What is Christmasy about setting fire to Christmas cards? What is festive about a giant Venus flytrap almost eating a small dog? Nothing, but apparently those are the kinds of Christmases two of the largest high-end retailers are trying to sell us, and we aren’t buying.
The release of Christmas ads in November launches the holiday season, and there are few greater British traditions than gathering around the kettle in the work kitchen to talk about the new John Lewis advert the day after it’s aired.
But the first major retailer to release its ad did not get the reaction it had hoped for. Marks & Spencer faced a backlash over its ‘Love Thismas, Not Thatmas’ ad, which sent the message that traditional Christmas needs to be burnt down, shredded, smashed, and go swimming with the fishes.
In one scene of the retailer’s clothing and home campaign, Sophie Ellis-Bextor turns her attention from browning marshmallows on a gingerbread house with a kitchen blowtorch to setting a stack of Christmas cards on fire. In another, paper hats get mulched into confetti, an elf gets launched off the roof of a house with a baseball bat – you get the idea.
It ends with the voiceover saying: ‘This Christmas, do anything you love.’
‘Do anything you love.’ Eschew the spirit of charity. Destroy Christmas and make it all about you. Not about family. Not about children. Reject tradition.
The John Lewis ad was worse. If the Little Shop of Horrors did Christmas ads, it would look like this.
In short, a boy’s Christmas tree seed grows into a giant voracious Venus flytrap with multiple sharp-toothed mouths, that at one point appears to snap after the family’s Pomeranian. Fearful of the carnivorous plant, the boy’s mother, grandmother, and sister take it outside.
But the narrative that you shouldn’t judge a predatory plant based on its natural inclination triumphs when the family joins the flytrap in the garden with their presents. And as if taking inspiration from the feverish delusions of a sick toddler, the ad ends with the plant snatching the wrapped gifts, gobbling at them, and spitting them back at the family, unwrapped.
John Lewis’s message is spelt out and very much the same as M&S: reject tradition. Or as the major retailer phrased it, the ad “celebrates the joy in the UK’s changing Christmas traditions.”
At one time, John Lewis set the standard for Christmas ads. Memorable favourites like Monty the Penguin (2014), the 2010 montage ad accompanied to Ellie Goulding’s rendition of ‘Your Song’, or the adventurous snowman ad of 2012, were warm, festive, and at times tear-jerking. They celebrated dreaming and childlike innocence. They felt like they were produced with true love for the season. While not all were cookie-cutter traditionally Christmasy in appearance, they conveyed those timeless values of family, sharing, hope, and gratitude. They were crafted with the skill of Don Draper.
The 2023 John Lewis ad is ugly nightmare fodder.
The affordable food retailers, however, embraced and celebrated the traditional messages of Christmas.
Asda leans enthusiastically into the festive season with its joyful, light-hearted ‘Make This Christmas Incredibublé’ ad, featuring Michael Bublé as a store quality officer.
Showing off turkey, mince pies, panettone, and enough cheeses to put a lactose intolerant into a coma, Bublé is funny and ostentatious. The sets are tastefully but festively decorated, and the ad is finished with the singer joining a choir of staff in an energetic rendition of ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland’.
Asda struck the right chord and knew its audience. It knows they’re suffering under the cost-of-living crisis and says without saying: you can still afford to have a nice Christmas dinner this year.
The Aldi advert sees a return of Kevin the Carrot, this time in his adventures in a Christmas food-themed Willy Wonka’s factory. Narrated by British actor Jim Broadbent, lines of poetry convey deep-rooted values such as: ‘Only Kevin the carrot clearly understood the true meaning of Christmas and the importance of being good.’
And: ‘The season of goodwill was truly in the air, for Christmas is a time that’s sweeter when you share.’
But it was fellow German food retailer Lidl that stole the paper Christmas crown. A racoon who loves Christmas goes on a little hero’s journey to make sure a toy monkey gets delivered to the boy who he’s been watching through the window. While never discovered to be the creature that placed the toy under the tree, the raccoon is rewarded when the family dog takes a portion of Christmas dinner outside to share with him.
It was old John Lewis: full of innocence, adventure, mild peril, and generosity. It was moving and warm. It shared an important message: little gestures of kindness matter.
