Democrats claim that the MAGA movement constitutes a “threat to democracy.” Once you cut through their incessant rhetoric on race and gender, the threat the Democrats most fear is that an elected chief executive may actually try to control the executive branch. And when candidate Trump aligns himself with capable businessmen, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, government bureaucrats aren’t wrong to be afraid for their jobs along with the repressive policies they’ve imposed.

Voters who still haven’t made up their minds which threat to take seriously—“protecting democracy” vs. “draining the swamp”—should ponder life in California, where Democrats, run by bureaucrats and billionaires, wield absolute power. Decriminalized crime. Record homelessness. Punitive, impossible cost of living. The highest taxes. Failing schools. Fleeing businesses. And a state bureaucracy that is openly hostile towards unsubsidized home builders, oil and gas producers, farmers, loggers, ranchers, manufacturers, and any other productive, job-creating citizens.

If you want to pick one bureaucracy in California that epitomizes the ignorance, fanaticism, arrogance, and corruption that plagues that state, look no further than the California Coastal Commission. Ran by an unelected 12-member board, this state agency has the power to stop virtually any activity they wish if it is within five miles of the Pacific Coast or in the ocean within three miles of land. For nearly a half century, along an 840-mile coastline stretching from Oregon to Mexico, the Coastal Commission has been a capricious tyrant.

One of the most consequential examples of the Coastal Commission’s recent abuse of power was their unanimous rejection of a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach in Southern California. This facility would have produced 55,000 acre-feet per year of fresh water from the ocean and had already painstakingly secured permits and approvals from a dizzying array of federal, state, regional, and local agencies. The company attempting to build the plant, Poseidon Water, spent over 20 years and more than $100 million fighting off environmentalist lawsuits and paying for innumerable engineering studies and permit applications. The plant would have been an exemplary model of how to safely desalinate ocean water with minimal environmental impact. But in May 2022, in a 12-0 decision, the California Coastal Commission killed the project.

It is hard to overemphasize the level of abuse and poor judgment this decision represents. Nowhere in the Coastal Commission’s ruling did they demonstrate that this alleged environmental impact would cause irreparable or even significant harm, much less take into account the overall cost versus benefit. Even if a few hundred acres of marine habitat were slightly degraded, such a minor and localized impact would have represented a minute fraction of the coastal habitat under their jurisdiction, in exchange for a permanent solution to the chronic water scarcity threatening hundreds of thousands of people living in nearby coastal cities.

To truly appreciate the blind zealotry of the California Coastal Commission, however, you have to consider their reaction to the proposal to install floating offshore wind turbines along California’s central and northern coastlines. This entire project oozes corruption. It is being propelled through a state legislature that is willing to destroy the planet in order to save it from climate change. At an estimated cost somewhere north of $300 billion, it is being sold to California’s Democratic politicians by heavily subsidized—and very generous—international offshore wind developers who have been losing projects in the North Sea and most states on the East Coast by state and national governments that are horrified by the results. With costs rising along with awareness of the ecological devastation these offshore leviathans are wreaking, about the only jurisdiction left in the world that is unequivocally welcoming is California.

Where is the Coastal Commission?

You would think this all-powerful claque of environmentalist fanatics, who prevent private citizens from dropping a few rocks in front of their oceanfront homes to protect them from storm surges, would stop this looming catastrophe. But no, they’re not doing anything to stop offshore wind, apparently because its supposed climate benefits outweigh the price. And the price is steep. An abruptly industrialized coast on a scale unimaginable under any other scenario. A collection of literally thousands of floating wind platforms, each one up to 1,000 feet in height, connected via high-voltage underwater cables to onshore transformers, battery farms, and transmission lines. The impact on marine life, including whales? Who cares? The scenic destruction? The ripped-up coastline? The rampant development for construction and operations? Who cares?

This contrast epitomizes the California Coastal Commission. They deny a desalination project that might cause a slight ecological disruption to around 400 acres of ocean just off the coast, while at the same time, offshore wind developers are leasing hundreds of square miles of area offshore to float thousands of gigantic wind turbines. Offshore wind, fully built out to the planned 25 gigawatts of intermittent generating capacity, will develop, and in many cases completely destroy, vast areas both on and offshore, but the Coastal Commission has done nothing to stop it.

How quaint. Thousands of wind turbines, each one roughly three times the height of the Statue of Liberty from the waterline to the tip of the torch, with commensurate facilities onshore to construct them, maintain them, and process the electricity they generate. But apparently, all this development is not, as explained in the Coastal Commission’s charter, a significant “change in the intensity or density of land use.” Somehow we get inaction over offshore wind from an agency that won’t allow a landowner to graze a few cows on their land or a homeowner to renovate a small dwelling on their coastal property.

So far, one might conclude the Coastal Commission’s selective application of tyrannical powers has a perverse consistency. That is, quash everything that so much as adjusts a fallen twig on the ground, unless it’s to save the climate, in which case they’ll permit a mess sufficient to exterminate entire whale populations and industrialize hundreds of square miles of coastal areas. But not so fast. Now the Coastal Commission is sticking its nose into satellite communications.

Since the late 1950s on a windswept promontory in Central California, Vandenberg Air Force Base has been launching missiles and rockets over the Pacific. In recent years, they have accommodated launches using rockets manufactured by SpaceX. But with many of these launch complexes located within five miles of the coast, Vandenberg is arguably within territory controlled by the California Coastal Commission.

So it is, that in a hearing on October 10th, the California Coastal Commission (CCC) rejected the U.S. Space Force’s request to increase the annual number of SpaceX’s Falcon launches from 36 to 50. Commissioner Aguirre claimed the launches would “benefit a private company.” Commissioner Bochco was concerned that “Space Force has failed to establish that SpaceX is part of the federal government; part of our federal defense.”

There’s not much in those remarks that concern the coastal environment, but the most telling indication of political bias, rather than concern for the coastal environment, came from Commissioner Gretchen Newsom (no apparent relation), who said: “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet.”

How is that germane to the Coastal Commission’s mission to protect the California coastline? SpaceX has sued the Coastal Commission, alleging political bias informed their decision to limit the number of launches. This isn’t the first time the Coastal Commission has been sued, but at least in the past, these lawsuits were to defend property rights. The Coastal Commission has hit a new low.

The California Coastal Commission isn’t the only pack of unelected bureaucrats with amazing power and obvious political bias to tie development and innovation in California up in knots. They’re just the latest gang whose depredations have risen above all the other noise. This bureaucratic culture of intimidation, extortion, and political retaliation, mixed with gross incompetence, is life in California. We may hope it doesn’t become life in America.