No Significant Risk Level

This is a Carousel guest piece by Twitter anon sorcova de corb

Humble Beginnings

It’s 1986.

America is high on coke, crack, and Reaganism.

Fitness enthusiast Jane Fonda and second husband Thomas E. Hayden endeavor to hold the line against GOP encroachment. They’re helping Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley in a narrow race for California governorship against an insurgent Armenian, Republican incumbent George Deukmejian, by entreating more lefties to the polls. Hayden, long-time professional agitator and peak physiognomy example , settles on environmental and health concerns as potentially winning causes.

They muster attorneys to draft a ballot proposition and, in a masterstroke of “it’s literally in the name” marketing, dub it the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. Ms. Fonda hangs up her leggings to campaign. The Environmental Defense Fund , flush with Walton donations, provides ample funding.

Simple-minded literalists and granola-munching hordes show up en-masse on election day, passing Proposition 65 with close to a two to one margin.

Disappointingly for Reagan-resisters, and contrary to a majority of advance public polling, Deukmejian wins.

Mme Fonda returns to on-air frivolities, Mr. Hayden becomes legislator-for-life and the Environmental Defense Fund pivots to other concerns, eventually segueing into anti-nuclear propaganda and Obama ball-washing.

In the Golden State, Prop 65 becomes the law of the land.

A Deluge of Details and the Inevitable Devils Therein

Prop 65’s lead writer, David Roe, didn’t expect it to pass. Initially skeptical of the environmental gambit conceived by Fonda, Hayden et al, Roe feared that prospective governmental enforcement would be heavy-handed and capricious. Donning his best thinking cap, he sought to design an enforcement mechanism that eschews regulatory command in favor of a market-based approach. 

What if businesses were forced to fess up, lest they risk an avalanche of public prosecutor and civil suits? And if there was an obligation to publicize their failings, trespassings and sins, the use of carcinogenic or otherwise poisonous chemicals, wouldn’t businesses choose to… use less carcinogenic and poisonous chemicals? 

Of such musings and speculation was section 25249.6 of California’s Health Code born:

No person in the course of doing business shall knowingly and intentionally expose any individual to a chemical known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity without first giving clear and reasonable warning to such individual, except as provided (…)

Clown-world Fatigue and Its Eventual Discontents

We veered into the wonderful world of formaldehyde stats because the substance is genuinely dangerous, and a well-documented carcinogen. Exposure to substantial amounts leads to immediate effects–eye, nose and throat irritation, rashes, wheezing and in extreme cases, changes in lung capacity.

It’s also common in industrially manufactured objects. Paint, furniture, cleaning supplies and paper contain trace amounts which pose zero threat. But Prop 65 is designed, courtesy of the one one-thousandth of the no significant risk level provision, to forego distinctions or practical outcomes. Ikea armchair, to lounge on? Stuffed possum ass, to huff for hours? Both must be festooned with identical warnings.

Witness coffee, soap, and buildings in the bear-flag republic adorned with notices cautioning against entirely theoretical hazards. To a disinterested observer, perhaps one versed in Robert Conquest’s third law , it might appear as if the law obscures rather than highlights or prevents harm.

It took some time to crystalize, but this realization, much like trace amounts of formaldehyde, lingers inescapably in the air. In 2021, the California Chamber of Commerce won a landmark preliminary injunction barring new lawsuits from enforcing the requirement for acrylamide in food and beverages. After a few decades of omnipresent injunctions, people understand that the law is fake , all noise, no signal , and have learned to ignore it . Try recounting to an Angelino friend how, after reading the sign posted at a hotel entrance, you turned around and slept on somebody’s couch. Will your compadre commend your caution? Congratulate your health-awareness? What comes next might shock you!

If we were in the mood for excess charity, we could credit Prop 65 as an attempt to improve the well-being of the public by publicizing and punishing social defectors, businesses and companies externalizing costs through pollution.

Some health or environmental benefits materialized , but they seem incidental. The main effect has been to create a sprawling ecosystem of parasitic fauna skimming fractional economic output from productive citizens. It cemented California’s reign as the most litigious state, with estimates of more than half of settlement money being routed to attorneys . 

Because it’s disproportionately punishing to small businesses, and since it allocates spoils to lawyers and Sacramento mediocrities, the law is likely to linger. But those subjected to its vagaries oppose it, if not consciously or explicitly, in the practice of routine, pervasive and nearly universal indifference. 

After a couple of decades, Californians have been forcibly red-pilled on Prop 65 by way of its absurd ubiquity, another entry in the long ledger of indignities and injuries animating the great bear republic exodus .

Familiarity Breeds Contempt 

Prop 65 overexposure dragged Californians by the scruff of their well-tanned necks, forcing many to notice the sordid reality of extractionism and extortionism masquerading as public well-being.

This can happen with wokeism.

We find ourselves beset by a coalition of easily gamed idealists, frantic bio-Leninist shock-troops and psychopathic elites misdirecting away from or justifying serial social defections. Those of us in a secure enough position to be explicitly adversarial, to mock the rituals, trappings and pieties of the Enemy, should do so. We ought to use wealth, connections and immunity from digital mobbing to openly oppose the blob.

But for the many who lack such luxuries, I humbly suggest a tactic of embrace and amplify. Perform the social justice rites, stretching them to their breaking point, while retaining plausible deniability. Convert and radicalize the miriad hoi polloi by saturating every interminable monthly meeting, each awkward Zoom sync, each ass-covering email, with horseshit.

Insist on land acknowledgements that plumb Holocene depths. Assert your novel pronouns with gusto and manically inquire if others have changed theirs since the last time you talked. Extol the virtues of BIPOC representation, of fiery but mostly peaceful protests, of rolling blackouts and HR initiatives–the more condescending, the better.

Publicly and vocally lament the absence of Rastafari-fit helmets . Castigate the scientific method for its white culture roots while simultaneously admonishing everybody to TRUST SCIENCE. Enthusiastically celebrate and share trail-blazing marketing from Hershey and from Budweiser . 

Become an all-singing, all-dancing advertisement for how terminally dumb and annoying the Current Thing malediction is. 

I’m suggesting, wise and gentle reader, that you can be a hundred, a thousand, a million warning signs that caution against cancer and reproductive toxicity. That by tuning your performance all the way to 11, you might in small but perceptible ways push those around you toward not just a realization but the certainty that social justice kabuki is fake, stupid and, most importantly, low status. 

Friends, frogs, dissidents: I entrust you with the sacred charge of shoving GAE-flavored, rainbow-tinted pablum down every normie throat until they choke and spit it out, joining our ranks in revolt. If California’s maximally organic Thunberg respect00rs got to a place where they ignore and deride Prop 65’s dire admonitions, we can surely bring less soyjacked cohorts to the light.

Terms and Conditions Apply

Throat-clearing makes for bad writing, but it’d be irresponsible not to clarify that some domains—most notably, things that have to do with children—don’t lend themselves to such a high variance, high risk strategy. 

Irony and exaggeration are perilous tools, chainsaw-like in power and likelihood to be mishandled, and while Californians’ revealed preferences when it comes to Prop 65 warnings are manifest, it remains the law of the land.

I make no guarantees but merely invite you to strife, hoping that you bring clear eyes and a happy heart.

We will win.

@sorcova_de_corb

he/Yim, writing on occupied land of the Olmec peoples