And the latter two retailers put their money where their mouth is: both Aldi and Lidl are part of the Neighbourly charity network to distribute unsold surplus food to local communities. Lidl is also hosting toy banks for donations in their stores and has said that it will be producing the monkey and raccoon toys for sale, with the proceeds going to Neighbourly.
These aren’t just empty words, but action. The desire to help comes through these ads and touches people. These are authentic expressions of the season of good will towards all men.
What I and people who took issue with in the M&S and John Lewis ads is not that some individuals reject traditional Christmas. People are free to have whatever unconventional Christmases they want and not be judged for it.
No, this is about people tired of being nudged by forces that shape our society and craft our media that our world must change. That even though we are in the majority, we must have our expression of our culture and tradition come second – or not at all – to unconventionality, modernity, and progression.
‘Don’t touch or break our Christmases,’ we’re saying.
These messages from John Lewis and Marks & Spencer were intentional, crafted by professional agencies that have been captured and work to serve the woke agenda and their ‘purpose-driven’ campaigns – sometimes at the expense of profit. While unconventional unChristmas ads are not woke in themselves, they originate from the same spiteful anti-tradition place.
But the fickle monster you feed eventually comes back to bite you over any perceived form of ‘hate’, slight, or microaggression. Case in point: Marks & Spencer had shared a still outtake from their ad to social media, showing paper hats burning in a fireplace, before quickly deleting it and apologising for any offence caused.
Not apologising to those Christmas-lovers who might have thought it mean spirited, but to pro-Palestinian activists. Yes, Marks & Spencer took seriously complaints that burning red and green paper hats was insensitive and stoking tensions because Palestinian flags also happen to feature red and green.
Let no good pandering go unpunished.
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In Conversation with Curtis Yarvin (The Return of Don Quixote and Anglo-Meiji Restoration)
Curtis Yarvin, known by his pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’, is one of the most prominent social critics and reactionary writers of the contemporary era. Yarvin’s blogs, ‘Gray Mirror’ and ‘Imperial Melodies’, can be found on Substack.
Yarvin’s words are in light.
There’s a little-known Chesterton work called The Return of Don Quixote. Don’t know it at all?
I don’t. I mean, I’m familiar with the original Don Quixote by Cervantes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Return of Don Quixote, and it’s about the victory of a joyous reactionary movement, written as an Edwardian novel, set in the future. It’s very interesting and it sort of catches the sort of joyousness right, which is an absolutely essential part of, like, any kind of restoration of this type.
And yet, you know, kind of Russian Hide And Seek, which is of course a much later work, is more…black-pilled, you might say, and perhaps a little more convincing. And I would say, sort of read them both. You’ll get kind of some of both of these ideas, but just breaking out of this incredible, I mean, it’s like, when you look in the rear-view mirror at Brexit. It’s like 0.1% of a British Meiji, right? And it’s a completely failed venture, and a completely failed thing, you know, I was reading Richard North’s blog EU Referendum, back in the earlier ‘00s, you know, I think he was associated to some extent with, like, early UKIP, and, um you know, the idea of having a referendum on Britain leaving the EU in 2005, let alone that referendum winning, it seemed like such, what we call here, a stretch goal.
It seemed so unimaginable and it happens. This incredible revolution happens and of course it happens and it doesn’t amount to shit. It just has no momentum. As soon as it wins it begins to lose. And, actually, the main effect of Brexit was to destroy the Brexit movement.
Pretty much.
You can’t help but feel that when you do something and people put that much effort and that much hope into something, and in retrospect you can look at it and just say “Well duh, obviously that was gonna…there was no way that could have worked in any way, shape, or form and done anything useful or relevant, or whatever,” and, the, you know…the definition of insanity is making the same mistake twice, and, right, and here, is just the form of government that has been how England rose to greatness and has been governed for pretty much all of the last two millennia, you know, before the invitation to William, right? You know, I guess, you know, William, it’s hard to know to what extent William of Orange was really interested in British domestic affairs. I don’t know how great it was.
Queen Anne was certainly pretty feeble and um, you did know that the um, the king has the right to veto legislation in parliament, right?
Yes.
And do you know who the last person, the last king, who actually used that power was?
It’s not going to be James I is it? Someone distant. Charles I?
