• De-greening the state.  See, even that term sounds automatically bad because green is good, it means go, it means safe, it means approved.  Green sounds better than “let’s destroy the economy and make sure everyone (well, not everyone – Silicon Valley and Hollywood nabobs can keep all their stuff) lives (or gets sick and dies) like they did 200 years ago.

Green is to de-carbonization as climate change is to global warming.

But even on the best of days, California cannot even approach providing an equivalent standard of living for its residents under the state’s thuggish existing and soon-to-be-implemented regulations.  The great rollback happening next year?  Zilch. But, again, maybe the trend to net-zero starts getting rolled back in 2025.

A couple things to watch closely in 2024:

• The LA DA’s race.  Prediction: come this time next year George Gascon will not be the District Attorney of Los Angeles County.  Actually, I’m pretty confident in that.

But how the race shapes up and shakes out will also shine a light on the potential strength for the continuing national pushback against Soros-backed DAs and progressive city politicians in general.  

Then the question becomes who will replace Gascon? If it’s Jeff Chemerinsky, Soros and the hard left and the progressive and the democratic socialists win.  His policies will differ little from Gascon’s but he is unquestionably more electable (he’s actually been inside a courtroom,) especially considering the amount of money that is about to be dumped into his campaign. FYI –  Any donations made in 2023 have to reported publicly by late January; that means the money will be dumped in January so it doesn’t stay in the public eye for too long and the money dumped will not be directly on Chemerinsky’s campaign but a political action committee called “Justice and Puppies and Cozy Sweaters and Warm Cookies for LA.”  Or something along those lines.

As to who will emerge from the March primary?  If the left that got him elected completely abandons Gascon, they will most likely migrate to Chemerinsky, practically guaranteeing him one of the two top spots to head into November (if it remains a tussle for the prog vote, they both may fall out of the top two.)  The other spot(s) could go to practically – but not all – of the remaining challenges; at this point, Eric Siddall, Jon Hatami, Debra Archuleta, Maria Ramirez, and Nathan Hochman seem to be standing out in the field of ten candidates.

• Now I know there’s something else going on next year that will stand out…what could it be…oh, right – who gets to live in the White House.

To start with the ballot issue, Newsom has received a bit of “look – he’s above politics!” praise for not trying to keep Donald Trump off of the California ballot.  

But should anyone think otherwise, this was not a decision based on principles – it was based on politics.

Trump is loathed in California. Keeping him on the ballot allows Democrats to tie every Republican candidate in the state – from local water board member to senator – to Orange Man Bad. Take a look at the recall attempt: Besides having a financial advantage of literally $100 million to zero and running the most blatantly racist campaign seen since George Wallace, Newsom’s smartest strategic move was to run against Trump and not for governor of California.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.9 million votes – she won California by 4.3 million votes, meaning in the other 49 states Trump won the national vote. In 2020, Joe Biden won the national popular vote by 7 million – he won California by 5 million.  Throw in his 2 million vote New York victory, and again you end up with Trump winning the national popular vote, though this time in 48 states (that’s why there is an Electoral College, by the way.)

Newsom announcing Trump stays on the ballot is a significant benefit for California Democrats.  It’s the “strength of character, adherence to principles, doing what is right” equivalent of someone who has never smoked saying he quit smoking.

As to Maine and Colorado and whatever other state run by moronic ideologues decides to tamper with the right of the people to pick their president, the supreme court will have to step and will rule Trump stays on ballots.  By the law alone, the ruling should be 9-0 but, sadly, it won’t be – at the very least Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s dimmest bulb, will vote in favor of keeping Trump off of ballots based on the whim of a low-rent partisan local hack.

Barring his death – or literally drooling in public – Joey “Black Eyes” Biden will be the Democratic nominee and Trump will be the Republican nominee.  Despite my references to a better 2025 above, I will not yet predict the outcome of the election – too far away, too many variables, too many potential shenanigans, and I don’t want to jinx it) – but Biden clearly has the tougher road ahead.

