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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.
How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?
The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.
Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.
Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.
At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.
Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.
Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.
California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.
The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.
Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.
The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.
Newsom raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.
Twenty-seven percent of Californians were born outside of the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California has long dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.
California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent anti-Semitism.
Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.
Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.
Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States, given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still raising, gasoline taxes—and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.
Yet its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.
The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.
As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.
It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.
What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?
Millions of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax, and well-served red states in disgust
In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and generous entitlements.
Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.
California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.
California suffers from poorly ranked public schools—but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal—but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.
The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.
In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.
I think California is more like Hell than purgatory.
Jeff I love ya man. But you and your significant other need to get the hell out of there ASAP.
Yes, I just met a chick who is in Atlanta Georgia right now visiting family. Not my first choice of a place to live in but California is lost.
And she’s very significant.
I live in Northern California and here in Siskiyou County were Red County in a Blue State tight on the Border with Oregon Southern Oregon and Northern California which we call the State of Jefferson
FWIW, there’s been a movement in California (mostly underground) to split it in two. I learned about this in high school in the 6o’s. We even had an attempt at a ballot initiative a while back, which was thrown out in court. The energy is there, but the political will has not been. What we have instead is migration out of state. Sad, because anything north of Sacramento is beautiful, rich, and Christian conservative. We’re just outnumbered. BTW, a Placer county resident here.
I’ve been there! There are still “Jefferson State” signs on the highways. It’s so cool.
I hope you guys get your independence. FUCK those mother fuckers in Sacramento.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste”. How can Democrats ensure the continued destruction of California engulfs the entire US? How can the promise in 2008 by Hussein Obama to “fundamentally transform” the US continue and become irreversible?
The Democrats have everything to gain by stealing the 2024 election. The Democrats have everything to lose by not stealing the 2024 election. And the Democrats have nothing to fear from committing even blatant election fraud from the corrupt DOJ and corrupt FBI. The Fake News will proclaim it was the cleanest election in US history, even if Hussein Obama himself publicly brags that the Democrat party that he controls stole the election (again). Proof that the 2024 election was stolen would be if Biden wins.
Besides reinstalling the puppet Joe in the White House and holding the Senate, if the Democrats can steal a few congressional seats and take the House, then the Democrats will have the power of the purse. If Democrats have the power of the purse, that will be tantamount to legally giving criminals the right to print as much money as they want. But don’t worry. Democrats in California wasting billions of dollars will be insignificant when compared to Democrats in the House wasting trillions of dollars.
Who benefits from the implosion of the US dollar and the unravelling of civil society? Through “elite capture” of the Biden Crime family with only 30-50 million dollars, China may be able to replace the dollar with their yuan as the world’s reserve currency. Who hates the Founding Fathers of America and embraces America’s enemies? Hussein Obama. Historically, China is acting like a typical tyranny. But historically, Hussein Obama is acting like a typical traitor.
If a miracle happens and Donald J Trump wins the US presidential election (for a third time), he will have one last chance to drain the swamp. If we the people are given a second chance with Trump, but the swamp is still not drained, will we see in 2028 a 4th term of Hussein Obama playing ventriloquist for another dummy?
Democrats can literally get away7 with murder because 90% of media is a tool of The Party and has no qualms with lying.
If we had professional journalists that put truth above politics Democrats could never get away with the full blown corruption they currently practice.
We have journalists like that, but they have been banned to Substack.
Sounds a lot like the United Kingdom and every other western nation that is part of the UN. Oh, that’s all of us.
To prove Victor’s point on how bad California has become – Little Fidel Newsom just announced that he will not give a state of the State speech at the Capital – instead, Little Fidel said he will just write a report on the State and file it somewhere in Sacramento where the citizens will probably never see it. That’s how bad Little Fidel’s record is – he is no longer even trying to lie about it before the citizens – he can’t report one thing that he has done to help California – so he will now try the Biden method of politics – which is to hide in the basement = except it will be Fidel’s report hiding in the basement instead of Fidel himself.
Was one of the lucky restauranteurs who, during the Trump economy in 2018 sold our stores and got out. Missing COVID nightmare lockdowns and the dumbest minimum wage hikes in history. The Republicans are irrelevant and the Democrats are determined to try every failed Marxist policies. Friends and family still there are now struggling and stuck. English is a second language in many areas of California.
This a commentary expected from someone of VDH’s caliber. Short, succinct and to the point laying out the problems in CA that may never be fixed until total collapse and even then the cry for DC to pour in the dollars to save them will come and be answered due to the voters and millions from the ruling class. California tries the latest progressive gimmicks and America pays the price while the elite whistle behind their gates.
I got out 10 years ago because of ever increasing taxes and the stupid gun laws. I moved to a gun happy state. Lower housing prices and taxes. Although we have a whack corrupt governor at this time and things are not as bad as Cali. She doesn’t dare fiddle with our gun laws. And things may soon be changing back after November.
I felt bad for all of the “Blue State Prisoners” during COVID. Our idiot governor tries to become Whitmer but failed.
To quote Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”.
The permanent and growing Democrat voter base is buttressed by the millions of current and retired public sector workers, their parents, their wannabe public sector children, their “allies” and everyone dependent on government (Democrat) spending including contractors and welfare recipients of all kinds for a continuing paycheck, which for employees is estimated by the Hoover Institution at $140,000 per employee. See https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-government-workers-california-paid-twice-much-private-sector-workers)
We have completely opaque elections thanks to the Gavin’s pandemic emergency decrees, and a moribund GOP that has not held a registration drive since 2013!
Just a couple of reason why this will not change, ever.. Get used to it, or get out.
It’s a winning strategy to get as many people on the govt payroll and public dole. Along with that fundamental is all the people working in the private sector to supply the govt with products and services. I don’t know what the total number of those two groups is but it is almost certain they vote to maintain the status quo. Anyone elected that attempts to reverse this trend is doomed to one term. I can’t see anything but a total collapse of the dollar and, subsequently, our society if this continues. A nation wholly consisting of govt employees and those dependent on them is a totalitarian nightmare ending in total failure. It’s the stuff of which real “democracies” are made.
So true! Also, California’s woke laws that are designed to break the family by harassing and abusing its youth – along with abolishing parental rights, as seen with the laws forbidding the brainwashing academies (aka public schools) to inform parents of their successful covert mission to make kids go trans. Families with school-age kids are fleeing the state. It seems the only people who appreciate Newsom’s destructive policies are perhaps some of those real estate agents in other states, where the families are fleeing to…
I think that California and Illinois should have Statehood revoked and they can revert to territorial status. When Trump is elected, he can appoint territorial governors who can start cleaning up their messes.