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!
My dad did three tours on submarines in WWII at least one of which was equipped with highly classified optical equipment he was trained to operate. So he had a pretty high military security clearance.
In the early 60s he rented a house on a large property that had a barn where the local communist cell rented space. The FBI asked him to attend the meetings and report any actual criminal incitement. These meetings were often run by Abbie Hoffman (who seemed to have a limitless Tavel budget given that this story occurs in Hawaii).
My dad told us about a pattern in these meetings where collaborators were planted in the audience to shout down any uncomfortable questions or dissent. Since my dad attended every meeting he saw that this function was filled from a cadre of cronies. The thing is, other people who weren’t cronies would take the cue and join in.
I think about that all the time when I see people shouted down for questioning the narrative. There’s almost nothing more unamerican than shouting down a question and we have a political party that’s proud of doing that.
Abby would have been right at home protesting lots of dumb shit. My salesman grew up with him near or in Worcester, MA. And declared him as goofy as any representative in California.
Peer pressure backed with intense moralism and the threat of ostracism is too strong for most of us to withstand. Especially if the person berating you is waving some kind of bloody shirt and/or demanding you prove your devotion to the (holy and righteous) cause.
We have two political parties proud of doing that. If you’re loudly antiwar you may become imprisoned or while journalists reporting what the gov’t wants secret is visited by the your FBI. So afraid of what the people say they hired spies, now the gov’t partners with surveillance tech lords to watch our every move.
As I recall, John Lennon mentioned in an interview in the 60s something to the effect of tithing to the Movement (probably not how he put it, but I think he referenced tithing). I suspect he bankrolled a lot of counterculture figures and their travels.
The ONLY reason we're not as far down the stupid hole as California is that we're a small state with a small, limited tax base. Otherwise the demons in Montpelier would be doing exactly the same thing. They're trying though.
Oh, and there are fewer and fewer school-age kids here, but school taxes and spending have only gone up. I've read that despite the fall in enrollment, none of the administrative staff in any school district has been got rid of.
Haha, I feel that way about a lot of CP’s comments. Didn’t know he or she was in Socal too. I love this state, but oh man, how it has been steered into decline.
Californian Sado-Malthusian governance is aggressive libertinism camouflaged for the edification of the credentialled classes.
The Californian "Highlands" too valuable to be left to natives. Local chiefs and allies from oligarchies across the world need somewhere to park the loot before the system crashes. Hence the clearances.
My guess for next targeted area is a Chicago suburb: There hasn’t been a clean out neighborhood that the elites can buy for 10 cents on the dollar. They can scoop up nice property for a pittance and rebuild their fantasy mansions, close to the city but far enough away to be serene.
Rahm kinda already got that going when he smashed the Vibrant school system, which is the generational death knell for them.
They know it too.
There’s no reason not to learn from the past, adopt the system and make it one’s own system.
A great deal of time and inefficient suffering and drama can be eliminated if people face the truth faster. Early adopters and adapters always have the edge, it’s well past prototyping into engineering and refinement.
"The Social Justice Revolution is a moral revolution, an American Lite Maoism..."
Your entire comment is great and rings true, but the quoted phrase stood out as extra-true. It is a mania of some plethora of pent-up compulsive needs that haven't been allowed an outlet for generations I think.
I have a British friend there. We were both lefties in Britain (of the old-school greater opportunity and material improvements kind). He seems to have adopted the entire progressive lingua franca now. I visited a couple of years ago and have never felt so crushed. I stood next to that highway, with trucks thundering past, reading a sign telling me that I couldn't even vape outside.
People would rather have a social life then stand for something. I was friends with a girl who moved to NYC. At first she would call to talk because she had no friends, then she came back one holiday and was a militant feminist and i was being lectured on how my preference not to date single moms made me a bad person. You can get people to do anything if they perceive it as popular enough. Now you know how the nazis did what they did.
We must all believe in the hazy egalitarian California faith, where God is whatever boosts your self-esteem and where if we all pray to the State it will dispense endless free favors in the name of Justice.
There's a lot of lost souls out here, and lost souls will fall for whatever is the newest flavor of utopia, esp if everyone else is doing it too. And lost souls are usually poor thinkers, as they lead w their need.
You have my sympathies, brother. There is so much natural beauty there, but beautiful or not, if I were you I'd be packing up and fleeing the madness, for exactly the reasons you're describing. My guesses are that: 1.) You don't have children young enough to need the school system (or you have access to a really good private school), and 2.) you are retired or don't otherwise have to worry about being vilified as a participant in the evils of capitalism. Otherwise, there'd be no way you'd be staying, I'm guessing.
1) We don't have any children, young or otherwise;
2) My wife is a writer with some irons in the Hollywood fire, so we're hoping to make a big score (though those days may be over, or close to it).
Also, we rent and don't own, so we can bail quickly if we ever need to, and I was raised in Queens, NY, and now live up in the hills surrounded by all sorts of magical nature, which is a real treat for me. I don't think I saw a real tree until I was 10 years old ;) (only slightly exaggerating)...
Well then, I’ll pray your wife is on-board with a non-woke endeavor that blows the doors off the industry so you can enjoy more of the unparalleled natural beauty the golden state still has to offer. Man, if you could’ve seen it even twenty years ago (!) Just beware of the mountain lions - they are real.
I teach philosophy. Every society needs a shared moral code of some kind. Ours was historically Judeo-Christian, but we no longer believe that myth and we've been flailing around looking for a new one since Mill and Nietzsche killed God. (This isn't novel, it's what Heidegger meant when he said "only a God will save us.")
Every society must collectively answer the question "what is good and evil", but ours no longer can. Wokeness solves this in a racially skewed, Marxist way: "oppressors of all kind are evil; those who are oppressed are the saints." It's warped, but that doesn't make it any less powerful as a moral order. Lenin posited a similar order based on class and it lasted 70 years. Hitler posited one based on race ("Aryans good; everyone else evil") and 12M people were slaughtered.
The Right currently has no answer to this. R.R. Reno wants us to have "a strong God" but he offers none. Deneen and Amari want a Catholic order, but all their fellow integralists in America would fit into a Starbucks. Personally, I think a rediscovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics could help, but that's pretty niche. The only force broad and strong enough to counter wokeness is nationalism (and it likely won't be Christian.) It's a poor moral order, but it's better than secular-authoritarianism. And with the rise of China, American nationalism is queued up to play the role of Heidegger's God.
"Every society needs a shared moral code of some kind."
Since we swim in the world like a fish swims in water, people can be blind to the most powerful parts of the zeitgeist, and in our case what most everyone is blind to is that the most salient, unique and terrifying aspect of modernity isn't AI or any of our magic technology, but that we seem to be the first secular societies in recorded history—the first people without a shared sacred (or any sacred), a shared metaphysic, a shared purpose and meaning.
The Right currently has no answer because you can't convince or cajole people into becoming Christians much like how you can't command someone to fall in love. It either happens or it doesn't, you have to have the capacity and the need and willingness; and Woke is the great faith of our age because it is a post-Christian post-Marxist therapeutic faith designed to make its believer feel holy and righteous, and where the Right Side of History supplants the Right Hand of God. It is bespoke, entirely sentimental and sans rigor, and thus perfectly designed for the lost deracinated souls of the modern screen-mediated world. Oddly enough, for the liberal West, Christianity had to die for Christian morality to become sacrosanct and almost mandatory.