Here’s a hint. It wasn’t a king at all.
Really? OK, so was it Queen Anne then? Was it in fact Queen Anne?
It was in fact Queen Anne. Uh, she did it once, and I forget over what. Probably some completely symbolic bullshit.
I see. They went “No, no, this is no good, we’ll get this Dutch fellow”.
Yeah, yeah, it was sort of their ‘lordships die in the dark’ moment. I think, like you know, the People’s Budget of 1911 or whatever. Yeah, Queen Anne was like the legitimate daughter of James II, right? And there was some hope that – and she was basically a Jacobite heir – it’s sort of like this woman Georgia Meloni who gets elected in Italy spouting all this rhetoric and then she’s like “We must fight for the Ukraine, the cause of Ukraine is the cause of all of us”, right?
You know, when I was in Portugal, I was in a small town in this summer and, you know, all of the…you would swear the whole population of Setúbal, Portugal, had come out and, like, popular enthusiasm for the cause of the Ukraine was everywhere, spontaneous graffiti, right, you know, and it’s like, these expressions of popular enthusiasm, like ‘workers of the world, unite’ in Czechoslovakia in 1976. You know, the greengrocer does not really care about workers of the world and I’m pretty sure that if you’re a bus driver in Setúbal, Portugal, your interest in the Dnieper isn’t really – excuse me, Dnipro – is fairly limited, and the uh, just, I mean, it’s increasingly comical, and so, the idea of just like, this whole structure collapsing in one boom is so much more realistic than the idea of Brexit. It’s so much more realistic. People think it’s unrealistic, no, it may be unrealistic, but it is vastly more realistic than Brexit.
I read your piece about a Meiji Restoration. I was sat in the middle of a bunch of naval officers and I was thinking “You know what? Rishi Sunak’s not very popular, neither is Keir Starmer, nobody likes parliament, what would actually happen right now if King Charles did in fact just go ‘guys’…”
Martial law.
Yeah exactly. What would actually happen? And you know, there’s been this sort of endless slew of headline after headline after headline of “Oh, this thing isn’t working, we’ll get the army in to drive trucks” and “Oh, this isn’t working, we’ll get the navy in to sort out this hospital”, and you just sort of look at this thing and think “Why is it that the last sort of functional bit of our government is essentially military?” And “Why is it that…” what would actually happen if…would anyone stop it? Would anyone in the military?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was in Dartmouth. I was at BRNC when the Queen died.
Oh wow.
It’s full of these young, early twenties cadets, who are going through…you know, I was there the day…so I think I was one of the last people to officially join the Queen’s navy and one of the first to join the King’s, and you know, everybody, the whole, the whole college just stopped. I went out onto the Parade Ground at about 5pm in the early evening and every church bell in Dartmouth was ringing across the valley. And yes, there’s a huge amount of symbolic nothingness to it –
But that symbolism can be converted back into reality.
Right!
And everyone would be stunned at how easy it was, and how obvious it was.
I don’t think anyone would say no.
Well, would Sir Arthur Scargill bring the unions into the street? Would like, you know, would the SpADs like set up barricades outside of Nelson’s Column? What?
Right, right. I don’t see it.
I don’t see it. And so you can have your New Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. You just have to realise that the chains that are bonding you are made of paper.
But that’s the question. The new Prince of Wales hands out copies of the Big Issue –
[*Laughs*]
And I just don’t see the king going along with this, so what do we do? Do we have some kind of new Cromwellian parliamentary lie where oh no, no, the king is held captive by these malignants and bad ideas, what is it? What on Earth are we doing?
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, um, maybe we, you know, uh, I don’t know, if Prince William did enough acid, maybe?
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A Quasi-Defence of Classical British Education
A couple of weeks ago, enough to make this piece seem dated, our Prime Minister Rishi Sunak contended that all students should be taught mathematics to the age of eighteen. As one would expect with anyone holding a convicted belief in anything these days, such remarks were held to scant regard and I suspect that like most Toryism of the modern day, that with conviction with give way to that with expedience and this policy will be dropped by the waysides at the slightest pushback in parliament.
However, the criticism that has spawned from this rare moment of genuine conviction from our prime minister is probably far more interesting than his own aspirations of what would have manifest.
