Giant Impenetrable Mystery About Completely Open and Obvious Reality
Los Angeles County is bleeding people, sliding into population decline faster than anywhere else in the country. But don’t worry, the local newspaper is on the case!
After a careful examination of the matter, the Los Angeles Times is able to assign blame to — wait for it! — a certain VERY BAD ORANGE MAN.
While conservative critics of L.A. have rushed to frame the population loss as a “mass exodus” of people fleeing rampant crime, high taxes and inadequate services, the reality is more complex.
Los Angeles is by far the nation’s largest county, with 9.7 million people — nearly double the next largest, Cook County, Ill. In that sense, it’s not surprising that it saw a severe drop in population after the Trump administration rolled out a flurry of executive orders and new legislation aimed at restricting immigration. L.A. County is a historic hub for immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and a place where 1 in 3 residents is an immigrant.
If you read the story, you’ll see the name Trump several times, like a coven chanting the name of an enemy around the caldron. But definitely for sure don’t listen to those bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories about “high taxes and inadequate services,” noooooooo, that’s a huge lie, trust the wisdom of the local newspaper.
After a large and historic neighborhood ceased to exist because of a wildfire that rekindled after the Los Angeles Fire Department didn’t fully extinguish an earlier fire in dense, dry hillside brush, CNN produced a long story on the disaster of the city’s firefighter staffing. Small sample, describing a memorandum from then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley: “In the memo, which the city has since removed from its website, Crowley wrote that the city’s population had grown from about 2.5 million in 1960 to nearly 4 million in 2020. Yet the city has fewer fire stations today than it did back then, even as firefighters respond to a call volume that has quadrupled.”
A little less than a year and a half after that fire, the Los Angeles Police Department looks like this:
The last time a mean old white male Republican was the mayor, which is very bad and hateful, the city built up the police department, with a goal of having 10,000 officers. They actually hit that number in 2013, during the opening moments of the reign of Mayor Yogapants, then began shrinking soon after. Now we have very wise and progressive leaders, so the city is good.
So taxes are soaring, fire and police staffing are down, fat dumb communists want to crush basic city services a lot more to free up plenty of social justice cash, and some MEAN RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORISTS bizarrely claim that people are leaving Los Angeles because they pay high taxes for increasingly poor services. My goodness, these people will just believe anything! OBVIOUSLY WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IS THAT DONALD TRUMP IS VERY BAD, the professional journalists explained.
Go look at the story. Command-F “encampments,” or “Karen Bass.” Zero results.
There’s a cottage industry of social media influencers who make a living producing shock videos about how filthy and ugly Los Angeles is becoming.
Not mentioned. The Los Angeles Times, exploring the decline of Los Angeles, does not mention that the city, and big parts of its suburbs, are becoming filthy and ugly.
It’s like reading a newsletter from the subjects of experimental hypnosis. They’ve trained their minds to not see a thing while they stand in the middle of it, Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump. Los Angeles is declining aggressively and without a plan to stop the decline, and what they have to say about it is that ohhhhh, why is Donald Trump doing this to us?
The epistemic crisis is the core crisis. The “I don’t see what’s right in front of my face, because honest perception is low-status” crisis.
Los Angeles has no problems that can’t be solved or significantly mitigated, but it requires the institutions of the city, the county, and the state, including the non-governmental institutions like academia and the press, to see.
To allow themselves to see.
And they’re not going to do that.
Now take that picture and make it bigger. Thomas Friedman thinks that maybe Iran might be maybe possibly a little bit losing its war with America and Israel, and he kind of wants to think that it’s maybe good for that to happen, because maaaaybe a little bit you could kind of say that the Iranian regime is kind of maybe not so great, but also Thomas Friedman is worried, because if Iran loses, that means that people are going to think that Trump and Netanyahu succeeded, and THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED.
You show someone an apple and say, “What is this?” And they can’t say, “That’s an apple,” because WHAT IF TRUMP LIKE APPLES, you’ll be socially humiliated for saying apple, OH GOD think of something else to say, SAY ANYTHING BUT APPLE, there’s so much status at stake, all my friends and professional peers will see! My social class will see me say apple! OH I’LL BE ABSOLUTELY RUINED IF I SAY THAT THE APPLE IS AN APPLE, the apple is an orange. It’s definitely an orange. Or maybe it’s a wrench! The apple could be a wrench, is that a high-status perception?
We have several overlapping status groups, narrative-making institutions all, who are terrified of saying what exists, plainly, in obvious physical reality.
Could we, I don’t know, spray them with a hose or something? Is there a factory re-set on people, like we shut them down and restart them and they switch back on as something normal?
If you find the reset button on any liberal 🤡, please share. I have family and friends who desperately need it!
I recently spent some time with my brother, who lives in Northern California. We had a great time, until the evening, when, for no reason, his TDS kicked in. He started talking about windmills, and how Trump wants to get rid of them. When I told him that windmills aren’t that great as a power source, he scoffed at me and said, “DON’T YOU BELIEVE IN SCIENCE????” It was really strange. He went on to tell me he can’t sell a condominium he owns because of Trump, but he never explained why. I didn’t argue with him, because I know his brain has been broken by the corporate media and social media. I feel sorry for him.