Thank God I Left California
"Free Palestine" meets Mexico
I left California in 2018 after having lived there since1968. Many were doing the same then.
I have written about this move many times in books, articles, blogs and on this Substack. The subject has started to bore me. I didn’t want to hear about California. I barely commented about the fires that were so mishandled by the state and city’s incompetent leadership.
But with the demonstrations of the last few days, the protestors blocking the 101 as I type, burning cars and pelting police, I cannot hold back.
President Trump has done the right thing calling in the National Guard. Otherwise we could have a situation much like Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots, which was and is a national disgrace with decent men going to jail and that once-great Minnesota city turned into an open air sewer .
In much bigger California the results would likely be worse. The state is on the verge, or over the verge, of being the world’s biggest asylum for the criminally insane and arguably irredeemable.
What else can one say about escalating demonstrations in favor of keeping in our country (and their state) rapists, murderers, human traffickers, sexual predators, pederasts, batterers, violent gang members and drug cartels (to name a few)?
The Democrat Party, by defending these people, is continuing to implode at warp speed. James Carville must be on the edge of heart failure. Bill Maher may have to bite the bullet and switch parties with Karin Jean-Pierre. (He’ll probably just blame Trump to save his audience.)
The leadership of California is a litany of some of the most immoral politicians in the country, every one of them a hypocritical fake: Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, Sen. Adam Schiff, Rep. Maxine Waters, and former VP Kamala Harris, among a raft of malignant narcissists in a one-party state.
As I type this, the old Fidel Castro-lover Mayor Bass is giving a press conference, predictably blaming Trump for the violence occurring in her city. The vice governor speaking after her was more honest. She bemoaned what was happening because it would provide video Trump could use endlessly to his advantage. Why wouldn’t he?
When I describe these people as “hypocritical fakes” I am joined by the redoubtable Michael Shellenberger on his Substack in The Reason the Left Loves Riots is Because It Hates Civilization:
“In wealthy neighborhoods, the law is still enforced. In poor and working-class neighborhoods, it is not. If you torch a car in Beverly Hills, you’re arrested. If you do it in East LA while shouting political slogans, you’re ‘engaging in protest.’ This two-tiered enforcement is not progressive. It is segregation by another name. It creates one set of expectations for the politically connected and another for the disposable. And in that framework, working people, especially immigrants, families, and hourly wage earners, are abandoned. They are the ones who walk their kids past open-air drug markets. They are the ones whose shops are looted and whose cars are stolen. They are the ones who call 911 and wait, and wait, and wait.”
I will go one step further, in the plainest English. I don’t think these Democrat politicians give a shit about black and brown people (even though some of them are black and brown). They only care about their own power and money.
As evidence, I submit the obvious. In all the 50 or so years I lived in LA and the few thereafter, almost all of which the Democrats were in control of the executive and the legislature, nothing changed in those communities. Compton remained Compton. East LA, East LA. Only the rhetoric got more shrill. Oh, and Maxine Waters got to live in a fancy house while her constituents suffered.
All this is again so obvious it’s almost not worth mentioning.
California is the capital of the moral narcissism that I wrote about in my 2016 book, “I Know Best.” By “moral narcissism” I meant the often large disconnect between what people claim to believe “idealistically” and the results of those beliefs. (And how they wave off those uncomfortable results and move on to the next pronouncement.)
Meanwhile these leaders got to feel good about themselves while the plebes they pretend to be helping were left to deal, basically unaided, with the real problems of life. These same leaders simultaneously fanned up what Shellenberger calls the “disposables” to their own advantage.
And you thought exploitation by the Bolsheviks and the Maoists was bad.
That is, more or less, what you are watching— taken to destructive extremes— in these new demonstrations. Today’s issue attracting the most disable of the disposables is immigration, yesterday’s George Floyd, before that BLM. What will be next? Is Antifa in the house? Who’s paying? Where’s George?
Or will the masses finally get bored with Trump and impatient with their “liberal” masters and turn on Beverly Hills and Brentwood as was feared years ago?
Glancing at the TV to my right, I see the flags of Mexico and “Free Palestine” unfurled over the 101.
As I said, thank God I left California.
While constructing a salmon pie in anticipation of my husband coming in from the barely melting fields here in northern Sweden I was simultaneously being revolted at the videos and carnage of the immigrant riots in L.A. I asked myself again how the residents of that State can continually countenance the behaviors of their leaders.
Just then a ding sounded and it was the weekly email from my brother in Utah. He and his wife teach a Sunday School class of 6 year olds each week, one member of which is a frail , semi-silent girl whose family made it to Cache Valley after a 12 year stint in a Zimbabwe refuge camp. She was born during that time. At the end of the class period my brother asked the little one if she woud like to give the closing prayer, offering that his wife would help her if she would like.
That child stood up immediately, walked to the front of the class (nowhere near his wife), folded her hands with the fingers pointed towards heaven and in a clear and resonant voice recited the Pledge of Allegiance! Isn´t it interesting (and reassuring) that a six year old whose family is in America legally, after years of incredible hardship has a deeper grasp of the deep connection to meaning and virtue of this country than those flame throwing freaks in downtown Los Angeles? We think so.
You and Schellenberger say it all here. Thank goodness for California, video cameras, and X. An eye to the future for us if we don't fight like hell at the ballot box.