California

In California, public officials now favor the lawless and deviant over the law-abiding and hardworking.

On August 15, 2022, an intersection in South Central Los Angeles fell prey to a particularly Southern Californian form of anarchy. Parked vehicles blocked the crossroad to through traffic, while inside the blockade, cars sped in tight circles, their burning tires emitting acrid smoke. Just after midnight, spectators to this “street takeover” stormed into a nearby 7-Eleven. They grabbed whatever lay closest to hand—candy, soft drinks, chips—jumped over the payment counter to get at cigarettes and lottery tickets, and pelted the lone salesclerk, cowering underneath the counter, with bananas and other items. The vandals live-streamed the mayhem from their smartphones. An hour earlier, a teenager had been fatally shot during a nearby street takeover.

I backed into a spot where I could watch both entrances of the Papa Johns Pizza parking lot, punctual for my rendezvous. To be safe, I had first taken a slow cruise through the lot, on the lookout for the telltale signs of an unmarked police car. I was here to meet someone I knew only as Smog Lady. Adam, the night manager at Autozone had given me her telephone number. Word on the street was that Smog Lady could get me a smog certificate, and thereby cut the Gordian knot of the California Department of Motor Vehicles bureaucracy.

Even in San Francisco, tolerance for sanctuary laws has reached its limit.

For the last few decades, a cabal of far-left groups have been on a mission to normalize a witch’s brew of radical public policy ideas and get a majority of Americans to accept them. This effort has been far more successful than even its advocates could have imagined, and the results can be seen throughout society, to the country’s detriment.

The problem with this mission is that reality inevitably crashes the party. Once they are implemented, such ideas are not sustainable by the laws of economics and human nature. Such is the case with sanctuary laws, which may have been popular theories when they were conceived in faculty lounges and think tanks, but only yield crime and chaos in practice.

You Won’t Believe How Many People Have Fled California

California used to be the dream destination for Americans from all over the country and people from around the world. Now, for the first time, the state is shrinking.

Once a byword for aspiration, the golden state is crumbling under the weight of ‘progressive’ ideology.

For Americans, California once looked like the future. It was a state defined by risk-taking and utopian dreaming. Yet for most Californians today, the upward mobility so central to the state’s ethos is rapidly disappearing. For decades, California was the primary destination for both other Americans and for foreign immigrants. Now, this trend has gone into reverse, with people and companies leaving the state. Population growth, already slowing over the past decade, has turned negative for the first time in modern California’s history, largely due to the state’s shrinking middle and working classes and its loss of families.

… The great westward drive that began with Lewis and Clark has been steadily rolling backward. Southern California is filled with moving trucks headed to Arizona, Texas and Nevada. Those who can afford it, fly to Florida. The Russians were here once and then the Spanish. The American presence in California was more comprehensive and lasted longer, but may one day leave sagging Wells Fargo banks and decrepit mini malls filled with sushi places and nail salons the way the Spanish left their missions.

In a blistering third year of drought, Californians have been asked to limit their indoor water usage to 55 gallons (208 litres) per person per day. It takes about 30 gallons to fill a bathtub, so forget about a deep Jacuzzi experience.

Yet in the gated communities of Calabasas and Hidden Hills – exclusive enclaves in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu – lush lawns and filled swimming pools and koi ponds make it clear that some are ignoring the rules.

So officials have created a device to take power showers away from rich and famous water hogs. A small metal disc with a pinhole drilled through the middle, it has seriously reduced the flow of water into some multimillion dollar homes.

People here call Derek Krauss the ‘water police’.