As a sidenote, I expect that should this compulsory maths to 18 intention go through, what will likely happen is that the ever-beleaguered adolescent must now come to grips with the ire of all office workers: Microsoft Excel, only too early for their time. It is infeasible in the least that people who struggled to get a 4 in their foundation papers for GCSE maths could go on to study integrals. Maths is unlike other subjects in that one must have a command of the knowledge foundational to the next level, it is not a matter like in history, of switching periods or method of analysis to an area you may find more interesting. There are limits for everyone be it in wit or will. I, much like everyone else reading this article, is likely aware of our own maths limitations, it’s all too human.
But the furore about what should be taught instead of maths, or anything else for that matter, is as I’ve already said far more interesting. Of course, the first conviction of the modern vision of education, a cookie-cutter idea of turning an innocent child into the taxpaying office worker to satisfy the top-heavy pension-state is very tempting. In a world of material, the person is personified by their work, after all. Teach people about taxes! Teach them about compound interest! Teach them how to start their own businesses! Teach them about how to tie their shoes! Et cetera, et cetera.
For someone however who normally takes a very technical view towards things, I’d like to take a moment to defend the British style of education in which people choose their A Levels and focus on honing their skills in a certain area, be it in humanities or technology, as opposed to being taught what the education cynics would prefer people learnt, which is essentially accounting 101 or what the cabinet desire, learn all the maths possible until your brain turns into C++ code.
In the first place, can we please clear up the idea that education is only, or even primarily about getting people ready for work? If you are leaving school at eighteen (good choice by the way) your job is likely going to have nothing to do with what you studied, nor has it ever been like this. The two original skills we most valued in school, maths and English, were primarily about getting people up and ready to learn information by themselves. Economists do not use a “can do their own taxes” rate when measuring educational development, they measure either literacy or time in school. Most people do not learn about their own job, or about their hobby because they were taught in school. For the degree educated among us and who retain passion for their subject, how much do you really owe your subject knowledge to the university instruction and how much to your own passion and research?
Education is, no matter how wearily and poorly it does it these days, a matter of getting people to learn things for themselves and maintain some level of function in society. Before the SNP took charge of Scotland, most state schools still taught Latin and Scotland retained a reputation as one of the premier education systems of the world (that has been dashed, you may finger point at whodunnit somewhere else). No, I’m not saying Latin is what makes a good education, but I don’t think it’s useless either if people are willing to learn it and be passionate about it.
I’m not going to pretend that a society in which everyone is a “critical thinker”, or “free thinking” Twitter user is either realistic or good. The reality is that humans are by and large not critical thinkers. But I think there is something to be said of the idea that education is not about doing your taxes (have these people never heard of PAYE?) but about rounding yourself out cognitively and figuring out who you are amongst peers.
Some of the greatest in British history studied what many would consider ‘useless’ in modern standards. The traditional British education was to go to Oxford or Cambridge and study classics or the law, after which one could study whatever one wanted, or indeed get a premium job in the civil service. All this was during the period of time in which British innovation was the envy of the world. I struggle to see how if more children were taught the properties of triangles during the 1840’s how the Industrial Revolution could have been anymore revolutionary.
I think the likely final avenue here of discussion is the frequently cited immense rise of Asian cognition in the economic space and the pre-eminence of the Chinese and Japanese companies and workers in the tech sphere. To be frank I do not think either that the rising ability of these nations need pose any threat to us in this country unless we decide it does. Liz Truss reportedly after a visit to China thought we all needed to study more maths and I’ll admit, the Chinese mathematics curriculum is terrifying. Calculus in many parts of China is taught as young as twelve, but that alone need not merit fear from anyone. Firstly, China’s economic coming dominance is vastly overstated by their own figures, but more importantly an economy isn’t just data scientists and modellers. Have people ever stopped to think that maybe too many mathematicians is also a bad thing? The most fundamental feature of all economies, the ability to produce food and water, is almost never going to feature maths beyond that which we use in Excel. Nor for that matter do most electricians, plumbers, journalists, chefs, manufacturers, technicians or even IT workers need to know how to find an eigenvector.
