One of the best punk banks in history called itself The Dead Kennedys. Offensive, right? That was the point: to puncture pieties, even liberal pieties. The band members were edgy leftists. But their scattershot attacks on anything and everything could sometimes hit the mark. Or even foretell the future.

California is colluding in the cover-up of Planned Parenthood’s lucrative trade in little lungs, livers, and eyes, collected in Styrofoam coolers.

We learned this week that the State of California is criminalizing journalism. It’s colluding in the cover-up of Planned Parenthood’s lucrative trade in baby body parts. Think: little lungs, livers, and eyes, collected in Styrofoam coolers and shipped to medical research labs. California wants to send David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt to prison for decades. Why? For exposing that ghoulish business.

Totalitarian California

That news has got me humming again the best Dead Kennedys song, “California Über Alles.” It seemed like harmless fun back in 1982, when we cranked it in our Gothic dorms.

Here are the lyrics:

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president …

Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!

[Chorus:]
California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face

Close your eyes, can’t happen here
Big Bro’ on white horse is near
The hippies won’t come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!

[Chorus]

Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It’s the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece

Come quietly to the camp
You’d look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don’t you worry, it’s only a shower
For your clothes here’s a pretty flower.

DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent’s egg’s already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
When you mess with President Brown

[Chorus]

That song doesn’t seem so funny now, does it?

Sending Journalists to Prison

Not with Gov. Jerry Brown’s California trying to send journalists to long terms in violent state prisons. Their crime? Covertly recording business people who seemed to be conspiring to break the law. You know, the way animal rights activists do at factory farms.

As Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America wrote:

Daleiden and Merritt did what investigative journalists should have done years ago and investigated the abortion industry. [California Attorney General] Becerra has it backward. Instead of pursuing bogus charges against the citizen journalists who exposed this racket, Becerra should pursue the criminal referrals sent by the Select Panel in the House of Representatives against Planned Parenthood in California.

If this were any other issue besides exposing the corrupt abortion industry, Daleiden and Merritt would have won the Pulitzer Prize . …

The Cult of the Self and Abortion Rites

Governor Jerry Brown is a proud product of liberal Jesuit education. He’s a former seminarian in fact. But he has found a new creed to preach. He can even enforce it on heretics. Hence the ludicrous, piled-up charges against honest journalists who exposed inconvenient truths and stupid facts.

Goodness consists in piling up the greatest number of pleasurable moments for the greatest number of voters.

No less than Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi has defended abortion in clear, religious terms. Back in 2013, she condemned a bill restricting abortions of “pain capable” unborn children. Pelosi said: “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this. … This shouldn’t have anything to do with politics.”

What’s sacred to Brown and Pelosi? To the government of our nation’s largest state? The new cult’s golden calf is the pleasure-seeking self.

Its moral calculus is simple: Goodness consists in piling up the greatest number of pleasurable moments for the greatest number of voters. (For more on that, see my sober, judicious piece, “Is Nancy Pelosi a Satanist?”)

Time to Hunt Down Heretics

Some religions are tolerant, others less so. Part of what makes the difference is whether a creed is entangled with worldly power. If so, its followers might see any heretics as traitors. At one point, the enfeebled and crumbling Roman empire decided that emperor-worship was crucial social glue. So it started hunting Christians.

The new cult sweeping American elites — as Andrew Sullivan has warned us — is based on nothing but power-politics. So its devotees are ferocious heresy hunters. They shout down speakers. They assault professors on college campuses. They want to send journalists to prison.

And yet this new faith rests on nothing. Just the grasping, selfish, hedonistic little self. A god who will wink out within 70 years or so like a match dropped in a toilet. In service of that, it’s willing to traffic in the butchered bodies of children.

Let’s remember the roots of the racketeers whom California is perverting its legal system to cover for: Planned Parenthood, founded by Margaret Sanger to make the world safe for sexual hedonism. And also to weed out “undesirable” or “inferior” strains from our nation’s “germ plasm.”

It’s fitting that The Dead Kennedys’ second best song is entitled “Kill the Poor.”