I & I Editorial BoardMuch has been made, as it should have been, about the stark differences with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the once-great NASA’s pathetic woke-DEI-politically correct existence. Musk wins on merit, but in California, that’s not what counts. So Musk has been vilified because he dared to leave the progressive plantation.
SpaceX has been launching rockets from the Vandenberg Air Force base in Santa Barbara County for more than a decade. It wants to increase the number of annual launches from six to 36, and maybe even more. The Air Force has no problem with the plans. The California Coastal Commission does. It voted 6-4 last week to block the increase.
As one would expect, the opposition was based on Musk’s political transformation. He also has the temerity to be successful in a society that has increasingly come to devalue success and deem failure and the amenability to be offended to be virtues. That will get him nowhere in California.
- “We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race,” said Commissioner Chair Caryl Hart.
- “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” said Alternate Commissioner Gretchen Newsom.
- “This company is owned by the richest person in the world with direct control of what could be the most expansive communications system in the planet,” Commissioner Mike Wilson said. “Just last week that person was talking about political retribution.”
The “official” reason for the commission’s decision is due “concerns that all SpaceX launches would be considered military activity, shielding the company from having to acquire its own permits, even if military payloads aren’t being carried,” reports Politico.
But it’s obvious that was concocted for public consumption.
California is clearly the most progressive state in the country in terms of politics. It elevates the administrative state over private affairs. It pursues a political society at the expense of civil society. Progressives prefer the rule of men, not the rule of law; elites over Mainstreeters; dependence rather than independence; coercion instead of cooperation; taxes instead of economic freedom; revolution (or a fundamental transformation) when what’s needed is greater freedom.
In truth, there is nothing progressive about any of that. Musk has figured this out and abandoned California, taking his SpaceX and Tesla headquarters to Texas with him. Others have learned the same lesson. That’s why companies and residents have been fleeing the state as if a wildfire were licking at the seat of their pants.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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John Merline
Stop calling them “Progressives”. There’s nothing remotely “progressive”’about authoritarian Marxist Communism. Nothing.
The slow learning curve and the absence of any historic memory of Progressives needs to be remembered and understood by decision makers.
Progressives, as mentioned in the I & I article above, try things that have failed for decades and cost taxpayers billions all over again and again.
Does Kamala not recall the colossal financial meltdown across the country directly caused by Congress’s Progressive desire that everyone must own a house?
No job, no income, no collateral, no intact family, no household maintenance skills…”no problem” declared Progressives in Congress; we will take away the Federal Charter from any institution which denies anyone without collateral a mortgage. Billions were lost; millions of families tossed out of houses they could never afford. Backfiring Progressive ideas are extremely cruel and always hurt those they claim to want to help. Always.
And Kamala wants to start that disaster all over again by awarding $25,000 for anyone to buy a house! Short memory? No memory!
Worker’s Family Party” ideology, if they think hard enough to have an ideology, is even more brain dead than Progressive Kamala. Two such morons of WFP, were elected to the City Council of Philadelphia by “voters.” Their first initiative was to propose raising special taxes on “The Rich.”
Our city border is just over there, and whenever similar morons proposed such backward ideas against the most generous segment of our tax base and against the better management of Philadelphia and against caring for our low income residents, our wealthy residents and companies moved outside the city…taking millions in tax revenue with them shrinking the city’s ability to operate.
If you want more revenue, Progressives and all other leaders need to create incentives to stay and move into our great cities, instead of legislating fundamentally moronic reasons not to stay.
One more irony of this situation is that nearly everything that ‘progressives’ say about opposition has a hidden and/or inverted meaning. People attack and/or complain about Musk* because of his boldness, success, wealth, and influence, all of which are unmistakable and sizeable. How many people – especially progressives – do the same about George Soros (the foreign national who has been active in US PAC funding for half a century), Michael Bloomberg, or Larry Fink?
* Musk doesn’t get attacked on his own platform much anymore, not because of policies or censorship, but because he can dish out as good as or better than he gets; he has proven himself to be ‘The Troll King.’