Bubonic California

And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, their canals, and their ponds, and all their pools of water, so that they may become blood, and there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.’” -Exodus 7:19

Moses and Aaron did as they were told, and plague after plague descended on Egypt. While God ordered the plagues and the freedom brothers played their assigned roles, Pharaoh is responsible for the devastation. He enslaved the Jews, and he refused to free them until enough screws got turned on him that he had to utter whatever the ancient Egyptian equivalent of “uncle” was. 

Fast forward a few epochs and the City of Angels has a hell of a problem. It’s starting to look like some of the worst times of the past. Los Angeles is suffering its own host of plagues, right now. Like ancient Egypt before it, LA’s leaders are responsible and its people suffer. According to Dr. Drew Pinsky, LA is experiencing a “complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization,” with an exploding health crisis in the offing. 

The Obama administration might have called these plagues “man-caused disasters.” They’re not natural. They stem directly from decisions made by elected leaders, some recent and some across several decades, decisions so poor that Dr. Pinsky describes them as “reckless negligence” worthy of setting sovereign immunity aside to make the officials who made them personally liable. Pharaoh did lose his army in the Red Sea. 

Plague One: uncontrolled rats and other rodents. They’re overrunning Los Angeles thanks to the next two plagues.

Plague Two: sanitation gone mad. Los Angeles is failing to pick up the trash, particularly the garbage dropped by its exploding homeless population. Stinking, oozing garbage is piling up all over the city.  

Plague Three: Urine and fecal matter…everywhere. Like Plague Two, this scourge comes from the city’s insane policy allowing the homeless to camp out all over town. Not only do they not pick up their trash, they pay no heed to where they deposit their human waste. The Golden State has a golden flow and brown mounds in its streets and alleys as Los Angeles’ homeless population swells to about 60,000. 

During the Exodus, Pharaoh arrogantly failed to let God’s people go, and then they got plagued: Their skin turned to boils. In Los Angeles, a terrible skin disease is making a comeback because the city’s massive homeless population can camp anywhere. They attract rats the size of soccer balls. Those rats carry fleas, which carry typhus. And the city has no rodent control program. Again: Los Angeles has no rodent control program.  

Reform California says that there have been 124 confirmed cases of typhus in Los Angeles County. 

LAPD reports that well over half of its calls now deal with transients and homeless and the issues associated with them. Its Central Division station was recently inspected and found to be overrun with huge rats, to the point that many officers are considering quitting or at least transferring to another station. A city employee has now come down with typhus too.  

And another city worker has come down with typhoid fever – another medieval disease. Typhoid fever sounds related to typhus, but unlike that skin disease, typhoid is caused by a different bacteria. Typhoid comes with lasting fever, headache, nausea, stomach pains and loss of appetite and in rare cases can be lethal. Once confined the non-industrialized world, typhoid is making a comeback in the city that includes Tinseltown. Typhus includes some similar symptoms but it comes from fleas on rats, while typhoid usually comes from unsanitary food. (The typhus case has caused a plague of lawyers to descend on the Los Angeles city government, but we won’t count it among the deadly plagues.) Typhus was also once relegated to the medieval era and today’s non-industrial world, but thanks to rampant rats it’s riding back into Los Angeles. 

The worst plague falling on Los Angeles may be its deadliest, riding on a pale horse. It is, literally, the bubonic plague. Also known as the “Black Death,” this scourge killed a wide swatch of Europe in the Middle Ages. History Today describes the Black Death pandemic as the greatest human catastrophe ever.

The tragedy was extraordinary. In the course of just a few months, 60 percent of Florence’s population died from the plague, and probably the same proportion in Siena. In addition to the bald statistics, we come across profound personal tragedies: Petrarch lost to the Black Death his beloved Laura to whom he wrote his famous love poems; Di Tura tells us that ‘I […] buried my five children with my own hands’. 

The Black Death’s toll was a mind-numbing 50 million from 1346 to 1353. It swept across the continent with a fury not even contemplated again until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.  

Rats carry bubonic plague. It’s already here; the western United States sees a case or two per year but it’s still rare. Thanks to the aforementioned lack of rodent control policy in Los Angeles, Black Death may jump to humans and spread beyond the city. Dr. Pinsky even says the entire population of California may be at risk. That pale horse may become demonic pony express.  

The plagues of Exodus were a punishment on Egypt, and a means of persuading them to let the enslaved people of Israel go free.  

The plagues descending on Los Angeles and spreading around California are the direct result of rampant liberalism and virtue signaling gone wild. Liberal policies on the mentally ill emptied institutions and filled streets with people who cannot care for themselves. The liberal homeless camping policy, which is popping up in Democrat-run cities from Portland to Austin, directly causes sanitation issues in the form of garbage piles and urine and feces so widespread it can be tracked with online apps. Apps may be the only way to track it. Rats and trash could be controlled, but Los Angeles and California Democrats choose instead to sound off on “climate change,” gun control, transgender bathroom policies, the border, breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for their big hearts, and trashing Trump’s latest tweet – without bothering to do the bare minimum to manage their own failing cities. 

Hollywood likes to live like Marie Antoinette if she had any money, but all the cash in the world cannot stop the plagues from jumping those mansion walls in Beverly Hills.