Nancy Pelosi gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend.
I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience.
Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education.
They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities. Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay.
We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.
Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)
Much Ruin in a State
On the way to town, I passed three neighbors’ parcels. All have something in common: several families are living on lots zoned for single-family residences in an array of illegal sheds, shacks, and stationary trailers. The premises are characterized by illegal dumping, zoning and building code violations, illegal electrical hook-ups, and petty misdemeanors of unlicensed dogs and strays. I remember similar such rural settlements from my early youth in the 1950s, over a decade after the final end of the Great Depression. Now, in our back-to-the-future state, we see some concrete reminders of what my parents used to relate about life in the 1930s.
In this strange “day in the life” melodrama, at the dry cleaner in town, a car collided with mine in the parking lot. We both got out to inspect the fender-bender damage (he had more damage—maybe in the range of $500-800—than I did—probably around $400). I showed him my license, registration, and insurance authentication and asked him to do the same to complete the exchange of information.
But he seemed either to have no license, registration or insurance authentication or was reluctant to show me what he had. I suggested then that we call the police to verify our likely insurance claims, and let them determine whether either one of us was at fault. He said no and suggested instead cash, as if perceived comparative damage outweighed assigning culpability. He spoke limited English. I gave him $50 in cash (all I had in my wallet) and he sped out. I figured that my damage would not have exceeded the insurance deductible and his was likely greater. I suppose he felt a possible insurance claim was not worth even theoretical exposure to deportation. Our negotiation was calm and respectful.
On the way home, I went a different route. The roadside of an adjoining farm parcel has become a veritable dump: I stopped and counted the following sorts of trash piled by the almond orchard: two infant car seats; one entertainment center, three bags of wet garbage, one mattress, one stroller, five tires, and a stack of broken cement, paint cans, and drywall.
Pulling into my driveway, I noticed that a pit bull mix had been dumped at my house during my brief absence (I have already five rescue dogs). We called the animal control officer and are waiting for a reply. I think the result will be predictable, as in the case of my recent misadventure in purchasing expensive solar panels: though they were installed over three months ago, I am still waiting for Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the local utility, to hook the idled system to the grid.
Some time ago I was bitten by two dogs while biking down a rural avenue nearby. The animals’ owners did not speak English, refused to tie up the unlicensed and unvaccinated biters, and in fact let their other dogs out, one of which also bit me. It took four calls to various legal authorities and a local congressional rep to have the dogs quarantined in an effort to avoid rabies shots. The owners were never cited.
The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. So I quit riding out here and they kept their unvaccinated, unlicensed, and untied dogs.
All that is a pretty typical day, in a way that would have been atypical some 40 years ago.
Traveling Halfway in Reverse
In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.
Why is this so, and how do Californians adjust?
They accept a few unspoken rules of state behavior and then use their resources to navigate around them.
1) Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect.
The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.
2) Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.”
The more likely one associates with the privileged, so too the more one avoids those who seem to be impoverished or residing illegally, and the more one is likely to put his children in expensive and prestigious private academies. One’s loud ideology serves as a psychosocial means of squaring the circle of living in direct antithesis to one’s professions. (I do not know how the new federal tax law will affect California’s liberal pieties, given the elite will see their now non-deductible state taxes effectively double.)
3) California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter.
The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota. Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)
4) The postmodern 21st-century state media in its various manifestations is committed to social justice, not necessarily to disinterested reporting. Few read about environmental lawsuits over the planned pathway of a disruptive high-speed rail project; not so in the case of planned state nullification of offshore drilling.
In many news accounts, the race and ethnicity of a violent criminal are deduced in the cynical (and often quite illiberal) reader comments that follow. Is the newspaper deliberately suppressing news information to incite readership, who, in turn, through their commentaries flesh out the news that is not reported and simultaneously spike online viewership by their lurid outrage?
Folk wisdom in California translates into something along the following lines: an unidentified “suspect” in a drunk driving accident that leaves two dead on the side of the road can for some time remains unidentified; a local accountant of the wrong profile who is indicted by the IRS has his name and picture blared.
Progressive Winners and Losers
There are progressive exceptions: universities—in email blast warnings to students and faculty about mere suspects seen on campus in connection with reported burglaries or sexual assaults—are not shy in providing physical characteristics, dress, and perceived racial identities. The media, in other words, feels by massaging its coverage of California realities, it can serve an invaluable role in guiding us to our fated progressive futures—with exceptions for income and class.
Californians, both the losers and beneficiaries of these unspoken rules, have lost confidence in the equal application of the law and indeed the idea of transparent and meritocratic government.
Cynicism is rampant. Law-abiding Californians do whatever is necessary not to come to the attention of any authorities, whose desperate need for both revenue and perceived social justice (150,000 households in a state of 40 million residents pay about 50 percent of California income tax revenue) is carnivorous.
A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway.
I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog.
In the former case, neither the owner nor the state ever appears; in the latter both sometimes do.
In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.
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I am dreading a drive I have to take across CA to San Fran later this month. I used to love traveling to CA. That was in the 70s though.
The name of the city is San Francisco. In California people became tired of FoxGOP lies and misgoverning. Drive thru, enjoy the 6th largest economy in the world. Yes, it has the best weather, now that you asked.
Are you trying to tell me that CA is well governed? Did you read this article?
Typical REgressive.
I read the article. In in, someone who has elsewhere admitted that he’s a lifetime Democrat voter laments what his votes have done to the once-Golden State.
P.S. It’s rude to refer to San Francisco as “San Fran”. Or “Frisco”. Now you know.
“P.S. It’s rude to refer to San Francisco as “San Fran”. Or “Frisco”. Now you know.”
I don’t think the junkies, homeless mental patients and murderous sub-human Mexicans find it rude.
How about “San Feces Y Needles”?
“P.S. It’s rude to refer to San Francisco as “San Fran”. Or “Frisco”. Now you know.”
Tough shite.
I’m a fourth generation Californian and Im 77. I am ashamed of my state. I know what it was. Wacko lefties have ruined it.
Lefties had nothing to do with it. The state is overrun by Mexicans and Central Americans. Mexifornia.
An effect without a cause? No, Lefties let them in.
OK, so lefties let them in, but that’s changing the subject. But it’s THEM. That’s the point. It’s THEM. California was a conservative RED state filled with lefties for many decades. Lefties have nothing to do with it. Mexicans are NOT lefties, which say they are. They vote democrat but they are not lefties.
You’re a muddle-head — and, part of the problem.
You’re clueless, it’s the Mexicans not liberals, they’ve been around for decades, don’t change the subject by saying liberals let them in, then it’s not Mexicans, it’s liberals. Why don’t you just admit you got it wrong?
The denial in this one is strong!
See how you are treated when you drive into another state with California license plates.
I’m going with Texas plates. Crap.
The loving tolerant progressives in Cali will treat you like crap. You deserve it, after all.
Isn’t “loving tolerant progressives” an oxymoron? Progressive are the most intolerant, hateful and closed minded people I ever have the bad luck to run into.
And that’s a colossal understatement.
People of the 49 lesser states have long been envious of Californians and show it in very ugly ways. Sometimes in ugly, violent ways. This is not limited to Texas but that’s where it seems to be the most commonplace.
Meanwhile, I haven’t ever heard of a Texan being beaten up in California just because he was from Texas, clearly here only to suck off welfare, and his beater car had Texas plates.
Californians are treated with crap in other states because of the liberalism that runs rampant in California. It doesn’t matter what you drive the plate identifies you as a typical destructive liberal.
The name of the most popular website about San Francisco is “Human Wasteland” an interactive public defecation map. Then we have typical CA propaganda, it does in fact, not have the 6th largest economy in the world, not even close. The weather? Oh definitely, ya’ gotta’ love that giant thermometer on the 15 informing you it is 108 degrees at the Bun Boy in Baker and there’s nothing quite like a summer day in Palmdale. I enjoy looking back on countless hours wasted on the 91 west going through the Santa Ana Canyon at 5 mph because there was a heavy mist. Loved those motorcycle cops white-lining it while we were at a standstill making sure we were all wearing our seat-belts and handing out tickets to the miscreants that weren’t. It sure made us all feel much safer and thankful for their effort. My family is so happy we moved back to the U.S. a long time ago. God Bless Texas. Troll swine.
Do you have plenty of money and live in a blue bubble?
You lefties are always bragging about California’s economy being “6th” largest or some such. So what. California’s GDP per person is only 10th in the US, despite the state having all that warm weather, great seaports, and being the main gateway to Asia. California’s economy would be doing a lot better if it wasn’t famously over-regulated and over-taxed.
Right? A lot of good that economy does… lucrative as it is, CA is rapidly crumbling… infrastructure is failing, public services are over-run, CoL is prohibitive, law enforcement is unreliable, water rationing, lousy public schools… the list goes on & on… no wonder people are leaving CA in droves.
California is a dying carcas being devoured by parasites.
Console yourself with the thought that California’s yesterday is your tomorrow.
Hah ha.
Fortunately Trump won the election. Beginning the process of curing the disease.
The private enterprise in CA alone is responsible for more than 20% of the US economic growth in the past ten years. Without CA’s contribution, the US economy collapses. CA is the sixth largest economy in the world and growing. CA is the number one tax-payer to the fed gov.
Most populous state, no surprise their economy is large. But the reality is that other than tech, hollywood and other very high margin industries, the economy is sinking. When I lived there CA schools were #1` in the nation, now they are #47. Since 1970, California’s share of the middle class fell from 60 percent to just over half the population. Between 2007 and 2016, California lost 1 million more domestic residents than have come into the state, according to the IRS. Many are moving to Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon.Toyota, Occidental Petroleum, Nissan, companies that employed a large number of middle class people, are going. The debt swamps their income and assets. Rapid decline.
Some of the factoids you cite are true, some false, and many misleading because you don’t explain what underlies them. In fact, CA has more US headquarters of international corporations than any other state. The population of CA is increasing. New business start-ups in certain parts of CA outnumber most every other state. The decline in school ranking is due to the large numbers of hispanics, not the curricula or quality of the teachers – bright, motivated students can still get a good primary education.
The bottom line is that the CA government is a Lib-Leftist mess with huge debt and stupid policies. But, the private sector in CA is flourishing despite their bad government. Can that go on much longer? Hard to say.
I personally abhor the ideology of socialism (marxism) and of loony Liberalism, but I acknowledge that most people are in a position – for a variety of several reasons – that inclines them to embrace it. America IS in fact a socialist state and, it seems to me, will continue to move ever more Leftward and Liberal.
and one-third of all welfare cases. And a public school system that has fallen from number 2 to number 48. Your economy is hollow. It will collapse under the weight of liberal stupidity.