Our other example, Japan, is perhaps an even more damning verdict of teaching a high number of students to eighteen mathematics than the former. Japan is a great country and I have little bad to say about them as a culture, but their economy has not been saved by maths being taught to eighteen. If you think the UK productivity figures are bad than Japan’s are lamentable. Japan lags the rest of the west in productivity despite a highly technical education. In spite of this 85% of Japanese Students will take maths to eighteen with math PISA scores that dominate the free world.
It is hard to assess the economic impact, let alone geopolitical impact of teaching everyone maths. But I’m comfortable in saying that if China or Japan are our examples of high-level STEM education, I’m not going to tie myself in knots. Britain’s productivity issue probably lies elsewhere.
I’m not attempting to be biased here, I myself have studied two different STEM subjects at higher education, but for me it seems expertise and skill is unlikely to be unearthed by your schooling. In my view then, don’t make the poor children study maths or accounting; adolescence is a strain unto itself. Let people pick their own interests, and the chips fall where they may.
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Going on Holiday? Skip LA
California—The Golden State. Land of sunshine, Hollywood, and endless beaches, and destination for tourists from all over the world, especially for those seeking to get away from colder climes during the winter holidays.
However, for residents, over the past decade such California dreamin’ has become more and more just that—a dream. I usually try to resist writing America-centric articles, but, as a CA native living in Los Angeles County, I feel the need to warn friends and readers in other parts of the world about what is actually going on here, especially as vacation season approaches. While for most people life is generally fine outside of the city centers, crime, homelessness, and their economic consequences are becoming less avoidable, and I feel it incumbent on me to dispel the naive idea that Hollywood is anything like in the movies.
But before laying out examples of what’s going on here, I’ll lay out the policies and figures that have allowed, if not encouraged, such things to grow, especially over the past couple of election cycles. While not exhaustive, nor the beginning of the state’s problems, the main culprits for the current state of affairs are Proposition 47, so-called zero-cash bail, and Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, all of which amount to a gross machine that benefits criminals at the expense of law-abiding citizens.
Touted, in Orwellian irony, as the Safe Neigborhoods and Schools Act, and partly authored by then San Francisco DA Gascon, 2014’s Prop 47 ‘reduces’ crime by downgrading ‘nonviolent’ crimes and drug possession from felonies to misdemeanors. Written against a 30-year-fermented spectre of the 1980s’ War on Drugs, Prop 47 was presented to a seemingly more sympathetic and enlightened public as a way to address the costs and racial disparities of prison overcrowding (the construction of more prisons being apparently both too expensive and too stigmatizing). Simply put (and, depending on where one is, common to see), shoplifting items is no longer a felony so long as they’re under $950, and drug possession, even of drugs like Rohypnol and fentanyl, would now count as a misdemeanors. In practice, the law has led to the release of repeat offenders, who continue to convey drugs and fill trashbags with less than $950 in merchandise to presumably be kept or fenced elsewhere.
Prop 47’s effects have been compounded by the state’s elimination of cash bail for suspects picked up by police. Usually, if a suspect cannot pay bail, they must wait in prison until their arraignment; zero-cash bail means those arrested for misdemeanor and non-violent felonies (with ‘non-violent’ covering a lot of ground that many argue it shouldn’t) can be released same-day, to the bewilderment of their victims and the disheartening of the cops who arrested them. In its initial form as part of the emergency policies from CA’s 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns (its then iteration put in place to protect already jailed prisoners from the virus by keeping it out amongst the public), zero-cash bail led, like Prop 47, to an almost immediate rise in repeat offenders. After ending in July, 2022, it was reinstated in May, 2023, with a grace period before later reimplementation, when an LA County Superior Court judge ruled detaining offenders ‘solely for the reason of their poverty’ to be unconstitutional (with ‘solely’ arguably covering even more ground than the above ‘non-violent’). While, since it went back into effect a month ago, only three percent of arrests were due to repeat offenders (a three percent that could have been prevented), twelve cities are, nonetheless, suing the county to get rid of the program. With little immediate consequence beyond a slap on the wrist, and benefitting from the DA Office’s backlog of over 10,000 cases yet to be filed, offenders old and new have predictably been emboldened to commit new crimes before they have even been charged for previous ones.
