From The City Of Angels To The City Of Zombies...

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

The Jungle Drums Speak!

"Love that the crack heads on Skid Row are up on the issues, know the candidates, and are able to Make Their Voices Heard in between hits of meth."

- Peachy Keenan on X

Whaddaya know? Looks like the charismatic Nithya Raman has overtaken maverick candidate Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral “jungle” primary because. . . jungle reasons. That is, the denizens of LA’s vast homeless encampments — once known as “hobo jungles” — apparently voted overwhelmingly by mail for the Harvard-credentialed champion of street-junkies in the Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, and Hollywood neighborhoods (SELAH) she represents on the LA City Council.

LA Mayoral Candidate, Nithya Ramen, Champion of the Down-and-Out

So, it will be a November runoff between the super-duper “progressive” incumbent Karen Bass, and merely super-progressive Ms. Ramen. Better reserve your U-Haul trailer ASAP, as the City of Angels completes its transformation to the City of Zombies. And no complaining, please. This is what you voted for.

By the way, what does “progressive” actually mean these days? Progress towards. . . what? The culminating disintegration of a civil polity? The concerted failure to govern a large, urban organism? Unconditional surrender to the forces of entropy? One might suspect a soupçon of racial animus in the mix, too, something of a middle-finger to this thing called white supremacy we hear so much about. It must be rooted out at all costs, including the cost of a place that a productive population once loved — the very people renting all those U-Hauls, dispersing out into the USA gloaming.

Of course, this “progressive” Democratic Party has transformed itself in a decade or so into an out-and-out racketeering operation, that is, to a criminal enterprise dedicated to the misappropriation of taxpayer money among its rank and file, many of whom are not citizens. The model is not unlike more primitive early versions, such as Boss Tweed’s ring in 19th century New York, or the gang under mayor James Curley, the “Rascal King” of Boston. The system was known as “patronage.” Voters were the party’s patrons, and the patrons were on the payroll. Some had actual party jobs. Some just got free stuff in exchange for their votes. They called it a “machine” because its operations became automatic, self-fulfilling.

There was one big difference, though: these earlier Democratic Party grifters, for all their moneygrubbing shenanigans, were American patriots. They celebrated a country so ostentatiously “free,” so fervently dedicated to upward mobility, that it made room for their garish political corruption. The Democratic machine of Los Angeles today is quite the opposite: It’s a faction that loathes and detests the American system and seeks sedulously to destroy it, even while grabbing as much loot as it can in the process.

Mayor Karen Bass was trained for that mission in Cuba. Beginning at age 19, in 1973, Ms. Bass made eight trips there with the Venceremos Brigade (founded in 1969 by the Lefty-left SDS) to “show solidarity with the Cuban revolution,” which, you might remember, was a straight-up communist revolution. One might infer, then, that Mayor Bass is a straight-up communist, with ambitions to destroy the capitalist city of Los Angeles, so as to replace it with a communist utopia — where all production (if there is any) is owned and controlled by the government, which then dispenses the fruits-of-production to the people, according to their needs, as officers of the government see fit.

In such a system, history shows, the people enjoy no ability to make decisions for themselves about what sort of work to pursue for their own improvement and well-being — what we call economic liberty. That’s all left to the political office-holders, the kommisars, the decision-makers, who tell everybody else what to do (because, you see, they know better). It has not worked too well in practice, as the collapse of Soviet Russia demonstrated, and the imminent collapse now of Cuba, will validate.

This is also exactly what you see in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires of 2025. There was the fiasco of the fire itself in which everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, in the way of prevention and mitigation. The incompetence of Los Angeles city officials was so total — from the mayor’s absence in Africa, the fire chief’s cluelessness, the empty reservoirs, the broken fire hydrants, etc. — that Pacific Palisades and Altadena across town got completely destroyed. In the eighteen months since, the city’s bureaucracy (with “help” from the state) has made sure that next-to-nothing can be rebuilt. Since a large number of people employed in the movie industry lived in these places, and were left financially ruined, Karen Bass’s government has also neatly helped destroy the city’s signature business. . . a home run for communists!

Marxian economic theory is appealing to those who hate and oppose the natural fact that not all outcomes in human life are equal, who resent with red-hot passion the human tendency to social hierarchy, and work fanatically to defeat it. They never do, of course. In communist revolutions hierarchy always reorganizes itself — only within the party structure itself, while all extra-party human effort is outlawed. In California, as in the other “blue” states and cities, Democratic Party leaders perch in the upper branches of the social hierarchy while they cream-off all available revenue streams.

If you suspect there’s something shady about the California election system, you might be onto to something. President Trump thinks this is the case, and said so pretty forcefully on Sunday in his confab with the argumentative Kirsten Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press show. “There’s no evidence!” Ms. Welker repeated strenuously, of voting irregularity, either in this month’s California jungle primary, or in the 2020 national election. You think? I guess we’ll see about that.

Remember: former president Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — home of the Smartmatic vote tabulation system — has been in US custody for months.

Do you suppose he might be trying to cut a deal for himself to avoid a very long prison sentence by disclosing what he knows about Smartmatic?

Do you suppose that Mr. Trump might know something about these ongoing negotiations?

Do you wonder if any of that has occurred to Kirsten Welker of Meet the Press?