The problems is CA are state and local GOVERNMENT caused, not their private enterprise. The economy of CA is anything but hollow – it is the number one contributor to the US economy BY FAR.
Right… San Francisco. Try to dodge the needles & feces in the streets + the homeless in the doorways… after dark, they rise like zombies and begin their daily harassment of the brave souls who actually go out at night in their own neighborhoods. Lovely city.
Everyone knows the preferred name is Frisco. You’re obviously a transplant.
Is that satire? Everyone knows that genuine Calis would never say “Frisco.”
No real Californian is a Cali.
My condolences. If there is any way to cancel the trip, I would recommend doing so. Leave no money in a hostile foreign country.
Subotai Bahadur
I wish, but gotta pick up some of my work.
C’mon Hanson; Even God is aghast at the California intellect, and He is also dumbfounded WHY any sane person would permit themselves to be crucified by the psycho’s that think they are government administrators.
Here’s an example:
“Leather events for a good cause”???
https://www.folsomstreetevents.org/upyouralley/
Sick stuff. Weirdly, though, the participants smile for their photos with the smiles for a Sunday picnic photo. Sadly, once seen, that disgusting stuff cannot be unseen. Frown.
Egad. Pathetic, this shared deviance. The opportunity for which is provided to them by the hard work of those who built this country and subdued her attackers.
Difficult to conceive that these are the same species, let alone gender, of the MEN who built this nation and those who in today’s day hold our nation together and keep her functioning.
Indeed!
They strive to exhibit the most heinous capability of mankind.
CA doesn’t sound like America a anymore. It sounds like a banana republic. YUCK!
San Fran is dirtier, nastier, and more saturated with human waste than most cities in third world nations. It’s not America; it’s Progtardistan.
You mean Frisco.
The Army sent me to FT Ord in central California in 1992 and I got to see what was probably the beginnings of this. With the end of the Cold War the state’s then substantial defense industries and matrix of military bases were withering away and with that a fairly substantial cohort of conservative middle class citizens began to leave the state. At the time it seemed bizarre how California’s political elites were either indifferent to this or actually celebrated it. I think I understand why that was so now…
The California mind seems to be enduring a sustained and willful departure from reality. There is a constant strain on the individual to overlook the glaring inconsistencies and contradictions. It must take a terrible toll on a person’s soul to live so at odds with reality and the natural order of things and this condition is absolutely toxic to a notion of cultural self-confidence. In some ways, it is like living in Soviet Russia where the imaginary ideal was the only acceptable view and the sordid reality was never to be acknowledged. I wonder how long this societal tension can last and what will happen when citizens awaken from the infantile California dream.
No glasnost in California, Comrade!
Not at all. Liberals have no souls.
Friend from Romania said everyone had to smile broadly when standing in a line for bread, food, etc. It showed your happiness with the Ceaucescu revolution. If you were tired or frustrated, you were questioned at length. Women had to get yearly pelvic exams and they were questioned as to why they were not pregnant yet: more babies for the revolution! Very soul destroying.
Blue tribe women in Cali can’t be bothered to have children. They import illegal immigrants to do that.
Babies are not the property of a revolution..babies are a replacement for the old and must be a part of a developing society. I have always found the attitude of the left toward babies very puzzling. How are their social programs to be financed when the workers, who are milked by taxes die off?
Again, they import illegal immigrants for that.
Beautifully put. We left the Bay Area because in large part we could no longer twist our souls and sense of justice into pretzels to fit in there. (Not to mention paying exorbitant taxes for the privilege.)
Unfortunately, since different people come to the realization that CA is intolerable at different times and the more aware middle and upper middle classes become aware first, the best option for the individual is to leave instead of fix the state. In a number of years, the state will be comprised of 90% uneducated and poor and 10% uber rich. Then the 90% will decide that they are going to force the state to seize the wealth of the 10%, which will force the 10% to leave and the state will be comprised of 100% uneducated and poor.
I ask the Average Joes who work for a living in CA why they tolerate the disparities and high taxes – they answer essentially the same every time. They view their government policies and costs to be the price they pay for their aesthetic, comfortable lifestyle. They say the private sector provides good jobs, good restaurants, good entertainments, and extensive recreation; the governments keep the flowers blooming, the beach volleyball courts well raked, and the riff-raff at arms length. They LIKE it that way.
BTW, my middle son, who works in the greater LA area, experiences on average three hit-and-run accidents per year.
This is my state and my family lives here and will always live here. I cannot go running away to another state which WILL have some of the same problems or is developing them rapidly anyway. There are a lot of things I dont like about California but we are just ahead by a couple of decades or less. The country is going down like a submarine..Trump can slow it but not stop it.
Trump is speeding it up. He’s a big government, big spender who is increasing the already out-of-control debt. He is interested in adding another ever-growing entitlement – “family leave.” He’s going to see that DACAs get legalized and citizenship. And, he’s not going to deport the 30 million illegals.
Be honest..you are a leftist projector wishing Trump would go away.
He’s not actually, but he is somewhat discordant in his political judgement, of late…..although I will admit, not on the subject of Big Govt spending.
I may seem discordant to you because your starting point is ideology and emotion – which is inherently discordant – whereas my starting point is objectivity and logic – something that seems odd to you ideologists.
No, my starting point is pragmatism, whereas yours is more like Patrick Henry…..
I’m a Madisonian Constitutionalist – something you wouldn’t understand – and that is why I object to the Lib huckster Trump. You are being played – again – by the Progs and you don’t see what’s being done to you.
BTW, douchebag, I’m ALWAYS honest.
I have this feeling that the people living inside that bubble are probably going to think that things are great the day before it all falls down, as eventually it must.
The state and local governments in CA are indeed in big trouble, but the private sector in CA is booming.
Interesting.
Thus, the Soviets’ answer: vodka; and ours: opioids.
You nailed it. Living in this dystopia has become soul-crushing.
Dystopias are all that the large majority can accomplish. Look around you at “the folks.”
These VDH pieces always break my heart for California, which I once enjoyed visiting, and for our nation. It has probably already been said, but he is like a Cassandra. He warns with a sharp tongue and firm grasp of reality.
Me too! It was once home, and I was proud to call it so. My grandparents came to the promised land of CA in the 20s and 40s, and growing up in the 60s and 70s I knew it would always be home. God had different plans I am now grateful for. I’ll never go back. and we’re proud residents of Florida! (We escaped Illinois last summer.)
welcome to my home state.. please when voting, remember why you left.
We spent the last 17 years in Illinois. Now our votes will finally count!!!
You incorrectly assume dummies can learn.
Cassandra was of the royal house of Troy by birth. She could not become un-Trojan.
In contrast, VDH has chosen to be a lifetime Democrat. He could change that but doesn’t.
No, VDH has nothing in common with Cassandra.
VDH had a hand in creating the very problems in California that he now laments.
I see now—-just a troll
Russian bot alert ^^^^^!!!
You’re still an idiot.
Why would anyone want to visit California? Or invest there? These are questions Dr. Hanson has not directly addressed here, but the answers are clearly implied. Short of mass deportations and a total financial collapse, necessitating what can only be described as a revolution, none of the problems he describes is capable of an orderly political solution.
Asians. Asians are going to take everything the natives are leaving behind. Already well on their way in many cities. CA is magnitudes better than where they come from, they don’t give a rats ass about illegals/minorities/virtue signalling, and they love consumerism more than anyone. Asians will take over as the plantation owners and the rest will remain the serfs they’ve always been.
Plausible except on the illegal issue. Because so many Asians want to enable their own relatives’, friends’, colleagues’ etc. unauthorized immigration, they won’t curtail the larger Latin American unauthorized population.
Sure. But Asians come with one or both of 2 things: 1) skills/work ethic, and/or 2) money. They open businesses and buy property right away. Plus the usual corruption: cash business tax evasion and welfare/benefits fraud. But their end game is different from Latin American aliens: Asians want to be boss and own everything and everyone. LAs just want freebies. Believe me. This is what is happening in Southern California, the San Gabriel Valley particularly.
The West Virginia Option is intriguing well beyond California A casual look at other states shows the same dynamic : Chicago and Down State Illinois, and NYC and the Northern Tier. To a lesser extant ,there is even Minnesota driven leftward by the Radical Left in the Twins , or Ohio, the entire state the captive of the bien pensants in Columbus and the Inner Cities of Cincy and Cleveland. But the West Virginia Option for Caly might just work: if something cannot go on forever , it will stop.
I’m looking forward to moving to the State of Jefferson after the split.
See ya there, Pervy!! Got my spot all picked out!
I hear ya. KC and SL have waaaay too much influence in this state. Esp. SL.
Ohio went for Trump. But, yeah, that was unexpected.
What Dr. Hanson describes is life in a weird combination of the third world and a fascist utopia. Ca is in an in between stage of collapse. The law no longer functions to provide justice, but is not yet corrupt enough to provide clear paths for bribery protections from the fascist excesses. In another 5 years or so the bribery channels will be clear and the fascist utopia will settle into its 3rd world status.
The same fate awaits us all, if we do not control immigration. The bureaucratic bribe takers at the federal level are already in place.
I fled the Bay Area in 93. In 91, my locality was trying to pass a law banning the carrying of firearms in businesses, including gun stores. I went to a hearing on the issue and pointed out that, with a loaded magazine, anyone could enter a gun store, load the magazine, and have the only functional weapon. Shortly after, the law passed and the scenario I had described happened. Two detectives came to my home and tried to question me. Why? Well, I developed the “plot,” you see….what a sh*thole.
Fascinating and horrible. How did that discussion go? Did the detectives at least have the sense to seem embarrassed to be questioning you?
I fled in 05/97,, lived in Covina.. Haven’t been back to Haiti #2.. When you’re white and over 50 looking for a job,,,,,,,,,, FORGET IT!!!
E. Goldstein,
You wrote: “if we do not control immigration”. Not to be picky, but CA’s fate awaits us all if we do not…
1. REVERSE illegal immigration by massive deportations of the ‘undocumented Democrats’; and…
2. Greatly REDUCE legal immigration from recent levels of over 1 million per year to perhaps 100,000 per year, and only of the very highly skilled such as doctors / surgeons and the like.
For my entire adult life CA has been the canary in the coal mine for the rest of America. It has been America’s ‘designated $#!t#ole’ for several decades … long past time to quit talking and START DOING!
THIS! A Million Fold!