Agree about the basic uselessness of integralists, esp. the monarchy-flirters among them, even if I continue to admire much that Deneen says. But don't give up on Aristotelian ethics! As ol' Morty Adler said, "Aristotle for Everyone!" You could also see how Lee Trepanier makes a good case for how it could be used as the lynchpin of higher-ed reform. https://leetrepanier.substack.com/p/the-character-model-for-the-american-01c
Libertarianism can be viewed as a moral code. Evil is those who interfere with your private business, or engage in non-state sanctioned violence. Good is those who support a minimalist state, libertarian ideals and who are economically productive.
Sure, it's not poetry, but I'll take it over Maoism, Naziism or Wokeism any day.
I agree, Alistair, the Market can certainly become a god, and a small but noisy minority have made it one. From a Christian perspective though, that's as pernicious as wokeness. From a practical one, it's a vastly weaker god than nationalism and thus less useful. (Arrgghhh! I just finished an article on Machiavelli a few minutes ago and I find myself talking like him.)
Libertarianism is about more than just markets=good though. Markets being good is more a consequence of the core moral code, sort of like how Christian morality leads to the conclusion that charitable giving is good. It's not a core axiom of Christianity but a consequence of Jesus' teachings about treating everyone as a neighbor.
I don't think nationalism is much of a god. Maybe in America it can just about approximate that, but people don't identify much with their nation so much as they do tribes within it, or (in large parts of Europe) nothing at all.
What you've articulated is an unusual position. Most libertarians begin and end their analysis at "you own your body, therefore restrictions on what you do with your body or how you earn money with it are illegitimate." So how would you define the "core moral code" of libertarianism?
And entirely because if you leave as a meritocracy white males will end up more on top than not, which is presumably why at the outset of this thing so many white males were tolerant of it; they took it all as a back handed compliment
In our 3.5 years there, I got sucker-punched in the face by a deranged bum, my dog (just a chihuahua) got kicked also by a deranged bum, all our neighbors had crazy stories of harassment, and a woman on our corner awoke early one morning to find a crackhead bleeding out in her bathroom—he'd severely sliced himself up while breaking through her window. (Maybe if I were still in my 20s I could have dealt w all that, but my 20s passed a few decades ago.)
Venice does have its charms nevertheless and it was great as an NYC transplant more used to walking than driving and very excited about being able to walk every day to the Pacific, but I wouldn't live there again for free.
We live in the hills now and have exchanged bums, crackheads and criminals for wildfires and floods.
Speaking of walking to the Pacific - spouse & I went to a conference in Panama City, Panama. Noticed that the city seemed surprisingly empty of homeless and scary thugs on the streets. Then, while eating in a street cafe, we observed the local solution: there were motorcycle cops patrolling the streets. Two guys on each official police motorcycle - guy in front driving, guy in back carrying an Uzi.
I've been here in Carlsbad, San Diego county since 2009. My wife and I left Jacksonville FL for new opportunities. Since, we had a daughter in 2011 and luckily she's had a decent education here.
I lost my job (after eight years with the company) in 2023 and although we are financially sound, I feel genuinely lost. This got worst in September of last year when I was attacked by a homeless woman outside of Albertsons. Initially, I thought she stabbed me with a needle so I made a police report, saw my doctor and got on the latest HIV anti-virals. I believe now she just scratched me with her nails which is still nasty considering Hepatitis concerns. I've tested negative for both which is a blessing. People wouldn't believe the size of the homeless colonies living under the 78 and 5 interstate freeways. Not hundreds but thousands.
I'm not sure where this state is going. On one hand, it's amazingly beautiful and fun. On the other, it's incredibly tense and people are always on edge. The only way I can begin to describe it to those not here is owning a million dollar home/condo and having people sleeping in your garbage and recycling bins.
It's time for decisions and I'm genuinely torn which way to go.
I'm old enough to remember when going Downtown was a real treat, back when I was a kid. We even got dressed nicely for the occasion. Nowadays that would make you a target.
And BTW, while the fist is stupid, the only thing stupid today about the "Power to the People" slogan is the opposite-world hypocrisy of those who deploy it.
I was in Old Town Pasadena on a Saturday evening for the first time in a while a few weeks ago. There had always been a few people on the sidewalks asking for handouts but vastly outnumbered by people out for dinner, a movie, shopping, whatever. Not this time - more vagrants, far fewer other people. And while the restaurants were still pretty full, I was struck by how many of them had a security guard hovering by the door.
Geez...even Pasadena! Curious, did you try to drive up into to Altadena? My heart breaks for those folks--I know that rich Palisades people are people too, who also need homes and need a politics to let them rebuild efficiently, but Altadena was something special. Horrible to lose a good third of it.
20+K per student.....and teachers complain about low pay.
Think about how many excellent tutors you could hire with this kind of per pupil spending: you could have five-8 kids per class, cut out the organized-crime-middleman called admin, and the chances of any of them being as DUMB, ignorant, and uneducable as the output of the current system is close to zero.
When people complain about teachers being overworked and underpaid, remember that number: 20,000 per kid.....PER KID.
**It takes design to make education this bad for this price.**
What college major attracts the lowest SAT scores? You guessed it-education.
We moved to California from South Eastern Washington when I was in the 5th grade circa 1980/81. I remember sitting in a meeting with the principal and my mom/step dad. The school wanted to bump me into the 6th grade--but THANKFULLY, my folks were wise enough to recognize I liked sports and was already one of the smaller kids for my age.
They kept me where I was only so I could play ball.
When I was in a high school Spanish class five or six years later, some of my classmates literally smoked a joint in class. Seriously. The collapse began long ago...
It began in the early 1900s. A lot of people think it is a recent phenomenon but the slide downhill started in the early 1900s when they realized kids were only learning 50% of their vocabulary words. So the big brains in education cut the vocabulary words by half. The kids were only learning 50% of those. SO they cut the list again. Same results. Rinse, repeat.
And the idiocy has been run by these big brains, and getting worse annually, for 100 years now.
The US Army did something similar circa 2000. They changed the APFT-Army Physical Fitness Test-changed the times for 2 mile run, number of pushups/situps to max.
It was amazing, in one flourish of the pen, the US Army increased its APFT score across the board! We were now FINALLY FIT TO FIGHT!
I had no idea it has been over a century in the making, but it makes sense.
Killing the Dept of Education was a start. Next would be to kill at schools of education at every university. Why do we need to learn how to teach? We’ve only been doing this for millennia…
The teachers are a bunch of crooks, too, because if you graduate kids who are illiterate and can't balance a checkbook or understand compound interest, then you have FAILED. You had ONE JOB. Teach kids. But you failed.
And never forget - these people can not be fired unless they commit a violent crime in front of witnesses.
To be fair, most of those dollars are going into the pockets of worthless administrators. Its pretty wild... teachers are the most left wing people I frequently come into contact with and they reliably vote for more government every time they get a chance. The schools need all these high paying administration jobs to ensure the schools are tracking regulations and staying compliant with them. Then the teachers complain about low pay, inability to do their jobs, and... worthless administrators. Sure they might be good enough at a subject or two to teach it, but by and large our kids are being taught by adults who are so holistically dumb that they vote for things that they then complain about.
