By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — As mid-September arrived, a pall covered the sky here from the mountains on the west — the direction where the overcast came from — to the mountains on the east. It wasn’t a congregation of individual clouds but unending gray above the peaks and deserts.
It looked like the “marine layer” that California coastal residents are familiar with, called the “May gray” or “June gloom.” Just drive east a bit from southern California’s Pacific Ocean beaches toward the desert and it dissipates.
However, this September aerial visitation was different and came all the way into Arizona. Phoenix is about a five-and-a-half-hour drive east of those beaches. This gray didn’t arise from a coastal temperature inversion but the raging West Coast wildfires. News reports said the smoke extended to the East Coast and beyond.
Something even more menacing than West Coast conflagrations was in the air, too, as summer waned. And the golden-flames state dominated by Democrat politicians was as good an incubator as any for left-wing totalitarianism.
Damaging as the wildfires were, their flames would die out, even though they recur each year. But forcing politics onto every aspect of life was the invasive toxin of totalitarianism, where the expression of even one wrong thought could bring banishment.
A mere dictator wants power but doesn’t try to control your every thought and move. A totalitarian dictator does.
Look, for instance, at U.S. educational institutions. And corporate executives terrified that some “woke” activists would extort their businesses. People in some places couldn’t even sit down at a restaurant without abetted political thugs sending them fleeing from tossed-around chairs. Meanwhile, dominant media played down the dangers because, after all, this was their own ideology being imposed.
Although certain grievances were said to be centuries old, they hadn’t even been unearthed during the recent 16 total years of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama Democratic presidencies.
But now they suddenly were discovered and political mandates quickly imposed on everything from sporting events to forest fires to entertainment to political messages officially painted down the middle of city streets to sex and gender to what everyday business employees had to read for political indoctrination to how police must be viewed. The possibilities were all-consuming, like an inferno.
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer on September 14: “All around us, we see a mix of anarchists, cultural Marxists, aggressively atheistic radicals, Communists, and domestic terrorists — and even the non-overtly radical liberals seem to at least half-approve of the radicals’ tactics and more than approve of some of their aims.
“The situation is dangerous,” Hillyer added. “Good people should stand up against these agendas and tactics, using the ballot box and all other legal means to save our constitutional system and our culture.”
The left-wing politicians who govern California, Oregon, and Washington state insisted their weather culprit was “climate change” — a condition that used to be called “global warming,” and, before that, “a new ice age,” before these formulations’ phoniness became unbearable.
However, if you let trash and garbage pile up in your back yard for years then throw in a lighted, gas-soaked rag, the result isn’t due to elitists’ theoretical models for 50 years from now. Not even if you’re a left-winger who thought the pileup was eco-friendly.
California conservative Victor Davis Hanson posted at National Review on September 15: “There could be a long answer to explain why California for years abandoned dead drought- and insect-stricken trees — over some 60 million of these withered, towering time bombs in their coastal and Sierra forests — to rot. But the short of it was that the kindling and tinderboxes were seen as perfect green mulch for flora and fauna.
“A cynical interpretation of the eco-agenda was that doing nothing to clean up the mess was cheap for a broke state eager to spend billions on high-speed rail and the consequences of open borders,” Hanson said, adding that an even more cynical view was that ordinary people had to be discouraged from living on land that should belong to environmentalists.
On September 14 national radio talker Rush Limbaugh said that tropical humidity makes air-conditioned Florida, where he lives, hotter, but the Sunshine State doesn’t have the rolling brownouts and blackouts of California, where the government ruled out efficient energy production and won’t clear out its forests, all in the name of environmentalism.
California did all it could to fight climate change, Limbaugh said, but it’s burning down.
People who think that heaps of evil acts eventually bring a divine response saw more than coincidence that as the nation under a pall was pulled deeper into disarray and disgrace, California’s left-wing, pro-degeneracy Catholic Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a bill easing penalties against those who have sex with minors. How much longer, oh Lord?
Even some Democrats said Newsom went too far. A September 12 Associated Press story quoted San Diego Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez: “I cannot in my mind as a mother understand how sex between a 24-year-old and a 14-year-old could ever be consensual, how it could ever not be a registrable offense. We should never give up on this idea that children should be in no way subject to a predator.”
However, the AP story also quoted the executive director of Equality California, LGBT activist Rick Chavez Zbur: “If we want a California for all, then we need a justice system that treats all Californians fairly and equally — regardless of who they are, what they look like or whom they love.”
