What happens when leftism meets reality?
Ana Kasparian, co-host of the left-wing show “The Young Turks,” recently found out.
Kasparian railed against the financial hardship of retrofitting her California condo to allow for electric-vehicle charging.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who’s committed to driving California straight into the ground, signed an executive order mandating an end to gas-car sales by 2035, and very expensive charging stations will have to be installed throughout the state.
A distressed Kasparian describes the “massive f–king loan” her building must take out to install the stations.
“I want to do something in response to climate change, that is not my issue here. My issue is that we are forced to make all these changes that are a financial burden, a giant inconvenience, with little to no help,” she says — and launches into a rant about how the government should just “give me the money” instead of offering tax credits for things like charging stations.
Well, yes, all of us want to “do something” as long as we don’t actually have to do anything. Her plea for the government to just pay for it is further proof leftists don’t understand how anything works.
The government paying for it is . . . you paying for it.
There isn’t a magical money tree the government plucks from for its pet projects. The government doesn’t have a side hustle or part-time job where it makes a little extra cash for splurging on bad leftist ideas. All the money comes from us.
Kasparian also points out that shortly after the gas-car ban was announced, the state experienced a heat wave and Newsom was forced to tell Californians their grid was in trouble so please don’t charge your electric cars. It’s one of many reasons rapidly moving to all-electric cars is not a serious proposal and Newsom is not a serious person.
What’s extra interesting about the exchange is that fellow leftist Cenk Uygur, her co-host and “Young Turks” creator, couldn’t really challenge her remarks.
At one point he tries to gingerly push back. “I hear you on all that, but at some point we gotta go to electric cars,” he says. “The planet’s burning. . . . So when California says, ‘Hey, let’s go to electric cars by 2025,’ yeah, it’s gonna be tough, but at the same time now prices are coming down.”
Kasparian didn’t stand for it. She understands the actual cost of the policies, not merely the theoretical changes people will need to make.
Another recent viral video along the same vein had British podcaster Konstantin Kisin at the Oxford Union explaining exactly this problem with fighting climate change and why we need to face reality: “The future of the climate is going to be decided in Asia and in Latin America by poor people who couldn’t give a s–t about saving the planet.”
Kisin argues the trade-off to “fight” climate change is simply too high for people all over the world who have malnourished kids and no toilet inside their homes.
Kasparian’s point that it’s too high for even people like her, in her almost certainly very nice building in California, should be an instructive one for the left. Kasparian is the target market for these policies, and she’s finding them unbelievably burdensome.
This is Kasparian’s second recent foray into breaking out of leftist groupthink.
She also got in trouble with her political allies for saying she finds terms such as “birthing persons” and “persons with uteruses” degrading to women. Well, they are. For this, lefties called her names and urged her to stop commenting altogether.
But she shouldn’t. Kasparian isn’t a conservative — it’s unlikely she’s even a moderate — but she’s the epitome of what happens when a progressive thinks her ideas through.
There are no easy fixes to complex problems like climate change, and rearranging the language so .01% of the population feels included at the expense of everyone else is crazy. It’s OK to say so.
Woke conformity pressures people to parrot the lines. Good for Kasparian for saying “Enough.”
Karol Markowicz is co-author of the new book “Stolen Youth.”