Educrats also love to build grand buildings and name them after themselves. These are almost always more expensive than they need to be because nothing is too good for their fiefdom. The NEA supports abortion, but the school districts still love to pretend that there are just too many kids in their district for the schools they currently have. They must have more, and larger, and newer buildings for all the kiddies. Then, within ten years (can you tell I am speaking from experience here) that new school is underutilized because the population is actually dwindling....but hey look - a squirrel!!!! Look over there!!! And now in a new part of the city, they need a new school because.....anyway, it never ends. Just like your property taxes.
Because major unions have turned into another layer of top down compromised governance, far from representation. Union leaders have sold out for their own perks, with workers too demoralized and actively obstructed from acting on their own behalf. Yet.
I’ve been through many negotiation sessions and seen leaders fold when they could easily have emboldened. They send dues to useless Democrats rather than create vigorous strike funds which is blatant back-scratching.
A fair point. This is why we need more right-to-work states. Our charter school teachers are not part of the union.
But honestly, are there any people more ruthless and vicious than teacher's union hacks? I don't think so....my mother was one. In my city the teacher's union office was *right* inside the main 'head shed'.
No obvious conflict of interests there. Pretty sure negotiations took place all the time and the annual "negotiation" was just a dog and pony show for the dupes who think they need the union to represent them.
Yes, union management is corrupt, didn’t I say that? Everything is broken.
“Right to work” means “we have a right to fire you for any reason - go starve peasant - and do not dare complain about hours, safety, pay, or organize, or we’ll give you the manufacturing jobs in prisons where you can toil for pennies a day that that you deserve.”
Of course, if you were born with a brass ring and some fashionable bootstraps: societal support, great parents, a good neighborhood, role models, access to educational resources, then please disregard.
P.S. that goes for those with inborn resilience, talent, and drive, you can fuck off everyone else too cuz you’re Every Man an Island. Just don’t look behind you to see the pitchforks and torches.
I often wonder if the decline of successful societies is due to incompetence and can be turned around by brilliant leadership or if it's a natural function of a societal cycle and will occur regardless of what is done to stop it.
Unfortunately the leadership all over the West is so retarded that we don't have a good test of it at the moment.
It can be turned around, but the removing of the bad people is difficult, not just because they cling to power, but because there is a whole line of bad people stretching out into the future who are the same.
A vastly smaller government would be a start. Nobody can keep an eye on something so labyrinthine.
The great example for us is the Roman state that reformed over and over for two millennia. Maybe we need to shed the western parts as well if we want to survive.
Cycles of decline are due to elites monopolizing more and more of the excess energy of a system, until there isn't enough energy for regular people to survive and to overcome unforeseen emergencies like barbarian invasions or climate change.
Notice how virtually all examples of civilizations reforming themselves (Henry II, Suleiman, Napoleon, Caesar) takes the shape of decreasing the power and influence of most elites and putting that energy towards some other pursuit. Usually war.
Hence Ukraine and Taiwan... our "elites" are trying to do things backwards, as usual. Trigger a war in order to create the conditions that excuse a few elites taking power and influence from the other elites in order to reform society, except of course what will happen instead is taking power and influence from non-elites which is what lead us to this point, thereby speeding up instead of slowing it down.
More importantly, shed the republic to become an empire with an actual emperor that can get shit done. Yes, 'get shit done' means doing horrible stuff that future historians will 'tut tut' about.
Unrestrained bureaucracies and an increasingly disconnected, delusional leadership class tend to eventually push a country over the edge, whether that be a catastrophic war and they get their teeth kicked in, or the economy collapses under the weight of corrupt leadership and a bureaucracy so bloated that it is incapable of doing anything productive…leading to revolution
It can be turned around. Britain in the 1970s is an example of that. Outright socialist collapse far worse than anything California is seeing: think rotating power cuts, bodies piling up on streets unburied, democratically elected governments being toppled by communists, things like that. Thatcher single handedly turned it all around and by the 90s Britain was a fairly normal modern first world state again.
Except that you could also say she just delayed the inevitable as the UK is beginning to experience all those things again. With higher debt levels.
If you zoom out Thatcher "flattened the curve" of decline, only for new labour to use those wins to sow the seeds for the next phase downwards.
By the time of Thatcher the UK had been in decline for some 100 years or so, so she did well to even cause a halt. But you'd need more than 11 years to turn it around.
And that is probably an inherent problem in halting decline, even if Trump can do it, and Vance follows that, the next lot will just come all in and fuck it all up again.
It (almost) goes without saying that I agree with everything Chris, and most of the commenters, have written here. I suspect that the main reasons California has gotten away with political stupidity for so long are its irreplaceable coastal climate and natural beauty. Peter Thiel gave a speech at NatCon a couple years ago in which he explained the continued astronomical real estate values of certain parts of California as a matter of "negative elasticity." (Which was news to me: in my econ classes, elasticity could never go below zero.) California's "failure" won't mean it ceases to be a functioning state: it will mean that it becomes something like Mexico or Brazil: heavily-guarded enclaves for the very rich, favelas for the poor, and various degrees of shit sandwich for everyone in between.
I lived in California from the late 80s until late 00s, mostly San Francisco but a handful of years in Los Angeles. San Francisco was amazing for 20 years until the PC culture emulsified with the gay rights Mafia to create an atmosphere relentlessly hostile to anything but government-sanctioned depravity. Instead of a regular white dad with a wife and children representing his mixed race mixed class neighborhood on the city council, it became lived experience. Always only ever. Families are practically verboten, and children are considered accessories for those who can afford surrogacy.
"Weak men make hard times" ought to be inscribed on the gates over the freeways leading in and out of the state, and if we had the balls to do it, we'd build a big beautiful fence to keep the insanity inside too.
Make sure to time your exit to avoid the inevitable biblical reckoning.
About time. Even up here in cheap-hydropower WA, the idea of going all-EV by 2035 is laughable. No infrastructure. What Trump needs to do is start pushing for next generation nuclear power, as well as domestic fossil fuel production to bridge.
Oh lovely, I grew up with smog so thick you couldn’t see the hills of San Fernando, I’m so glad future generations will have that opportunity! It started with the dreadful tailpipe emissions standards in ‘66. Let’s bring back backyard incinerators too! Those were fun, and think of all the money saved with no garbage men! Let it burn!
I understand, the brown cloud that hovers over Denver used to be horrible, too. Then they cleaned up the gas, took lead out. What makes up the brown cloud these days is usually tire rubber/petroleum particles that get left behind from contact with asphalt at high speed rotation. And EV tires do that, too. Even more - they're heavier, so tires wear faster.
Also the "clean" gas, unleaded, has to replace lead with other chemicals that do even more harm to the air we breathe than lead. Big-time carcinogens. But it's invisible. So out of sight out of mind and all. It looks cleaner. So it has to be cleaner. Or maybe not?
I suspect the endless billions LA spends on “homelessness” and other woke-mind virus issues is a mini-version of the USAID grift game plan. If DOGE were to show up in LA, we’d find all the “players” in LA politics connected -via family members and friends - to “non-profits” hugely profiting off of taxpayer dollars aimed at homelessness. Thus, we’d have the answer to, “Where’d the money go?”
