In the first ten days of his administration, Joe Biden signed a Guinness-record number of 25 executive orders. The most egregious of them killed thousands of high-paying Keystone Pipeline jobs in the American heartland, subjected every American to the economy-numbing Paris Accord and made it legal for a grown man to use the same bathroom as girls and women.
But no matter how far the president’s dementia advances, or how emboldened his handlers become, here are three things the current administration could never dream of doing:
- Tell a deli owner how many poppies he can plant on his patio
- Legalize larceny on a grand scale
- Arrest a citizen at a public meeting for mentioning the rape of his daughter
I’ve seen the first abuse of local power personally at a public meeting in my former hometown of Cotati, California, and have seen the latter two, along with millions of other witnesses, on the evening news.
Local governments commit offenses like these routinely, because you and I give them, along with our tax dollars, permission to do it. The reason is simple. When the framers created the Constitution, they limited the scope of federal control over citizens’ lives and delegated much unspecified control to the states, which promptly delegated much of their freshly delegated control to the cities and counties.
Today, the liberals, progressives and twits who control most of America’s cities have stretched their inherited powers past the breaking point. All ten of America’s most dangerous cities are run by Democrat mayors. Contrast that with America’s ten safest cities, which are run by six Republicans, three Independents and only one Democrat mayor.
Even Democrats in traditional Democrat strongholds are saying, “Enough is enough.” In San Francisco, where Nancy Pelosi will win elections years after she dies, citizens are likely to vote yes on the recall initiative against District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the adopted child of Weather Underground members Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. It seems even progressive San Franciscans won’t tolerate Boudin’s “What shoplifting?” policies, which have caused a number of Walgreens pharmacies to close permanently and turned Neiman Marcus into The Little Shop of Horrors.
This time last year, school board meetings were a snoozy backwater where overeducated wonks droned on about arcane trivia. Today, they’re the white-hot center of three flash points in our culture: Alleged systemic racism, vaccine mandates and even the question of whether we or the state have dominion over our own children. In Loudoun County, Virginia, where residents voted against Trump 61/37, a recall is underway to rid the county of six school board members who have declared their chambers to be a First Amendment-Free Zone.
The moral of the story? For every conservative who wishes he or she could do more than just yell at the TV and create some actual change for good, stop wasting all your attention on the wrongdoers in the federal government. Focus on the wrongs in your backyard. Take your constructive ideas and intense complaints to your alderman, precinct captain, city council member, county supervisor and school board member. They meet once or twice every month, and have no choice but to hear you speak. Recruit your conservative friends and have them join you. Together, we can put a broom in the spokes of these fools.
This is just the CliffsNotes version of my book, “The Little Picture: How Liberals, Progressives, and Twits in local governments are strangling America, and what to do about it.” Besides documenting the wrongs in your neighborhood, its final chapter, Tools Against Radicals, has specific resources and templates that can help you push back against your local progressives and win.
Greg Karraker is an advertising writer/creative director who started on Madison Avenue in 1967, and still works for national clients.