Both the cause claimed for the West Coast wildfires and the political justification given for creeping, or striding, totalitarianism was twisted or false.
Virginia Catholic Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs Les Femmes – The Truth blog, told The Wanderer on September 14 that liberal politicians increasingly are exercising arbitrary power.
“I think we are seeing firsthand what it’s like to live under a totalitarian regime committed to total control using fear and the iron fist,” Kreitzer said. “So many storefronts have mandates on their doors ‘by order of the governor.’ Ridiculous mandates!
“Every day more information comes out about the exaggeration of the ‘pandemic’ and the horrible impact on people from the shutdown — the 600 percent uptick in suicides, cancer treatments postponed, people with stroke symptoms not going to the hospital,” she said. “At the same time, leftist mayors encourage chaos in their cities and the vicious hatred toward the police.”
In addition to that, dominant media relentlessly push the false line of the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization that police routinely intentionally kill minority people because of their race. The resentment that these media and left-wing activists stir up results in a mob mentality against police.
Attacks On Law Enforcement
As this was written on September 15, a firearms attack occurred here in Phoenix earlier in the day on a security officer wearing a protective vest outside the Sandra O’Connor federal courthouse downtown. News accounts said the officer was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and a suspect downtown who drove away was detained later in the day.
A few days earlier, two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were critically wounded on September 12 when a gunman boldly walked up to their parked patrol car in Compton and fired through the window.
After the attack, one video showed a man on the street rejoicing at the violence, while the sheriff’s office tweeted that some protesters went to the hospital where the officers were taken and shouted threats while blocking emergency entries.
A local city manager brought outrage on himself by posting on social media after the Compton shooting, “Chickens come home to roost.”
One might note that the shooting occurred despite California’s stiff gun-control laws. Indeed, clueless Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden responded by calling for more gun control nationally. Hmm, if it doesn’t work in California, it’ll work elsewhere?
In addition to what are politically motivated assassination attempts, law-enforcement officers also face potentially deadly hazards in their daily work in a milieu where respect for blue lives has decreased.
On September 10, a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy was shot fatally while trying to make an arrest following a break-in call. On September 3 a Cleveland, Ohio, police detective was shot fatally along with an informant — continuing brutal attacks while leftists call for police to be defunded and disbanded.
A southern California woman told The Wanderer on September 15 about the Compton shooting: “The security video footage was amazing and terrifying to watch. A sheriff’s car is parked along the curb. A man simply walks toward the open passenger-side window, pulls a gun, starts shooting into the window then runs away. No hesitation, no sneaking up to the car, no furtive looks around as if he was afraid he might be seen.
“Brazen, cold-blooded, no regard for anything but his desire to kill the deputies if possible,” she said. “And the slavering animals at the (hospital) ER entrance calling the deputies m—f—ers, yelling they hope the officers die. I felt angry, outraged, and sad all at once, watching what people can let themselves do when they devote their lives to lies and hate.
“I believe that years of normalizing abortion and talk such as ‘making the baby comfortable’ after birth while the mother and doctor talk about more killing options have taught society that human life is essentially worthless, especially if it’s ‘in your way’,” the woman said.
Leftists And Modernists
Kreitzer, the Virginia blogger, told The Wanderer that while “Jesus and Mary are right in the middle of all this,” people need to take action.
“I’m encouraged by what happened at Benedictine College in Kansas,” she said. “When the government ordered students quarantined in their dorm rooms for 14 days, the president called for a campus rosary, fasting, and prayer. Seven hundred students met in a campus park to pray the rosary. The school also threatened lawsuits by every student on campus.
“They reached a compromise,” Kreitzer said. “Why aren’t all of our Catholic colleges and dioceses challenging these unconstitutional government intrusions?
“The left wants Trump defeated and, sadly, many of our bishops are leftists and modernists. They hate him, too. Trump is one of the few obstacles to the left’s goal of one-world government. All of this is part of the agenda to bring it about,” she said.
“We need to pray and fight and stand up for those clergy who speak the truth like Fr. James Altman, who said Catholics can’t be Democrats,” Kreitzer said. “I hope Wanderer readers will sign the petition of support for Fr. Altman at LifeSiteNews.com.”
Altman is a priest of the Diocese of La Crosse, Wis., who drew the ire of his bishop for saying that.
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