Throughout Kate Brown's tenure as Governor of Oregon, she has often demonstrated her need to completely control everything around her, whether it is information or people. A perfect example of this has to do with the Public Records Advocate position. This position was created by the Oregon Legislature - at Kate's urging - in the wake of the resignation of John Kitzhaber, due to his continued stonewalling of media and others when public records were requested. The purpose of the role was to improve public records access and mediate disputes between the public and state and local government agencies over which records should be released or kept confidential.

The first person appointed to the role in January of 2018 was Ginger McCall. McCall had spent a decade working on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) issues for the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the federal Department of Labor, so she brought lots of relevant experience to the position. However, after only 18 months, McCall submitted her resignation to the Governor, and detailed her reason for leaving in a letter.

I do not think that the staff of the Governor's Office and I can reconcile our visions regarding the role of the Public Records Advocate. When I accepted this job, it was with the understanding that the Office of the Public Records Advocate was to operate with a high degree of independence and had a mandate to serve the public interest. That is an understanding that I believe the public, the Legislature, and the Public Records Advisory Council share.

Meetings with the Governor's General Counsel and staff have made it clear, however, that the Governor's staff do not share that view. I have received meaningful pressure from the Governor's General Counsel to represent the Governor's Office's interests on the Public Records Advisory Council, even when those interests conflict with the will of the Council and the mandate of the Office of the Public Records Advocate. I have not only been pressured in this direction but I have been told that I should represent these interests while not telling anyone that I am doing so. I believe these actions constituted an abuse of authority on the part of the General Counsel, and are counter to the transparency and accountability mission that I was hired to advance.

There were also issues of cronysim with Misha Isaak, when Brown initally appointed him to a position on the Oregon Court of Appeals, in spite of the fact that he had absolutely zero experience as a judge. After much backlash, Isaac quickly turned down the appointment.

After that, Brown hired a second Advocate, Becky Chiao, who promptly resigned after only two months over the same issue - a lack of independence. The third Advocate, Todd Albert, was promoted from within the Advocate's officer on November 1st, 2020. After one month, he is still there, so it remains to be seen how long he lasts.

As you can see, Kate is all about control. In the case of Ginger McCall, her interaction was with the Governor's staff, but it is completely reasonable to assume that Brown's staff does what she tells them, and Isaac's actions were not, as Brown indicated in her response, a surprise to her; it is laughable to think otherwise.

Ever since last March, Kate has continued to attempt to satiate her thirst for complete control, first with the inital lockdown to "flatten the curve", and then her repeated extensions of her "emergency powers", which she feels gives her the leeway to order everyone to wear a mask, and arbitrarily shut down schools and bueinesses, leaving incredible wreckage in her wake. It is obvious that to her - as with any leftist/socialist/communist leader. just sitting back and rolling with the situation in a way that does the least amount of damage possible is simply not an option. She seems to feel that if she is not controlling everyone and their every movement they make at every moment, she is not doing her job.

This week, I came across a blog post that perfectly explains Kate and her need for control. It is a post by John Stonestreet and Maria Bare of Breakpoint, an organization founded by Chuck Colson in the 1990s. It is titled We Can’t Control COVID (Or Much of Anything Else), and addresses where the need for this control comes from - practical atheism.

In early March, the University of California San Francisco held a panel discussion of infectious disease specialists on a new virus that had, at that point, killed 41 Americans. These experts not only estimated that 60 to 70 percent of America’s population would eventually contract the virus, but that our best attempts to contain it, either through lockdowns or contact tracing, would be, in their words, “basically futile.”

Today, nine months later, the predictions of this particular panel of experts have turned out like most other COVID-19 predictions: right on some things, wrong on others. It’s not clear just how effective all of the quarantining, lock-downing, social distancing, and masking has been in reducing the number of infections, or why, despite more data, our assumptions about COVID-19 remain largely unchanged. And, of course, we’ve yet to reckon with the economic, educational, and mental health consequences of the policy paths we’ve chosen.

To say the wreckage of draconian lockdowns is vast is an understatement, whether you look at economics, mental health, or our kids and their education.

What is clear, more clear than ever in fact, are the base set of assumptions we now operate from as Westerners and Americans. Catastrophes like COVID always reveal worldview. To borrow a phrase philosopher Craig Gay uses in his book The Way of the Modern World, we are “practical atheists.” A subtle, operational-level form of secularism, practical atheism is not necessarily to believe that God does not exist. Rather, it’s to live as if God does not exist.

Professor Gay identifies two features of a culture operating from a deeply engrained practical atheism. First, there is an illusion of control. If there is no Higher Power determining the course of human events or judging the morality of our actions, the world is a place for us to make and remake according to our wishes. Grand leaps in science, medicine, and technology only deepen the faith we put in ourselves.

At the heart of our illusions of control is the assumption that world is totally understandable. We actually believe, Professor Gay says, not only that we can “comprehend reality in its totality,” but that "we are capable of rendering it stable and predictable.” In other words, we will ultimately make the world “work for us.”

That’s a really attractive proposition, of course. However, what happens when we face something beyond our understanding, something that is an existential threat to the “convenient fiction” of our control? Like a global pandemic? The answer can be seen in how so many U.S. governors approached last week’s Thanksgiving holiday: travel restrictions and curfews, bans on indoor gatherings, shaming even the idea of family gatherings for everyone, not just those at higher risk. The governor of my home state of Colorado said that gathering with family for Thanksgiving was like “putting a loaded pistol to Grandma’s head.”

A perfect example of this same controlling thinking is Kate and the inane video she put out telling you to uninvite everyone from Thanksgiving. Before that, she even when so far as to mimic the Soviet union and East Germany by encouraging people to call the police on COVID-19 "violators" (aka those that dared to get together with more than six people and/or not wear masks).

How quickly we went from the “we acknowledge we can’t control this” of the UCSF panel of experts to the “we absolutely can and will control this” of elected officials. The shift from “most of us are going to get sick but let’s care for and protect the vulnerable” to “everyone must avoid getting sick at all costs” is a significant one. Now, if anyone contracts COVID, it’s not because it’s a novel virus we don’t understand, but because someone failed. Practical atheists want control. When control is lost, someone is to blame.

You can see this in the constant mask-shaming by Governor Brown and her acolytes on social media; if you don't wear a worthless mask, it means that you don't care about anyone else, and want to "see Grandma die" (see quote the Colorado governor above). The uselessness of masks is an argument for another post (why are Oregon's cases still climbing long after the mask mandate?, but suffice it to say, there is alway someone - not something - to blame for the increase in cases, regardless of things like flu - another coronavirus - season, winter, etc.

This brings up another characteristic of “practical atheism” that Professor Gay rightly identifies: anxiety. Anxiety is the inevitable reaction when we realize just how out-of-our-control this fallen world is, and how fragile our shoulders – which now bear the weight of the world without God – really are.

And I truly believe that as endemic as the need for control is with Kate Brown, it is only exacerbated by the anxiety she feels about being in way over her head, not with just COVID19, but as a governor.

As time goes on, and more and more people start to rebel against her communist authoritarianism, maybe she will start to relent. However, I am very afraid that it will take quite a large amount of pushback for her to loosen her white-knuckled grip on our lives.