My Dad used to say that bribery was the way countries without a tax base were able to afford government services. Basically, the people who used the service had to pay for it. If California keeps losing its middle class, as evidenced by the state income tax being paid by only 150,000 out of 4,000,000 residents, then bribery will be the only way government services can be paid for.
Here in Texas, southern hospitality mandates that we welcome the Californians fleeing their situation, and we do so happily. Unfortunately, this Left Coast Liberal mindset is turning parts of deep-red Texas slowly towards purple.
That is 150,000 HOUSEHOLDS, out of FORTY MILLION residents.
I stand corrected. That makes more sense. Still a small minority, though.
No, it doesn’t make more sense. An average household does not have 10 people. So, Raymond’s numbers show a WORSE situation that your (wrong) numbers do.
Until you idiots free yourselves of Jewish money and influence, your State is DOOMED.
Get angry, for Christ’s sake !! Wake up from your porno fantasies.
Man
up, guys. Don’t tell me you don’t know the difference between right
and wrong, cause if you’ve lost that, you are screwed. The toilet has
been flushed and YOU ALL are in it and going down down down to the
sewer.
You can stop it, but you don’t have time to be complacent.
the blatancy still shocks me….
I grew up in the same stomping ground and it is as Victor says. The central valley has certainly declined since I lived there. But it was never idyllic and like the frog in the cooking pot, most people just shrug and accept it as it slowly approaches lethality. Some in california would like to split up the state, but there is no realistic legal way to do so. Glad I don’t live there anymore.
I left California in 2002, a friend emailed me and asked why. I responded by telling him that when a cop is indicted for shooting the driver (an illegal) of a vehicle that is trying to run him down then its the inmates who were now running the asylum and it was time to go because it was no longer safe.
Build the wall now. Not along Mexico border but CA border and keep them away from the rest of the USA.
the wall will quickly become something to go around or over or simply come by airplane or boat………….
I live in the alleged hellhole of California, nowhere near the coast, described here and happen to travel throughout the country quite a bit. I’d much rather live in California than in Mississippi, Nevada or even Connecticut, states where there is little to no economic growth nor even any particular reason for our adult children to ever move to. Colorado and Washington State are attractive alternatives to California and although I haven’t looked into their state government closely, both seem to be better run how California is run. But we’ve also seen how states like Kansas show us how a state should NOT be run, but I’ve never seen a word of Kansas mentioned here.
In Mr. Hanson’s telling, illegal aliens and pit bulls rule the streets and law-abiding citizens are in fear of their lives in California. That’s caricature, not reality. What is reality are failing public schools, crumbling infrastructure, runaway pension obligations — all genuine facts that Mr. Hanson should focus on rather than illegal aliens and pit bulls. But bashing California makes good click-bait.
Funny stuff. I grew up Upper East Side Manhattan – and moved deep South decades ago. Simply put – one can live an exponentially higher quality of life here for pennies to the NY dollar.
And my relatives in CA seem to agree more with Hanson than you. Then again, they’re the ones having to tiptoe around excrement and Hepatitis outbreaks…
To each his own, but there’s no plausible case that Mississippi and Alabama offer a better quality of life than California. For all California’s problems, and they are not few, there’s zero chance that a child molester could come with 1% of winning a US Senate seat.
A few weeks ago I was talking to financial advisor about retirement options. I suggested that when I retire I might leave California for another state like Texas or Colorado, where the cost of living is undeniably much lower. He told me, and I’m not kidding, how many of his clients actually did leave California for Texas only to come back. Sure, housing is more expensive in California than in Texas and gas is on average 15-20 cents higher, but the quality of life is simply much better here. No one seriously denies this. I might still leave California someday depending on where my children end up living and it’s likely they won’t come back to California — it’s just too expensive here — but if they did come back I’d definitely stay here and wouldn’t consider for a moment going to states like Mississippi and Alabama. Probably nowhere in the South at all, where vestiges of devotion to the Lost Cause are still strong, as seen by the confederate flags that can be seen everywhere. And the food is pretty horrific too, but that’s a minor complaint.
Caricatures of daily life in San Francisco are perfectly in order, but most Californians don’t live in San Francisco. They live in cities like the author’s Fresno and elsewhere, where ends are met with biweekly or monthly paychecks, where families go to church and children go to school and play sports, where you can still buy and own a firearm (but not a semiautomatic weapon) and you can take day a trip to the forests, deserts, and beaches very easily and meet people from different backgrounds from around the world.
If someone has lived his entire life in Mississippi I would absolutely not recommend even considering moving to California, maybe not even visiting it. The culture shock would be as extreme for him as it was for me when I visited Mississippi the first time in the 1980s. Live your life wherever you’re most at home, where your families and friends are and where you think you will most likely prosper economically and spiritually. For some, that may well be in Mississippi. But for many, opportunities for advancement are much more abundant in California than in Mississippi (insert pretty much any other state for Mississippi), whether in the big cities of SF or LA or the suburbs. Less so in the Central Valley or the Sierra foothills, which are suffering from the same kind of economic malaise that we see in rural areas in the rest of the country and which are hotbeds of support for President Trump. Just as you don’t see the best young minds rushing to live in the Central Valley or in the Sierra foothills, you don’t see them rushing to live in Mississippi either.
Well please don’t move to Colorado. We have enough of your kind. Oh, what “kind” is that? The kind of people who don’t know that nearly all self-reloading pistols are “semi-automatic”, or the kind of people who visited the South in the 80’s and still denigrate it thirty years later, or the kind of people who are just certain that “the best young minds” wouldn’t be found in Mississippi. Yes, that kind.
Thanks. I was thinking something similar and you wrote it very well.
Cheers????
My friend grew up in the Fresno area. She has lived here in Montana for 13 years. Now she will move back. The last 2 brutal winters were more than she can take. Our forecast -22 F. tonight won’t help. She misses the warmth down there but says cities like Fresno are sewers these days.
She better go for a visit before she moves back to that sewer. Then she should look at Florida, Arizona or Texas instead.
Speaking of caricatures…..Sounds like some people are still harboring stereotypical ideas about red states. To each his own…sounds like your idea of hell and my idea of heaven are pretty much the same places…. and it works out nicely for all.
I would argue that there is more economic growth in Kansas or Mississippi than there is in CA away from the coast. The Sierra foothills in particular are depressed.
Enjoy your life and when it goes south don’t call us for help. You are on your own.
If you like your state, you can keep your state.
Kansas’ problems were not caused by cutting taxes. The left is lying, as usual:
–Just as tax cuts went into effect in 2013, corn, wheat and soybean prices began a slow decline that grew worse during 2014 and continued through 2015. Soybeans made a partial comeback in 2016 but corn and wheat continued to fall. By the end of 2016, corn had fallen 57 percent from $7.15 per bushel to just $3.05. Soybeans had fallen by a third, from $14.10 to $9.39 per bushel and wheat was hit the hardest, falling from $8.01 per bushel to $2.88 – a drop of 64 percent.
—
Farm income declined as prices fell. The Kansas Farm Management Association at Kansas State University reports average net income fell from $159,352 in 2012 to $140,356 in 2013 and then to $128,731 in 2014.
—
Steep declines in oil prices also hurt much of the agricultural area in Kansas…
—
A combination of price declines and related production cutbacks caused severance tax collections to plummet from $125.8 million in FY 2014 to just $22.4 million in FY 2016; collections improved a bit to $42.1 million in FY 2016 but still considerably contributed to state budget shortfalls.-
—
Aerospace and aviation are very important to the Kansas economy, with several major manufacturing facilities and related parts suppliers located primarily in Wichita, including Spirit AeroSystems, Cessna, Beechcraft and Bombardier Learjet. Unfortunately, global economic conditions and workforce relocations created havoc in the industry throughout the Kansas tax cut effort. Boeing ended its 85-year history in Wichita in the middle of 2014—
https://kansaspolicy.org/tax-cuts-kansas-economy/
If you want to see states that are screwed and tatooed, look at Illinois, California, and Connecticut.
The correct analogy is screwed, BLUED, and tattooed.
Good one. Very apt.
Proggies don’t do fact-based reasoning, but I appreciate the info! Thanks.
Hanson illuminates why much of the country views California as the national Granola bowl – what ain’t fruits and nuts is flakes. It’s only surprising more people aren’t fleeing the place.
It’s also extremely amusing that in the era where liberals are vilifying anything remotely ‘secessionist Southern’ (having apparently failed to notice what century we’re in) – the only morons in the nation still trying to secede – are those lovable Avocado leisure suit wearing bozos in California…
“It’s only surprising more people aren’t fleeing the place.” I grew up in California in the 50s and 60s. Wonderful place back then. I moved to Texas in the early 90s and didn’t go back for a year or two. When I did go back for a visit I was shocked to realize those people were insane, but they just didn’t know it. I had to leave for a while to be able to clearly see the insanity which was right in front of me. I think when you’re immersed in the swamp; when all you’ve ever known is the swamp, you can’t see the problem clearly. Today, I don’t even enjoy going back for a visit. It breaks my heart to see what the left has done to the fabulous place I used to call home. The left hasn’t been able to screw up the weather yet, so there’s that …
You’re the frog who jumped out of the heating water for awhile.
Often think Washington, DC is that same sort of place where they’re all insane and don’t realize it.
If the contagion could be contained to California, I’d say, “Fine, to hell with the lot of ’em.”
But the evil, the degeneracy, the corruption, the poverty, the crime, the hypocrisy–all are highly contagious.
Maybe a civil war *is* the answer–only the other 49 states will declare it against California. Not secession, but expulsion.
It’s not a “state” issue. It’s the cities vs. the countryside. The majority of California, by land area, is hard conservative. Look at a national map of the last presidential election broken out by county.
But it’s winner take all. It’s Mexifornia now.
and that disease is only going to spread.
…and without the Electoral College, the US would already be ‘California’.
republic > democracy.
Despite the EC, America will soon be CA.
You’re right. But there are some hard core conservative native Californians working on reforming this, if that’s any consolation. People with clout and money. Personally I think it’s too late, but they’re not going down without a fight.
I feel ya. I’m in occupied territory New Jersey. Urban centers and mass immigration outnumber us normals. Otherwise NJ would be as conservative as South Carolina and Texas.
There are several million of us conservatives in the urban areas of CA–and most of the countryside is conservative too. We are just outnumbered by the nuts, and increasingly so. But there are more conservative talk radio options here than in most of the other cities in the country that I’ve driven in… This real estate is too desirable to concede it to the leftists.
