Mainstream Media Outlet Celebrates Biden's Plan to 'Make America California Again'
Only days before the inauguration of a new president, this might be the last message the country wanted to hear — but the one it needed to see what’s coming.
After four years of the relentless, in-your-face optimism of President Donald Trump’s motto of “Make American Great Again,” citizens of the greatest country on earth are being advised Trump’s successor wants to “Make America California Again.”
California’s largest newspaper might think that’s great news. For the rest of the country, it sounds like a confirmation of everything Trump supporters spent the election and its aftermath fighting against.
The headline came from Sunday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times:
“Make America California Again? That’s Biden’s plan.”
The piece by Evan Halper, a Washington-based writer for the L.A. Times, harkened back to a time when California really was a national leader. As Halper wrote, an “incubator of innovation, premier laboratory of democracy, land of big ideas.”
It’s safe to say that’s not the image most Americans have of a perennially fire-stricken region that’s better know for its reputation for liberal insanity than anything particularly admirable these days. Nonetheless, Halper described a host of reasons the now-tarnished Golden State will serve as a beacon for President-elect Joe Biden’s administration, not least of which is his Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris.
Harris, of course, is a soon-to-be former California senator who got her unseemly start in politics as a consort to California heavyweight politician Willie Brown in the early 1990s, when Brown was the powerful speaker of the state Assembly and Harris was an assistant prosecutor.
Though Brown was married at the time, the relationship was no secret. As SF Weekly reported in a 2003 piece that was sympathetically written about Harris:
“Harris met Brown in 1994 when he was speaker of the state Assembly. She was 29, he was 60. Their May/December affair was the talk of the town during the year before Brown’s successful 1995 bid to become mayor. But shortly after he was inaugurated, Harris dumped Brown, a notorious womanizer.”
The fact that Harris rose from that relationship to be California’s attorney general and eventually a United States senator who decided to run for the presidency before completing even one Senate term says a lot about California politics.
Of much more importance, the fact that Harris was forced to drop out of the crowded Democratic presidential primary in December 2019 before even a single vote was cast or caucus attended says a lot about her appeal — even among her own party — and about how well California politics go down in the rest of the United States.
She was selected by no one but Biden. Her qualifications are somewhere between slim and none. Yet through an accident of genetics — primarily her gender and skin color — Harris is just one bad day for Biden away from holding the most powerful position in the world.
But Harris isn’t the only symbol of how the Biden administration will Californicate the country for the next four years.
As Halper points out, “California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control.”
“There is no place the incoming administration is leaning on more heavily for inspiration in setting a progressive policy agenda.”
The dismal news continues: California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a man with a soft spot for illegal immigrants and a hard heart against Second Amendment rights is Biden’s nominee for the secretary of Health and Human Services.
Biden’s choice for Treasury secretary is Janet Yellen, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, possibly the most left-wing campus in a radically left university system, who also has picked up more than $7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street since leaving her last government position as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve in 2018.
If California is known for anything besides radically leftist politics, it’s the abyss between the extraordinarily wealthy and the very poor. A 2020 report by the World Population Review put California fourth in income inequality in the U.S., behind the liberal bastion of New York, its neighbor Connecticut (of course) and Louisiana.
And if California is known for anything besides left-wing politics and Third-World style wealth-poverty gaps, it’s the state’s commitment to sacrificing its economy on the altar of “climate change.”
As Halper notes, the rest of the country should get used to the idea of California’s draconian energy rules — including an envisioned ban on gasoline-powered engines, and a commitment to the demonstrable bunkum ideals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement Trump walked away from — becoming at least part of the national conversation, and even national policy.
The idea of an administration so open to California’s fads was not well received in conservative quarters.
So he admits to wanting to run America poorly ?
— Jeannette Dickinson (@JeannetteDicki9) January 18, 2021
California is not a great example of good management, bankrupt or broke state budget. Two classes of people poverty or rich, blue collar jobs, middle class people and leaving as fast as they can, one of the highest taxed states now Texas or Idaho look way better to me
— Coast Grampa (@CoastGrampa) January 18, 2021
Texas, get ready to accede and build more housing to accomodate the rest of Americans..
— Pat Pinner (@pptwit47) January 18, 2021
It’s not just the ideas that are questionable that have a chance in a Biden administration. According to Halper, Biden is an enthusiastic supporter even of ideas that have been proven disasters in California, like high-speed rail.
Even leftist California Gov. Gavin Newsom had to abandon a proposed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2017 because, he said: “The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.”
If that was true at a California level, what do Biden and his inner circle think would happen if the whole country was involved, and corruption-prone Democrats in Illinois and New York, along with their labor union allies, were wetting their beaks?
And the Californication doesn’t stop in the executive branch. As Halper pointed out, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself is a Californian, from a wealthy district in San Francisco, who has already shown the country her leftist bona fides by ramming Obamacare down the national throat during her first tenure as speaker, in the disastrous first two years of the Barack Obama presidency.
After the disputes of the 2020 elections — which will likely never be resolved honestly thanks to dishonest Democrats and do-nothing courts — the country is stuck with a Biden presidency and a unified Democratic Congress for at least the next two years.
For an idea of what that’s going to bring, all Americans need to do is look to California — a high-tax society run by liberals, overrun by illegal aliens, with a yawning gap between rich and poor, and losing population for the first time in 170 years, as former Ventura, California, Mayor William Fulton wrote in a piece for the nonprofit news site CalMatters.
The problem, of course, is that while Californians have somewhere to go — Republican-run Texas is a popular relocation spot — the rest of the country won’t have that option in the Biden years.
“Make America California Again? That’s Biden’s Plan” might sound like a dream headline at the L.A. Times and for liberals everywhere, as much as it is a nightmare for the sane part of America.
Days away from the beginning of a new presidency, it’s the last message the country wants to hear — but it’s a great idea of what we can expect.
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