Are You Ready to Be Brainwashed?

There, he said it. He said what most of them are thinking. He identified your problem and offered a solution.

Your problem is that you have not been sufficiently brainwashed. So said Gov. Moonbeam himself, Gov. Jerry Brown of the People’s Republic of California. (Politico, via Watts Up via Maggie’s Farm)

Because, Jerry knows best. He knows things that you do not know and that you cannot imagine. He knows how bad it really, really is. Your pedestrian imagination flounders when faced with such a grandiose vision of human destitution and desolation, of a world where every last living thing, down to the most miniscule bacterium will be erased and eradicated. Your imagination, however capacious you think it is, cannot grasp the scale of the calamity.

On his way to the climate talks in Bonn, Gov. Moonbeam stopped off at the Vatican. Now being led by an Argentinian, the Vatican has become far friendlier to crackpot theories, especially anti-American ones. Whether this has anything to do with Argentina or with the fact that the pope underwent psychoanalysis, I leave to your imagination.

Politico sets the scene:

On his way to the United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany, this week, Jerry Brown stopped over at the Vatican, where a doleful group of climate scientists, politicians and public health officials had convened to discuss calamities that might befall a warming world. The prospects were so dire—floods and fires, but also forced migration, famine and war—that some of the participants acknowledged difficulty staving off despair.

The word “apocalyptic” does not quite do it justice. At least in the Biblical narrative, the New Jerusalem descends on the purified world. In the new leftist world of deep and serious thinking, nothing good comes about.

One needs to mention that this represents the last throes of an all-out assault on capitalism and free enterprise and the Industrial Revolution. Beginning with the famed Luddites the Western world has always had a coterie of haters, people who believed that economic progress was going to destroy your soul. In its place they proposed economic stagnation, because capitalism was evil and its gains ill-gotten. They knew, as you don't, that the hand of divine justice would destroy everything that the venal capitalists had built. But it would not stop there. It would destroy the rest of the world.

In the Vatican Jerry Brown was in his element. He seized the occasion:

California’s doomsayer governor did not express much optimism either. Seated between an economist and an Argentine bishop at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Brown leaned into his microphone and said, “It is despairing. Ending the world, ending all mammalian life. This is bad stuff.”

Next thing you know Gov. Brown will be standing in Times Square holding up a sign that reads: The End is Nigh.

And yet, Brown clings to one last thread of hope. He sees no cause for optimism, but he still believes that something can be done… like banning fossil fuels and raising taxes to the point where the vast majority of people in California will starve. Happily for Brown, nearly the majority of people in his state do not speak English at home. One trusts that he belongs to the Barack Obama, Angela Merkel open-borders school of immigration policy, the one that believes that we can do penance for our capitalistic sins by welcoming more and more people who reject our values and who will vote the way Brown wants them to vote.

Brown continues:

“There’s nothing that I see out there that gives me any ground for optimism,” he went on. Still, he promised action: “I’m extremely excited about doing something about it."

Being a patriot, Brown is showing off his own rejection of the last presidential election by traveling around the world pretending that he is the president, or, shall we say, a shadow president in an alternative nation. Didn’t Victor Davis Hanson once call it: Mexifornia?

 Crusading across Europe in his Fitbit and his dark, boxy suit, Brown advances California and its policies almost as an alternative to the United States—and his waning governorship, after a lifetime in politics, as a quixotic rejection of the provincial limits of the American governor. In the growing chasm between Trump’s Washington and California—principally on climate change, but also taxes, health care, gun control and immigration—Brown is functioning as the head of something closer to a country than a state.

In his final term, Brown has lobbied other states and regions to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, while augmenting California’s already expansive suite of climate change programs. But Trump’s election—and the specter of Brown’s own retirement—have lately set the governor on a tear. In a rush of climate diplomacy this year, Brown traveled to China to meet with President Xi Jinping, then to Russia to participate in an international economic forum. This past week saw him address lawmakers in Brussels and Stuttgart, Germany, and he was preparing for roundtable meetings with scientists in Oslo before arriving in Bonn for a climate conference, where Brown will serve as special adviser for states and regions. And he is preparing for California to host an international climate summit of its own next year in San Francisco.

While Obamaphile politicians whine about Donald Trump’s supposed lack of patriotism, Brown pretends that he no longer belongs to the great American nation. He is running his own foreign policy. Patriotism does not do it justice:

He [Brown] was still talking about the need for a fundamental shift in lifestyle when he said at the Vatican that confronting climate change will require “a transformation of the relationship of human beings to all the mysterious network of things.”

“It’s not just a light rinse,” Brown said. “We need a total, I might say, brainwashing. We need to wash our brains out and see a very different kind of world.”

Happily for us, we have the Jerry Browns of this world to keep us apprised of what is happening in the mysterious network of things. It sounds like he has taken a page from an earlier and greater opponent of the “dark Satanic Mills” of industrialization. Brown talks like someone who has been stuck in a time warp, sitting in class and reading William Blake. Didn’t Blake write:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

The more important part is the wish to brainwash everyone. After all, that is what it’s all about. The new Resistance, the one that is still fighting the Nazis in the fields of France, believes, as an article of faith, that those who voted for Donald Trump had been influenced, tricked, cajoled, nudged or pushed by those meddling Russians. No one in his right mind could have voted for Trump, so Trump voters were not in their right minds. It echoes the sentiment of one Thomas Frank. Didn't Frank write a book where he suggested that the people of Kansas did not know what was good for them and were voting against their best interests. It would not take any great leap to suggest that Frank knew better and that in a true democracy we could ignore their votes and allow their betters, like Frank, to decide for them. If that did not work, we would have to try a little brainwashing.

After all, totalitarian democracies do not need to have elections. The Party knows what is best for you. The Party can read the general will of the people. If you think otherwise, you have been indoctrinated by the great capitalist propaganda machine. Nowadays it is begin led by the Russians who have been meddling in our elections. Doesn't that mean that the Russians control your minds and are forcing you to do what is not in the best interest of Jerry Brown and Thomas Frank? To overcome the terrible things that Russia is doing to your mind, Jerry Brown proposes a good brainwashing.

Good to know where he stands. Good to know that you either agree with Gov. Moonbeam or you are guilty of thought crimes.