A Variety of Hopeful Signs and Portents

much information, and the trajectory becomes clearer

I’ve had a lot on my mind, and have given up on trying to untangle a bunch of threads, so come with me for a few minutes and find out what it’s like inside my head. Bring a flashlight. Some updates about a long list of topics, and some thoughts at the end about what they mean when taken together.

First, I wrote recently about the morally insane freakout among most California Democrats in the state legislature when one of their Democratic colleagues introduced a bill to make the adult solicitation of 16 and 17 year-olds for paid sex a felony. Democratic leaders stalled the bill in committee, and amended it to make it meaningless. Republicans used legislative rules to try to force the original bill to a floor vote, prompting a remarkable outburst from a dumber-than-a-golden-retriever Democratic legislator who denounced a gay Republican colleague for suggesting that the legislature vote against “civil rights for gay people.”

Paid sex between adults and minors: gay civil rights. This dude represents Boyle Heights, where I’m sure that’s a popular argument that would be welcomed in discussions around the kitchen table.

But this bizarre narrative is California Democrat 101, as all discussions about sexual violence and sex trafficking run into a what-did-you-just-say response about social justice. Prison rape? Why, Senator Scott Wiener thinks we need to keep this topic in perspective, because he remembers as a little boy how much he and his friends talked about all the hard man-on-man action that goes down in prisons, so. No, really: watch him talk about it. But Wiener is also proud that all of the state’s hot little 12 year-olds can get abortions and birth control and STD medication without mommy and daddy finding out:

And so, with regard to the bill to make solicitation of minors a felony, Wiener warned that making the bill a law would send a bunch of high schoolers to prison, because don’t high school students just constantly use their lunch money to buy sex from their classmates?

Then, amazingly enough, after they gutted the bill, California Democrats ran a sociopathically shameless series of advertisements on social media accusing Republicans of refusing to protect minors from sex trafficking.

Even in Deep Blue California, the backlash was pure fire. Democrats quickly pulled the ads, and Democratic leaders fell completely silent about them.

Today, the 80-member Assembly voted 74-0 to advance the solicitation felony to the Senate. They refused, they complained, they killed it, and then they shut up and passed it, amending it only to add a requirement for a three-year age difference between the adult doing the soliciting and the minor being solicited. So great news, Scott, high schoolers can still buy sex in the locker room.

California Republicans have zero power in the state legislature, where Democrats have a supermajority in both houses. But shaming still works, and the most absurd and morally lost institutional culture still slams into limits when people notice.

Second, I’ve mentioned the discussion in Germany about the official declaration that the populist-right AfD party is an extremist organization, a maneuver that seemed to be leading to an effort to ban the party outright. The secret intelligence dossier that was the basis of that declaration has been leaked to the press, and posted online in unredacted form. Don’t miss the discussion from Eugyppius about the result.

Spy agency report on the alleged "extremism" of Alternative für Deutschland turns out to be so stupid that it destroys all momentum for banning the party

Notably, an 1,110-page secret report based on information from spy agencies doesn’t contain any apparent spying; they’ve cut-and-pasted a bunch of lazy gibberish from news and social media. An intelligence service is a bunch of idiots reading Facebook. Eugyppius, summarizing: “The previously secret dossier assembled by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution leaked on Tuesday. It is unbelievably retarded.”

Remember what Eugyppius says about the super-top-secret officials who compiled this major report: “Because they are incredibly stupid, uninspired and plodding, they cannot fail to make asses of themselves over and over again.” Hold that sentence in your head while we transition to….

Third, I hope everyone here at least saw some clips from the congressional hearings yesterday in which Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced committees full of obviously stupid and inept interrogators who told him over and over again that he is very very very bad. What I want to say about it is that, let me think for a moment, “Because they are incredibly stupid, uninspired and plodding, they cannot fail to make asses of themselves over and over again.” Patty Fucking Murray, excuse my language, has been in the Senate for 32 years, and she’s obviously much dumber than the average golden retriever. I know I already used the thing about the golden retriever, but Patty Murray.

If you didn’t catch any of these exchanges, watch an example here. There’s much more to say about this topic, but I don’t have the patience to say it. Congressional hearings: still useless, still mostly a display of just how stupid people can become when they live pampered lives in a bubble with other stupid people. The failure of Congress as one of the three legs that holds up the republic is…a problem, let’s say. The pathetic spectacle of people-shaped things on the dais looking down while they read their staff-prepared outrage statements — it says on this piece of paper that I am very angry — is nauseating.

