To Rule Over the Ashes

To explain my thoughts on the Trump verdict, let’s start with something else that tells us more or less the same thing.

The conservative California Assemblyman Bill Essayli introduced a bill this session to require police in the state to cooperate with federal immigration officials so that pedophiles who are illegal immigrants can be deported following child porn and child molestation offenses. The Democratic supermajority in the legislature pounced on the bill and strangled it in the cradle, because they won’t tolerate that kind of meanness. Essayli tried to speak about the bill on the floor, but they killed his microphone.

Today, Essayli lost his seat on the Assembly Judiciary Committee, punishment for bringing cruel legislation to the floor.

During the same session, Senator Susan Eggman drew widespread attention for breaking with party orthodoxy regarding another pedophile-focused bill on the floor of the Senate — saying plainly and directly that even though she’s progressive, she no longer feels comfortable protecting adults who buy children for sex.

Imagine having the courage, as a legislator, to just directly say that you don’t think adults should fuck children. So brave.

And so on, and so on, as — for example — the California legislature also just advanced a bill to forbid parent notification policies in schools.

California is all-in on the sexualization of childhood, to the point that the protection of pedophiles against mean Republicans is a major theme of the legislative session.

Meanwhile, families are fleeing California in significant numbers, and sprinting away from public schools in astonishing numbers — with six straight years of declining enrollment figures, a trend state officials project will continue. You’ll never guess which extremely progressive district leads the decline:

Of the students who remain, less than a third show up consistently. By and large, the families that still send children to LAUSD schools are the families that don’t worry about school all that much.

So California is pushing pushing pushing for more sexual secrecy in schools, more sexualization of children, more sexually explicit school materials, and so on…

…and parents are responding with their feet. But the state, and its most woke school districts, are responding to the enrollment implosion by pushing pushing pushing for all of the things that cause it. They can see the result, but they can’t imagine stopping. They’ll burn the house down, but they’ll rule over the ashes — and so the ruins will reflect their wonderfully progressive values.

Camille Paglia, whose views of sexual behavior are not at all conservative, has argued that transgender mania is a sign of a culture in its end stages, and the particular focus on transgender children reflects the emergence of fashionable child abuse.

And, I mean, of course. Of course a state legislature that’s focused on protecting lots of good healthy pedophilia from the cruel interventions of mean Republicans is a sign of incipient cultural ruin. Of course we’re watching end-stage behavior. This is death.

So.

The Adams administration also used criminal charges against its critics and opponents, and John Adams was the last Federalist president. The extinction eruption, the mania of repressive lashing out, was the behavior of a dying thing. Regimes that arrest and imprison their opponents are sick.

The madness of the Trump conviction is a sign of incipient cultural death. It’s illness embodied. The same goes for the era of elevated mediocrities. If Norm Eisen is important, we’re in decline. The absurd conviction of Donald Trump on a list of made-up noncrimes is a demonstration of stupidity, ineptitude, and mindless evil. The “mainstream” establishment complex is dying, as a cultural formation, and something else is coming.

Caveats: The death throes can go on for a long time, and damage everything they touch, and the dead thing may be replaced by something worse. But none of this merits anything but contempt and loathing. These people are the scum of the earth, and their time is passing. There will be some profoundly ugly days as they make their way off the stage.