Huntington Beach shuttered after extra-large great white shark starts acting naughty

Here’s a decent read:

Every time a Western electorate declines to do what it is told, the same pantomime begins. The commentariat reaches for its 1930s file, dusts off the photographs of men in uniforms, and begins explaining that what is happening in your apparently stable democracy is essentially a re-run of the road to Nuremberg. The voters are not expressing rational preferences. They are not responding to observable failures of governance. They are the mob. They are, pending further analysis, probably fascists. This diagnosis excuses the people delivering it from engaging with the pushback on its actual terms. It reframes democratic dissent as moral disease. It is also, structurally and in every analytically meaningful sense, wrong.
The 1930s were characterised by fragile states, economic collapse, and mass street movements competing violently to seize control of institutions too weak to resist them. Look around. The states of the contemporary West are not fragile. They are hypertrophied – vast, well-funded, possessed of regulatory reach that would have made the authoritarians of the 1930s weep with envy. The problem is not that the state is too weak to resist capture. The capture already happened, quietly, over several decades, from the inside, by people with lanyards and PhDs and an absolute conviction that they were the good ones. The 1930s were an attack on weak states from without. What we are living through is the consequence of strong states captured from within. These are not the same phenomenon. Deploying the same vocabulary for both is not analysis. It is a category error deployed as a silencing mechanism.
How did postmodern theory escape the seminar room and colonise the civil service, the judiciary, the media, and the NGO sector? The universities produced graduates. The graduates took jobs. The ideas – that objective truth is a power construct, that biological reality is a social imposition, that language is a site of oppression – went with them. Over approximately three decades, government function was progressively replaced with ideological enforcement. Energy security gave way to renewable virtue signalling so badly managed that energy prices now constitute a genuine threat to living standards. Infrastructure gave way to consultation processes so captured by activist interests that building things has become genuinely difficult. Public safety policing gave way to the policing of speech and sentiment. Ireland enacted hate speech laws legislators could not clearly explain. Canada froze citizens’ bank accounts for associating by financial transaction with a political position the government found inconvenient. In Australia, a Victorian woman faces tribunal proceedings in Queensland for saying men cannot breastfeed. The apparatus built to protect the vulnerable has been repurposed as a weapon against people who say true things the capturing class finds offensive. This is not Fascism. It is a soft totalitarianism operating through bureaucratic procedure and the weaponisation of institutions whose stated purpose is the protection of the very rights being suppressed.
The left’s authority died not with a bang but with a series of bewildering positions announced with the confidence of people who had entirely lost contact with the population they claimed to represent. The transition from defending working-class material interests to championing luxury beliefs – the political preferences available only to people whose material needs are met – was a slow drift. The traditional left-leaning voter who valued free expression because they had historically needed it to organise, who valued civil liberties because they had needed them to protest, found themselves looking at a political movement that had adopted their language while abandoning their interests. Being then told that their common-sense views on biological sex, national sovereignty, and the appropriate limits of state power made them extremists was not persuasive. It was alienating. It drove them toward whatever vehicle offered the option of not being called a fascist for holding positions that had been mainstream liberal positions a decade earlier.
The electorate has not moved right. The electorate stayed roughly where it was. The centre moved left, then further left, then into territory the centre did not recognise as somewhere sensible people lived. And then it called the people who stayed behind extremists. The “lurch to the right” is, in most cases, simply the refusal to follow. What is actually happening is transactional pragmatism: voters accepting or tolerating secondary positions in order to secure the essentials – free expression, economic rationality, bodily autonomy, national sovereignty, the proposition that the state exists to serve the population rather than correct it. The political axis has also rotated. Left versus right – horizontal, economic – has been superseded by citizens versus an unaccountable managerial class that controls institutions, sets vocabulary, defines acceptable opinion, and responds to democratic challenge by diagnosing the challenger as morally defective.
The real danger to Western democracy is not a phantom army of 1930s fascists. The institutions are strong. The phantom army does not exist. The danger is the quiet, procedural suffocation of democratic accountability by a managerial class that has confused its own ideological preferences with objective reality. The public has begun to notice. The current moment is an awakening – messy, imperfect, occasionally expressed through imperfect vehicles, because the available vehicles are the ones that exist. The managerial class built the curtain. The population has pulled it back. Sanity and the stubborn human insistence on saying true things will outlast the ideology. The question is how much damage is done in the interim by people who insist on misdiagnosing the problem because the correct diagnosis reflects badly on them.

https://x.com/FraserDAnderson/status/2096919656561000455?s=20