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Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away in April at the age of 89, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. Ten years earlier, the Peruvian novelist (The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World ) gained global attention for speaking the truth to power. In a 1990 conference organized by Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa proclaimed that “la dictadura perfecta” was not communism, the USSR or Fidel Castro. The “perfect dictatorship” was Mexico.
As the Peruvian understood, a dictatorship is not a nation where there are no elections. A dictatorship is a country where one party never loses, and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) dominated Mexico since the 1920s. In a practice known as el dedazo, PRI presidents picked their successors, following up their choice with fake elections. In the US state of California, Democrats have established a perfect dictatorship of their own.
Democrats have been in power in Sacramento since 2011 and now hold all major elected offices: Governor (Gavin Newsom), Lt. Gov (Eleni Kounalakis), Secretary of State (Shirley Weber), Attorney General (Rob Bonta), State Treasurer (Fiona Ma) State Controller (Malia Cohen), Insurance Commissioner (Ricardo Lara), and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Like all state Democrats, these officials enjoy the support of an imported electorate.
For years, Pew Research pegged the number of illegals in the United States at 11 million. A recent study by scholars at MIT and Yale – conducted before the massive influx under Biden – estimated more than 22 million. So the 11 million figure likely underestimates the number in California alone. In 2019, when state attorney Xavier Becerra announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration, he displayed a sign citing “over ten million immigrants” in California – “immigrants” being code for false-documented persons illegally present in the USA. With illegals, California’s approach has been two steps forward, no steps back.
Under California’s “motor voter” scheme, the DMV automatically registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license. Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who refused to participate in a federal voter-fraud probe in 2016, has never revealed how many of the illegals actually voted. Party cadres known as politiqueros bribe and threaten the illegals to vote for Democrats. Gov. Newsom and state Democrats reward them with welfare benefits, in-state tuition and even positions in state government. The illegals become a permanent electorate and, in effect, an imported legislature.
The Democrats can place on the ballot measures such Proposition 47, titled the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” by Kamala Harris, but which legalized theft in amounts below $950. Illegal votes can make the difference on such pro-criminal measures. Illegal votes come on top of longstanding practices such as ballot harvesting, same-day registration, voting without identification, and registering the dead. Consider also the people who vote for a living rather than work for a living, and the strongly pro-Democrat government employee cartels. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), for example, rallies outside the state capitol proclaiming “this is our house!” For Democrats, it all adds up.
In the 2018 election for governor, Gavin Newsom got 61.9 percent of the vote. In 2020, Gov. Newsom imposed the most rigid lockdowns of any state, deploying police to arrest solitary paddleboarders, and even proposed a ban on sport fishing. Newsom spent $1 billion on masks from Build Your Dreams (BYD), a Chinese company that makes motor vehicles, and hid the details even from fellow Democrats. When wildfires torches vast reaches of the state, Newsom rejected common-sense forest management and blamed “climate change.” And so on, as bad as it gets.
The people gathered signatures for a recall and in 2021 Gov. Newsom got 61.9 percent of the vote – the same percentage as 2018. Newsom claimed Californians were saying “yes” to science and vaccines, and “yes to diversity, we said yes to inclusion, we said yes to pluralism.” For all but the willfully blind, the recall was a confirmation of institutionalized voter fraud, hardly the state’s only dictatorial feature. Consider the unelected California Coastal Commission (CCC) which combines Stalinist regulation with mafia-style corruption.
Commissioner Mark Nathanson, appointed by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, hit up Hollywood celebrities for bribes and drew a prison sentence of five years. Under the command of regulatory zealots like longtime director Peter Douglas, the commission blocked development and made coastal residency practically impossible for working people. The CCC rides roughshod over property rights and prevents landowners from clearing brush, but there’s more to it.
The CCC rejected the Poseidon Desalination Plant in Huntington Beach, in progress for 20 years and supported by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers. “The ocean is under attack from climate change already,” explained Commissioner Dayna Bochco, wife of the late Steven Bochco, producer of “Doogie Howser MD,” “Cop Rock” and other television shows. The unelected CCC thus prevents Californians from deriving full benefit from the Pacific Ocean, the state’s greatest natural asset. And when it comes to undemocratic rule, the CCC has company.
Consider the unelected California Air Resources Board (CARB) which seeks to achieve the state’s carbon neutrality goals by 2045. CARB is fond of imposing new regulations on gasoline, particularly when prices are running low, as in 2014. Recurring CARB boss Mary Nichols, a lawyer, has been pushing for $5-a-gallon prices since the 1990s. Nichols also kept on staff Hien Tran who bought his statistics Ph.D. in a New York City diploma mill and fudged air pollution figures.
At this writing CARB is inflicting a new price increase, just in time for the Fourth of July.
Gov. Newsom compounds the problem by restricting the state’s oil and gas production. He wants all new car sales after 2035 to be electric only, preferably manufactured by Build Your Dreams, Newsom’s favorite Chinese company. The Coiffed One, shrink-wrapped in statist superstition, wants Californians to get only what his government wants them to have. He is also aware of the people’s victories through the initiative process.
In 1978, Californians passed Proposition 13, the People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation. by a landslide margin. In 1986, the people passed Proposition 63, the Official Language of California Amendment. This measure directs the state legislature to “preserve the role of English as the state’s common language” and refrain from “passing laws which diminish or ignore the role of English as the state’s common language.” Seventy-three percent of California voters approved the measure, a landslide by any definition.
In 1996 the people passed Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which eliminated racial preferences in state employment, education and contracting, what is now known as DEI. In 2020, Democrats advanced Proposition 16, which would have overturned the California Civil Rights Initiative. The people shot it down 57.23 to 42.77, a wider margin than the 1996 victory.
Last year, the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act required voter approval for all new taxes passed by the legislature and two-thirds voter approval for all new special tax increases. The measure easily qualified for the November ballot but Gov. Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown leaned on a compliant state supreme court – with six out of seven justices appointed by Democrats – to have it taken off the ballot. That blow to the people was a capstone to the state’s perfect dictatorship, which state Democrats hope to extend nationwide.
Joe Biden brought in millions of illegals to expand the imported electorate and keep one party in power. That’s why Democrats support violence against ICE’s deportation criminal illegals. For the left, as Orwell noted in Animal Farm, rats are comrades. As President Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.