California is the prime example of the unholy union between 3 parties: 1) the mid-wit politicians with just enough smarts and lack of morals to figure out how to replicate the USAID grift at the state level, 2) the demented “true believers” infected with the woke mind virus, and 3) the ignorant citizen just trying to make ends meet and oblivious to how much the Regime hates them and uses them.
I am still wondering who got the twenty four billion dollars last year in the state budget for “fighting” homelessness. That is very roughly 120,000 dollars per a homeless person. You could just build the housing. Or since a cheap apartment is two thousand a month, you could pay for five years of rent.
People complain about the homeless, but forty percent of them are working. Then there’s the children. The rent is just too damn high, but solving it would end the grift.
blacks and women will be the ruination of that beautiful state i had the good fortune of defecting from over a dozen years ago. being black AND female i KNOW exactly whats happening in california is deliberate and deceitful. god bless all my white liberal friends who still believe the orange dude is the bigot.
I'm not really bragging, but the decline had been evident for a LONG time. When I moved to Sacramento in 1982, it was a delightful place. Clean, things worked. By 2010, the decline was apparent to me, at least, but not TOO bad. We stuck it out until, in 2018, Navin Gruesome announced that he wanted to have sheriff's deputies going door to door to round up all the guns. My wife, a lifelong CA girl, sad "We need to get OUT of California!.
I retired at the end of 2019, just in time for the Covid hysteria. In August 2020, we sold our delightful Sacramento home, packed up everything, and moved to San Antonio, TX. Our house was an utterly conventional tract house on a 1/6th acre lot. In San Antonio, we bought a larger, nicer house on a full acre, and had $100K left over.
In the late 1990s, Sacramento schools were no longer good, but weren't terrible. Yet. Now, my son and his librarian wife are home-schooling their daughters, and the family moved out of Cacafornia and to Texas even before we did.
Voting for different elected officials won’t fix California, there are too many uninformed and dumb voters, plus the Dems have perfected election rigging with motor-voter laws, mail-in ballots, and ballot harvesting. What needs to happen is Federal convictions for corruption of these legislators, that’s the only thing that will get them out of office. Hopefully Bill Essayli is working on this.
It's the dynamic of encouraging and rewarding anti-social, destructive behavior. Somehow this became left-wing orthodoxy. Maybe it happened in the late 2010s, but if you hadn't paid close enough attention, it only became very evident in 2020 with lockdown madness.
Chris is right. California is the harbinger, except the rot goes much much deeper than the progressive ideology that so triggers conservatives. It’s a general massive level of grift where municipalities pilfer budgets for political projects, rather than infrastructure upkeep and good development planning. Much of the this darkness has infected red states as well. Don’t believe? Take a cross country trip. This first thing you’ll notice is a nearly complete destruction of our main roads, state and cities. The interstate system has about 2O years of deferred maintenance. There is a section of I-40 going east of the California line to Flagstaff AZ, so filled with large potholes and degraded road bed, it’s dangerous to drive at night. Most major cities I’ve been in are the same. Surface streets are falling apart national wide. Why? City municipalities figured out they could spend road repair fund on other things and no one would notice for years. Now we notice, but there is always an excuse to not spend on roads. This is one example many, where basic infrastructure and upkeep have been neglected for generations.
California is filled with massive levels of grift, from spending 20+ Billion on homelessness NGOs that has accomplished zero, to over 10Billion on a bullet train project without a single thing built. City councils are so completely incompetent, they fail to take care of basic needs, as seen in the recent LA fire tragedy. But these issues are also national wide, especially in major cities, suffering from years of decay and neglect. Cities have let developers run roughshod over the needs of citizens, with mayors getting talked into failed “downtown” projects that funnel millions in local revenue to out of state corporations, while issuing debt bonds for the egregious tax breaks offered.
I lived on CA from ‘82 to ‘95 and most recently from 2020 to 2023. When I returned in 2020, I was shocked. The best way I can describe what I saw was general level of decay and even filth. CA roads used to be an experience of beauty with wild flowers and succulents growing roadside in abundance. Not any more. Frequent trash dump on side roads, I never seen in the past. Driving into Santa Clara county, up through 101, you’re treated to homeless encampments in every interchange, with all the trash and debris that follow. Only the rich tourist areas like Carmel and Monterey enjoy road resurfacing. House prices are so unbelievably high and sell so fast, basic maintenance and upkeep isn’t necessary. I saw houses sell for $1million plus routinely with mold and termite damage. Once bright and proud working class neighborhoods like South SF, now reflect the depressing vibe of intercity projects. This is beyond just DEI progressive policies. It’s uninhibited corruption and stupidity.
But getting back to the dark shithole of progressive DEI politics, both Colorado and NY are churning out a blizzard of laws designed to destroy families, farmers and social fabric of society. Colorado in particular, has been racing ahead of CA with a recent flurry of crazy, outstripping CA, and happily signed by our so-called “libertarian” governor Polis.
This won’t change overnight. I believe one of Trump’s main goals is to simply reveal what our country has become over generations, and lay a road map for the future. But, much needs to happen at the local and state level to recapture American communities.
Same can be said for WA, especially Pugetopolis. Our roads are a disgrace, and it’s particularly noticeable when traveling to ID, MT, or UT. Hell, Oregon has better roads than WA!
SALT needs to be reduced to zero, and CA needs to be cut off from Fed tax dollars. I've long advocated for a wall around my state, now thinking the rest of us should build a wall around CA WA OR. Then ya'll can do whatever you want. Or, you know, something something San Andreas fault, nuke from orbit. (On X my stated position is to return CA to territory status, break it into three with appointed governors and no reps at Fed levels; let's see if 50 years on probation will work the psychoses out of your systems.)
I guess it will be interesting to see what happens?
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!
My dad did three tours on submarines in WWII at least one of which was equipped with highly classified optical equipment he was trained to operate. So he had a pretty high military security clearance.
In the early 60s he rented a house on a large property that had a barn where the local communist cell rented space. The FBI asked him to attend the meetings and report any actual criminal incitement. These meetings were often run by Abbie Hoffman (who seemed to have a limitless Tavel budget given that this story occurs in Hawaii).
My dad told us about a pattern in these meetings where collaborators were planted in the audience to shout down any uncomfortable questions or dissent. Since my dad attended every meeting he saw that this function was filled from a cadre of cronies. The thing is, other people who weren’t cronies would take the cue and join in.
I think about that all the time when I see people shouted down for questioning the narrative. There’s almost nothing more unamerican than shouting down a question and we have a political party that’s proud of doing that.
Abby would have been right at home protesting lots of dumb shit. My salesman grew up with him near or in Worcester, MA. And declared him as goofy as any representative in California.
Hat's off to your dad!
Peer pressure backed with intense moralism and the threat of ostracism is too strong for most of us to withstand. Especially if the person berating you is waving some kind of bloody shirt and/or demanding you prove your devotion to the (holy and righteous) cause.
Works almost every time.
We have two political parties proud of doing that. If you’re loudly antiwar you may become imprisoned or while journalists reporting what the gov’t wants secret is visited by the your FBI. So afraid of what the people say they hired spies, now the gov’t partners with surveillance tech lords to watch our every move.
As I recall, John Lennon mentioned in an interview in the 60s something to the effect of tithing to the Movement (probably not how he put it, but I think he referenced tithing). I suspect he bankrolled a lot of counterculture figures and their travels.
Vermont is in the same bullshit situation. A whole crop of dumb fuck woke retards in Montpelior.
