Blue states have more problems than Red states. On average, the people in Blue states are less law-abiding and less law educated.

The dysfunctional big cities are mostly in Blue states – Chicago, L.A., New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Detroit, East St Louis, Minneapolis, and – I’ll admit it – my own former city, Denver.

Blue states have the worse budget woes. California, Illinois, Washington, New York and now Colorado are facing severe shortfalls. Their remedy is of course to raise taxes, not to cut spending. You see, the official color of Blue-sters is green.

In Colorado, there’s the TABOR Amendment to the state constitution which requires voter approval for these tax shakedowns. Naturally, the Democrat politicians are scheming to dodge the Amendment, even though the people of the state have already foiled them in their dodges three separate times. Ah, but this time the Democrats have 100% Democrat appointees on the Colorado Supreme Court.

That’s right, even the Blue-ish people of Blue Colorado (isn’t it a cruel irony that “Colorado” means “color red”?) refuse to allow their elected Blue-sters to raise taxes beyond the rate of inflation. But the Blue-ster politicians may still find a way to do it.

In all Blue states, there’s a psychological denial of the fact that if you raise taxes too much, people will move away. In California, they’re proposing a “one-time” 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, as assessed by government assessors (how convenient that they do the assessing).

Apart from the fact that this tax is almost certainly unconstitutional, and vague to the point of being unenforceable, it ignores the fact that billionaires are typically smart enough to dodge it by . . . [wait for it] . . . moving out.

Duh.

One might think that even a Democrat state legislator in California would know that typical billionaires are smart enough to figure that out. But no, Democrat state legislators in California are not smart enough to figure out that the billionaires will figure that out.

We’re talking world class stupidity here.

This Blue state stupidity has gotten too obvious to ignore. The country used to mock the people of Mississippi. But recent data shows that Mississippi students are now doing better on standardized tests than California students.

People used to mock the kissin’ cousins of Appalachia. But we now have a deep Red Vice President who went to Yale Law School after growing up poor and barefoot in deep Red Appalachia, while the new mayor of deep Blue New York is an unredeemed Marxist with nary a clue about how to balance a budget, manage people, avoid Jew-baiting, or tie his shoes. And he was voted into office by a million deep Blue voters who don’t know Karl Marx from Groucho, and don’t care that they don’t.

So, I have a question along the lines of, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

In Blue states, did the stupidity of the people make the states Blue? Or did the Blue states make the people there stupid?

I think it’s mostly the latter. The people who flocked to California a generation or two ago weren’t stupid.  Heck, they launched Hollywood, they invented Silicon Valley, they made surfing cool (and that’s no easy feat). Fifty years ago, I wished everybody could be California girls.

But after the people got there, something weird happened. Maybe it was in the water or the drugs or the collective fashion-consciousness.

Whatever it was, it became cool to be leftish, to be druggy, to be counter to whatever is the culture. The more extreme, the more cool – all the way up to, and stopping just short of, Charles Manson.  

Yep, there was general agreement even in California that Manson was a step beyond cool. You could say that, in California, Charles Manson was literally too cool.

Of course, in the rest of the world, Manson was a murderous psychopath. California probably would not say that; too judgmental.

Once this mass hysteria took root in California, it spread like crabgrass. Fashion is like that. Hula hoops, bell bottoms, long hair and moustaches, streaking, gender mutilation, electric vehicles, dumbing down the school curriculum, you name it.

One day you’ve never heard of it, the next day you can’t live without it, and the following day you wouldn’t be caught dead in it.

And so, Leftism was the fashion of the day. Except it lasted for a generation. A generation lost in space.

In that time, they really messed things up. They tried to abolish merit, and almost succeeded, substituting a hodge-podge of skin color, sex habits, and political leanings. They ridiculed 2,000-year-old religions, and hated 3,000-year-old ones. They canceled and sought to outlaw anyone who disagreed with that agenda.

The fashion-conscious people went along with it for a long time. To be on the wrong side of fashion in a fashion-conscious world (and all worlds are) is to be without a friend. Better blue than uncool.

In short, my conclusion is that the Blue states produced stupidity, not the other way around.

But finally – or maybe this is not final – the tide turned, the fashion changed, the chickens came home to roost, the Kool-Aid ran out, and the people awakened from their wokeness.

They’re discovering, one hopes, that they aren’t actually stupid, but were just mistaken. We will see what comes next.