The ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’ Is About CA’s Descent Into Impotence

You won’t find the words “Nick Shirley” in the new Democrat-passed California law that the Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio dubbed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” and the horrible spokescreatures for the state’s reptilian governor are riding that fact pretty hard.

But they’re lying by omission and misdirection, an act they perform with the regularity of breathing. It’s still more or less the Stop Nick Shirley Act, and it’s designed to create a special class of privileged people with extra privacy rights: “Privacy for immigration support services providers.”

You can read the thing, which purportedly makes it illegal to “knowingly publicly post or publicly display, disclose, or distribute on the internet the personal information or image of any designated immigration support services provider, employee, or volunteer, or other individuals residing at the same home address.” So you can engage in independent journalism, and you can investigate anybody you want. You just can’t ever mention their names.

Trying to turn a ludicrous premise into something that a judge won’t laugh out of court, the bill adds a bunch of language about intent: The person posting the name of an NGO grifter has to intend to be mean and hurtful, boo hoo. It’s pathetic, it’s a First Amendment nightmare, and (as we’ve said before) it’s not going to work.

But even if it’s not going to work, it’s going to work. An unenforceable law that you can get the judge to throw out of court when they charge you with it is still a punishment delivered in the form of a process. It’s not a smart threat, it’s not a terribly plausible threat, but it’s a threat: Don’t you dare to report on people who have a corrupt patron-client relationship with California Democrats.

They do this kind of thing because, to put this as charitably as I can say it, they’re the scum of the earth: slack-jawed, appetite-driven, consumed by their soulless, mindless, morally and intellectually empty grift. California Democrats can’t do anything. If you gave them sliced bread and a toaster that you plugged in to give them a head start, it’s still an open question if they could figure out how to make a real piece of toast. They’re greedy, stupid, and worthless at best, and the Stop Nick Shirley Act was introduced by a legislator-thing that advertises its stupidity through the beady eyes on its slack-jawed face.

Remember this sentence: The less they can actually do, the more noise they make.

In January of this year, Gavin Newsom proudly announced that the state’s ludicrous high-speed rail project had entered the “track-laying phase,” and then he swaggered around about the whole fake thing on a long media tour, with boastful social media posts.

Eight months later, here’s an August 26 headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Years Late, Billions Over Budget: California’s High-Speed Rail Hasn’t Laid a Track.”

So: Loud, confident announcement to cover a shameful reality. That’s it. That’s how California is governed.

Why do they do this? Why does Newsom swagger and strut and preen and gloat and toss his greasy hair like a lion’s mane over a crushingly obvious lie?

He does it because he is not a good person, and California Democrats are demonstrably, consistently, reliably not good people. They’re vampires, but really dumb vampires.

Nithya Raman is a simply awful member of the Los Angeles City Council, a DSA ghoul running for mayor who wants to drag the city leftward. Look at this social media post she gave the world this week, and really drink it in:

So last year, somebody asked for a crosswalk. Because the response to that request was led by a bold team of crusaders who fiercely “problem-solve” and “push for solutions,” Nithya’s stable of socialist heavy hitters was able to get some yellow stripes painted on a street in somewhat less than a full calendar year, after which they all strutted around and congratulated each other for being brilliant and amazing.

But look at the street, the thing that local government officials are supposed to be taking care of as stewards. They had yellow stripes painted over deeply cracked and faded asphalt, doing no maintenance at all but then covering ruined things with painted symbols.

There is. Nothing serious. Nothing! That these people. Know how to do. There is nothing serious that they will ever do or can ever do. They suck blood, they seek power for the sake of power, and they congratulate themselves. Their lives have no other meaning or value, and never will.

This is why their instinct is to criminalize disagreement and criticism, which is exactly what they just tried to do. They did it poorly, because they do everything poorly, except for their two fundamental lifelong tasks of scheming for power and self-interest.

After Gavin Newsom and the other members of this grifter class comes the void. They are the abyss. But give them enough time and they’ll try to make it illegal to mention any of that.

Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.