California 'values" at stake in recall?

 Roger L. Simon:

Sunday evening I was standing in an excited crowd at a Long Beach fundraiser for Larry Elder’s California gubernatorial campaign when I received a text with the headline “Gov. Newsom Pivots Recall Speeches To Attack Larry Elder’s Political Opinions.”

The article was from the California Globe, a publication I had never heard of, and was dated Aug. 17, ages ago in the whirlwind pace of today’s politics, but it caught my eye because it quoted extensively from Gavin Newsom’s stump speech, which ran in part:

“Though we defeated Trump, we didn’t defeat Trumpism. Trumpism is still alive and well, even here in the state of California. If you don’t believe me, just consider the likely person to enter an oath of office, to enter in the governor’s office in just a matter of weeks if we don’t reject this recall.”

“Don’t think for a second that this recall is not about all of you. It’s about each and every one of us and the values we hold dear.”

I immediately thought of an editor at the Los Angeles Times who, during a Zoom interview with Elder, accused the talk show host of much the same thing, being out of synch with the values of the state.

But just what are those California values everyone is supposed to hold so dear Newsom was speaking about? And are they in the process of changing or going back to something from years ago that was lost?

In a sense, the current governor and the editor of the state’s most prominent paper are correct, this recall election is about values.

But are they the values of a rich class that has, for years and years, sent their kids to private schools while they—at the insistence of all-powerful teachers’ unions—deny poor minority children “school choice” and force them into schools like the one Larry Elder attended years back in South Central, Crenshaw High, from which, just recently, but two percent of students passed a basic math proficiency test?

It would be interesting to know what Crenshaw was like when Elder attended compared to today.

And now these same supposed progressives want to teach Crenshaw students Critical Race Theory and the concurrent anti-racism, an approach to education likely to bring that two percent to zero.

There’s nothing like reverse racism to enlighten the young mind and develop responsible adults, according to Democrat (and Newsom) “values.” Don’t worry about fathers in the home. That’s so 1950s.

From their vocal, enthusiastic responses to Elder’s speech, it was clear CRT and the Afghanistan debacle were the two issues most on the minds of the fundraiser crowd Sunday night.

The escalating violent crime in the streets in every major California city, not to mention the rest of the country, came in a not-so-distant third with the myriad COVID duplicities, masks (no one there wore one) and the lockdowns just behind.

Only twice before in my life have I seen a candidate received with so much excitement and enthusiasm: Trump and Bobby Kennedy, the latter ironic since this Elder event occurred almost simultaneous to the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot Bobby and one of the first active jihadists on our soil.

Before the speech, I had wandered through the crowd, asking people, essentially at random, even though I knew this was a skewed sample, if they thought Elder could actually win.

Skewed or not, the answers were astonishingly uniform and direct: “Yes, if they don’t cheat.”
...

I think the libs are so desperate to keep their weird values that they will cheat if they can.  The liberal elites of California have decided that turning their cities into middle ages dope bins where people poop on the streets and live in tents is "progressive."  They have some of the worst roads in the country.  They can't keep the lights on and yet they want electric cars.  Housing prices are ridiculous for places that would not be acceptable in much of the rest of the country.  California liberal values suck.