California Is Demonstrating the Other Path
Ruin, accelerating, in an atmosphere of celebration.
We have two political futures to choose between, sadly, though I continue to argue that we need cultural reorientation before we can implement meaningful and sustainable course corrections through the instrument of politics. But, broadly, the choice is Trump or Newsom, MAGA or California. And California is doing its very best to show us how incredibly sad and shoddy the latter choice really is. The state is trapped in a long decline, the seriousness of which is not well understood.
My point isn’t to talk about California; my point is to discuss the effects of the 21st century American “progressive” worldview, a grab bag of moral and intellectual retardation that produces ruin with the efficiency of a bomb. If you see what California is doing, you’ll see what America looks like if we follow Rosa DeLauro and Hakeem Jeffries off the cliff.
The Golden State is a harbinger, not an isolated case. Across the country in Massachusetts, a state senator is proposing to cap the number of miles that residents of the state will be allowed to drive every year, with financial penalties for travel that government officials regard as excessive. The progressive mind virus is everywhere. But single-party-rule California concentrates the dose of the poison, making its effects clearest. It’s a laboratory of woke policy.
My argument is not that the Republican Party is offering us a bright future against the dimming future offered by the functionally insane American left. With federal debt nearing $37 trillion, Congressional Republicans are running away in fear from a whopping $9 billion in proposed DOGE rescissions. Democrats are deranged, while Republicans are mostly a void. And I agree with the criticism that the Big Beautiful Bill creates way more debt, offsetting some spending cuts with big increases in military and border spending. We need to cut federal spending, and we’re not doing it.
Nevertheless, to borrow from Buck Turgidson, it is necessary now to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, post-MAGA environments. The California path, the progressive path, is unmistakably a path to the most dire state of ruin.
Think of California as a house, and you’re the inspector who’s been hired to check on its condition. Everywhere you look, everywhere, you find rot. The roof, the walls, the plumbing, the chimney, the HVAC, the wiring, the foundation: everything is failing. You can start analyzing the structure at any randomly chosen point, because every. single. thing. EVERY SINGLE THING. All of it, every part, is entering the condition of structural failure.
Start with the state’s public schools to see the pattern. A well-executed May 23 news story quotes Lance Christensen, a vice-president at the conservative California Policy Center, and pay close attention to the numbers:
Christensen’s warning of the system’s collapse is supported by the inversion of the age distribution of students by grade over the past ten years. In the 2014-2015 academic year, there were 511,985 kindergarteners and 496,901 12th graders, with the comparatively higher number of kindergarteners indicating slight population growth.
In the 2024-25 academic year, there are now 365,002 kindergarteners and 488,295 12th graders, indicating rapid demographic decline.
During the current school year, 5.81 million California residents were enrolled in TK-12 schools, with a budget of $119.5 billion, or about $20,568 per student, in state funding.
During 2019-20, 6.16 million TK-12 students were enrolled in schools, with a budget of $103.4 billion, or about $16,786 per student, in state funding.
The schools are shriveling, but becoming more expensive. That’s California. That’s all the things.
The story blames demographic decline — people having fewer children — and there are economic factors driving some of the implosion. (And if you look at the decline for Santa Clara County, remember that they were some of the most brutal Covidians in the country, and the place became a prison.) But the bigger problem is net outmigration, the frantic departure of people who can leave. Families are fleeing California:
In the face of that harsh decline, California policymakers are forbidding parental notification policies and fighting to ensure that public schools can facilitate secret gender transitions for children, hiding transgender identity from parents — consistent with a policy of secret birth control, secret abortions, and secret STD treatment for 12 year-olds:
The dumbest state legislator in America, Dr. Corey Jackson DSW (whose dissertation was 56 pages of cut-and-paste boilerplate), proudly authored the successful bill to prevent “book bans” in schools, guaranteeing young children unbroken access to sexually explicit curricular materials and library books and protecting the right of sexy 8 year-olds to learn about hot blowjobs:
Meanwhile, the state is fiercely defending the right of biological males to compete in high school sports as girls:
Endless anti-family, anti-child policies. Proud declarations of sexualized K-12 experiences. Degradation as policy: secret birth control for 12 year-olds. And the results don’t change the policy course. Schools implode, learning declines, families flee, and California is wonderfully proud.