I can say that one thing the media has already forgotten is writer Salena Zeto’s remark that Trumps supporters take him “seriously but not literally” while his opponents do the opposite.  While the media obsesses over every word (see he said he would be a dictator on day one!!!!),  the public knows that Trump, love or hate him, has a (often obnoxious) sense of humor and blusters for effect constantly and that only people obsessed with defeating Trump take each word “literally.”

This blind spot – I can predict – will yet again play a bigly role in the media’s failure to cover Trump even remotely truthfully (Author’s note– did you know spell check doesn’t flag ‘bigly?’ Hmm…)

A few other quick observations:

• Due to a court ruling, soon the public will learn the names of a whole bunch of people who took advantage of Jeffrey Epstein’s, shall we say, largesse.  What the public will not be learning in 2024 are the names of the political beneficiaries of crypto con (and Californian) Sam Bankman-Fried.  The absolutely non-political Department of Justice has decided not to pursue the rest of the charges against SBF, saying basically we already got him on the other stuff so why bother?

The donations he had to report publicly have been noted – that is true. But an actual trial would have opened many many doors the Democrats wish to remain very very closed (SBF made nearly all of his donations to Democrats and/or progressive causes).

• The battle over government censorship will continue and – considering what is at stake – will get even nastier.  

Academics paid by the government, companies terrified of being shuttered by the government, activists aligned with the government, and the government itself will continue to censor news and opinions and truths that they find inconvenient and the public will lose even more trust in the media and institutions involved.

The Missouri v. Biden (not called that anymore but we’re sticking with the more familiar name) case could and should put a halt to the effort, pending the supreme court ruling.  But as with campaign finance laws, the bad actors will hunt for other ways to cover their tracks or at least claim it will “take until the end of the year or so” to dismantle the system (by the way, you can add the foundations noted above to this problem, too.)

• COVID and the government’s deadly response will somehow be memory holed during much of the year as nobody wants to talk about.  The pandemicists don’t because they were wrong, Biden won’t because it is of no benefit to him, Trump won’t because the one thing his supporters hold against him is his getting rolled by the deep state and the bureaucracy into going along with lockdowns, etc., and a distressingly large part of the public really doesn’t want to talk about.

(Except for one reason – sick days.  If you call in with a cold or something, you can get away with that for a day, maybe two.  But if you call in with COVID, welcome to the week off, no harm, no foul.)

For almost everyone, the psychological issues around discussing the pandemic response – how could we have been so stupid, so gullible…how could we have let a superflu destroy our relationships with friends and family? why did they lie?– are still very raw, hence the “we’re done with it” stance taken by most of the public.  And the media?  Even beyond the massive “um, we screwed up and will understand if you never take us seriously ever again” problem, there is also the matter of revenue.  Next time you watch broadcast/cable TV, count how many pharma ads there are – no industry spends like pharma, especially during the daytime hours.

As I’ve noted before, it’s like having an election in 1946 and not talking about World War II, an election in 1976 and not mentioning Watergate, an election in 1868 and not mentioning the Civil War.  That is not hyperbole, either – what the nation lived through over the past year was nearly as traumatizing as those events and will definitely have effects that last as long.

This is one of the major reasons why the RFK Jr. campaign is getting some legs – he’s talking about something no one else wants to. And as to the public reaction, as noted above most don’t want to but deep down most understand the importance and realize that it has to be talked about, that that very uncomfortable conversation cannot be put off forever.

This cannot be coincidental, which makes it even more frightening.

• The World Health Organization will try to destroy national sovereignty as we know it.  The WHO, you may not know, is in the process of modifying its by-laws and treaties and such, making certain current “non-binding” items “binding” on the member nations.  In other words, if the WHO decides you have to lockdown, you have to lockdown.

This is serious, that’s why it’s been so underreported as the WHO is “talking about restricting basic human rights essential for a democracy to function.”  For a fuller and even scarier look at the issue, do read this.

Well, I could go on and on and on but you have hangovers to get back to – hope you have enough Pedialyte and ibuprofen (and no, you’re not necessarily a raging drunk if you have a little hair of the dog in the afternoon) to make it through the first.

That being said, mimosas do not count as hair of the dog. What – are you going to just throw those half-empty bottles of champagne away?

Thanks for reading the Globe!