I did my bit to prevent the slide from moderate politics into the Deep Left. What grassroots politicking have you ever done?
Are you a real professor, X? If so, how many of the nuts did you spawn in your classrooms? In the faculty lounges?
I attended a couple of Tea Party rallies, but that’s about it. Between work, commute, and family, I’m busy. Maybe when my kids are bigger… But my level of grassroots political activity doesn’t make me a left-winger. I appreciate that you were able and willing to do something, though.
Yes, I actually am a professor. I have not spawned any nuts–some of the students are already nuts when they get to my classes, but if anything I’m the one dropping a comment here and there indicating that perhaps the entire academic world doesn’t sing from the same hymnal. But most political topics are irrelevant to my subject, so I may stand out by not spouting leftwing pieties at every opportunity. (In fact, a student once told me that was true. My failure to reflexively curse BushHitler, for instance, was apparently a giveaway!) And I wish we had a faculty lounge, or better yet a pub, on campus, but I have to content myself with having a couple of drinks close to campus now and then. When I do that, it’s almost always in the company of another professor who is as conservative as I am.
tens of millions of normal middle class parents have pursued the American dream since WWII. Unfortunately, at the same time, liberals and progressives pursued a different agenda, one to acquire political power through the degradation of society. What VDH writes about, and this isn’t his first California “reality” column, is a face-slap wake up call for the rest of America, to do what’s necessary to prevent this from coming to their neighborhoods and towns. I live in a very nice suburb of Chicago. The infestation began a decade ago and is out of control.
Don’t dignify his comments with response.
Why the ad hominem? Have you nothing of value to offer?
“If the contagion could be contained to California…”–srlucado
You losers in the 49 lesser states imagined that was so. Thus when California’s governors insisted that the federal government (dominated as it is by the 49 lesser states) do its job of controlling the border, you losers of the 49 lesser states yawned. You losers assumed that this was a California problem (you ignored Arizona’s similar pleas for the federal government to do its job) and believed yourself safe in ignoring it. Now carpenters in Minnesota and Vermont are crying that illegals from south of the border are taking their jobs. Because you losers in the 49 lesser states had the attitude that California really wasn’t a part of the USA that had to be defended from foreign invasion, there’s now secessionist talk (that’s upsetting you hypocrites greatly, hah ha). What’s more, now a majority of California’s voters has through their elected officials decided that if illegal immigration is de facto OK by the lesser 49 states then it’ll now be OK by California too. This also upsets you hypocrites of the 40 lesser states greatly. Hah ha.
Suck it up, losers.
ever wonder why there is no environmental report on illegal immigration? Regarding Water,utility,land use? The left only cares about the expanding number of representives that come with population increases no matter how they arrive. Yes folks thats how they rig elections, using the census and illegal immigration….
Consider the Left’s assertion that the Carbon Footprint of America is a fatal burden to the planet.
They then advocate to allow millions of ‘Low Carbon Footprinters’ from the 3rd world to come to the 1st world, consume resources and, thus, get a larger ‘Carbon Footprint’ than they had in their respective 3rd World nations.
The conservatives also need to raise the issue of those who go the Legal Immigration route while watching Illegals go the the front of the line.
Illegals aren’t going to the front of the line; Dems are demanding that we create a special, separate process to directly reward illegals with instant legal status and then citizenship for coming criminally, siphoning off critical educational resources from low income American children, and driving down wages and employment on honest Americans who are disproportionately minority.
You can’t expect logical thinking from psychotic – Liberalism is a psychosis.
California’s Democrat party uses illegal immigrants the way the Slave States used slaves to increase their representatives in the House of Representatives (side 1 of 3) It counts illegals in the census. This also distorts their number in the Electoral College (side 2 of 3). Democrats NEED to swell their state populations with illegal immigrants to increase their numbers and influence in Congress AND Presidential Elections. The Democrat Party in the 1840s-1850s representing the Slave States knew what it was doing then and it certainly knows what it is doing now. DISENFRANCHISING millions of American voters(side 3 of 3) by the Importation of New Voters completes their TRIAD of the Illegal Immigration Importation Industrial Complex. The Democrat Party can’t stand American voters and can’t win them either.
great observation. Sadly, dead on target.
and once they outnumber and outvote Americans………it’s going to ramp up……..cartels will be the muscle
California is now rather a lot like the border provinces of the Roman Empire in the late 300’s AD.
The large majority of Americans are uniquely delusional and ignorant of biological reality — CA just has a few more such people than the rest of the country. But, don’t worry – the rest always catches up to the lunacy of CA.
Evidently California is becoming just like Mexico, and Mexico is a sh**hole. The Mexican Spanish elite analogize with Moonbeam, Pelosi and the Silicon Valley & Hollywood ilk. The California serfs are simply Mexican serfs translated. This is not going to end well.
Didn’t you read the article a couple of days ago? California is now more unequal than Mexico!
How many years and how many illegal immigrants did it take to ruin a once great state?
These dregs are turning America into that s**thole from south of the border. How’s that secession thing going for ya california????? Can the rest of us vote also. After all the foreigners from south of the border will. I would love to send you all on your merry way.
California gave Hillary her popular vote margin. One wonders how many of these Californians speak English.
Some guy got arrested there on a criminal warrant. He came illegally in 1996 and was deported at least once. When they tried to interview him because there were protests against deporting him, he spoke no English.
.
Just think about the huge drag his spawn are on our public schools. Kids not fluent in English cost 20-40% MORE to educate than our own kids and that money is mostly wasted because they either become criminals or welfare moochers. Sheesh.
Dems love illegals and hate honest Americans.
I would love to pay for billboards in Chicago to tell them about all the benefits people get in California, but so few people can read here.
In fact the majority of these illegal aliens in America–are godless welfare whores, and they are all criminals–and are of no value to America–they are defecating all over America–being used by the Marxist democrats for this evil purpose–if they were truly good people–the Marxist democrats would not allow them to be in America.
I never saw anyone toss a loaded diaper on the ground until I saw a couple Mexicans do it. This is what’s coming…er, flooding in here.
Sorry, I have. Black folks from the ‘hood a few blocks away routinely did this on my street. At least they changed the diapers, I guess. Before someone asks, yes, I know because I saw them do it.
I lived in the black part of Denver called 5 Points for years and never saw that
I saw similar on a Native America reservation I lived next to.
It started with Odumbo ignoring the rule of law and trickled down to the blue states like Kalifornia. I have said repeatedly that the influx of illegals from third world shitholes will eventually ruin the country because they don’t have any morality and won’t adhere to American societal and legal norms.
Alas, California.
I’ve lived in Nor Cal over 50 years and I can’t wait to leave. The liberals I work with fall into 2 groups:
1. Baby boomers who live in a cocoon and think things are just as wonderful (or better) as they were 30 years ago. Talk to them about traffic or public universities and it becomes obvious they don’t realize how things have changed. The only change they are aware of is that the little house they bought for $150k 30 years ago is now worth $1m.
2. Young people who drank the Kool-aid. They know they can’t afford a house or even a 2 bedroom apartment, but they don’t plan to have kids so they don’t care. They also don’t care how bad the schools are. I’m not sure who they think is going to take care of them in their old age.
Both groups seem to embrace hedonistic pleasures: fine dining, foreign travel, wine tasting. You really get the feel of the decline of Rome here.
I really don’t have anything in common with these people. When we get together the conversation tends towards restaurants and travel and what we plan to do when we retire.
You have it exactly right.
And that is why my wife and I live in a gated community in California. Our next move will be to Arizona.
If your a conservative or libertarian your welcome to move to the outback, rural area where I moved to in 2007.
Australia seems a bit far, don’t you think?
Yeah, that works. The closest town is typical, small-town red. True, a half hour’s drive away is a larger city, and it is dominated by a university…but we only go there once in awhile for doctor visits. Where we are is corn fields and pastures….nice. (I, too, fled CA, but oh, the 70s in San Diego was a beautiful time.)
“… live in a gated community…”
Lot of that going around, isn’t there? My son lives in a gated community in Florida, not far from my not-gated but restricted community. And our place in n. Wisconsin is so well-hidden it doesn’t have to be gated. (Protected & insured by Canik-55. You can’t be too careful.)
If you can afford to live like this, why wouldn’t you?
After reading articles like this one I know we made the right move in leaving California.
It is the state that goes out of its way to screw with your life in as many ways as possible.
Good and accurate article.
Feed the crocodiles so they will eat you last.
Samuel Francis presciently referred to the conditions Dr. Hansen described as ‘anarcho-tyranny’. The notion is that the State prioritizes application of the law to those who are generally law-abiding while excessively applying the law for trivial violations for those who are generally law-abiding. He described his concept of ‘anarcho-tyranny’ in 1994:
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/1994/July/18/7/magazine/article/10843089/
Unfortunately, this is ‘subscription only’ content.
Kalifornia is gone to h*ll already. In 5 years it’ll be bankrupt.
I can hardly wait to help bail them out with my taxes. You gotta love Amerika.
I grew up in a different Calif., the Golden State. Immigrants were GI’s who had come through on their way to the Pacific, loved it, returned to stay, gone to college in the GI bill and formed a middle and business and entrepreneurial class. Education was #1 in the nation. Movies and tv were still shot on location throughout Southern California. There were myriad sectors of manufacturing and a huge middle class, as well as large numbers of impressive mega-wealthy tycoon pioneers in various industries.
I went to Wall Street for a few decades and came back to…Mexico del Norte meets the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It would take 1000 pages to catalogue the crazyness. Sad! No, tragic and unsustainable.
Dwight Yoakam: “The Late, Great, Golden State.”
Mexico refers to what we call California as “Alta California”, the sister state to Baja California.
well, well said!
I don’t have words for how crazy the place is. The news today is the unneeded bullet train from SF to LA is only going to go from SF to Bakersfie!d (for $78 bil.). There is zero demand for a bullet train from SF to Bakersfield – a town in farm country. Oh well, for another $5O billion or so and an extra decade, they may figure out how to extend it through or under the mountains for the remaining 100 miles to LA.
Same thing – MIA to Orlando in FL. Why?
That’s the story of most of the USA. The fundamental cause is obvious to anyone who would care to look. Most Americans (like most humans) want to live beyond their means and their worth to society. That means living in debt – whether it be personal debt (check out credit card debt in America) or government debt (70% of gov debt spending is on wealth transfers to those who cannot earn). Thus, socialism looms.
Tax the remittances at 75%, build the wall, have Mexico indirectly pay for it. #MAGA
Of course, at 75% the remittances would most likely end. Win/Win!