The ONLY reason we're not as far down the stupid hole as California is that we're a small state with a small, limited tax base. Otherwise the demons in Montpelier would be doing exactly the same thing. They're trying though.
Oh, and there are fewer and fewer school-age kids here, but school taxes and spending have only gone up. I've read that despite the fall in enrollment, none of the administrative staff in any school district has been got rid of.
Are you familiar with the online publication, the Vermont Daily Chronicle? I highly recommend it.
I will look for it. Thanks for the tip!
CP, I’m going to print this out and make a poster of it.
lol pls do thanks
Haha, I feel that way about a lot of CP’s comments. Didn’t know he or she was in Socal too. I love this state, but oh man, how it has been steered into decline.
That’s because SJW is conquest by moral preening and working within the system to undermine, usurp, destroy, replace.
As for burning 🔥 out not before they burn you out.
Californian Sado-Malthusian governance is aggressive libertinism camouflaged for the edification of the credentialled classes.
The Californian "Highlands" too valuable to be left to natives. Local chiefs and allies from oligarchies across the world need somewhere to park the loot before the system crashes. Hence the clearances.
Why that sounds suspiciously like Maui...I wonder where ruin will "accidently" strike next?
My guess for next targeted area is a Chicago suburb: There hasn’t been a clean out neighborhood that the elites can buy for 10 cents on the dollar. They can scoop up nice property for a pittance and rebuild their fantasy mansions, close to the city but far enough away to be serene.
Rahm kinda already got that going when he smashed the Vibrant school system, which is the generational death knell for them.
They know it too.
There’s no reason not to learn from the past, adopt the system and make it one’s own system.
A great deal of time and inefficient suffering and drama can be eliminated if people face the truth faster. Early adopters and adapters always have the edge, it’s well past prototyping into engineering and refinement.
"The Social Justice Revolution is a moral revolution, an American Lite Maoism..."
Your entire comment is great and rings true, but the quoted phrase stood out as extra-true. It is a mania of some plethora of pent-up compulsive needs that haven't been allowed an outlet for generations I think.
I have a British friend there. We were both lefties in Britain (of the old-school greater opportunity and material improvements kind). He seems to have adopted the entire progressive lingua franca now. I visited a couple of years ago and have never felt so crushed. I stood next to that highway, with trucks thundering past, reading a sign telling me that I couldn't even vape outside.
People would rather have a social life then stand for something. I was friends with a girl who moved to NYC. At first she would call to talk because she had no friends, then she came back one holiday and was a militant feminist and i was being lectured on how my preference not to date single moms made me a bad person. You can get people to do anything if they perceive it as popular enough. Now you know how the nazis did what they did.
You can't argue with these people.
Only a total takeover of power will suffice.
Well said. In 2013 I almost got beaten up by a stranger in LA who overheard me say healthcare should be cheaper not provided free.
Oh yeah, that'll get you mobbed out here.
We must all believe in the hazy egalitarian California faith, where God is whatever boosts your self-esteem and where if we all pray to the State it will dispense endless free favors in the name of Justice.
There's a lot of lost souls out here, and lost souls will fall for whatever is the newest flavor of utopia, esp if everyone else is doing it too. And lost souls are usually poor thinkers, as they lead w their need.
Cheers
You have my sympathies, brother. There is so much natural beauty there, but beautiful or not, if I were you I'd be packing up and fleeing the madness, for exactly the reasons you're describing. My guesses are that: 1.) You don't have children young enough to need the school system (or you have access to a really good private school), and 2.) you are retired or don't otherwise have to worry about being vilified as a participant in the evils of capitalism. Otherwise, there'd be no way you'd be staying, I'm guessing.
1) We don't have any children, young or otherwise;
2) My wife is a writer with some irons in the Hollywood fire, so we're hoping to make a big score (though those days may be over, or close to it).
Also, we rent and don't own, so we can bail quickly if we ever need to, and I was raised in Queens, NY, and now live up in the hills surrounded by all sorts of magical nature, which is a real treat for me. I don't think I saw a real tree until I was 10 years old ;) (only slightly exaggerating)...
Cheers
"I was raised in Queens, NY"
So was I!
So was Trump!
That's why we're so blunt and honest!!
No other way to be!
Well then, I’ll pray your wife is on-board with a non-woke endeavor that blows the doors off the industry so you can enjoy more of the unparalleled natural beauty the golden state still has to offer. Man, if you could’ve seen it even twenty years ago (!) Just beware of the mountain lions - they are real.
I teach philosophy. Every society needs a shared moral code of some kind. Ours was historically Judeo-Christian, but we no longer believe that myth and we've been flailing around looking for a new one since Mill and Nietzsche killed God. (This isn't novel, it's what Heidegger meant when he said "only a God will save us.")
Every society must collectively answer the question "what is good and evil", but ours no longer can. Wokeness solves this in a racially skewed, Marxist way: "oppressors of all kind are evil; those who are oppressed are the saints." It's warped, but that doesn't make it any less powerful as a moral order. Lenin posited a similar order based on class and it lasted 70 years. Hitler posited one based on race ("Aryans good; everyone else evil") and 12M people were slaughtered.
The Right currently has no answer to this. R.R. Reno wants us to have "a strong God" but he offers none. Deneen and Amari want a Catholic order, but all their fellow integralists in America would fit into a Starbucks. Personally, I think a rediscovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics could help, but that's pretty niche. The only force broad and strong enough to counter wokeness is nationalism (and it likely won't be Christian.) It's a poor moral order, but it's better than secular-authoritarianism. And with the rise of China, American nationalism is queued up to play the role of Heidegger's God.
"Every society needs a shared moral code of some kind."
Since we swim in the world like a fish swims in water, people can be blind to the most powerful parts of the zeitgeist, and in our case what most everyone is blind to is that the most salient, unique and terrifying aspect of modernity isn't AI or any of our magic technology, but that we seem to be the first secular societies in recorded history—the first people without a shared sacred (or any sacred), a shared metaphysic, a shared purpose and meaning.
The Right currently has no answer because you can't convince or cajole people into becoming Christians much like how you can't command someone to fall in love. It either happens or it doesn't, you have to have the capacity and the need and willingness; and Woke is the great faith of our age because it is a post-Christian post-Marxist therapeutic faith designed to make its believer feel holy and righteous, and where the Right Side of History supplants the Right Hand of God. It is bespoke, entirely sentimental and sans rigor, and thus perfectly designed for the lost deracinated souls of the modern screen-mediated world. Oddly enough, for the liberal West, Christianity had to die for Christian morality to become sacrosanct and almost mandatory.
Cheers
Agree about the basic uselessness of integralists, esp. the monarchy-flirters among them, even if I continue to admire much that Deneen says. But don't give up on Aristotelian ethics! As ol' Morty Adler said, "Aristotle for Everyone!" You could also see how Lee Trepanier makes a good case for how it could be used as the lynchpin of higher-ed reform. https://leetrepanier.substack.com/p/the-character-model-for-the-american-01c
Libertarianism can be viewed as a moral code. Evil is those who interfere with your private business, or engage in non-state sanctioned violence. Good is those who support a minimalist state, libertarian ideals and who are economically productive.
Sure, it's not poetry, but I'll take it over Maoism, Naziism or Wokeism any day.
