“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown” is the signature line that follows a senseless killing in the 1974 film “Chinatown,” starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It’s not so much about the Chinese, though a few of the film’s lines don’t stand the test of time. Instead, it’s about corruption. Chaos. Things don’t make sense because someone with an agenda doesn’t want them to make sense. Sound familiar?
There’s been a lot of chaos lately, starting with the Biden administration’s rushed exit from Afghanistan. No one has explained why it was so rushed—part of someone else’s agenda. Then there’s the border. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, agents have had more than eight million “encounters” with illegal aliens—sorry, “undocumented migrants”—since the start of the Biden administration. This includes 20,000 Chinese nationals since Oct. 1. Many find their way to “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to enforce federal immigration laws. In 2019 candidate Biden told an ABC News forum that migrants should “immediately surge to the border.” That was a willful act of chaos. Why? Forget it, Jake.
Two of the illegal immigrants who attacked police officers in Times Square in January were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Four others were arrested and released without bail by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg; one was rearrested for robbery. Another few weeks and the attackers might have received a $10,000 debit card from the mayor. Crazy. That’s a chaos-agenda hat trick: Sneak across the border, head to a sanctuary city, then get released by a left-wing district attorney after committing a crime. This goes beyond leniency and bleeding hearts.
Crime is rampant. Pamela Price won the election for district attorney of Alameda County, Calif., on an anti-incarceration platform and with George Soros’s backing. Crime got so bad in Oakland that Gov. Gavin Newsom sent in 120 state troopers. In-N-Out Burger, which has never closed a location, will shutter one near the Oakland Airport in March because of crime. I drove by a gas station down the block and heard a recorded voice over loudspeakers warning motorists not to leave their cars unattended because of theft. Why not arrest and prosecute criminals instead?
Great American cities like San Francisco are in doom loops. KFC is closing locations in Chicago. Chaos often leads to less freedom—ushering in a more authoritarian regime to clean up the mess and make the trains run on time. What I fear is a “burn the Reichstag” moment of change toward authoritarian rule. Is that the agenda? Both sides have tried to spark such a moment: on May 29, 2020, outside the White House and on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol.
For the 40th anniversary of Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad, which introduced the Macintosh personal computer, Steve Hayden, who worked for the ad firm Chiat/Day, told the New York Times, “We’re realizing Goebbels’s idea, getting people so confused they have no idea what to believe other than an authority figure.”