Of course, zero-cash bail was not an invention of 2020; it had been pushed for years by progressive advocates of judicial reform who allege bail to be an unfair punishment of the poor and minorities. Like Prop 47, zero-cash bail was sold to voters as the best means to provide equity for disenfranchised communities unfairly oppressed by supposedly too harsh sentencing and too costly bail schedules. This perspective is maintained by many voters, as well as the politicians they elect and reelect. One such politician is, of all people, LA’s current District Attorney.
Another tool in LA’s soft-on-crime machine, DA George Gascon moved south after pushing empathy-based policies in San Francisco, to spectacular lasting effect, to spread the same. On his election, Gascon declared that his office would not prosecute criminal enhancements—felony firearm possession, gang affiliation, multiple-strikes status, &c—that would require adding jail time to conviction, and that he also planned to retroactively review even death-row cases to remove such enhancements to give lighter sentences. Such a blanket refusal to enforce established criminal law would, one would think, seem tantamount to a de facto cancelation of it—something under the purview of legislature and courts, but not an executive. Either way, with such radicalism Gascon started his tenure being lenient on criminals, present and past, while working against law enforcement and public safety.
Put in place to ostensibly reduce prison populations and mitigate racial disparities in conviction numbers, Prop 47, zero-cash bail, and Gascon’s backwards approach to crime have had effects visible across the state, but especially in inner cities. One of the most glaring effects has been the growth of homeless encampments on sidewalks, in vacant lots, and under road overpasses. Freed from the worry that their drug habits and the theft that supports them will land them a felony, and assured they will be quickly released if they actually do get picked up, the homeless have become a local fixture in LA over the past decade. Indeed, even in Pasadena, a veritable Hollywood Producers’ Row, one can now see tarps, trash, and transients, the forward envoys of future encampments. Whether any countervailing NIMBYism towards this new ad hoc infrastructure will provoke residents to change their voting habits remains to be seen, but more on that below.
While most residents and tourists can avoid the fire and biohazards posed by these encampments, there are, nonetheless, the dangers posed to people and businesses, with immediate as well as lasting effects. Contrary to the romantic stereotypes behind the policies, the participants in the current crime wave are far from the downtrodden Jean Valjeans and Aladdins that many predominantly Democrat CA voters sympathetically assume. As could have been (and was) predicted by anyone to the right of the Prime Minister who is allegedly not Castro’s illegitimate son, leniency towards crime has produced more of it, with smash-and-grab thefts, often during business hours, becoming a daily occurrence (for example this, or these, or yet this, or this, or that, or this, or this, et cetera). And theft always carries the implicit threat of violence, as the manager of my local Ralph’s grocery store learned when confronting a thief this past September. Because of stories like this, chain store employees have been ordered not to engage with thieves so as to avoid insurance liability, reinforcing the sense of entitlement displayed by thieves (property and business insurance is a whole other topic I don’t have time to explore; in short, by rendering businesses uninsurable, the above policies are precluding future entrepreneurship in the state touted, for now, as the world’s fifth largest economy).
After putting even basic necessities under lock and key did not work, retail mammoths like Target have, predictably, shut down or plan to shut down CA locations. Furthermore, food spots as seemingly staid as Starbucks are starting to pull out due to safety concerns. In addition to removing day-to-day resources (and revenue) from inner cities, stores that theoretically have the most to gain from tourists are leaving them bereft of amenities—from coffee and food to toiletries to diapers to medicine to everything else that might make their stays near key landmarks more enjoyable.
One might rightly say that with planning and situational awareness most of the dangers surrounding in-store theft can be avoided. Indeed, while these are always one’s own responsibility, first, they are now expected by law enforcement. Displaying the ‘blaming the skirt’ mentality of Gascon’s approach to criminals and their victims, LA police earlier this year advised people not to wear jewelry in public. Unfortunately, in addition to punishing locals with the consequences of their actions (both in what they wear and in whom they vote for), such approaches affect visitors, too. Tourists not keeping up with LA politics may not have heard the advice—and might suffer the consequences of their assuming a baseline of social trust in the City of Our Lady of the Angels.