I agree, Alistair, the Market can certainly become a god, and a small but noisy minority have made it one. From a Christian perspective though, that's as pernicious as wokeness. From a practical one, it's a vastly weaker god than nationalism and thus less useful. (Arrgghhh! I just finished an article on Machiavelli a few minutes ago and I find myself talking like him.)
Libertarianism is about more than just markets=good though. Markets being good is more a consequence of the core moral code, sort of like how Christian morality leads to the conclusion that charitable giving is good. It's not a core axiom of Christianity but a consequence of Jesus' teachings about treating everyone as a neighbor.
I don't think nationalism is much of a god. Maybe in America it can just about approximate that, but people don't identify much with their nation so much as they do tribes within it, or (in large parts of Europe) nothing at all.
What you've articulated is an unusual position. Most libertarians begin and end their analysis at "you own your body, therefore restrictions on what you do with your body or how you earn money with it are illegitimate." So how would you define the "core moral code" of libertarianism?
And entirely because if you leave as a meritocracy white males will end up more on top than not, which is presumably why at the outset of this thing so many white males were tolerant of it; they took it all as a back handed compliment
Are you still living in Venice, and if so, so you plan to stay?
We lived in Venice from 2013-2017.
In our 3.5 years there, I got sucker-punched in the face by a deranged bum, my dog (just a chihuahua) got kicked also by a deranged bum, all our neighbors had crazy stories of harassment, and a woman on our corner awoke early one morning to find a crackhead bleeding out in her bathroom—he'd severely sliced himself up while breaking through her window. (Maybe if I were still in my 20s I could have dealt w all that, but my 20s passed a few decades ago.)
Venice does have its charms nevertheless and it was great as an NYC transplant more used to walking than driving and very excited about being able to walk every day to the Pacific, but I wouldn't live there again for free.
We live in the hills now and have exchanged bums, crackheads and criminals for wildfires and floods.
Ahh California....
Speaking of walking to the Pacific - spouse & I went to a conference in Panama City, Panama. Noticed that the city seemed surprisingly empty of homeless and scary thugs on the streets. Then, while eating in a street cafe, we observed the local solution: there were motorcycle cops patrolling the streets. Two guys on each official police motorcycle - guy in front driving, guy in back carrying an Uzi.
That’ll do it!
I've been here in Carlsbad, San Diego county since 2009. My wife and I left Jacksonville FL for new opportunities. Since, we had a daughter in 2011 and luckily she's had a decent education here.
I lost my job (after eight years with the company) in 2023 and although we are financially sound, I feel genuinely lost. This got worst in September of last year when I was attacked by a homeless woman outside of Albertsons. Initially, I thought she stabbed me with a needle so I made a police report, saw my doctor and got on the latest HIV anti-virals. I believe now she just scratched me with her nails which is still nasty considering Hepatitis concerns. I've tested negative for both which is a blessing. People wouldn't believe the size of the homeless colonies living under the 78 and 5 interstate freeways. Not hundreds but thousands.
I'm not sure where this state is going. On one hand, it's amazingly beautiful and fun. On the other, it's incredibly tense and people are always on edge. The only way I can begin to describe it to those not here is owning a million dollar home/condo and having people sleeping in your garbage and recycling bins.
It's time for decisions and I'm genuinely torn which way to go.
"owning a million dollar home/condo and having people sleeping in your garbage and recycling bins."
lol you just described Venice CA.
My solution was to move up to the hills. We have wildfires, mudslides, coyotes and bobcats but no deranged street people.
Sometimes you have to pick your poison.
Cheers
Word
Very well put.
See also:
https://x.com/boriquagato/status/1926769805152915740
The blue zones are screaming warnings at us.
I'm old enough to remember when going Downtown was a real treat, back when I was a kid. We even got dressed nicely for the occasion. Nowadays that would make you a target.
that stupid fist🫢
And BTW, while the fist is stupid, the only thing stupid today about the "Power to the People" slogan is the opposite-world hypocrisy of those who deploy it.
Go the 70s Chi-Lites song "For God's Sake, Give More Power to the People," and hear how the lyrics pretty much apply to the populists of today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEwMaeN2x-c&ab_channel=AuntieSoul34
I was in Old Town Pasadena on a Saturday evening for the first time in a while a few weeks ago. There had always been a few people on the sidewalks asking for handouts but vastly outnumbered by people out for dinner, a movie, shopping, whatever. Not this time - more vagrants, far fewer other people. And while the restaurants were still pretty full, I was struck by how many of them had a security guard hovering by the door.
Geez...even Pasadena! Curious, did you try to drive up into to Altadena? My heart breaks for those folks--I know that rich Palisades people are people too, who also need homes and need a politics to let them rebuild efficiently, but Altadena was something special. Horrible to lose a good third of it.
Cf. downtown Seattle or Portland
20+K per student.....and teachers complain about low pay.
Think about how many excellent tutors you could hire with this kind of per pupil spending: you could have five-8 kids per class, cut out the organized-crime-middleman called admin, and the chances of any of them being as DUMB, ignorant, and uneducable as the output of the current system is close to zero.
When people complain about teachers being overworked and underpaid, remember that number: 20,000 per kid.....PER KID.
**It takes design to make education this bad for this price.**
What college major attracts the lowest SAT scores? You guessed it-education.
We moved to California from South Eastern Washington when I was in the 5th grade circa 1980/81. I remember sitting in a meeting with the principal and my mom/step dad. The school wanted to bump me into the 6th grade--but THANKFULLY, my folks were wise enough to recognize I liked sports and was already one of the smaller kids for my age.
They kept me where I was only so I could play ball.
When I was in a high school Spanish class five or six years later, some of my classmates literally smoked a joint in class. Seriously. The collapse began long ago...
bsn
It began in the early 1900s. A lot of people think it is a recent phenomenon but the slide downhill started in the early 1900s when they realized kids were only learning 50% of their vocabulary words. So the big brains in education cut the vocabulary words by half. The kids were only learning 50% of those. SO they cut the list again. Same results. Rinse, repeat.
And the idiocy has been run by these big brains, and getting worse annually, for 100 years now.
The US Army did something similar circa 2000. They changed the APFT-Army Physical Fitness Test-changed the times for 2 mile run, number of pushups/situps to max.
It was amazing, in one flourish of the pen, the US Army increased its APFT score across the board! We were now FINALLY FIT TO FIGHT!
I had no idea it has been over a century in the making, but it makes sense.
Killing the Dept of Education was a start. Next would be to kill at schools of education at every university. Why do we need to learn how to teach? We’ve only been doing this for millennia…
bsn
You guys are pikers; NYS wastes an average of $35,012/student.
They are stealing… just like the Demorats in DC. The teachers are being swindled too. Pols and administrators are a bunch of crooks. #FollowTheMoney
The teachers are a bunch of crooks, too, because if you graduate kids who are illiterate and can't balance a checkbook or understand compound interest, then you have FAILED. You had ONE JOB. Teach kids. But you failed.
And never forget - these people can not be fired unless they commit a violent crime in front of witnesses.
To be fair, most of those dollars are going into the pockets of worthless administrators. Its pretty wild... teachers are the most left wing people I frequently come into contact with and they reliably vote for more government every time they get a chance. The schools need all these high paying administration jobs to ensure the schools are tracking regulations and staying compliant with them. Then the teachers complain about low pay, inability to do their jobs, and... worthless administrators. Sure they might be good enough at a subject or two to teach it, but by and large our kids are being taught by adults who are so holistically dumb that they vote for things that they then complain about.
