California Über Alles?

By Will Swaim

Sunday, September 25, 2022

 

If you know anything about the 1970s California punk scene then you likely recall the Dead Kennedys, the puckish foursome straight outta San Francisco. And if you know the DKs, you recall, perhaps with delight, their 1979 debut single so timeless they might have released it last night: “California Über Alles,” which translates to “California above everything,” and adapts the incipit of the German national anthem. (The anthem’s first stanza, which begins with “Germany, Germany over everything,” is no longer performed as it’s a grim reminder of the Nazi regime.)

 

It’s not just that the song is literate — its titular callback, its dirty Dick Dale surf guitars and references to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ronald Reagan, and Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg. It endures for another reason too, evoking California’s then-as-now certainty that the future we’re building on this island in the land is so mind-blowingly grand that it must be shared with everyone — or imposed by force, if necessary. “California Über Alles” spotlights California’s well-known reputation for cool; more than anything it illuminates the Golden State’s less-understood id, its dark and boundless drive for global conquest. Consider the lyrics:

 

Zen fascists will control you

Hundred percent natural

You will jog for the master race

And always wear the happy face

 

And the warning:

 

Mellow out or you will pay

Mellow out or you will pay

 

It goes on like this — a catalogue of juxtapositions, a double helix of hippie and fascist impulses. Though now middle-aged, the song remains relevant. The West Coast authoritarian threat to the world is, if anything, more real.

 

Consider our governor, Gavin Newsom, a true believer in the type of climate change that can be reversed by the action of a single, bold leader. Still governing under Covid-era emergency executive authority, Newsom recently cut his very own climate deal with China. Elbowing aside the Carter-like, feckless, feeble Biden administration, Newsom declared: “California is a global leader in combating the climate crisis while growing our economy, but we can’t tackle this existential challenge alone.” Who needs the Biden White House when Newsom has a Chinese partner — which has failed to meet even its own stingy climate pledges, and whose own electric-vehicle batteries are handcrafted by Uyghurs concentrated in camps? But never mind these bothersome details. It’s the image that matters, the picture of a progressive California governor with presidential aspirations cutting a planet-saving deal with China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment. For a man prepping his 2024 presidential primary run, this is campaign gold.

 

Also, more impressionistic than real, Newsom has pushed for the total electrification of California’s automobile sector — no more filthy fossil fuels, just electric cars running on so-called “clean energy.” Newsom forgets e-cars are made primarily of petroleum-based plastics and run on massive batteries made from such toxic metals as lithium and cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, and lead. Each of these components must be torn from defenseless Mother Earth. In California, we’re already hearing the protests of reedy-voiced, sunbaked environmentalists camped out near lithium deposits in such places as California’s Salton Sea. And when an Instagrammer in June warned that California has no plants capable of recycling car batteries, media first-responders slipped into their hazmat suits to clean up the social environment. “The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed,” PolitiFact announced gravely, before helpfully noting that “Instagram is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta” and that you can read more about “our partnership with Facebook.” The post wasn’t false because the woman’s facts were wrong. No, it was dangerous because “observers” told PolitiFact that the absence of recycling plants in California “is not an obstacle to recycling lithium-ion batteries, however.” The observer appears to be Alissa Kendall, a UC Davis civil-and-environmental-engineering professor, who told PolitiFact “that California not having a recycling facility was a ‘particularly irrelevant’ point, as there are ‘many things we recycle or process in the U.S. economy that don’t have a site in every state.’” Translation: We’ll ship our waste to your state.

 

Bottom line: These electric cars are no “cleaner” than CupcakKe’s mouth.

 

Emblematic of the relentless push for an all-electric future, Newsom’s appointed California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced just days ago that it will ban, by 2035, the sale in California of new gas-powered vehicles. But watch how reality can alchemize high-sounding policy into old-fashioned irony: Earlier this month, as California bid adiós to a summer with a historic heatwave, our governor seemed to be reversing course. With thermometers pegged around 100 for days on end, and even nights like the lightless innards of a convection oven, demand for power surged — and Newsom was appearing on social media, begging us to go easy on the AC and to unplug our new electric cars lest we take down the entire Western power grid.

 

CARB’s 2035 deadline triggered a kind of national Schlieffen Plan. See, because of our weird topography and demography — millions of people crammed into the Los Angeles Basin, the Central Valley pinned up against the towering Sierra Nevada — the federal Clean Air Act allows us to set our own emissions standards so long as they’re stricter than the federal requirements. Other blue states, hoping to reduce vehicle emissions in the service of Saving the Planet, have been allowed to draft on California’s pioneering regulations. Some 15 states have said, “Sure, California, sign us up for whatever you think is best.”

 

In 2021, when Virginia was still reliably blue, for instance, lawmakers there agreed to tie the Commonwealth’s fortunes to California’s. Then a red wave swept through Virginia’s statehouse and through statewide offices, including the governor’s. Today, Virginia lawmakers are working on a repeal.

 

We could go on like this, citing the innumerable ways in which California believes we’ve got ideas so effective and so (what’s the right word?) moral, superior, or übermenschlich, that the rest of you must be compelled to follow. Let’s start with bacon.

 

Porkocalypse Now

In 2018, California voters approved a ballot measure that declared that animal products sold in state must meet exacting criteria for kindness. Newsom took it upon himself to satisfy their uninformed ultimatum by dispatching state-agricultural inspectors around the nation. That struck other states as presumptuous. Even President Joe Biden agrees with the farm states. California “has no legitimate interest in protecting the welfare of animals located outside the state,” his DOJ wrote the U.S. Supreme Court. The compliance costs to pork producers in those other states “clearly outweigh the negligible in-state benefits” to Californians. SCOTUS says it will take up the case in its next term.