And theft is not the only, or even worst, crime residents and visitors need to worry about. Indeed, while there are three years of incidents to choose from, two recent cases show just what DA Gascon thinks of law-abiding citizens in relation to criminals. In September an adult woman harassed and beat up a thirteen-year-old after school at a McDonald’s. Despite her being caught on camera by multiple witnesses, the woman’s sentence was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor at the request of DA Gascon, whose office cited the fact that the teenager may have escalated the interaction—presumably by putting her hands up to protect her face—thus expanding the above skirt-blaming to apply to underage girls. In a more recent case that’s perhaps too close to the above idiom for comfort, a woman in Long Beach was sexually assaulted in broad daylight by a homeless man who, grinning with pants unzipped, lifted her dress and thrusted against her so vigorously that it knocked her down before he was pepper sprayed and chased off by a bystander.
Despite the man’s having been caught on camera, and despite its being against the requests of Long Beach City Prosecutor (who, in his request for a felony charge, had to coddle to the DA’s sympathy for criminals by emphasizing the rehabilitation the man would receive), Gascon initially charged the man with a misdemeanor for sexual assault (presumably for the groping) and vandalism, citing the lack of evidence of the man’s intent to actually commit felony rape. The decision’s having provoked outrage from many directions, the DA eventually charged the man with a felony, but the fact that this was not the initial charge speaks to the disconnect between Gascon and the cities and citizens he has sworn to protect. What more the DA’s office needed to discern a man’s intent than his pressing his exposed member against a woman’s backside I won’t presume to know, but one thing is clear: despite claiming, in campaigns, to stand for children and women, DA Gascon sees them both as culpable when attacked, and treats violence against the latter the same as mere property crime.
One should not miss the correlation between that last story and public transit. Tourists expecting LA public transit to be like that of their home countries should be warned: it is now a truism that to ride public transit is to risk being harassed, which, now, always carries the threat of violence. While such occurrences certainly precede the last decade (I’ve personally witnessed them when riding the subway), stabbings on and near public transit are becoming more frequent. Indeed, incidents of violence are so frequent on transit that drivers and conductors do not even stop for them, even when it places LA Metro in legal liability. Granted, at this rate if they stopped for every instance of crime they’d never get anywhere.
Such stories can leave one wondering where the police are in all this. The answer? Just as frustrated as the rest of us. Predictably, LA’s legal leniency to crime, added to the extra scrutiny on police across the country (see ‘the Ferguson Effect’), has left many police discouraged and looking elsewhere for work, if not retiring early, with few willing to fill their vacated positions. One would imagine this would cause celebration among the ‘abolish the police’ lobby (a formidable presence in LA—a recently elected member of the City Council openly advocates the policy direction). However, the dearth in law enforcement has prompted the city to raise law enforcement pay and bonuses to entice people to take the, sadly, thankless job.
And, again predictably, the lack of police protection will more and more be filled by citizens willing to defend themselves. Recently, when a man came into their jewelry store armed with a hammer and a can of bear mace, one family did just that. Interviewed on local talk radio, one of the family members articulated what many are feeling across the county: ‘We had to do something…I don’t feel secure anymore in this city…These people are robbing because they don’t want to work, not because they were born poor…I don’t think it’s fair, you know?…Politicians are not working in favor [of] the small [business] owners or [of] the regular citizens. They’re just working in favor of [criminals], you know?’ This sentiment is felt by others; on hearing the DA would not initially treat her incident as attempted rape, the Long Beach woman mentioned above has purchased a taser and plans to get a gun permit. She is part of a growing number of voters from the usually pro-gun-control LA who are rediscovering the value of the Second Amendment—a trend only augmented by the Jewish community after the outbursts of antisemitism following Hamas’s attack on Israel.
As I’ve mentioned, such policies and perspectives are advocated in the name of reducing prison populations and mitigating disparities of minority representation in crime statistics. If you’re a liberal progressive who wants to be the virtuous hero and get rid of systemic racism, you’ll vote for these policies! What are you, a RaCiSt TrUmP sUpPoRtEr?! And, indeed, this is effective political rhetoric in California; unable to shake the cast of being, as the Governor claimed his own 2021 recall was a solely partisan Republican plot (somehow possible in a majority Democrat state, in a county with even higher Dem. percentage).
Gascon’s two previous recalls failed to garner enough signatures to oust the man. As I hope I’ve shown, this has mainly been a win for criminals, not voters—primarily minority. This, unfortunately, is a common story. Like many well-intentioned progressive policies that lead down the primrose path, soft-on-crime approaches to public safety meant to allegedly help minorities have ended up hurting them the most, Black and Hispanic people making up the wide majority of LA’s violent crime victims.