Said driver in parking lot collision – undocumented – why on earth give him $50? UGH!
California’s Venezuelan experiment will end poorly!
In Los Angeles, $4 million homes sit side-by-side with homeless encampments, and homes in Bel-Air were destroyed by a fire from an encampment in a ravine full of dry brush. (Google up some news stories about the cause of the Skirball FIre if you doubt that.) The police have given up on controlling the sprawl and danger of homeless encampments, and respond to public heroin and meth use in city parks by offering drug addicts a ride to the county welfare office to apply for benefits — see the last paragraphs of this story:
http://curious.kcrw.com/2016/09/a-day-of-compassionate-policing-with-the-lapd
Extremes of wealth and poverty, excessive regulation alongside total lawlessness. Exactly right.
Last week I walked down a busy pedestrian street of restaurants and boutiques. Sitting on the sidewalk in the afternoon sun was a man smoking crack or meth (I can’t tell the difference.) I thought about calling the police, but the average response time here is 35 minutes. Also, I knew the police wouldn’t bust the guy even if they did respond.
There is a big effort in the state to keep people out of prison, which sounds good until you realize that the way this is accomplished is by not prosecuting criminals. Felony theft has been revised upward to apply only to thefts of more than $9,500. This is why every grocery store has at least one private security guard on duty at all times. Smaller stores (Sur l’Table, etc.) the same.
Totally not worth the phone call. Read the story of Leela Ramirez at the end of this 2016 NPR story:
http://curious.kcrw.com/2016/09/a-day-of-compassionate-policing-with-the-lapd
The police in California respond to meth addiction by offering users more free cash to pay for their habit. On a positive note, police pensions are bankrupting the state — so at least they’re doing something.
Ah….Nancy Pelosi…I knew her 30 years ago. I was working at a posh tennis club where she was a member. Few people will ever know the wealth and privilege Nancy has known her entire life. Every year the Pelosi’s attended the Black and White Ball. Their entourage would form at the tennis club…a fleet of 20 foot long restored Packard’s swept them to the gala. Chauffeurs, personal assistants, private school for the kids, the whole deal.
Someone is voting to her who doesn’t have a chauffeur
serfs & idiots… they love psuedo-royalty.
Behold mankind!
What Dr. Hanson describes is Anarcho-Tyranny. The State of our Union.
California is a wonderful case study in what happens when the democrats get everything they want.
So is Detroit, Chicongo, Baltimore and the rest of the blue big cities.
I was born here. My mom was born here. My dad’s family moved here when he was 3. It has been a great paradise for most of my life. It is no longer anything remotely close, and I’m leaving never to return. I am convinced the only reason more good people (not just politically active people of the right or center, but just everyday folks) have not abandoned this state (and taken their income-earning/small-business tax base with them as many, like my family, already are) is simple: People are still so underwater on their mortgages that they literally cannot afford to walk away because they can’t manage a downpayment elsewhere, even at 30% of the cost with no state income tax, without selling their home. People are literally mortgage slaves and stuck. It’s a shame. Glad I’m not. Adios mi California. You were my love…but you’ve morphed into a self-righteous, utterly-amoral, and thoroughly corrupt and irredeemable morass. It won’t get fixed in my lifetime, so…adios.
And friends and family.
Jeez Mr. Hanson, I know that your family has been there for generations but I would certainly get the hell out of that sh!thole.
5) Surreptitiously kill the wayward pit bull.
At some point, those with something to lose might start secretly fighting back like they have nothing to lose. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, just that people react, however slowly.
We stopped driving across California when returning from the south. We used to head north inland to avoid even entering the state. Gasoline was high, the traffic was terrible and with the exception of I-5 the roads were going downhill. The situation that Dr. Hanson describes is also pretty much an accurate description of Mexico with the exception that the Mexicans are devoting a lot of resources to their infrastructure.
“That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay.”
So true!
I believe the mismanagement and unequal application of the law are intentional (see The Curley Effect). With immigration, they can build the electorate that they want so they don’t need to please everyone. I don’t see this ending. The youth have never known a clean, safe, prosperous California so they don’t know what they are missing.
When I ask liberals why all the states or cities under decades of Democratic hegemony are places of squalor and bankruptcy they have no answer.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/05/31/president-obamas-wealth-destroying-goal-taking-the-curley-effect-nationwide/#33d8e3683d75
There are lots of better places to live. Family farm or no family farm, get the hell out!
His position as a Hoover fellow may require “near by” residency.
I’m retiring (quitting business) just to get out of California. I voted in all the elections but it does no good because the democrats commit voter fraud in this state on a wholesale basis. So now I am voting with my feet. Our business was recently burglarized. The service called me and I drove to the business at 2 AM. About 20 minutes later a policeman arrived. The videos of the burglar in our business were good and we gave the policeman the person’s name and address. I was informed that he would fill out a report so I could get our insurance to pay for the damage and loss but the city would not spend the money to investigate and prosecute the criminal. We replaced the window he broke and other damage ($4,000) but we installed a 5/8 tempered piece of glass with the 4 ply plastic backing so it was somewhat bullet proof. The creep returned again but this time when he ran at the window and chucked a 15 pound chunk of concrete at the window it bounced back into his face. Being in California it’s a wonder we didn’t get sued. The other two owners are leaving the state also. My only regret is we will be putting 9 heads of families, three of which are single women with children, out of work.
Because you were supporting “three… single women with children”, you are part of the problem.
You seem to be very hateful, why am I causing a problem when I provide a job which gets a young woman who’s husband took off on her off welfare and teaches her a salable skill.. A pinhead like you must enjoy the state paying out an average of 40K a year for a single parent and the funding is born by the taxpayers.
You’re the solution and a very positive force, except to those slugs who want more dependency to feed their power and enable their corruption (Dems). That’s why the Dem troll takes a shot at you.
Yet, they’ll enforce some rules against certain others to the hilt! When I was stationed at FT Ord, I forgot to renew my car emissions inspection. It expired over one weekend when I didn’t drive my truck. I got on post with no problems on Monday morning (probably because the sun hadn’t come up yet) but when I headed out later in the day I got pulled over by three different cops from three different police departments; the last one got me as I was pulling into a service station to get the inspection! I doubt I drove more than 5 miles through this gauntlet.
The second two cops were fairly decent about it; once I showed them my first ticket and explained I was heading into town to get it fixed, they let me go. But I remember paying out the nose to clear up the one citation I did get.
once again, a positive part of society preparing to move out. Meanwhile 20 million more mexicans preparing to relocate to “the state with the beautiful climate.” The very best of luck to you and your families.
The largest influx of foreigners to CA is now from Asia rather than Mexico. They’re pouring in.
I have decided that when it gets bad enough where I live that I will move. Where? I’m not sure right now. Likely, not another state, so that means across some body of water. Mexico? Perhaps they will all have gotten here by then and the state will be empty.
I love to read you Victor, but what is happening in California isn’t unique. In Colorado the blue Boulder-Denver (not all of it) bosses around the rest of the state (even conservative Colorado Springs). Our university system costs more than private schools, we’ve had exactly one Republican governor since we moved here in the 70s, every tax increase is for the children, and we have similar issues with illegal populations (though we have more responsibile such illegals here who want a better life and not just a handout). So here the line from Mass to Miss is just 60 miles. But I wonder why VDH doesn’t leave. Then I look out at Pikes Peak and…know why so many people stay in CA too. Keep writing VDH…people are listening.
Sent from my iPhone
But I wonder why VDH doesn’t leave.
He’s also the owner of a farm near Selma, which if I recall has been in his family for quite some time. He has deep roots in that area.
California was great in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the early 1990s it was obvious that the state legislature have become dominated by Marxists. It did not matter much who the governor was, the state legislature was dominant. By the mid-1990s when the time came to start my business after brief inspections I realized it would have taken months of delays to get the relevant permits to operate – so I moved to a more business friendly environment in the East. That business now employs thousands. Moving out of California was one of my better life moves. It has only gone downhill from then.
What’s the terminology for a woman who cannot leave an abusive relationship? Some of the smartest women and Californians suffer the same ism.
I have a hard time sympathizing.
Dr Hanson, sounds to me like it is time for you to move out of California, and do it quickly.
They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as…
It’s not a loss of confidence in these abilities; it’s an unwillingness to exercise them by the leftists that have basically taken over the education system.
The author is a national treasure.
Like Professor Hanson, I’m California born and raised.
40 years ago, I was voting Republican. I suspect VDH was not.
Has VDH even bothered to change his party registration from Democrat to something more appropriate?
Calif would not be as it is today if the Federal Govt had done its job on immigration enforcement.
We shouted out the alarm 30 years ago and all we got in reply was crickets chirping.
That’s true, but Cali is now harassing and interfering with ICE and any enforcement whatsoever, including removal of violent criminal illegals. That’s not the FedGov’s fault.
Always appreciate Dr. Hanson’s essays, they each provide valuable insight into the stories of our time. Not only do the elites avoid living with the consequences of their policies and inflict harm against other citizens, those same policies do untold harm to the very group they wish to help.
They don’t wish to help anyone. Their concern for illegals is about cheap servants, more government control and corruption, and illegal votes. Illegals hurt low wage Americans, Blacks most of all, but benefit the rich and powerful. They’re all about continuing the corruption and cheap labor.
Advocating for open borders by most democrats is based on virtue signaling.
Not really. It’s mostly about Dems’ massive greed and lust for power and control. They’re pretty much just evil, greedy fascists. Hatred for America and honest Americans may be 30% or so, but it’s mostly greed and fascism.
For over 40 ears I have watched Jerry Brown and his communists turn CA into a 3rd world s—hole. If I ever get out of here I will NEVER tell anyone I am from this place. Even though not every Californian is a passive-aggressive arrogant condescending leftwing sh-thead, I can understand why the rest of the country hates Californians. A lot of us in the interior do too.
I understand that sometimes it is difficult to move away from the state of your birth. But, to live every day in that mess… difficult to understand why anybody would continue to submit themselves to that.
I have elderly in-laws and I cannot leave. Im trapped until they die.
We are by far the wealthiest state in the union! We have the most robust economy of the 50 states, now surpassing France as the world’s 5th largest economy!! I’ll take Cali with her troubles, over any mid-America sh***ole, like Alabama or Louisiana! We want to leave the union, and Washington and oregon will come with us! You keep the debt, we keep our freedom!!
No, you will have to take your share of the debt.
:-)
Of course, we are honest! We owe 1/50th of the $25,000,000,000,000 debt, but our economy produced a GDP of $4.5 trillion annually! Good luck paying off your end Mississippi and Alabama!
