Steinbeck's Revenge: Kamala Harris and The Geopolitics of the California Deep State
If a state has a geopolitics it also has a bard.
“Why don't you go on west to California? There's work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there's always some kind of crop to work in. Why don't you go there?” — John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
One of the things that’s very gauche to do is to apply geopolitics within the United States. Might different states have a different foreign policy than the American deep state? How might the Union be maintained?
The very idea that different parts of the Union might have different geopolitics is, of course, not totally permitted and yet it comes up over and over again in American history. California, along with Texas, was even a separate country at one point.
One way to think about Texas, California and Florida is to think of them as in constant conversation with the United States. The Union may be indivisible but it’s definitely negotiable — like any marriage.
If you follow the idea that these might be separate countries with separate geopolitics then you also have to contend with who really rules in those politics. A separate geopolitics comes with it a separate destiny and even poetry. George Strait just doesn’t sound the same outside of Texas. Steinbeck reigns supreme in the Golden State.
But who really rules is always the question that the Union must contend itself with and what deals, if any, can be maybe with these de facto rulers.
To my mind the real rulers of Texas and Florida are the Knights of the Golden Circle.
These rulers are effectively smugglers who bring the enslaved peoples of Latin America up to the factories of the North. Like all slave empires, they take their cut and hide their behavior. To point them out as slavers is to have their apparatus attack you. Just ask any of the people monitoring the human trafficking routes in the Midwest.
Headquartered in J.D. Vance’s Cincinnati this Golden Circle Empire is alive and well. What are the efforts to bus migrants from the Border but a continuation of this approach? You can see it also with Congressman Matt Gaetz’s approach to President Nayib Bukele. What Gaetz doesn’t quite get is that Bukele is sending his criminals to America. Perhaps the politics of Florida is to turn the whole peninsula into a penal colony and Bukele’s experience with Israeli spyware may well prove useful to that end.
Eventually, yes, eventually the Union will have to go in and sort the whole thing out and point out how yes, maybe this group or that’s civil liberties has been violated but by then the rulers will have moved on to another puppet, another candidate.
Still, the states-as-geopolitical-actors issue hasn’t gone away as some essential reading shows:
Juan Enriquez, The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future
Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
Venture capitalists like Tim Draper wants California to break up, too. He’s a part of this weird Nazi network that’s rude to mention but never far from the action. Look closely at Draper Fisher Jurvetson if you dare. Draper was one of the first backers of Theranos, wasn’t he? Draper also holds Ross Ulbricht’s bitcoins, doesn’t he?
Growing up I spent a lot of time in California. My father is from San Diego and I spent a few holidays and summers working on our family house there before I moved to California to go to college. My grandfather served in the U.S. Navy and on the Coronado school board. My grandmother worked in a book store and volunteered at her Episcopal Church.
We were Okies who had come still further West just to see what we could be. Think Grapes of Wrath but not quite that destitute and more deep state. My grandfather was a naval strategist whose career made the Pacific if not an American lake then certainly a Californian one.
It’s that California which has now returned to rescue it from the clutches of organized crime and lethargy.
Call it Steinbeck’s Revenge.
Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck — John Steinbeck’s paternal grandfather — was the founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived Christian commune in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attacks murdered his brother and raped his brother’s wife and mother-in-law. Johann fled to the real paradise on Earth — the United States of America. The rest of the Steinbecks made California their home and inspiration.
I knew California first from the stories of my father, the hugs of my grandmother and the literature of its authors. I came out West as soon as I could and stayed as long as I could afford. I loved Clovis and Fresno, West Hollywood and the San Gabriel Valley, and the Inland Empire. (I never did find out who the Emperor was.)
Like Steinbeck, divorce and disappointment pushed me away for a time but I returned every quarter to spend with family, friends, and the Pacific. I have invested in a satellite company and a solar powered car company. I saw both companies as quintessentially California — protecting the Earth from the Heavens — and as a return to the old, real California.
If I have gone East it was only to regroup before I made a final return.
Yes, California is worth fighting for. To be a Californian is, as Steinbeck knew, to believe in progress.
“the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
Steinbeck, like Hemingway, was just a writer. Or was he?
Well these letters to the CIA suggest something else don’t they?
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You can see Kamala Harris as a Schelling Point between the California and Black Deep states. Her tutelage under Mayor Willie Brown Jr. (California National Guard’s 126th Medical Battalion) and Montel Williams (U.S. Naval Academy, NSA) are Exhibit A and B.
It’s rude but not wrong to talk about how Kamala Harris’s rise ends both #MeToo—and the Obamas. You get the sense that the first Black President really ought to have been a Howard graduate like Harris than a Harvard grad like Obama. Harris, for all her faux friendship with the Obamas, gets that. She pretends to be excited by the Obamas calling and they pretend to be in a real marriage. Kamala is nice to put up with that.
