A couple of months ago a friend said she felt like she was living in Bizarro World. If you live on the Pacific Coast, Bizarro World is normal. Our world is bizarre at the best of times. 2020 was not the best of times. Weirdly, in 2021 the now victorious Democrats still don't seem happy. (Admittedly they rarely are happy, being bitter and savagely angry is the Progressive norm in Democrat land.) Progressives are kind of crazy. Or, at least they want us to believe in their crazy delusions. They get upset if we don't play along.
Guess what? We should never play along with bad ideas. The list of fake stories, hoaxes and bizarre assaults on civil liberties over the past year should have burned away all our tolerance for reality-denyers. Progressive Democrats are reality-denyers. They have divorced reality, and they expect us to pay them alimony so they can go along their not so merry way unhindered by a lack of cash.
We don't have time or space to make a full list of all the hoaxes and lies Democrats have pushed on us. But we can confront a few of the most ridiculous and outrageous head on. We've let them get away with denying reality for so long, in part, because we just got tired of confronting the craziness. But that is another lesson we may have collectively learned the hard way: If you don't confront the craziness it WILL get crazier.
So here is a list of some of the crazy things that happen when your governing class begins to divorce reality.
1) The Blame Game on Steroids: Progressives don't believe in taking responsibility for their own failures. There are probably a handful of "Progressives" in California who don't think Gavin Newsom is "Progressive" enough. But he is a high profile loud and proud Progressive. And he is a Progressive in a state where Democrats have been in almost total control for at least a decade. Well, if your state is essentially a one party state and your party is in control you need to take responsibility for problems. Homelessness is a MAJOR problem in California. This is an easy problem for a Democrats to confront though... they just blame Republicans. Back in 2019 Gavin Newsom actually had the bald faced chutzpah to blame the state of Texas --big bad Republican Texas-- for the homeless crisis in Los Angeles. Even the LA TIMES thought this was a stretch. You can read about it here.
2) War is Peace and Hate is Love: Progressives just relabel their failures. In case you haven't noticed Democrats LOVE to describe themselves as the party of peace. In fact yesterday a basic Leftist told me she was "so relieved Biden was in office and peace had returned to the world." In case you are unaware, this week rockets are lighting up the sky in the Holy Land. The world is NOT at peace. (The Middle East really isn't at peace.) But if you wear the rose tinted glasses of a Progressive, war can look like peace. If you care about reality rather than "perception" --definitely not the same thing-- well, Donald Trump as president may have sent a few mean sounding tweets, but he actually was responsible for unprecedented peace breaking out in the Middle East. But if you are a Salon journalist you think that although Donald Trump didn't start new wars his "brand of hucksterism" makes him so "weird and incoherent" he may as well have started wars. (You can read about it here. Frankly I'm not sure anyone who writes for Salon is in a position to accuse ANYONE else of being "weird and incoherent.") But if you are interested in facts the Left is factually inaccurate. We are in 2021 facing a rising tide of violence in the Middle East, exponentially increasing crime in American cities --almost all of which are Progressive bastions-- and a political leadership that has divorced itself from failure so completely that when they face the obvious failures of a twenty year "career" trying to solve problems they just congratulate themselves on their efforts. The Progressive mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, is a case in point. He spent much of 2020 attempting to defund the police and leave the law abiding citizens defenseless in the face of rising crime. Now in 2021 he is attempting to re-fund the police and reinstitute some law and order. (Possibly because the mob violence he celebrated back in 2020 when it was just directed at Federal Law Enforcement, local business owners, random drivers, home owners and local police, has now been directed at him.) You can read about it here.
3) Narrative Matters More than Facts: Individuals Will Always be Thrown Under the Bus in Progressive World. Check out the header picture. The text suggests an ominous future for "Joe." If "Kamala is to Come On" "Joe" has to "Go." But it also suggests a narcissistic non fact based world view. "Sanity and humanity have returned!" Really? Really? Humanity? Is it "humanity" when toddlers are being abandoned in the desert? Is it "humanity" when children are left wrapped in tin foil in plastic draped holding areas? You can see the pictures here. Is it sanity when President Joe Biden jokingly threatens a reporter and refuses to answer actual questions? You can see the video here.
No wonder the Left is in love with itself. Being a Progressive these days means you don't have to take responsibility for your own actions. It means everything is always the other guy's fault. And it means you can victim shame others while pretending to be a victim yourself. Personal responsibility is a harder path. But do you want to live in a country where individual responsibility has gone by the wayside and instead we deal with "group guilt"? As Republicans we believe we need to take responsibility for our own actions. Which means that as Republicans in Marin we KNOW Republicans haven't had any political power for thirty years. So when the professional Leftist political class blames us, we KNOW they are playing games with their own voting base. But we also know we should have spoken out more. We need to be willing to point out the obvious. We definitely didn't create Marin's modern problems --mass homeless encampments popped up long after Republicans lost power in Marin-- but we can be the voice that points out the problem. And we can be the people who demand accountability.