The Patriot Post® · The Spreading of California Crazy

It’s too bad that California’s motto isn’t that of Las Vegas, because what happens in the Golden State seems to invariably serve as a preview for what will eventually spread to the rest of the nation. Unfortunately, over the last several decades, what California has been spreading has been wholly infected with a hard-leftist political ideology that has increasingly eschewed reality in favor of fantasy. It’s as if Hollywood has become the ultimate definer and arbiter of reality and everything else is deemed as the wrong side of history.

It is this Hollywoodized influence that has been increasingly dubbed “California crazy,” as those living under its spell seemingly only press the insanity harder and deeper.

A quick rundown of several of California’s recently established rules and laws underscores this political mindset. Here are a few examples:

Let’s start with California’s climate activism. This year, the state legislature passed a law that will ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035. The law was passed even as the state struggles with an inadequate power grid that can’t properly regulate the state’s expanding dependence on unreliable renewable energy, which forces Californians to endure rolling blackouts as well as jumping energy prices. And this is called progress.

Making matters worse, 17 other states are poised to follow California’s lead on banning fossil fuel-powered vehicles thanks to their legislatures having passed laws back in the 1990s requiring them to adopt California CARB emissions standards. Not only will such a ban prove to be practically unfeasible, it will also prove to be economically detrimental to those states.

Yet California’s climate activism is far from the only thing that earns its crazy moniker. Increasingly, the state is making efforts to protect the blatantly immorality, and not just within its borders but beyond. California has taken its “sanctuary” status, initially applied to illegal aliens, and expanded it to now include near-unlimited abortion access and “gender-affirming care” for children whose parents reject their “transgender” identity demands. In short, California is becoming a sanctuary for child abuse.

This desire to set rules for the rest of the country seems to be a growing issue for the Golden State, as voters approved a ballot measure back in 2018 establishing standards for farm animals butchered for meat sold in the state. Included in this standard is a rule that female pigs must be housed in large group pens rather than smaller individual pens. This rule runs counter to hog farmers’ best practices that have been effective in preventing the spread of disease. Furthermore, the fact that 99% of hog farms exist outside the state of California reveals the fact that the state’s leftist lawmakers are seeking to regulate out-of-state farms, the legality of which the U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide.

The state with the university that was credited as the birthplace for the “free speech” movement in the 1960s, Berkeley, has increasingly become the land of censorship. California’s Democrat legislature passed a law that would green-light medical boards to discipline doctors who have been deemed to “disseminate misinformation or disinformation” that runs counter to the “contemporary scientific consensus.” Talk about Orwellian. Who gets to determine what the “scientific consensus” is? Furthermore, is not the concept of scientific consensus itself often an oxymoron?

As for Berkeley itself, the university is over that whole free speech thing and is lately reduced to censoring Jews.

Finally, there’s Joe Biden following suit on not only the crazy green agenda with his anti-fossil fuel policies, but in a slew of other actions, including one of his administration’s latest moves taken straight from California.

Biden’s Labor Department is proposing a rule that mirrors a law created in California that effectively suppresses small business and freelance work. Essentially, Biden is proposing going after gig workers just like California has done by expanding the Fair Labor Standards Act and reclassifying millions of independent contractors as employees. The rule would effectively only end up benefiting unions and government, under the guise of ensuring that independent contractors aren’t exploited. It’s a dubious claim that will only make it harder to be an independent contractor. As Beth Milito, the executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business legal center, explained, “This is a rule that’s only going to make it more challenging for small businesses to operate in today’s already difficult economy.”

It might be tolerable if such a liberty-limiting law was limited to California, but alas, what starts in California rarely stays there. Indeed, the Democrat Party has effectively embraced California crazy as its guiding ideology.