One of my friends once quipped that you don’t get very far in California politics if you don’t have a weird sex life. The Governator knocked up his Mexican nanny. Newsom married Kimberly Guilfoyle before she began dating Donald Trump Jr. I mean, come on. California, when it’s at its best, is a progressive place—and a forgiving one. Nobody cares, nobody cares. Is California America’s France? Where no one cares about the affairs and weird sex lives? Well, Kamala Harris, like yours truly, does speak French.
When you play the game as the California deep state you have two real options — break away or takeover America.
There’s always the choice: You can weaken U.S.G. and become the Republic of California. You can think of the naughty elements of Silicon Valley as essentially daring the Union to come after them. Like the mobsters of yesteryear they seem to delight in stacking their sacks of lucre. They have taken so much from California and given back so little.
Now there’s always a distinct possibility, especially as the world gets warmer and the desertification of the Mountain West spreads and destabilizes. If you look close you can imagine a world where there are Arizona refugees, fleeing the heat and thirsting for water, descend upon California like the Okies from the Grapes of Wrath. You can imagine the grid, groaning under the weight of these new arrivals, going down. You can even imagine foreign governments pushing that grid over and then laughing about how the richest nation in the world couldn’t get it together. If America is to fall it’ll be through the Southwest where American ambition and know-how wasn’t enough to beat the cults, nuts and heat — where the dream was literally burned alive.
But the second option for California was to become the United States government. This was always the promise of the first Californian — John C. Frémont — who ran for president. Frémont ran against the twin barbarisms of our time — slavery and polygamy. To be sure, those issues have never quite receded from the West though we don’t call them that. No, we call them “migrant labor” and “open marriages” or, if we’re cheeky and forty miles outside of Salt Lake, “Mormonism.”
Frémont was too wild, too Southern, and too original even for California. There would be others and they would have the backing of powerful interests, too.
There was Nixon, equipped with his Closet, his Compromise and his Germans and perhaps the CIA.
But the real master was Reagan who in assembling the mobsters of Southern California commanded first the attention of the country then its respect. That was always the danger of the Reagan years when the California mob was at its apogee. To be sure, that fear was ballasted with CIA director George H.W. Bush on the ticket. There was always “All the Vice President’s Men” lurking if Ronald Reagan veered off script.
It used to be said that as goes California, so goes America. It used to be something of a promise and has now become something of a threat. Harris restores California’s promise.
Governor Newsom, backed as he was by the Nazi network and the Getty network (but I repeat myself), was the dilettante governor before the Lady from Oakland became the Democratic nominee and she forced him to do his damn job.
Newsom — fresh from the French Laundry Eloi effeteness — is now forced to help Seneca Scott do the counterintelligence sweep of Oakland which is itself ripe for development. Let’s not forget that Oakland banned facial recognition. When you understand that the city council has plenty of criminals on it you get a lot of the way there.
Kamala the Cop has arrived. The girl from Oakland has a message both for the weird eugenicists of Palo Alto and the Chinese bribe-taking San Franciscans: we’re going to get down to business now.
Did you know that the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her and called her the “Law and Order” candidate in 2010?
Now that Harris is the de facto Democratic nominee the attention must turn to her running mate. To my mind the only real option is Tim Walz of Minnesota and the Lutheran deep state for reasons we’ll get into in a moment. When you realize that the Walz family are real Christians you get a lot of the way there in realizing why he’s the essential choice for Kamala and indeed we’ve been told he’s already been selected by our Midwestern sources.
Every Californian knows that Arizona is not a real place. My father spent some years there as did some other family members, including a great uncle who was a justice of the peace. But where there’s no water there’s no future. Like hurricane-prone Florida there’s something both disturbing and funny about shipping off your grandparents to a hostile environment to burn.
But one man’s anarchy is another’s fresh state. I read the Amazon series Fallout as ultimately about this question. Same goes for Dune. The preppers become the causers.
Arizona is in league with the Knights of the Golden Circle. To some extent you can see the collapse of the climate as the best possible opportunity. That’s seemingly the thinking behind the criminal Mormon element of the state who are aligned with the Russians. Mormonism and Putin’s Russia both see themselves as benefiting from global warming.
All of your prepping is useless if we don't have an apocalypse. "Just one in 10 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints view climate change as a crisis," notes a recent survey. You can see the thought bubble of nearly every foreign power. Turn the American west into a desert and reduce its power. It’s why the Saudis until recently were so interested in alfalfa in the Southwest.
Which brings me to Arizona and why it’s an error to have Mark Kelly as Kamala Harris’s running mate.
I once told Blake Masters that he couldn’t defeat Mark Kelly because no one has ever really defeated an astronaut politically. I stand by that.
To be sure I think Harris is so strong that her running mate is almost immaterial but I suspect it can’t be Kelly. Astronauts are about escape. We can’t afford to normalize Arizona with its water crisis. We can’t afford to have anyone else move there and strain its grid and its dwindling water supply.
We need people moving toward the Blue Belt where there’s plenty of fresh water and fresh opportunities. Brookings has a survey: “The Great Lakes region has a chance to replace the Rust Belt with the Blue Belt.”
To some extent we need to normalize Tim Walz whose can do-Minnesotan style suggests a different future than J.D. Vance’s Kulturkampf, dontcha know.