Educrats also love to build grand buildings and name them after themselves. These are almost always more expensive than they need to be because nothing is too good for their fiefdom. The NEA supports abortion, but the school districts still love to pretend that there are just too many kids in their district for the schools they currently have. They must have more, and larger, and newer buildings for all the kiddies. Then, within ten years (can you tell I am speaking from experience here) that new school is underutilized because the population is actually dwindling....but hey look - a squirrel!!!! Look over there!!! And now in a new part of the city, they need a new school because.....anyway, it never ends. Just like your property taxes.
MLHVM> Teachers don’t set pay.
The union sets pay. The teachers pay the union to set pay and benefits. The teachers set pay by their agents in the union.
Also - when you accept a contract, you are *accepting/setting pay*.
Because major unions have turned into another layer of top down compromised governance, far from representation. Union leaders have sold out for their own perks, with workers too demoralized and actively obstructed from acting on their own behalf. Yet.
I’ve been through many negotiation sessions and seen leaders fold when they could easily have emboldened. They send dues to useless Democrats rather than create vigorous strike funds which is blatant back-scratching.
A fair point. This is why we need more right-to-work states. Our charter school teachers are not part of the union.
But honestly, are there any people more ruthless and vicious than teacher's union hacks? I don't think so....my mother was one. In my city the teacher's union office was *right* inside the main 'head shed'.
No obvious conflict of interests there. Pretty sure negotiations took place all the time and the annual "negotiation" was just a dog and pony show for the dupes who think they need the union to represent them.
Yes, union management is corrupt, didn’t I say that? Everything is broken.
“Right to work” means “we have a right to fire you for any reason - go starve peasant - and do not dare complain about hours, safety, pay, or organize, or we’ll give you the manufacturing jobs in prisons where you can toil for pennies a day that that you deserve.”
Of course, if you were born with a brass ring and some fashionable bootstraps: societal support, great parents, a good neighborhood, role models, access to educational resources, then please disregard.
P.S. that goes for those with inborn resilience, talent, and drive, you can fuck off everyone else too cuz you’re Every Man an Island. Just don’t look behind you to see the pitchforks and torches.
WTFAYTA?
My overall response to this article: HMOF!
I often wonder if the decline of successful societies is due to incompetence and can be turned around by brilliant leadership or if it's a natural function of a societal cycle and will occur regardless of what is done to stop it.
Unfortunately the leadership all over the West is so retarded that we don't have a good test of it at the moment.
Same!
It can be turned around, but the removing of the bad people is difficult, not just because they cling to power, but because there is a whole line of bad people stretching out into the future who are the same.
A vastly smaller government would be a start. Nobody can keep an eye on something so labyrinthine.
The great example for us is the Roman state that reformed over and over for two millennia. Maybe we need to shed the western parts as well if we want to survive.
Cycles of decline are due to elites monopolizing more and more of the excess energy of a system, until there isn't enough energy for regular people to survive and to overcome unforeseen emergencies like barbarian invasions or climate change.
Notice how virtually all examples of civilizations reforming themselves (Henry II, Suleiman, Napoleon, Caesar) takes the shape of decreasing the power and influence of most elites and putting that energy towards some other pursuit. Usually war.
Hence Ukraine and Taiwan... our "elites" are trying to do things backwards, as usual. Trigger a war in order to create the conditions that excuse a few elites taking power and influence from the other elites in order to reform society, except of course what will happen instead is taking power and influence from non-elites which is what lead us to this point, thereby speeding up instead of slowing it down.
More importantly, shed the republic to become an empire with an actual emperor that can get shit done. Yes, 'get shit done' means doing horrible stuff that future historians will 'tut tut' about.
Unrestrained bureaucracies and an increasingly disconnected, delusional leadership class tend to eventually push a country over the edge, whether that be a catastrophic war and they get their teeth kicked in, or the economy collapses under the weight of corrupt leadership and a bureaucracy so bloated that it is incapable of doing anything productive…leading to revolution
You just described the US. Adding to the deficit spells defeat.
It can be turned around. Britain in the 1970s is an example of that. Outright socialist collapse far worse than anything California is seeing: think rotating power cuts, bodies piling up on streets unburied, democratically elected governments being toppled by communists, things like that. Thatcher single handedly turned it all around and by the 90s Britain was a fairly normal modern first world state again.
Fair point.
Except that you could also say she just delayed the inevitable as the UK is beginning to experience all those things again. With higher debt levels.
If you zoom out Thatcher "flattened the curve" of decline, only for new labour to use those wins to sow the seeds for the next phase downwards.
By the time of Thatcher the UK had been in decline for some 100 years or so, so she did well to even cause a halt. But you'd need more than 11 years to turn it around.
And that is probably an inherent problem in halting decline, even if Trump can do it, and Vance follows that, the next lot will just come all in and fuck it all up again.
Watch Argentina
Tim - natural function probably.
If you believe in the Spenglian/Glubb cycle of history like me.
You realise we are now entering winter and it’s the end of the cycle.
However in Winter you get Ceasars who improve things for a bit.
Then the cycle resumes.
It (almost) goes without saying that I agree with everything Chris, and most of the commenters, have written here. I suspect that the main reasons California has gotten away with political stupidity for so long are its irreplaceable coastal climate and natural beauty. Peter Thiel gave a speech at NatCon a couple years ago in which he explained the continued astronomical real estate values of certain parts of California as a matter of "negative elasticity." (Which was news to me: in my econ classes, elasticity could never go below zero.) California's "failure" won't mean it ceases to be a functioning state: it will mean that it becomes something like Mexico or Brazil: heavily-guarded enclaves for the very rich, favelas for the poor, and various degrees of shit sandwich for everyone in between.
like. Like button doesn't work.
The great Mark Steyn often says of situations such as this: some societies are too stupid to survive.
Sadly they will fight like hell to drag everyone else into oblivion with them.
^^^This!^^^
I lived in California from the late 80s until late 00s, mostly San Francisco but a handful of years in Los Angeles. San Francisco was amazing for 20 years until the PC culture emulsified with the gay rights Mafia to create an atmosphere relentlessly hostile to anything but government-sanctioned depravity. Instead of a regular white dad with a wife and children representing his mixed race mixed class neighborhood on the city council, it became lived experience. Always only ever. Families are practically verboten, and children are considered accessories for those who can afford surrogacy.
"Weak men make hard times" ought to be inscribed on the gates over the freeways leading in and out of the state, and if we had the balls to do it, we'd build a big beautiful fence to keep the insanity inside too.
Make sure to time your exit to avoid the inevitable biblical reckoning.
Don't look back as you cross the state line, or you might be turned into a pillar of salt.
lol
Why did you make me look at this thing
I take no responsibility
Sounds like you have what it takes to run for office in CA.
Hah! A joke you speak
got some good news: Senate Nullifies California's Signature Gas-Car Ban, Sends Bill To Trump https://www.zerohedge.com/political/senate-nullifies-californias-signature-gas-car-ban-sends-bill-trump
About time. Even up here in cheap-hydropower WA, the idea of going all-EV by 2035 is laughable. No infrastructure. What Trump needs to do is start pushing for next generation nuclear power, as well as domestic fossil fuel production to bridge.
