The Election Nakba, in which Donald Trump was elected to a second dictatorship, occurred on November 5, 2024. This post is about a November 14, 2024 journey to Berkeley, California.
BART warns customers that “face coverings [are] required” and 10-20 percent seem to comply:
The gathering on the platform above includes about 16 people. Three are masked. One appeared to be unhoused (obscured behind the person in the gray jacket). One is Islamically covered, but not masked. Within a few steps of the Downtown Berkeley station there were unhoused Californians, outdoor maskers, and Halal food:
We entered the University of California’s art museum and found that most of the exhibit space was restricted to artists who identify as “women”:
To honor Democrats who have fled from X to the safe space of Bluesky (user who posted “there are only two genders” is banned from the platform within 30 seconds), we visited the Free Speech Movement Cafe:
Given that Democrats said that Americans would lose their freedoms and their democracy if Trump were elected (see Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? for some examples), I had expected riots on campus or at least mostly peaceful protests. Surely, these brave souls who tweeted (before fleeing to Bluesky) about #resistance wouldn’t meekly surrender everything that was important to them. Not only did we not encounter any anti-Trump protests, it was difficult to find anti-Trump signs. A handful:
There were far more signs related to masks than to the horrors of a second Trump dictatorship:
The famous campanile has a statute of Abraham Lincoln, whose signature on the Morrill Land Grant Act was important for the founding of UC Berkeley (also a sign at the top regarding the gender ID of certain carillon players). My friend asked a sophomore majoring in environmental sciences what she knew about Abraham Lincoln. The graduate of California public schools knew that Lincoln had been a U.S. president, but not in which century this had occurred nor did she know of any wars or acts with which Lincoln was associated.
Our next stop in search of anti-fascism pro-democracy protests was Sproul Plaza, famous for student activism. We found a couple of Trump-related posters amidst of a sea of unrelated material:
The anti-Israel protest that began just after October 7, 2023 was still in full operation.
End-stage Berkeley feminism is complete covering of the body, except for an eye slit, when in Sproul Plaza:
We wandered back into the commercial district and found that coronapanic level varied by shop.
We found that there was roughly one marijuana store on each block. Examples:
For those who get hungry after consuming a lot of healing cannabis, the good news is that L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is opening soon:
Moe’s Books is still at the center of Berkeley’s intellectual life. The area near the front door is primarily devoted to Queers for Palestine books, e.g., The Queer Arab Glossary (a bestseller in Gaza and the West Bank?):
(The secular Jews whom I know in Berkeley all say that they want Israel to be replaced by a river-to-the-sea country that would be ruled by Arabs and in which Jews, at the discretion of the Arab rulers, might continue to live as a minority group. These Jews-by-birth, none of whom have ever visited Israel, say that they’re “anti-Hamas” but also that Israel and Hamas are equally bad and that Israel should cease to exist as a nation. (Sometimes for fun I ask them “Suppose that you were pro-Hamas. What would Hamas want you to say that is different from what you currently say?”)
Going deeper into the store, we found a lingering commitment to coronapanic:
Some of the featured mid-store books:
Immigration Realities is from the giant brains of Columbia University Press, which starts its description of the book with “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work.”
Right around the corner from this important work about how “border walls do not work”, we find the border wall that UC Berkeley installed around what used to be People’s Park:
On the way to a rich neighborhood south of downtown, I found that the Berkeley Playhouse has found one social justice cause to elevate above all others:
A clothing store:
A couple of miscellaneous houses:
A $3 million house features Black Lives Matter sign and alarm system signs on the front fence, plus a car sticker advertising the Black-free private school to which the kids are sent at a cost of $40,000 per year per child:
I Ubered back to San Francisco with a driver who lived in Oakland and said how happy he was that Sheng Thao, the mayor of Oakland, had recently been recalled.
RE: Coronapanic: interesting revelations out of the Netherlands about NATO’s role. I don’t know how accurate it is, but Neil Oliver mentions that Sweden’s sensible reaction to COVID may be explained by Sweden’s non-membership in NATO until 2024-03-07:
What a sad state of the institution where Richard Feynman once taught.
Maybe the ignorance regarding Abraham Lincoln reflects the progressive belief that it is present-day White Saviors who freed the Black slaves. The idea that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863 (albeit not the ones held in the North over which he had any authority, but only those held by his enemies) would cause cognitive dissonance.
To be fair the Northern states had abolished slavery years before then.
Well, maybe Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri are only “Union” states rather than “Northern” states, but white oppressors in those states continued to hold slaves during the Civil War while fighting on behalf of the Union. Lincoln did not see fit to free Union-held slaves via his Emancipation Proclamation.
And look how far Delaware has progressed. From being a Civil War-era slave state they have now sent a transwoman to Congress. Interestingly, this person was previously married to a transman, thus creating what a biologist looking at DNA would say was a heterosexual relationship. https://19thnews.org/2024/10/sarah-mcbride-congress-transgender-history/
Since I was walking around with Philip when he took 2/3 of these pictures, I wouldn’t mind adding:
1- The proportion of masked people is marginal (far below 5%), but Philip took photos of almost anyone who was still wearing a face hijab. There may be more fraidy cats in California than FL, but from my experience, masks are much more a marker of belonging to the working class than anything else. Not sure why proletarians prefer to cosplay protective wear, but my hunch is that it’s something sociological. Most of the people in the photos do not look like bourgie Berkeley-ans.
2- The Moe’s evidence is similarly tendentious. Philip predicted that the front window would look like a bookshelf at UNRWA, when in actuality, I don’t think there was even one book about colonial settlers blah blah. Yes, the bookshelf inside brought together their recommendations for how to hate Israel more articulately. But I’ll give you a dollar if you can find 5 bookstores in the US that aren’t run by masked socialists who resent all the predictable shibboleths of the left.
Paul: My Berkeley photos from March 14, 2024 do show at least two Gaza-themed books in Moe’s front window. Night in Gaza by white savior Mads Gilbert and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, by Rashid Khalidi. It would be interesting to know why shoppers now have to enter the store to have their awareness of the genocide in Gaza (exacerbated by a population explosion) raised. Does Moe’s care less today than they did back in March?
@Paul, so far, we’ve spent over $4.6 trillion on COVIDFear, resulting with about 5% of the population continuing to embrace masking and vaccination. Meanwhile, we spent roughly 5.5% of our GDP, or about $1.5 trillion annually, into our education system, yet we’ve seen little, if any, improvement in educational outcomes.
When are we going to see posters prompting and encouraging STEM?
Ah the good old medeival pig sacrificing, liberal voting Calif* feminist.