In his every day decency Walz tells you how you work together when you are farming plots of land next to one another in the land of all those lakes. “You mind your own damn business,” he notes. This is exactly the ethos of where the old-fashioned Farmers Labor party comes from.
Walz has a banger of a line: “They’re banning books in their schools. We’re banning hunger in ours.”
You can see it now. Protect the kids. Fix the food supply. Fight for the Midwest.
A country which feeds its children real food is a country which reduces its long term medical problems. That certainly was something my grandfather, who favored a draft and physical fitness, would have agreed with.
Now I foolishly didn’t spend enough time studying all the ways in which Monsanto aka Bayer was destroying the American food supply as revenge for America winning World War II. You can see the efforts to patent seeds as part of an overall effort to reduce American biodiversity and increase American dependency.
And how Chinese elements have joined in. Consider this weird biolab near America’s food supply which is clearly a Chinese threat. Or these efforts by private equity to destroy food production in California.
We have no real conversation about biosurveillance yet when it comes to food production. We’re going to need to be more clever about this attack on us. It’s going to take a village.
I don’t want to scare anyone but it’s very clear to me that there is a sustained attack on American food production designed to kill a whole lot of us. It’s super dark but I think some friends and I might be ready to push back.
We’ll start in Minnesota and move on to California.
Did I mention Walz’s daughter is named Hope? We’re going to need all kinds of hope if we’re going to safeguard the food supply.
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An Indian-American friend of mine and I were chatting about the would be Second Lady.
You are 1000% correct about BJP and Hindutva. Usha however married a Christian, a total betrayal of Hindu pure blood dogma and she doesn’t seem at all invested in Indian politics. I joked at the convention that I’d like to see some ID because what Indian married woman of any caste or class, doesn’t wear a single piece of jewelry on a world stage?
There is a group that doesn’t like drawing attention to itself — that acts a bit like a cipher. Those would be spies, my dear, and interrogating the past of Vance’s father-in-law Dr. Krish Chilukuri a lot of questions start to emerge. Is he with his thin resume and avowed interest in aerospace belying something more sinister? The last company for which he worked — Collins Aerospace — was mired in controversy before it was neutralized through an acquisition with Raytheon. Chilukuri retired shortly thereafter.
Consider also that Chilukuri graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology. Oftentimes the deal for Indians moving abroad from that institution is that they are on call to conduct reconnaissance or even espionage for the Indian state. Is Chilukuri a part of the Indian diaspora loyal above all to Modi?
Could this explain why Vance’s wife remains a Hindu while Vance has converted to Catholicism? In what faith are they raising their children? In what language? After all, he New York Times reports that Vance’s in-laws speak Telugu with their children at home and kept mostly to their own insulated community.
The Indian press is noting that Usha’s family even joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — think the Indian Proud Boys — and that her great-uncle was the chief of the RSS in Andhra Pradesh!
What little we do know about Usha we know from her pedigree. She’s a Gates scholar. (We’ve talked already about Gates’s fondness for race science and eugenics) and apparently she was also a part of the two year Yale-China fellows program.
Here’s the obligatory mention:
Chilukuri and Choy will teach academic English and American studies at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. Chilukuri, a history major from San Diego, California, devoted much of her time at Yale to public education, volunteering in local elementary schools and as a Girl Scouts troop leader. She also served as editor-in-chief of Our Education, an education policy publication. Choy, a philosophy major from San Francisco, California, served as an executive editor of the Yale Philosophy Review and received a Humanity in Action fellowship to study human rights issues in Europe. Chilukuri and Choy were both elected to Phi Beta Kappa during their senior years.
What did Usha learn in China? And did her experiences in China influence Vance’s own relationship with the Chisraeli spy network headed by Amy Chua?
One of the very underremarkerd aspects of the 2024 election is how Usha Vance’s family is clearly Hindutva while Kamala Harris’s family hails from the bit of South India most resistant to it. Harris’s grandfather was a career Indian civil servant who served as Director of Relief Measures and Refugees in Zambia.
Many of my Tamil friends — I have employed a few over the years — were warning me about Vance before he even became a U.S. Senator. The children of Indian oligarchs who populate the Indian American community may well be resistant to it but the southern Indian states have effectively a well modeled form of social democracy. In fact they are the sort of communitarian communities that Vance purports to like!
For what it’s worth I have more or less concluded in recent years that the Modi government is a threat to American interests and that we ought to ally with other Indians to topple it from within.
Might I suggest that our First Indian-American, Black American Lady President dust off her own Steinbeck?
There would be something magical in hearing these words from Harris, said not so long ago before by another Californian.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
Nothing is lost if we fight for the individual to be creative, to be impressive.
Steinbeck gave us the path by resisting McCarthyism as we must know resist Trumpism. "In resisting, we keep our democracy hard and tough and alive, its machinery intact. An organism untested soon goes flabby and weak," he wrote.
We are to be tested again. Let’s not fail it.
Let’s let California be a model for the nation and then the world.