You ain’t going nowhere, fool. This was discussed in the 1860’s, remember?
You are a fool to think that you can stop us! We are FREE, remember!! Or, did you decided that freedom is only for idiots like yourself? Anywho, you don’t have the guts to fight another civil war, you’d lose!
You aren’t free, you’re a slave to a failed ideology. All the true California patriots east of I-5 would overwhelm your smarmy liberal island in about two hours. And don’t forget, there are still plenty of them within the Bay Area.
“You keep the debt, we keep our freedom!!”
Ah but how will you pay for all those federal welfare recipients sending remittances to Mexico?
You get assessed per capita, so count your residents! Also, we’re keeping the military bases and all the red counties.
Why would “Honest Don” hide its comments? Are you Russian? Or are you embarrassed by your trolling history? Or would you get caught telling lies?
How’s your pension funding and your poverty rate?
How fast can you make it happen?
President Trump 2020!
Crooked Hillary 20 to Life!
America first!
Born and raised in Palo Alto. My parents grew up there during the depression years.Much of my Dad’s family still lives in Northern Calif. – I don’t live there anymore (moved to Utah) and as much as I love my hometown- I can never return. I would pluck my eyebrows out in frustration everyday I had to drive down El Camino. Great post. Spot on. My brother in Clovis – was hit by a car on his bike by a “unidentified person” and the police really just looked the other way… “we won’t be able to find him.” It is a tragedy of epidemic proportions.
I lived near LA from 80 – 87, working for Rockwell. It was beautiful – the mountains, the beaches. The nuts were running LA, but Orange County was still mostly conservative. And we threw it away. I’ll never go back.
The Big OC is now 30% foreign born, and the prediction is that it will vote for the D’Rat Presidential nominee in 2020 for the first time ever. This is what unlimited immigration, legal and illegal does.
Welcome to Calizuela.
Shoot the dog. You’ll feel better about your world.
Overrun by Mexicans and Central Americans. Nuff said.
We have been here almost 20 years and are elated to be leaving California behind in less than 100 days after my daughter graduates from high school. Most of our wealthy California neighbors will also be exiting the state in retirement. Hopefully the rest of the country can learn from California’s failed liberal policies.
They made their bed.
If you got homeless in your town, buy them a one way ticket to California. Looks like they have a system for them.
As someone who grew up on California’s Central Coast, my only recommendation to Dr. Hanson and to others who live in California is to get out as quickly and as soon as possible. It’s hard to imagine living there, but the rest of the world doesn’t look like California.
Somebody is buying all that expensive real estate in California. Who? Why?
Chinese because they are just as much a bunch of suckers as we are.
Look up “The Greater Fool Theory.”
Why?
Because we can.
Who?
Educated and skilled voters.
This is one reason the upper tier in CA has enabled the out of control immigration of the last 35 years. Population growth pushes up land prices, which benefits earlier land owners and those rich enough to become new land owners. But that trend kills off a good deal of the middle class, and is hellish on renters.
Meanwhile, in the open sewer that is San Francisco…
“More and more, it seems, San Franciscans need to watch where they step. And they’re not imagining things: There’s been an explosion in complaints about needles and feces on the streets and sidewalks.
Reports of improperly discarded syringes have jumped 41 percent since last fiscal year, according to a recent city controller’s report. Complaints about feces have increased by 39 percent, with every district seeing a rise in the calls.”
from “Complaints of syringes and feces rise dramatically in SF” (www. sfgate. com/ bayarea/ article/ Complaints-of-syringes-human-waste-rise-10459969.php)
Let’s see..
Millions of people live there and they discovered 300 poops?
Doesn’t sound like much.
“District 6, which includes downtown and the crime-stricken Tenderloin neighborhood, saw the highest number of complaints for both feces and needles.
Almost half (7,509) of all the human waste found across the city was reported and 5,811 needles were also discarded there.”
from “The disgusting streets of San Francisco: Explosion in complaints of feces and syringes across city as homeless epidemic grows” (www. dailymail. co. uk/ news/ article-3897480/ Explosion-complaints-feces-syringes-San-Francisco-streets-city-s-homeless-epidemic-grows.html#ixzz57keUGiSQ)
A predicted outcome, overridden by the delusional regimes of Gavin Newsom and others.
If ocean coastal living is living is your thing it’s either the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific. They all have their drawbacks. California’s are becoming ever more evident.
California doesn’t have mosquitoes or rain.
It’s better.
When it does rain it pours with all ‘ell breaking out because we ain’t used to it. Where did you find the mosquito-less areas? I haven’t found one yet.
I remember Willows.
Mosquitos were like hummingbirds.
I’ll take the mosquitoes and the rain and the snow. You can have your insane government, illegals, mud slides, earthquakes, and droughts.
Don’t forget run-away wildfires too.
No just illegals and debt.
Hey, Hanson..?
Fresno, Bakersfield and yes, Stockton, are all Republican right wing regions..
And yes, those areas are poorly governed and poor compared to the more left wing regions of California….
Fresno, Bakersfield, and yes, Stockton, need to vote for their own best interests instead of listening to you, Hanson…and you actually know it.
And what is it in Mr. Hanson’s article that seems to not be in the best interests of the citizens of Fresno, Bakersfield, and, yes, Stockton? When state government pushes crap down your throat it might be difficult for local municipalities to regurgitate it back up.
And people wonder why ‘the rest of us’ shudder and run in the opposite direction every time someone holds CA up as the shining example to follow. No thank you. I wish the CA ‘immigrants’ in my fine state would find somewhere else to pontificate, too.
The dynamic that Dr. Hanson describes is a now a national phenomenon. While awaiting my case to be adjudicated for a license plate infraction; my plates had expired and my new sticker had been issued but not yet received by me, I watched other cases that were brought to the bench. While I and other white folk were exposed to the full rigor of the law for our respective infractions; the Mexican immigrants were quietly excused and sent on their way. This will end. If it is not addressed in an manner that reflects similar levels of accountability by all, the country will move farther to the right. Donald Trump may be seen by future voters as a moderate.
It’s been incremental creeping destruction for the last 50 years, now spilling out into the rest of the country.
I have been reading Dr. Hanson’s work for more than a decade. Knowing his family came to California and struggled through the Great Depression, famines, bad farm economies etc., and then to see this is where everything now lays, one can hear the sadness in his voice. This, America, is your country…… driven into the ground by power-hungry phony progressives and the hordes from latin america.
Just some demographic facts from the Census
Whites are the Minority in California now. A fact celebrated by Democrats. In 2010. Census.. Whites were 40% of the population. and hispanics were 38% of the population. Given another Decade of Demographics..trends, of white middle classes fleeing California, and illegal and legal Mexicans entering and having 3 kids per household… By 2020, then next census, Those numbers will have probably flipped further to 37% white and 43% hispanics. Just 1 out of 3 Californians will be white.
For perspective..in 1970.. there were about 15 million whites that were 80% of the Population in California. and about 2.5 million hispanics were 10% of the population.. Now 50 year later there about 16.5 million whites and 18 million hispanics.
Nobody voted for this… To be invaded and overrun by another nation.. Mexico?
A country with no borders is not a country.
Well I would say that it’s time to run them back out of the country. None of them have any rights to be here or to government benefits or anything else. They have the right to be treated humanely and to a Happy Meal on the bus back home. That’s it.
Gee, weren’t they here before we were?
No, they weren’t. Educate yourself.
Looks like you need the education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun%C3%ADpero_Serra
If you don’t understand the difference between Spanish and Mexican, then you need the education much more.
So you concede we were the immigrants. Maybe you should read B. Traven’s “The Ghost Ship” for more insight on the plight of immigrants and stop blowing smoke.
Well the Incas used to sacrifice people and the Spaniards killed them and made them feudal serfs which is why they all speak Spanish and name their babies Maria and worship Catholic Jesus instead of sacrificing people to some cloud god to keep the rain falling and the goats from dying. Uncle Sam didn’t come around until well after that and he paid those who preferred to remain Mexican citizens.
Gosh, you’re right. We are civilized and sophisticated. We don’t make human sacrifices to the gods. Instead we subject our kids to attack by assault weapons in school. If they survive that, we send them off to fight and die in one of our many endless wars.
Sounds like a great justification for importing millions of third world latinos who don’t know how to live in a developed country. We don’t send off anyone who didn’t enlist. AR-15 isn’t an assault rifle.
I didn’t concede we’re immigrants because I’m not an immigrant and never was an immigrant.
Your reading comprehension is super bad. Are you an illegal?
.
I conceded that you’re such a retarded proggie that you can’t differentiate between Spaniards and Mexicans. Probably you just hate Hispanics for some reason.
That’s racist.
Any illegals should go the hell home. If other immigrants find themselves in some ‘plight’ here, they’re welcome to go the hell home too.
OK, you were born here. Where were your ancestors born? Regardless of where you were born, your unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks show what you are.
My ancestors were mostly born here. My Mom’s family is all DAR. One of my great great grandmothers was brought here from Africa; I can’t prove it but I’m pretty sure no one asked her if she wanted to come. Some other ancestors were from other places, but none were criminal illegals and none mooched off American taxpayers once they got here.
You seem triggered because I pointed out your racism. You’re better off without hating others who are different from you. Try to work on that.
You seem triggered by misreading something I wrote. My point was that the white Californians were once immigrants and that there were Spanish and Mexican and First Nations folk here before them. The folks who are opposed to immigration now were once immigrants or their ancestors were. Notable case in point: the Trump family and the Trump in-laws who got here through chain migration.
If you really want to get into my status, my mom has an ancestor who was a bugle boy in the Revolutionary War. Mom could have joined DAR but she did not like their politics and snobbery. My dad was part First Nations (Cherokee). So, get off your high horse and stopped getting off on accusing others of racism. It doesn’t add to the discussion.
When California joined the United States in 1846, there were an estimated 45,000 people living here. Two thirds of them were Native Americans. Of the other third, about half of them were Anglos coming in from the rest of the U.S., and about half of them were Mexicans. Now of those Mexicans, it must be pointed out that most of them were descended from the Spanish (white Europeans) who controlled California until 1821, when Mexico got independence from Spain. So California was only part of Mexico for 25 years. But really, in 1846, the vast territory was virtually uninhabited.
