By Justin Chartrey
***Correction: The coordinated and well funded organization taking aim at defeating the 2024 initiatives was No On 2117, a collection of high spending donors like Steve Balmer and Bill Gates. The initiatives themselves were sponsored by Lets Go Washington, organized by Brian Heywood.***
The hallmarks of our national identity and the ideals to which our fathers passed on to future generations can be well summed up in America’s primary founding documents: that God alone had endowed men with the rights which they held to be self-evident: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Furthermore, they declared the role of all governments to be the protector of those inalienable rights.
Those statements were the impetus for principles that lay the onus of responsibility, integrity, and diligence at the feet of every citizen to live and respect life, to use freedom for the good of his fellow man and not as license for evil, and to pursue the blessings of his Creator for the betterment of his family and neighbor.
Over the span of its history, however, that nation is undergoing a steady pattern of erosion within the halls of government so that, though Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is still a rallying cry amongst Americans, those words often ring hollow amidst the rising tyranny and suppression of self government evident in every state and at all levels of political power.
Few places is that more evident than Washington state, a bastion not of freedom and life, but of tyranny, bloodshed, and oppressive government under the guise of pursuing the temporary happiness of pleasure. In the sleepy northwest corner of our continental US, the evergreen state has quietly, but aggressively, stamped out nearly all measures of freedom established in the founding documents of the nation at large, which were given not by man, but by God.
This is clearly on display when one looks at the laws that have been passed both in the Washington state legislature and on the ballot in the forms of initiatives. Life has been removed as a core principle, with abortion on demand as an enshrined right. Outgoing governor Jay Inslee went so far as to declare this state a “sanctuary state” for abortion – a mutual gathering place for all comers seeking to destroy life in the womb. Likewise, the means of self-governance to protect that life – the right to bear arms – has been all but stripped bare with onerous background checks, psych evaluations, and heavy restrictions on what can legally be possessed as a firearm.
Liberty has also been cast aside in favor of carbon credits and tyrannical control over what kind of fuel is allowed to warm your oven in your own home. Pursuit of happiness has been curtailed by crippling property taxes and miles of red tape for any would-be entrepreneur. So much so that businesses are fleeing the state en masse.
Ironically, the only example of “self government” that can be pointed to in the last decade or more is when Antifa thugs and radical social activists declared several blocks of downtown Seattle an Autonomous Zone and were allowed to do so for weeks without government, police, or military intervention during months of iron-fisted lockdowns in 2020.
That somewhat extensive backdrop sets the stage now to help describe what took place on November 5th in Washington state – the national masterclass of how to erode personal liberty and willingly subject oneself to tyranny, all in one fell swoop.
A State of Distress
No state has been so aggressive in its “climate agenda” as Washington over the last five years – with perhaps California as the only contender for that throne. Between passing a ban on producing gas-powered vehicles in the state in 2030, and the passage of a bill into law requiring all customers with Puget Sound Electric to convert from gas to electric by that same time frame – as well as the issuing of carbon tax and carbon credits, which includes the most onerous gas tax in the nation – the state government has solidified its place as authoritarian nanny over Washingtonians.
This trend, as well as others concerning mandatory taxation for long term health benefits and a newly-minted capital gains tax, have been noticed by some of the state’s populace, and for the first time in recent memory, a small organized group determined to do something about it, has put forth four initiatives that targeted those four issues:
In what should have been a stirring wakeup call for people long-lulled to sleep, the outcome of the recent election only solidified the indictment that while the state government has wickedly betrayed its citizens, those same citizens will not hold them to account. Out of the four initiatives included on the 2024 ballot – all of which required a “Yes” vote to repeal the draconian policies targeted above – only one managed to pass via the state electorate:
What would cause a group of citizens to willfully abandon their own liberties like this? In such a small case study as the 2024 election cycle, with reasonably low stakes, the results should have been resoundingly positive to reject onerous and unnecessary laws. Who would willingly subject themselves to more taxation and less freedom to make choices related to personal and family decisions? Why would anyone simply accept these things as the status quo?
Money and Messaging
It became clear in the aftermath of November 5 that the outcomes of these four initiatives boiled down to campaigning, not policy.
After the secretary of state announced the four measures that would be on the ballot in 2024, a well-funded and coordinated organization, Let’s Go Washington, took aim at defeating the quartet of initiatives with a greatly misleading series of campaign ads that dominated Washington television and Internet spaces for the months leading up to election day.
That organization pumped $10 million into attacking the initiatives, especially the one tackling the Climate Commitment Act, as “a bad deal for Washington” – a tagline that echoed through millions of homes. Contributing their own millions to the effort were former Microsoft bosses Bill Gates and Steve Balmer. The attacks were always obscure and failed to deal with the issue on the ballot, namely reversing the carbon tax and removing the need for entities to purchase carbon credits that would fill the coffers of the state budget even more.
Combine that with a little known fact that it was the Washington state attorney general’s office that wrote and approved the voter’s guide for the three failed initiative descriptions and impact statements. While the organizations or citizen groups who apply to add the initiatives to the ballot normally are allowed to write these, state senator Leonard Christian recently addressing this topic at a Spokane Valley town hall meeting advised:
“If it’s an initiative to the legislature, then the attorney general gets to write the impact statement… Well what they advertised on TV (is that) it’s so confusing, you might as well just vote no. They changed the law (regarding who writes the impact statement) so that they could write it confusingly!”
The tactic was incredibly effective, intentionally misleading those who wanted to repeal acts of the state legislature with a “Yes” vote, which is counterintuitive to practically all tax-related ballot initiatives.
The affirmative-supporting groups defending the initiatives meanwhile had little to no recourse; a much smaller donor base and the loss of agency to write their own impact statements. The results, as Christian put it, were that the initiatives “were blown out of the water.”
Final Analysis
The tragic reality and lingering regret that follow the 2024 election is that these initiatives showed that, at least in part, the population of Washington state is done being pilfered by a state Congress that sees these allowances a part of their established order. They represented small beginnings. Though not even touching the atrocities of state-sponsored abortion to the latest stages of pregnancy, or the racist practices of affirmative action fully enshrined in state law, they are the kind of trickle that can presage an avalanche.
These failures, then, ring as an indictment of the citizenry of Washington state, not because they acted against their own self interest, but because their desire to be citizens is so low that most would allow themselves to be swayed by clever messaging strategies than by determining the best course for their families. But they also tell our people where things stand and the work that must be undertaken to reclaim their heritage. It is not a lost cause or unreachable, but requires a far more concerted and resilient effort to reject the cankerous rhetoric of the powers that be, and hold true instead to a vision of self government as freemen, sons and daughters of God.