The American political class is empty, full stop.

Fourth, and related, in a topic I’m sure I’ll get into in much greater depth in the coming weeks, the wheels are coming off California. You can read this thread as an introduction to the discussion…

…but California just suddenly finds that it can’t pay for a bunch of things. If you dig a quarter of an inch into the problem, you start finding the answers just right there. The state with the $12 billion deficit is trying to figure out which services and offices to cut, for example, while also adding funding to its now $11.5 billion program to provide free healthcare services to illegal immigrants. It’s a real headscratcher.

State tax collection is down by $5 billion, in a state that has lost over a million taxpayers to other states since the pandemic. This is from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office:

The total population losses look like this:

The numbers tell the story. From 2020 to 2024, the state added 934,000 international migrants, compared to a net domestic migration loss of 1.46 million residents. California’s out-migration has come to resemble the pattern long associated with Rust Belt states. Over the last 24 years, more than 4 million net domestic migrants, a population about the same as the Seattle metropolitan area, have moved to other parts of the nation from California.

High taxes, appalling infrastructure, the endless growth of the homeless count, and Scott Wiener constantly telling people that the basis for state laws should be that it’s pretty normal to buy sex from minors: the bill is coming due. Remember that some of the people telling families to flee California have been members of the California legislature:

See also this discussion about Los Angeles County and its use of bond funding to keep the lights on — to fund daily operations. I don’t know who’s behind the Angeleno Insights account, but it’s someone who’s paying attention. Worth a follow.

And fifth, in contrast to the parade of failure and banality, it has to be said that the Trump administration is executing with a discipline and a steadiness that was missing in Trump’s first term. The speech in Saudi Arabia was remarkably candid and consequential — an open attack from a sitting President of the United States on the arrogance of fifty years of American interventionism — and the news media predictably underplayed it. This is a screenshot, but click this link to play the video below:

And Trump’s domestic policy interventions are far more shrewd and substantial than the Orange Man Bad news media will allow itself to notice. The executive order about regulatory overcriminalization, which I wrote about earlier this week, continues to go under-reported, while people who pay attention to federal criminal justice policy continue to see how significant it is.

I spoke this week to Christopher Wellborn, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and he said this: "NACDL strongly supports efforts to ensure fairness and due process in the enforcement of regulatory crimes. We believe it's crucial to reduce the overcriminalization of alleged regulatory offenses, establish clear mens rea requirements, and avoid strict liability. These principles are essential to protecting individual rights and preventing government overreach."

Wellborn noted that the NACDL and other groups have been working for years to convince federal policymakers to address excesses in the overcriminalization of federal regulatory enforcement, with little to show for the effort before the Trump order.

Similarly, the former Assistant US Attorney Andrea Haim — who is married to Dr. Eithan Haim, the whistleblower who faced Biden-era federal prosecution after he told the public that Texas Children’s Hospital was lying when it announced the end of transgender medical procedures on children — agrees that the Trump order “is long overdue.”

"I think it sends a message of what we expect out of prosecutors who are charging these technical criminal violations,” Andrea Haim says.

It’s a problem that everyone sees and no one addresses — until suddenly the Trump administration takes clear, thoughtful action, in an effective policy document that reflects deep knowledge of issues and institutions.

I’ll have more to say about this in the near future, but it’s clear that Trump has built an effective, disciplined, highly focused policy team. Something is different this time, and it’s working.

So. It seems to me that we’re seeing the collapse of the Blue Model, in all its forms, globally and nationally. “Because they are incredibly stupid, uninspired and plodding, they cannot fail to make asses of themselves over and over again.” While that’s happening, the thing we’re being offered as a political alternative, as a model of a possible political future, is moving with clarity and effectiveness.

The moment is seeming like a real inflection point, with a real likelihood of a narrative redirection. And by the way, after months of shrill doomcasting about the Great Orange Economic Collapse, probably not.

How long can the bubble people stay in their bubble? I think we’re coming to the end of a long-sustained series of delusions, owing to the failure of a bunch of idiotic narrative enforcement mechanisms. People see the world, and they see that the stories don’t match. Keep going.