LIBERALS LOST THREE MAJOR FIGHTS IN TWO DAYS, BUT WE'RE STILL ALL-POWERFUL

Today of all days, it's bizarre reading this:

The idea that politicians in New York are focused on going after coal-fired pizza is insane.

The Left is obsessed with controlling your behavior. It’s time to restore sanity. pic.twitter.com/y8pvaXY2GF

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 30, 2023

In case you don't know the backstory, New York City is asking pizza shops that use wood- or coal-fired ovens to install filtration systems in order to reduce their emissions. Fewer than a hundred pizzerias are affected by this edict, because most of the city's pizza ovens aren't fueled by wood or coal. (The city has well over a thousand pizza places.) The owner of one acclaimed restaurant has already complied and doesn't think the new policy is an outrage:

... the owner of one Brooklyn joint [says] he’s already tossed $20,000 on an air filter system in anticipation of the new mandate.

“Oh yeah, it’s a big expense!” said Paul Giannone, the owner of Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint. “It’s not just the expense of having it installed, it’s the maintenance. I got to pay somebody to do it, to go up there every couple of weeks and hose it down and you know do the maintenance.”

Giannone added that while the air filter is “expensive and it’s a huge hassle,” it also has some upsides.

“My neighbors are much happier. I had a guy coming in for years complaining that the smoke was, you know, going right into his apartment and I haven’t seen him since I got the scrubber installed.”

... Giannone ... said that despite assertions to the contrary, the air scrubbers will not affect the quality of the taste or texture of the pies.

“If someone is trying to say that putting the scrubber in changes the flavor of the pizza they’re just trying to save themselves $20,000. No, it doesn’t affect what’s going on inside the oven,” he said.

“No, it hasn’t changed the taste. It hasn’t changed the pizza. It hasn’t changed our product at all.”

You can debate whether this is a good idea or just a pointless crackdown on a relatively insignificant source of carbon emissions. But the goal isn't to "control behavior" in a totalitarian way. The city hopes the pizzerias will install better filtration and then go on serving pies. And yet the message from DeSantis and others is that liberalism is an all-powerful totalitarian system of control, comparable to the worst dictatorships in human history. As DeSantis told Fox's Jesse Watters this week (over coal-fired pizza in New York):

“You have an itch on the left, they want to control behavior. We saw the same thing with COVID. A lot of that wasn’t about your health, it’s that they wanted to control your behavior. They just don’t want people to be happy and make their own decisions.”

Get a right-winger going on this subject and you'll be told that an all-powerful axis of evil -- American liberals, George Soros, the World Economic Forum, the Justice Department, the CIA, Bill Gates, and China -- not only control pizza ovens in the five boroughs but also deliberately created a global pandemic in order to ensure pharmaceutical company profits and massively reduce the population of the earth, all out of compulsive desire for control. The desire for absolute ontrol is why liberals are investigating Donald Trump and why we increaed funding for the IRS. It's why we support trans rights and why we favor efforts to reckon with America's racial history. This might not be in the text of DeSantis's tweet, but it's definitely the subtext.

DeSantis is denouncing our alleged totalitarian desire for absolute power at a moment when it looks as if we have hardly any power at all. We've had three losses at the Supreme Court in two days -- today the Court ruled that web designers can refuse to work for same-sex couples and that President Biden can't follow through with his student loan forgiveness program; this comes one day after the Court struck down college affirmative action programs (in a ruling that could very well lead to the end of employer diversity programs). Right-wingers have near-absolute control over what is now the most powerful branch of government. Yet right-wingers believe that we're all-powerful. Any loss we suffer is a surprise victory by the overmatched, plucky-underdog right. And no matter how many times the other side wins, we'll continue to be perceived as a totalitarian juggernaut.