It’s official: California has lost its mind (part one)

Author’s note: This column has been entered in the David Foster Wallace “Most Synonyms for the Word ‘Insanity’ Used in a Single Column” Award. Results will be announced August 7, Year of Sally the Salad-Making Robot

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It was a long time coming, but it’s finally happened: The State of California has lost its collective mind. Forget covid-19, a plague of lunacy is rampaging through Golden State like a Santa Ana wildfire, only instead of stirling embers it’s dispersing germs of madness. And unlike the virus there’s no vaccine for insanity on the horizon.

Where to begin? Governor Gavin Newsom’s $1 billion deal with a Chinese manufacturer for N95 facemasks is as good a place as any. Domestic companies like 3M and Honeywell make the masks, but the leader of the world’s fifth largest economy contracted with an adversarial foreign power (remember, there are no truly private companies in China – when you deal with a Chinese manufacturer you’re dealing with the Chinese Communist Party). Which, as it turns out, is only the start of the crazy.

The company, called Build Your Dreams, never made facemasks prior to the coronavirus crisis. It actually makes industrial scale batteries as well as electric buses, trucks, forklifts, and other vehicles. At the start of the pandemic its leaders jumped into the suddenly profitable mask-making game. Profit comes easy when you’re dealing with Gavin Newsom: The deal he cut worked out to $3.30 per mask, more than four times the going rate for domestically-made versions. BYD ended up missing two deadlines for federal certification of its masks. Yet rather than kill the deal Newsom granted BYD two extensions, delaying by months the delivery of masks he claims are critical to public health. He tried to hide the details of his bonkers billion dollar blunder from prying eyes, until a public records request by the L.A. Times forced him to release them.

The loco doesn’t even end there. On March 26 Newsom signed a different deal for masks worth half a billion dollars with a company called Blue Flame, and wired the money the same day. The deal felt apart in a matter of hours when it was discovered Blue Flame had been in existence for a grand total of three days. The punchline? Blue Flame’s founders were two Republican political operatives with zero healthcare experience. They now face a federal criminal investigation (at least the state got its money back from that deal).

Meanwhile, as the City of Los Angeles staggers to recover from a devastating month in which peaceful protests for justice metastasized into riots, looting, and violence the City Council announced plans to cut to the police budget. L.A.’s police force is far from perfect but after tens of thousands of lawbreakers overwhelmed the Los Angeles Police Department and reduced large swaths of the city to mere anarchy, it is positively demented to degrade the department’s capacity.

Never mind that Angelenos of all colors and backgrounds were forced to barricade their neighborhoods and take the law into their own hands, nor that minority-owned businesses were hard hit. Never mind that looters and rioters – whom we used to call criminals – attacked innocent bystanders including an elderly man in Santa Monica and a wheelchair-bound homeless man in downtown L.A. None of that matters in this new Cultural Revolution: It’s hey, hey, ho, ho, LAPD’s got to go.

It’s sheer derangement on full display, politicians who’ve never had real jobs in their lives deciding that the way to make the police more just and effective is to reduce their capacity. In the process they’ve reached rarefied heights of hypocrisy: Earlier this month L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez announced plans to cut $150 million from the LAPD budget. A few days later Spectrum News 1 Los Angeles revealed that Martinez enjoyed a 24-hour LAPD security detail outside her home. A spokesman defended the detail, which Martinez cancelled out of embarrassment when it became public, claiming the councilor and her daughter had received death threats. LAPD Detective Jamie McBride, director of the Police Protective League, told Spectrum, “If she was really feeling threatened, then that security detail should [still] be in place.”

In other words, Nury Martinez is full of excrement.

Another L.A. city councilor, Mike Bonin, also supports the defund movement and has called for alternatives to police response for “non-violent” incidents (good luck defining that term with any legal certainty). Ironic, then, that Mr. Bonin has called LAPD officers to his home on numerous occasions. The most recent imminent threat to his safety that he felt necessitated an armed police response? A dozen-odd neighbors peacefully protesting his homeless policy in front of his house. No fewer than twenty officers and a dozen squad cars responded, setting up a perimeter on both ends of the councilman’s block while Mr. Bonin cowered behind his curtains inside.

