There’s a certain kind of political essay that works less like an argument and more like a temperature reading. Mark C. Ross’s piece for American Thinker, published September 16, 2026, under the headline “Getting used to tyranny,” is one of those. His opening image sets the tone: he feels, he writes, like a frog being slowly boiled, never quite provoked enough by the rising heat to jump out of the pot.
What follows is a catalog of California regulations that Ross treats as evidence the water is already simmering — and a broader claim about why voters let it happen.
The water rules
Ross leads with a new law he says forbids watering “decorative” grasses regardless of drought conditions. He doesn’t stop at the grass. He notes that California has already capped household daily water consumption at 55 gallons per resident for indoor use, with landscape irrigation outside that figure. The enforcement problem, as he describes it, is baked in: no one knows how many people live at a given address, let alone how much water goes to dishes versus the garden, so the state pushed the burden onto local water districts — which, in his telling, have mostly looked the other way.
His frustration isn’t really about gallons. It’s about the premise. “My sense of self-worth,” he writes, resents being told what to do with his water. And he argues the restrictions paper over the obvious alternative: building more reservoir capacity and coastal desalination plants alongside nuclear power facilities, pointing to the example near Carlsbad as proof the model already exists.
Why, he asks, are Californians governed by “such stupid jerks”? His answer is blunt and self-implicating: because we allow it.
The lawnmower ban and its workaround
From water, Ross moves to garden equipment. California has outlawed the sale of new gas-powered lawnmowers, blowers, and hedge trimmers, he writes — while leaving existing ownership and use legal. The result, as he frames it, is a predictable arbitrage: equipment dealers in western Nevada are, in his words, cleaning up. He also notes that some municipalities have banned leaf blowers over noise while still permitting motorcycles, a contrast he clearly considers less a policy judgment than a tell.
Then there are the plastic bags. California recently banned “non-compostable” plastic bags, the thin produce bags shoppers once used for green beans and mushrooms, per Ross. The compliant replacements, he writes, are so flimsy that surviving the trip home is a real question. His practical remedy is wry: rolls of real food storage bags remain available on Amazon for practically nothing.
The candidate who said the quiet part
The essay’s sharpest anecdote isn’t about water or lawn tools. Ross recalls meeting a candidate for his county’s superintendent of schools and using the encounter to pitch the abolition of government-run schools in favor of voucher-subsidized schools competing for parents’ choices.
Her response, as he describes it, was dogmatic: most parents aren’t competent to choose a school for their children. Ross says he let it slide, while thinking that nameless bureaucrats have far less at stake than “mostly doting mothers and fathers.” The kicker, for him, is that she won the election anyway.
That exchange anchors his larger thesis about motive. People enter politics, he contends, not to faithfully serve their neighbors but to lord over them, convinced they know better how others should live. The superintendent race is his proof of concept.
The soft tyranny of the like-minded
Ross saves his most personal material for last: the diffuse, lower-level pressure he associates with the language of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion. His claim is that this rhetoric extends tolerance only to those who already agree, and celebrates a diversity that is, in his words, entirely imaginary.
His evidence is anecdotal and he presents it that way. Walking his Bay Area neighborhood in a MAGA ball cap, he says he gets waved at, fist-bumped, and outright cheered — despite never having seen a Trump or MAGA lawn sign or bumper sticker in the area. Public display, he concludes, is suppressed by intimidation, but private opinion isn’t necessarily. Slashed tires and broken windows happen anonymously.
That gap between public silence and private sentiment, he suggests, may help explain why Democrats often appear to underperform their polling once votes are counted. His read: people are accustomed to keeping their opinions to themselves around strangers.
What the piece is really arguing
Ross isn’t making a legal case or citing fresh data. He’s writing as a resident compiling grievances — some directly experienced, some observed, some secondhand — and using them to make one cumulative point. Each individual rule is small enough to absorb. Together, he argues, they amount to a governing class that treats ordinary people as incapable of running their own households, gardens, schools, and speech.
Whether that adds up to tyranny is, of course, the contested question. Critics would point out that water limits and appliance rules are routine responses to drought and air quality, the stuff of state and local governance, not authoritarianism. Ross anticipates that objection implicitly and rejects it: it’s the accumulation, not any single rule, that he says numbs people into compliance.
His closing line is the thesis in miniature — the ability to speak our minds, he writes, matters more than ever to the republic we cherish. It’s a familiar note in conservative commentary, but Ross arrives at it by way of produce bags and hedge trimmers rather than grand theory, which is precisely the point. The pot, in his telling, isn’t boiling over. It’s just getting warmer.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/getting-used-to-tyranny/