By 1850, thanks to the Gold Rush, the population in California had exploded to over 120,000, nearly all of them white Europeans, and the population of Chinese laborers was greater than the population of Mexicans. By 1860, California’s population had swollen to 380,000, by 1870, over a half-million. Nearly all of them were white. California’s ethnic demographics did not change, despite the population swelling into the tens of millions, until the 1960’s, and it didn’t significantly begin to change until the 1980’s. The vast, vast majority of Mexicans in California are recent arrivals.
Moreover, the migrations to California from Latin America over the past 50 years or so have primarily come from Southern Mexico, or, for that matter, increasingly from nations in Central America. Many of them don’t even speak Spanish, they speak languages indigenous to Chiapas, or Oaxaca, etc. To say that California is historically part of Mexico is accurate, but based on historical facts that don’t amount to much when examined closely.
The primary tragedy of California’s ethnic politics is not the presence of Mexicans, or Latin Americans, or Asians. The tragedy is the race-baiting Marxists who purport to speak for them, and control California’s state legislature.
I was following you pretty closely until I got to the part about “race-baiting Marxists.” Huh? I’ve been in California nearly 50 years, and while I have certainly seen Marxists run for office I am unaware of any who were elected to anything other than the Berkeley city council. Tom Hayden wasn’t a Marxist. Villaraigosa isn’t one. Who are you talking about?
Hollywood – I’ll revise my comment. While it wasn’t entirely hyperbolic to characterize these folks as Marxists, that term is too loaded to be used flippantly. So I’ll put it this way: Many, not all, but many (definitely a super-majority) of the elected officials who purport to speak for California’s ethnic voters are race-baiting puppets of a coalition comprised of left-wing oligarchs, leftist environmentalist extremists, and public sector unions who pursue a far left political agenda.
Thanks for clarifying. I thought that (as usual) I’d missed something important. Now, I can sleep better.
I live in CA. Hit and run? DUI? Sex crime? I keep a rough score, unscientific. Illegals way off the chart.
Google “LAPD Most Wanted”.
VDH is a college professor. He understates.
What the democrats don’t quite understand is that obvious falsehoods are the way they will lose their majority. We are not there yet, but when the tipping point is reached, they will tip. And there will be hell to pay.
President Winfrey and Vice-President Clooney will offer recycled broken glass for embedding atop your perimeter walls.
Oh sure an attention-starved fattie and a drunk offering up solutions for us all.
Would never live there!!
But a heck of a lot of people there vote for the commie Democrats!
Including millions of criminal illegals.
Honestly, Dr. Hanson, I don’t understand why you don’t move away. Lake Tahoe is really nice.
My son worked at the hospital in South Lake Tahoe. He treated many, many heroin overdoses.
Yes, they have two seasons, August and winter.
Dr. Hanson is right on the money. Since the 1960s, the left has transformed from anti-establishment freedom loving hippies to cradle-to-grave fascists controlling every facet of one’s life (except for illegal immigrant aliens). The parasites running our school districts, cities, counties and the State are intentionally drowning the State with third-world filth for pure political power. This isn’t going to end well.
I recall coming across the Los Angeles teachers union newsletter on the Internet several years ago. The edition that I read was gushing with enthusiasm over the many teachers who had organized their classrooms to attend the annual gay pride parade. The first photo of this wonderful happening was of a lesbian elementary school teacher waving to her students with her ‘partner’ as they sat on the top of the backseat of a convertible wearing their “Buck Fush” tee-shirts. Another article bemoaned the decline in civil discourse… You can’t make this stuff up.
I’m looking forward to the day when the last actual taxpayer moves out of California. Or maybe, before then, the coastal Californians will finally agree that a wall really is necessary–to keep the taxpayers from leaving.
Coastal California will never agree that a Wall or any kind of border security is important or even necessary. Stoned people, left over hippies still looking for John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and limousine liberal elites like Feinstein, Boxer, Harman, and Pelosi are united in their desire to destroy the country with their brand of warped political ideology.
The sad thing is, I don’t think they think they’re destroying the country.
That’s because they don’t live with the impact of their repulsive ideologies.
As a small business owner in CA, I can assure you that this state is flat out hostile to businesses. The lawyers-turned-legislators that run this state (into the ground) think that every business is sitting on a pot of gold they acquired by screwing their employees and customers. Looking to escape, hard to leave the beauty and great weather.
The U.S. is filled with many, manty places of great beauty and quite a few places with great weather. At some point in time, peace of mind and sanity has to count for something.
Wait until the day you sell your business. The escrow company is required to send your proceeds to the State Board of Equalization and held while they scrutinize your entire life to determine if there are any unpaid tax bills, liens, child support payments, alimony, parking tickets and anything else they can find to confiscate your money. And they will take their sweet time doing it. I would get out now before they impose an exit tax. After all, you didn’t build that, did you?
Thank you for putting into real words what most of us have been suspecting for quite some time. I remember when California used to be some place real special. Now, gangs openly wear their colors at Disneyland and the company doesn’t seem to care that it’s “other customers” are bothered by this.
Some would argue that Californians can do whatever they want even if they destroy their economy, health, and decent way of life. I argue that California has the right to commit suicide but it doesn’t have the right to take the rest of us with it. Please consider moving and ceasing to “normalize” their “abnormal.”
When you combine this article with the current stories on San Francisco’s needles and feces everywhere, it appears as though the entire state (outside of gated communities) has become a progressive’s dream come true, and everyone else’s nightmare.
What a sad story.
Dr Hanson needs to sell and move out. The state obviously sucks and is irredeemably lost.
I think he lives on or near family land. His family has long roots in the area.
Hanson does have family land. He needs to get out now while he can still sell it. Unless you’ve lived in Commiefornia you have no idea how radically far left it has become. I see an “exit tax” coming soon.
I remember when I worked abroad but still had my California drivers license… A state tax board representative told me I need to pay taxes even if I live on the moon.
I am no longer a state resident.
He is a fellow at Hoover Institution. Usually this sort of position requires you to live “near by.”
I have great respect for those willing to stay and fight for what should be theirs without question. I hope he and other honest citizens can get Cali turned around.
It is chilling that what was once known as The Golden State has regressed to the point of resembling a 3rd world country. One assumes progress is the natural order; disintegration of a civil society is so unexpected as to be freakish. It comes down to Dr. Hanson’s assertion that the liberal coast rules the conservative inland. And doesn’t give one single damn about them.
Can you say “failed state?” If California didn’t have the movie business and the tech corridor, it would long since have been eligible for U.N. Supervision. Everything in the article is true.
This is not so much about understanding the California mind, but understanding the progressive mind when it gets control of government.
This is precisely why normal, traditional, patriotic Americans must actively fight against Progressivism. This is their idea of “progress”, and they mean to gradually inflict it on the rest of the country.
All one has to do to let the weeds take over the garden is nothing.
I used to live in California and still have a few family and friends who live there. It amazes me how willfully blind they are to what has happened to them and the state. While you step around garbage and excrement, they talk about the weather. They act as if the astronomical rents and real estate prices, which makes people with $200K in household income poor, are an accomplishment to be proud. As they bar their windows and alarm their cars in reaction to the ever present creep of property crime and theft, they natter on about gun control and how they need to release inmates from their prisons. I can not imagine what is going to happen once pot is recreationally legal. I have great memories of living there. I am glad I left when I did.
I would hope that if they ever get to vote on the CalExit proposal, that it wins. Go, California, leave the union, Please, GO!
That’s pretty hard on the big red part of the state. Let’s say farewell ONLY to the coastal crazies (while keeping our military bases and ports).
If they forcibly secede so as to take the whole state and our military bases/ports, then we should go in with extreme prejudice and massive military might to rectify the situation.
> Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?
For their sake I hope the answer is yes and yes.
Our state is desperately dysfunctional and the sooner the crockery is broken apart the sooner the shards have a chance to return to normalcy. We need three, maybe four states, boundaries on major waterways and mountain watershed lines. Seriously.
Mexico del Norte. Mexico has successfully ‘out-sourced’ a large part of their poverty north ( and recieves compensation with massive remittances south ). Anchor babies and those of the 1986 amnesty along with white leftists now run the state. The state is awash in illegal immigrants and spends something north of $20 bil per year on services for them. CA has become more like Mexico than the US. Mexico del Norte.
VDH lives just up the road from me. His stark portrayal of how we live here in California Appalachia is spot on. An illegal in a neighboring town driving illegally killed an entire family with her car. She is still driving around this tiny rural town. For me personally, I am so frustrated by how the young illegals are so arrogant and entitled. If you speak about ‘law of the land’, they sneer at you. This is no way to live. Unfortunately, I’m 72 years old with limited ability to get out of here. If I could, I would be gone in a heartbeat. It’s the only solution I see, because this hell hole is never going to improve.
Just keep giving tax dollars to the world’s poor and make American kids suffer. They don’t deserve affordable college.
Taxes are higher than when I went to college in the early 90s and I only paid $21/unit. They don’t deserve that.
Who can argue with this article? Goodbye California. You were truly amazing.
I’m a conservative, 40 years in Silicon Valley, an intellectual, w/ considerable success from merit. What most people would think describes a progressive leftie. Not so. Let me tell you a bit more about what the left has done here in California:
Income disparity in the Bay Area is equal to that of Guatemala. Normally that’s a topic of the left. But here it is a product of the left. 30-40 years ago there were tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs here, service jobs tending that manufacturing base. Those folks were economically middle class, maybe lower middle class. Enter the left and it’s NIMBY’s; there are NO such jobs anymore (they were dirty and didn’t generate enough tax revenue) and the middle class has been driven out. What is here are high paid STEM engineers (of which I was one) and their gardeners, day laborer’s, house cleaners, and waitresses, living 8, 10, 12 or more adults in run down 2 bedroom apartments.
Simply put, active government discrimination against a class of people and their livelihoods it isn’t right.
NIMBism, from the perspective of a homeowner around here is perfectly understandable: It’s a beautiful place to live and you’d rather not see it be turned into an unwashed armpit like Los Angeles. So stop the world and put it all in amber like some prehistoric bug. The result is things are still very beautiful around here, but now the dirt under our perfectly ordinary tract housing costs 6-8 million per acre. Nancy Pelosi could afford to buy whatever house she wants but hardly anyone else can.