Never one to walk the walk, on his official city Facebook page he later declared, “We need to stop using armed police officers as a response to every problem….neighborhood disputes, and other non-violent issues all demand a different response.” Just not disputes in his neighborhood.

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Then again at least Ms. Martinez and Mr. Bonin aren’t headed to prison, which is more than can be said for their former colleague Mitch Englander. Mr. Englander served on the powerful Planning and Land Use Committee, which evaluates proposed developments in the city. His tale of corruption reads like a bad detective novel, including the envelopes of cash he accepted from developers in Vegas casino bathrooms. Of course there were the hookers, the top shelf booze, the steak dinners, and the casino chips provided gratis by intermediaries for builders with business before his committee.

It being Los Angeles, land of the truly batty, all the deals his committee approved while he was under FBI surveillance continue to roar ahead, further warping the already psychotic southland housing market. Were sweet sanity to prevail those deals would be halted, reexamined, combed over by independent auditors or, better yet, the FBI. But here in Oz there’s no time for such niceties.

Of course, the frenzy is raging unchecked in the Bay Area, too. With the approval of city officials nonprofits in San Francisco have been delivering free alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana and other drugs to homeless people living in free hotel rooms under the statewide taxpayer funded “Project Roomkey” initiative. City officials are enabling addicts to continue destroying themselves, with a bay view, delivering booze and drugs to people who are in their situation precisely because they abuse booze and drugs. Officials in Baghdad by the Bay were quick to point out that the deliveries are funded not by taxpayers but individual and group donations, meaning that citizens have gone as nutty as officials.

Meanwhile, the District Attorney in the city that leads the nation in property theft has all but stopped prosecuting property crimes. Because social justice.

Speaking of the D.A., his name is Chesea Boudin and he was raised by terrorists. You can’t make this stuff up: His parents are convicted murderers who were part of a 60s-era radical political group called the “Weather Underground.” Mama and Papa Boudin never left the 60s, as they were convicted for their role in a botched 1981 armored car robbery that left two police officers and a Brinks guard dead (because nothing says political revolution like robbing a bank for cash and murdering innocent Americans). After they went to prison Mr. Boudin was adopted by the organization’s founder Bill Ayers, who’s best known for trying to bomb government buildings. Ayers himself avoided prosecution and boasts about his criminality to this day, declaring “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country”. Mr. Boudin not only has never repudiated his parents’ and mentors’ atrocities, he learned from them: His first job out of college was as a translator for the Venezuelan socialist dictator and criminal Hugo Chavez. Good luck, Frisco!

Of course the plague of madness is particularly insidious in Sacramento. As millions of Californians cling to their homes as the last firewall between themselves and financial oblivion our legislators are about to declare war on homeownership. Barring a miracle last stand in the Assembly they will pass a package of laws bills, which you can read about on the website of an essential nonprofit called Livable California, that will reshape housing in California and devastate thousands of middle and lower income communities (full disclosure: I do legislative analysis for Livable California). The near term result will be a massive destabilization and disruption of what used to be one of the safest investments in the world: California real estate. Over time the laws will unleash gentrification and displacement on a catastrophic scale in communities and neighborhoods.

Like zombies our lawmakers exist in a perpetual state of what Baudelaire called sed non statia, unslakable lust. They lust for control, for it nourishes them, it is all they know. Like religious zealots speaking in tongues they dictate a bizarre gobbledygook of impenetrable parliamentary double, triple, and quadruple speak. And like high schoolers playing model UN they hold 10-hour meetings in which nothing of consequence is accomplished by people who feel themselves Extremely Important. They bend their knees to protestors so clueless in their rage that they destroyed a statute of Ulysses S. Grant in Golden Gate Park in the name of Black Lives Matter. That’s right: In the name of racial justice they destroyed a statute of the guy who defeated the Confederacy.

Rioters also took down a statue of the fictional character Don Quixote, from Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote de La Mancha, the most famous novel from the golden age of Spanish literature. The story centers on an insane aristocrat who believes the stories he reads about medieval knights are actual history. He dresses up like a knight and goes on the road engaging in adventures only he believes are real. Which is the perfect encapsulation of the lunacy rampaging through the Left Coast.

Maybe that’s why the rioters destroyed his statue: The story of a delusional and privileged individual living out his ridiculous fantasies hits a little too close to home.