Editor’s note: This article discusses mature themes.
Like a woolly mammoth warning his friends in the tar pit that they should avoid tar pits, the former Massachusetts congressional parasite Barney Frank said this week that his final act as he enters hospice care will be to release a book warning Democrats that they’ve gone too far to the left. Imagine how obvious that fact has become if Barney Frank is able to perceive it.
There are at least a few similar noises being made elsewhere on the left, as the occasional Democrat warns that Democrats need to be less crazy and more effective at governing.
But don’t mistake those outliers for the Democrat mainstream, which isn’t moderating at all. They’ve set a course for the sun, and they mean to get there. Two recent examples warn us with great clarity that Democrats have no doubts about the aggressiveness of their hard turn to the left.
First, and most obviously, the latest in a series of California gubernatorial debates just saw Democrat candidates fighting to see who could give away more Monopoly money. The nightmarish candidate Katie “Mashed Potatoes” Porter promised free child care and free college, while the hilariously cynical anti-rich-people multibillionaire Tom Steyer promised state-run single-payer health care. California is facing a $35 billion deficit in the upcoming fiscal year, and a nosebleed-inducing unfunded public pension liability, so the plan is to give away more cash. Unusually for California, two Republicans are among the leaders in the polls and have a serious chance at becoming governor, but the competition isn’t forcing Democrats back down to earth.
Promising an endless buffet of free stuff, California Democrats also aggressively argue for an endless expansion of the people who get the free stuff. Steyer wants to arrest ICE agents, and California Democrats are uniformly calling for a zero-deportation regime that opens America to anyone who feels like coming. “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” Milton Friedman once said, presumably while actually wearing the Captain Obvious costume, but that’s exactly where California wants to go as policy: infinite welfare benefits for an infinite number of recipients.
But the fools who aspire to be California’s governor are mere amateur communists next to the fools who aspire to replace Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives. If you have a couple of hours to clearly understand the dark future of the Democrat Party, this is it, in the form of the April 29 debate between the leading candidates for California’s 11th Congressional District in San Francisco:
They all want single-payer, they want unlimited immigration by any means without ICE or the threat of deportation, and they want more, more, and more government-funded “gender-affirming care” and “reproductive care,” two euphemisms you already understand. All of those things connect: Your taxes need to cover more bottom surgeries so more dudes can get fake vaginas.
In a simply amazing series of arguments, CA-11 candidate Saikat Chakrabarti — AOC’s former chief of staff, and a former Silicon Valley tech bro who has a net worth that may approach $200 million — called over and over again for the nationalization of the economy under the firm guiding hand of the federal government. There are a half-dozen easy examples, and he thinks that you should buy food at “public groceries” on your way home from seeing your government doctor after a day of work at your government job developing new technology at the national institute that replaces tech corporations, but to catch the flavor from a single piece of video, watch his plan for housing:
Housing will be built with government loans, under the guidance of a federal agency created for that purpose, but much of it will also just be built directly by “a public developer,” from a federally owned stockpile of construction materials, after which tenants will pay for that housing with federal “rental vouchers.” Soup to nuts, housing is a government activity: planning, funding, materials, construction, paying to live in it.
Conservative journalists keep catching leftist governments giving away massive amounts of free money with no controls and for appalling purposes, but the things the right catches the left doing are things that the left will just tell you they intend to do.
While Chakrabarti is the most outrageous casual Bolshevik running for Pelosi’s seat, the person who probably wins this race is the longtime state legislator Scott Wiener, the proud author of the successful California bill that makes it less likely for adults convicted of sodomizing minors to be listed on the sex offender registry.
If you missed it, Wiener’s argument for a failed bill to give minors the ability to get Covid-19 vaccines without parental consent was that it was just a logical extension of California’s guarantee that 12-year-olds can already get secret abortions.
Meanwhile, a thousand miles up the Left Coast, the “democratic socialist” mayor of Seattle is casually waving goodbye to the businesses fleeing the city:
They do not moderate. They will not moderate. Democrats will not “move to the center.” There will be no course correction. The only way to moderate their course is to defeat them. They’re telling you that as plainly as they can. When they tell you who they are, believe them.