Voting power. Dr. Hansen touches upon this but let me expand on that a bit: The coast has the people and they control all the elective power in the state. Inland… it’s not screw them, it’s who? Where? Those folks don’t exist. Election law was changed a few years back so the real election occurs in early June with a run off in November of the two leading names from May. They call the later event The Election. It isn’t. The election occurs in May. My congressional district has, according to the experts, a 0.001% chance of electing a Republican. I’m not exaggerating there. As a registered Republican I cannot select my preferred party member from a slate of party members, voted on by party members, to represent my interests in the regular election. It’s an open ballot to all comers (no proof of identity required). And so there will always be two Democrats selected in May that go into the November runoff. It’s the same for all state-wide offices. Seeing as I cannot self-associate with like minded people and put forward a candidate of our own choosing — even tho we know they will lose — I don’t bother voting anymore for elective offices in this state. IOW, we can vote for anyone so long as they are a Democrat. Even the wacko granola and nuts parties that are far more marginalized than we Republicans are offended by this.
Schools. My kids attended a nationally high ranked high school. The head of the history department — Teacher of the year on year — is so far left she handed out an assignment that was, essentially, explain the war crimes committed by the United States for dropping the bomb on Japan in 1945. The skew to the far left kids get is astounding. US History was a course on intersectionality.
It WAS a great place to live. It still LOOKS great and if you have the right skills it is a great place to make good money. But fair? Not a chance.
My condolences. What a tragedy wrought by demented ideology.
Like Venezuela, California will grow worse before it has the chance to get better.
It’s not simply that we have different world views though. It’s that the left has become insane and is sinking ever more deeply into it. This is sanity versus insanity. Not simply different views of reality.
Here’s an excerpt from an interesting article I saw on “real clear politics” called “The Gay Rights Movement Is Undoing Its Best Work” by Andrew Sullivan. Every day I see articles like this on Real Clear Politics. What does this mean? It means the left has become insane and since the Democratic Party is the Party of the left it certainly makes sense to avoid voting Democratic.
“As many of us saw our goals largely completed and moved on, the far left filled the void. The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. They have no desire to seem “virtually normal”; they are contemptuous of “respectability politics” — which means most politics outside the left. Above all, they have advocated transgenderism, an ideology that goes far beyond recognizing the dignity and humanity and civil equality of trans people into a critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.” I would be shocked if this sudden lurch in the message didn’t in some way negatively affect some straight people’s views of gays.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/sullivan-the-gay-rights-movement-is-undoing-its-best-work.html
real clear politics is two thirds consecutive. I suggest you broaden your op-ed reading.
I suggest you learn to spell before telling me what to read.
This is an interesting and very accurate post. I too live in the Silicon Valley and have for a long time. There is a lot of beauty here. The restrictions on building has both enriched those of us who are long time residents and kept out many others. So for some of us long timers it is quite nice, though the traffic is getting tough. There’s nothing fair about it, and you can bet plenty of local politicians and urban planners have benefited from this. It’s tough on the young, largely minority, especially if you don’t have parents who are local homeowners who’ll one day leave you the old place.
California need to split along roughly diagonal line, starting at the Pacific between Del Norte and Humboldt counties and ending at Nevada border between Inyo and San Bernardino counties.
Expell all the liberals from Fresno, Mono and Alpine counties (don’t need their civic pollution).
Now since there already is a State of Washington, call the resulting North-East state State of Trump.
Join the Union as State of Trump.
Build a wall between the two.
Get popcorn.
Enjoy the show.
Divide California into two states: East California, inhabited by entrepreneurs, libertarians and conservatives;
West☭California, infested by Marxists, hippies and assorted fruits & nuts. Their U.S. Senators will balance out each other.
Yes, except “East California” should be called “Trump”.
Welcome to the Third World, California.
Liberals have trashed the USA and romanticized Third World Socialist sh!tholes for so long, they now own one.
I’ve said for years that the only people in CA who have to obey the law are those with bank accounts, property or some asset attachable by the government. Everybody else just does as they please without repercussion.
Dr Hanson’s colleague at National Review, Kevin Williamson, wrote an excellent piece a couple of days ago that sum up the failure of the FBI in Florida and big government in general:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/florida-shooting-fire-fbi-chief-christoper-wray
This is why that we Americans, as a prosperous society, long encouraged home ownership, civic involvement, and assimilation. People who have some skin in the game make better citizens. People who have nothing to lose have no commitment to preserving, protecting, and perpetuating the American way of life. And this is why identity politics is so corrosive and destabilizing to our country. In 2014, when foreign actors were reportedly attempting mischief in America, the Obama Administration was focused on allowing men and boys to use the ladies restroom and vice versa; President Obama was more concerned with gay marriage than with protecting America. Mass insanity among the elitists.
I respect and admire VDH. I read his articles faithfully. I watch him on Youtube. However, I don’t think he is a very good driver.
Spot on
Here’s an example I just read about over the weekend from the WSJ which is a good example of why I believe the conservative side is the sane side in our society.
The Wall Street Journal has a good article ( in the Review section, Feb. 17-18, 2018 ) by a law professor at the University of a Pennsylvania Law School. Her name is Amy Wax and she got into a great deal of trouble for writing an op-ed with another professor last year about our loss of cultural values.
Here’s what they wrote: “Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plaques inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.”
Here’s what they said should be done to fix this disaster: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”
For writing this and for saying that some cultures are more functional than others they were vigorously condemned as white supremacists and Nazis by most other professors and administrators. No denying the left ( half the country ) has become quite insane and is sinking ever more deeply into it. Does America even still exist as a country?
She’s a brave lady. She does good work and gets attacked viciously for doing so.
A good example though of how distressingly insane the left has become. So now what? Where do we go from here? No denying our society is now sailing in uncharted waters. Time will tell what fate has in store for us.
It’s too bad this isn’t easily available for everyone to read!
That’s how people were when I was a child!
America has become too PC and aetheist!
God help us all.
You can find out more about Amy Wax by just doing a search for her name. The article from Heterodox Academy is a good example. One of the professors who criticized her explains why he did so. He gets pounded in the comments below the article. There are also good articles on “Real Clear Politics” about this situation pretty much every day.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/i-dont-care-if-amy-wax-is-politically-incorrect-i-do-care-that-shes-empirically-incorrect/
Seems to me the left has become insane and is waging a race war against white people. Certainly an unfortunate development but it sure could be worse. If we were a defenseless minority like the Jews in Europe or rich landowners in China when Mao took over we’d really be in trouble. As it is, there are quite a few of us here, quite well armed plus we do have many allies among “people of color.” I have many Vietnamese and Hispanic friends who do not see me as a white devil oppressor. They sure would not be fighting on the side of the hate whitey left.
The best advice to the oppressed United States citizens who have, by an accident of birth, ended up living in California, is, “Go east, young man or woman, go east.” And do it quickly. Because even if you only work in California for a few days out of your entire working life, the State of California WILL collect taxes on a portion of your retirement benefits for the rest of your life. Leave the Third World behind and move east.
Here in NC they refuse to release pictures of wanted murderers and never release a name unless it is a white sounding name
Much as U empathize, for years, with Dr. Hanson’s essays; he needs to write about how he can see applying Alinskyite principles to his situation.
Victor, time to go. Many other States will welcome you.
Keep the property. After the inevitable collapse, you can return.
Since he’s a fellow at Hoover he probably can’t leave and keep the position.
Where to? What’s your recommendation?
My husband and I left in 2004. Best decision we ever made.
Chicago, a Sanctuary City, is just as crazy as California as are many other areas of the country.
A couple of years ago I read that millionaires are fleeing from Chicago because they fear crime and race riots. I told a Vietnamese friend at work ( in Chicago ) about this and he said if he was a rich white guy he’d go to Asia to live because white people are respected in Asia and they’re not here.
I don’t know what I’d do if I was rich but it sure does seem that our whole society is rapidly unraveling. Last week I was talking to a Mexican friend at work about how dangerous Juarez ( right across the border from El Paso ) is. He said he was in Juarez about five years ago and he was surprised to see so many people from all over the world there just waiting for a chance to sneak across the border.
If it was like that then on the Texas border just imagine what it’s like now on the California border now that California is a Sanctuary State which is, in effect, telling them that once they make it across the border they’ll be protected and safe from deportation. A truly disastrous situation.
Well.. The same could be said of the Trump family… They too live in an ivory Trump Tower and shuttle back and forth in their private plane and limos.. And yet for some reason, the author ignores all the activities that Trump has taken on this issue.. Go figure? Who would you prefer to deal with the realities of immigration, someone with decades of experience dealing with the issues from her ‘palatial mansion’ or someone whose whole world experience seems to be eating cheeseburgers in bed and watching FOX News during his ‘executive time’?
So, can we start calling California a sh–hole?
Please listen to this podcast on CA by David Crane… https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-state-of-the-golden-state/id1215059384?i=1000400718327&mt=2
It guess it’s too late in that state for Rudy Giuliani’s “Broken Windows” theory.
If chain migration and the visa Lottery aren’t banned, illegal aliens from everywhere will be allowed to flood our borders and create another DACA! Soon, all Americans will be in the minority!
DemoncRATS want the illegal votes in November in hopes of gaining seats in Congress!
Their main agenda is to undermine and harm our duly elected President!
Thank God for President Trump!
America First!
NBC no less…
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Diseased-Streets-472430013.html
well VDH I have been reading you for what now? 40 years? the question I have is are you now or will you ever be ready to pick up your musket and do something besides whine. This is what it will take. You at least i think are woke enough to actually understand that. Yeah we will have to come up with something better than the militia model to defeat the cathedral but we’re smart white guys we will if we can can screw up the courage to pledge out lives and sacred honor. currently 99% of “conservatives” are not even willing to be called racists.You write a lot about the hispanics But I can tell you theres all sorts of other problem groups in other parts of the nation. The sad fact is the left decided decades ago race was the model that would work best in the USA and eventually the entire west. They exploit the racial difference in ability and temperament to entice the non whites (and any other group they can atomize) into a war on whites. This makes any resistance a de facto race war, or at least subject to being easily interpreted as such. The real enemies the brains of the outfit are half whites and half the jewish commies or the seventh generation iteration of them that indoctrinated the good whites into this insanity because well good whites wann do good and jews want whats best for the jews . So yeah its an ugly mess and no one wants to think about let alone discuss candidly whats going on. And what it would take to undo it well its pretty much a bloody racially tinged civil war. It didnt have to be but cucks wouldnt deal with this 50 years ago 30 years ago 15 years ago so now we have 40% of the nation hostile non whites, and several generation brainwashed into self loathing.
There’s nothing morally wrong with whites even mixed ethnicity whites like americans having their own nations, in fact its an existential necessity, that the left clearly understands about other races.No ones being put into camps theyre being asked to go home and if they dont leave being shown the door. Stop wasting your breath telling carefully crafted polite racist anecdotes we all get it who are capable of getting it. start normalizing armed revolution or whatever 4G warfare might be a better tactic.