Thankfully, the recalls for Gascon were not the final word, and, with the effects of his policies being harder to ignore, Gascon will, hopefully, be replaced in Spring 2024 by a tougher-on-crime candidate (which is a low bar at this point). However, that would depend on voters’ connecting the dots between policy and outcome, as well as placing their own public safety over rhetorical kneejerks and partisan allegiance. I have encouraged my own liberal friends that, things having moved so far left in California, to consider voting for other policies and candidates—even, *gasp*, Republicans—would not be hypocritical but, rather, completely consistent with their values. Nonetheless, part of my optimism often involves the belief that, yes, things can always get worse, and that sometimes they have to for people to learn.
I usually hesitate to blithely throw around the word ‘tragic,’ tragedy requiring the added element of some kind of fateful choice or circumstance that produces the unfortunate outcome, but in California’s case I think the adjective fits—but not simply because we’re getting the policies and persons we voted for. In fact, California’s political elite has a history of ignoring voter decisions. While CA Attorney General, current Vice President Kamala Harris refused to defend her own state’s law (affirmed twice by voters) identifying marriage as being between a man and a woman when it was brought before the Supreme Court. Similarly, despite CA citizens’ voting in 2016, albeit by narrow margins, to speed up the penalty process rather than repeal the death penalty, when our Governor of One Hairstyle but Many Nicknames (Nuisance, Newsolini, Newscum, Gruesom…) entered office in 2019 he placed a moratorium on the death penalty, regarding his own personal predilections as trumping state law. DA Gascon is, thus, in good (or bad) company.
If anything, the tragedy of California is in our naively following the same, ever-sweetening pied piper songs of those we elect without recognizing the ever-souring and more dangerous opposite direction in which they are leading us—and not ousting them when they directly ignore our decisions.
While informing CA readers of what’s going on in LA County and convincing some to reconsider their voting patterns would be a great boon, this article’s focus is, in the end, on warning those outside of the state about what to expect should they choose to visit. Don’t get me wrong: I love southern California, which is why I am so saddened and angered by the direction it has gone—and did not need to go. Furthermore, my love stops when it places people in danger, and it behooves me and other Californians to try to prevent others from being victimised by our choices. With a lack of public law and order, things have gotten much less predictable in LA, and, while residents who have not left the state may have the werewithal to handle it, visitors expecting Hollywood to align with their expectations may be in for a rude awakening.
Even scenic outlooks far from the city center are not free from threat, much less the freeways through the inner city. Popular food spots, from restaurants to taco trucks, now carry more risk of crime, and, while some efforts to reduce the presence of homeless encampments are moving forward, housing advocates and opponents of programs like 2020’s Project Roomkey are contending over whether to require all hotels in the city to fill unbooked rooms with homeless individuals, possibly landing future tourists in rooms next to drug addicts. Add to all of this the artificially (because of taxes) high gas prices, toxic algae and sewage at select beaches (and, what with runoff from the homeless encampments, virtually the whole coast after a rain), and unavoidable looneys apparently confused about when Pride Month is, and Hollywood is a very different town than is portrayed in its movies.
Nonetheless, if people are intent on coming to California, they can certainly have a wonderful time—there is a lot to see and much fun to be had. With Pacific Coast Highway running along the ocean from Santa Monica to Monterey, as well as the High Sierras and Yosemite, the Redwoods, and Death Valley (ironically one of the state’s safer places to visit), California is made for road trips. Locations like San Diego’s Balboa Park and nearby Zoo, Pasadena’s Huntington Library and Gardens (which, among other exhibits, boasts prints of Shakespeare from his lifetime), and Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific are great for those wanting to see the sights while getting in their steps and tiring out their kids. There are also theme parks like Universal Studios, Six Flags Magic Mountain, and, of course, Disneyland. With prudence, planning, and flexibility, travelers can easily have a great time, so long as they avoid certain areas, keep their car doors locked, and watch their luggage until arriving at their hotel room. If one has access to previous visitors or a local who can direct them on which sights to see and which to skip, so much the better.