 

No Pork? Eat Babies!

Speaking of SCOTUS, when it seemed clear the high court would overturn Roe, Newsom convened the dystopian-sounding California Future of Abortion Council and conjured from that coven a strategy to make California a “sanctuary” for abortion. Among the suggestions he’s acting on: Forty-five ways to accommodate women seeking to end their pregnancies, no matter whence these women come — even if they’re noncitizens who travel here from outside the U.S. My favorite proposal would deputize medical students who, in exchange for performing abortions in rural California, will receive financial help with their student loans and liability-insurance premiums. You might have been conceived anywhere in the U.S. — Austin, Indianapolis, Billings — or anywhere in the world, but now it’s entirely possible that the first and only thing you’ll see in your too-too-brief life is a med student working off his student loan in California.

 

So Good It Oughta Be a Constitutional Right

But simple laws that offer free infanticide don’t go far enough. Proposition 1 on the state’s November ballot will make abortion a constitutional right, extending the state’s baby-killing so far you’ll be thinking of Peter Loree’s star turn in the 1946 horror movie, The Beast With Five Fingers. (One-sentence review: Give this murderous hand a hand for escaping Lorre’s frantic but legitimate desire to kill it, at one point even crab-walking out of the fire into which Lorre had hurled the five-fingered dealer of death!) Newsom asked his throne-sniffing state legislature to put the initiative on the ballot; they obliged. If the voters similarly oblige, California will permanently protect abortion across state boundaries and all around the benighted globe.

 

Trans World

Elsewhere this legislative cycle, Newsom will consider the state legislature’s bid to make California a sanctuary for transgender kids — even for minors fleeing their parents in states that anachronistically insist on parental authority. “Assuming Governor Gavin Newsom signs S.B. 107 into law, California courts will have ‘temporary emergency jurisdiction’ over any child in, and any person who may bring the child to, California for the purpose of obtaining harmful interventions on children’s minds and bodies,” reports Sharon Supp in National Review. In the real world, that would seem to involve the state in conspiracy to kidnap.

 

Vast Food Conspiracy

Consider another bill that Newsom just signed into law, Assembly Bill 257, the so-called FAST Recovery Act. Writing in Fortune, Sloan School professor emeritus Thomas Kochan called it “a path-breaking high-road business and employment strategy for owners and workers in its fast food industry.” He predicts it will end the bottom-feeders in the fast-food business, raise standards across all industries, and hopes the model will spread “across the nation.”

 

When I urge you instead to brace yourself for total catastrophe, consider that I’m no Sloan School professor, but just a Californian shaped by decades of excruciating experience.

 

Authored by the head of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, the Act creates a commission of 13 political appointees to manage work and wages in many of California’s fast-food businesses. In California, such political appointees are manufactured by the legislature’s Democrat supermajority; it’s no stretch to predict that these elected officials will anoint union-friendly commissioners who will impose on fast-food operators their Valhalla of a $23-hourly wage and more costly benefits.

 

Because franchise-food restaurants operate on razor-thin margins, this will likely have two immediate, predictable outcomes, neither of them being what you’d call a “high-road” outcome. On the workers’ side, higher wages and benefits will lead to job cuts as franchise operators seek to reduce the impact of skyrocketing labor costs. In some places, restaurant owners will rapidly automate; ATM-like ordering kiosks will replace people — primarily immigrants and other minority members who, because of the fast-food business model, are often climbing the American economic ladder starting from near-absolute poverty. Other business owners may simply close or sell off to larger operators whose high volumes will allow them to cope with slimmer margins. That concentration of ownership will make it harder for workers to rise into positions of store management and ownership. Local sales-tax revenue will fall, depriving local governments of cash they desperately need to fund myriad social programs.

 

On the customers’ side, as some franchisees simply close permanently, we’ll see the spread of “food deserts” in communities already underserved by grocery chains. Customer service in the remaining stores will become less human, more automated. Prices will rise. In grim partnership, poor customers and aspiring workers — immigrants and the native-born — will suffer together.

 

But the union leaders behind Bill 257 won’t stop at the state’s borders. Newsom’s signature on the bill was still wet when the Service Employees International Union — part of the aforementioned California Federation of Labor — unleashed a national media campaign promoting AB 257 as the solution to labor problems everywhere.

 

“This is LANDMARK labor legislation that presents a way forward for fast food workers in this country,” SEIU said in countless posts. Under the hashtag #UnionsForAll and #AB257, union activists in Texas, Florida, Missouri, and beyond posted photos of workers celebrating California’s win as their own. Were they moved by the spirit of international labor? Roused by their own personal victimization at the hands of ruthless fast-food businesses? Not likely. Their messages seemed, well, mass-produced, and were clearly amplified by one of California’s largest unions.

 

California is America’s unlocked back door, the easiest place to advance into the American mainstream bogus nostrums, new religions, untested business strategies, unchecked illegal immigration, noxious Marxist pedagogies, proliferating genders, Silicon Valley Towers of Babel, and rank authoritarianism. When the Dead Kennedys wrote “California Über Alles,” they were warning the world about Jerry Brown. But, if anything, their warning is more fitting to Gavin Newsom who, like Brown, aspires to the White House. If he succeeds, Zen fascists will control you.