So back to the point. What we are seeing is massive civil disobedience being egged on by Obama, Hilary, Soros and the media. There are lots of fake news stories pushed out that the press does not bother to check as long as they are anti-Trump. The courts are rubber stamping this with the immigration decision, which just encourages more attacks on civility and the law the left decides it does not like, more shouting down Congressmen who just want to hold a town hall to hear from the people who just elected them. Democracy and the rule of law is under attack, and is being replaced by what the universities have been teaching- if someone does not conform to your views, just riot and shout them down. Democracy needs free speech and civil discourse, and courts that rule by law not politics.

For all of us in CRE, this all matters a lot. Not just as Americans, but as developers and owner operators. This belief that mobs have a right to demand they have their way, will intrude into entitlement hearings, levying of fees on developers to meet some left wing agenda, denying the right to develop at all on some parcels because some snail or rat lives there, or any other number of things that will be costly and potentially stop your project because some small group yelled louder or claimed race or some other perceived slight to be reason to stop your project. Just look how costly it is in California to develop anything. How much obstruction and excess cost agencies like the water boards create. I am living right now on a project.

While you may think none of the political screaming matters to you, or none of what just happened in the ninth circuit matters, you are wrong. It has already seeped over to making CRE far more costly and difficult than it should be.

The views expressed are the author's own.

For those of you old enough to recall the 1968 Democratic convention and the Free Speech movements and Kent State, we seem to be returning to those bad days when students seemed to think they had some right to determine national policies and not the government. The same people who were student rioters then are now apparently grown up and running the Democratic party. They seem to think that losing the elections from top to the bottom of the ticket, all the way down to local elections, should not stop them from demanding to get what was soundly denied them at the ballot box. We have the same issues with west coast judges who seem to think they have more right than the president to set national security policies. There is absolutely no question that the district judge, after only a 15 minute hearing where the justice department had no time to put forward a prepared lawyer, thought he knew better what national security and anti terror policy should be. The ninth circuit, to nobody's surprise, made a left wing political decision and never even considered the law passed properly by Congress granting the president the authority to do what he did. The implications of these actions, and now the protests, the shouting down of GOP senators and Congressmen at their town halls, the pressure on retailers to drop products, and the pressure by concert promoters to drop singers who appeared at the inauguration, is all part of a very dangerous trend we need to stop.

Universities have conceded authority to the mobs of any minority that thinks it has been or may be caused to feel bad. All they need to do is claim some speaker may be a micro aggression, or may not conform to their norms, and the speaker is banned. Classes are now given that cover useless subjects about things supposedly to make white people feel bad about being successful or rich. Faculty is driven out of they stand up for free speech, of which there is none on most campuses today. Just look at the professors who were driven from Yale over Halloween costumes. Students today are told they have a right to demand everyone adhere to their thinking and anyone who does not is a racist, homophobe, anti gay or whatever bad person who needs to be barred from speaking or even existing. Just look at what happened at Berkeley and the cops did absolutely nothing. What lesson did they learn from that- trash and burn and no consequences so do it again.

Onward brown shirts. If you do not see the similarity to the Nazi brown shirts who attacked anyone who stood in their way, trashed Jewish shops on Kristallnacht, and forced adherence to their ideology, then you need to wake up. There is no difference.

Now we have federal judges who think they have a right to rule by ideology, and ignore the written law, to impose their political views on the rest of the country. If the mobs, and screamers, and left wing judges prevail, we are all in deep trouble. The rule of law, freedom of speech and in time, the right to be a free thinking American will be diminished. You can object to Trump, disagree or be upset that he won, but he won fairly and legally, and with a mandate. Just be aware he won more voting districts in California than Hilary, but there were more Democrats by population in LA and San Francisco so the vote count went to her. The point being the majority of the country went for Trump, not because he is a great leader, nor because he is a good guy, but because they rejected the so called progressive agenda we have lived under for eight years. Now the left and the press can't deal with their loss and they just do not understand what the silent majority thinks or wants.

So back to the point. What we are seeing is massive civil disobedience being egged on by Obama, Hilary, Soros and the media. There are lots of fake news stories pushed out that the press does not bother to check as long as they are anti-Trump. The courts are rubber stamping this with the immigration decision, which just encourages more attacks on civility and the law the left decides it does not like, more shouting down Congressmen who just want to hold a town hall to hear from the people who just elected them. Democracy and the rule of law is under attack, and is being replaced by what the universities have been teaching- if someone does not conform to your views, just riot and shout them down. Democracy needs free speech and civil discourse, and courts that rule by law not politics.

For all of us in CRE, this all matters a lot. Not just as Americans, but as developers and owner operators. This belief that mobs have a right to demand they have their way, will intrude into entitlement hearings, levying of fees on developers to meet some left wing agenda, denying the right to develop at all on some parcels because some snail or rat lives there, or any other number of things that will be costly and potentially stop your project because some small group yelled louder or claimed race or some other perceived slight to be reason to stop your project. Just look how costly it is in California to develop anything. How much obstruction and excess cost agencies like the water boards create. I am living right now on a project.

While you may think none of the political screaming matters to you, or none of what just happened in the ninth circuit matters, you are wrong. It has already seeped over to making CRE far more costly and difficult than it should be.

The views expressed are the author's own.