See this clearly: Everything that breaks is a declared as a victory. Screenshots below, but click this link to play the video, with upbeat music playing over a message about a huge success:
The fire that closed PCH happened in early January. The road re-opened in late May. HELL YEAH CALIFORNIA KNOWS HOW TO GET IT DONE BABY. But look closer at the image the governor of California uses to illustrate his celebratory message:
Let’s play Star Trek: Computer, enhance!
Ruined neighborhoods. Whole communities wiped off the map. Huge success! High five! “In California, we get stuff done — period.” Gavin Newsom is the personification of playing chess with a pigeon, the reason the comparison was invented: He knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board, and struts around like he won the game. It’s his entire performance. Big pieces of Southern California are just gone, burned to the soil, and they aren’t coming back any time soon. The governor just posted an image of one of those ruined places as, you couldn’t make this up if you tried, an example of California’s success.
Any example of this dynamic that you can find at the state level — ruin, accelerating, in an atmosphere of celebration — shows up all over the local level. Facing a billion-dollar deficit, the Los Angeles City Council just rejected the annual budget proposal from Mayor Karen Bass, finding it too right-wing, and instead voted for a progressive budget that limits public safety spending and preserves aggressive spending on the homelessness programs that have been an obvious grift. Correctly, the Los Angeles Times describes this choice as evidence that Los Angeles is turning hard to the left, sidelining the few moderates on the council.
You can watch recent footage of a distraught Hollywood resident screaming at Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, a former labor union organizer who is most proud of his efforts to shore up LA’s status as a sanctuary city, after transients squatting in an abandoned building burned it down. And you can watch footage of one of the council moderates blasting the madness of the new budget:
But you can’t find signs of a course correction, because no course correction is coming. The decline is baked in, everywhere, and the people who are causing it are proud of their work.
That future is available to the whole country, if you want it.
I moved from NYC to Venice, CA, in 2013 and could sense which way the wind was blowing—that the ideological secular faith called Social Justice would sweep across the state and then across the entire country, capturing and controlling almost every upscale liberal urban brain, and that there would be no stopping it—not because I'm any kind of genius, but because I sat a few times in the back at meetings of the Venice Neighborhood Council, and watched and listened.
Here's the epiphany that hit me (I'll try to keep it short):
If someone lived in or on a box and spent their lives on a local sidewalk smoking drugs etc, this is how they were referenced (even if they were the dreaded white male): they were a victim of the evil oppressive system called Capitalism, and deserved free food, free housing, free drugs and pipes and health care, and should never be asked to move or to comply with any laws until every aspect of this system was banished globally;
But if another, different "white man" (their bete noire) walked down the same street but passed the box-denizens and entered a building where he either owned a business or worked there: he was an ipso facto evil incarnation of gentrification, imperialism, exploitation, racism and every other kind of bigotry, and deserved at best to be bled for tax money before being chased out of town.
But it wasn't necessarily the content of the beliefs that stayed with me, it was the intense moral vehemence. If anyone stood up in any way to quibble with this sacred dogma, or even mentioned that a civilized society needed businesses, jobs and (gulp) police officers, they were denounced with a frothing rage and even threats of violence, as if they were some combo of Klansmen and Dr Mengele. That's when I knew that for modern liberals, Social Justice morality was impossible to resist, that it would conquer every brain in its path, from a dope like Newsom to a dope like Biden to a dope like Kathy Hochul, with millions of dopes in between.
The Social Justice Revolution is a moral revolution, an American Lite Maoism with white men as the new kulak class, and like all prior eruptions of religious mania it will only burn out once it's burned through all it encounters. It's currently burnt through every California politico and almost every member of the Dem Party, but it still has a long way to go.
The Biden disaster might be the Social Justice Chernobyl, but it's too soon to tell and if there's one place in America that's too far gone and has irreparably rotted its brain from sucking on the ideological crack pipe, it's my new home state of Califonia. Abandon all hope ye who enter!
See also:
https://x.com/boriquagato/status/1926769805152915740
The blue zones are screaming warnings at us.