Oh lovely, I grew up with smog so thick you couldn’t see the hills of San Fernando, I’m so glad future generations will have that opportunity! It started with the dreadful tailpipe emissions standards in ‘66. Let’s bring back backyard incinerators too! Those were fun, and think of all the money saved with no garbage men! Let it burn!
I understand, the brown cloud that hovers over Denver used to be horrible, too. Then they cleaned up the gas, took lead out. What makes up the brown cloud these days is usually tire rubber/petroleum particles that get left behind from contact with asphalt at high speed rotation. And EV tires do that, too. Even more - they're heavier, so tires wear faster.
Also the "clean" gas, unleaded, has to replace lead with other chemicals that do even more harm to the air we breathe than lead. Big-time carcinogens. But it's invisible. So out of sight out of mind and all. It looks cleaner. So it has to be cleaner. Or maybe not?
It isn’t the gas combustion engine making smog now. It is geoengineering using barium, strontium, and aluminum that are darkening the sky. https://geoengineeringwatch.org/clouds-whats-real-whats-not/
Thank you c Anderson. There are many articles from more than "anti-environmental" sources that describe the pollution problems of electric vehicles.
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I suspect the endless billions LA spends on “homelessness” and other woke-mind virus issues is a mini-version of the USAID grift game plan. If DOGE were to show up in LA, we’d find all the “players” in LA politics connected -via family members and friends - to “non-profits” hugely profiting off of taxpayer dollars aimed at homelessness. Thus, we’d have the answer to, “Where’d the money go?”
California is the prime example of the unholy union between 3 parties: 1) the mid-wit politicians with just enough smarts and lack of morals to figure out how to replicate the USAID grift at the state level, 2) the demented “true believers” infected with the woke mind virus, and 3) the ignorant citizen just trying to make ends meet and oblivious to how much the Regime hates them and uses them.
I am still wondering who got the twenty four billion dollars last year in the state budget for “fighting” homelessness. That is very roughly 120,000 dollars per a homeless person. You could just build the housing. Or since a cheap apartment is two thousand a month, you could pay for five years of rent.
People complain about the homeless, but forty percent of them are working. Then there’s the children. The rent is just too damn high, but solving it would end the grift.
Your description perfectly fits Portland too
And Seattle
That sounds like a description of the NM populace.
blacks and women will be the ruination of that beautiful state i had the good fortune of defecting from over a dozen years ago. being black AND female i KNOW exactly whats happening in california is deliberate and deceitful. god bless all my white liberal friends who still believe the orange dude is the bigot.
I'm not really bragging, but the decline had been evident for a LONG time. When I moved to Sacramento in 1982, it was a delightful place. Clean, things worked. By 2010, the decline was apparent to me, at least, but not TOO bad. We stuck it out until, in 2018, Navin Gruesome announced that he wanted to have sheriff's deputies going door to door to round up all the guns. My wife, a lifelong CA girl, sad "We need to get OUT of California!.
I retired at the end of 2019, just in time for the Covid hysteria. In August 2020, we sold our delightful Sacramento home, packed up everything, and moved to San Antonio, TX. Our house was an utterly conventional tract house on a 1/6th acre lot. In San Antonio, we bought a larger, nicer house on a full acre, and had $100K left over.
In the late 1990s, Sacramento schools were no longer good, but weren't terrible. Yet. Now, my son and his librarian wife are home-schooling their daughters, and the family moved out of Cacafornia and to Texas even before we did.
Voting for different elected officials won’t fix California, there are too many uninformed and dumb voters, plus the Dems have perfected election rigging with motor-voter laws, mail-in ballots, and ballot harvesting. What needs to happen is Federal convictions for corruption of these legislators, that’s the only thing that will get them out of office. Hopefully Bill Essayli is working on this.
It's the dynamic of encouraging and rewarding anti-social, destructive behavior. Somehow this became left-wing orthodoxy. Maybe it happened in the late 2010s, but if you hadn't paid close enough attention, it only became very evident in 2020 with lockdown madness.
Chris is right. California is the harbinger, except the rot goes much much deeper than the progressive ideology that so triggers conservatives. It’s a general massive level of grift where municipalities pilfer budgets for political projects, rather than infrastructure upkeep and good development planning. Much of the this darkness has infected red states as well. Don’t believe? Take a cross country trip. This first thing you’ll notice is a nearly complete destruction of our main roads, state and cities. The interstate system has about 2O years of deferred maintenance. There is a section of I-40 going east of the California line to Flagstaff AZ, so filled with large potholes and degraded road bed, it’s dangerous to drive at night. Most major cities I’ve been in are the same. Surface streets are falling apart national wide. Why? City municipalities figured out they could spend road repair fund on other things and no one would notice for years. Now we notice, but there is always an excuse to not spend on roads. This is one example many, where basic infrastructure and upkeep have been neglected for generations.
California is filled with massive levels of grift, from spending 20+ Billion on homelessness NGOs that has accomplished zero, to over 10Billion on a bullet train project without a single thing built. City councils are so completely incompetent, they fail to take care of basic needs, as seen in the recent LA fire tragedy. But these issues are also national wide, especially in major cities, suffering from years of decay and neglect. Cities have let developers run roughshod over the needs of citizens, with mayors getting talked into failed “downtown” projects that funnel millions in local revenue to out of state corporations, while issuing debt bonds for the egregious tax breaks offered.
I lived on CA from ‘82 to ‘95 and most recently from 2020 to 2023. When I returned in 2020, I was shocked. The best way I can describe what I saw was general level of decay and even filth. CA roads used to be an experience of beauty with wild flowers and succulents growing roadside in abundance. Not any more. Frequent trash dump on side roads, I never seen in the past. Driving into Santa Clara county, up through 101, you’re treated to homeless encampments in every interchange, with all the trash and debris that follow. Only the rich tourist areas like Carmel and Monterey enjoy road resurfacing. House prices are so unbelievably high and sell so fast, basic maintenance and upkeep isn’t necessary. I saw houses sell for $1million plus routinely with mold and termite damage. Once bright and proud working class neighborhoods like South SF, now reflect the depressing vibe of intercity projects. This is beyond just DEI progressive policies. It’s uninhibited corruption and stupidity.
But getting back to the dark shithole of progressive DEI politics, both Colorado and NY are churning out a blizzard of laws designed to destroy families, farmers and social fabric of society. Colorado in particular, has been racing ahead of CA with a recent flurry of crazy, outstripping CA, and happily signed by our so-called “libertarian” governor Polis.
This won’t change overnight. I believe one of Trump’s main goals is to simply reveal what our country has become over generations, and lay a road map for the future. But, much needs to happen at the local and state level to recapture American communities.
Same can be said for WA, especially Pugetopolis. Our roads are a disgrace, and it’s particularly noticeable when traveling to ID, MT, or UT. Hell, Oregon has better roads than WA!
SALT needs to be reduced to zero, and CA needs to be cut off from Fed tax dollars. I've long advocated for a wall around my state, now thinking the rest of us should build a wall around CA WA OR. Then ya'll can do whatever you want. Or, you know, something something San Andreas fault, nuke from orbit. (On X my stated position is to return CA to territory status, break it into three with appointed governors and no reps at Fed levels; let's see if 50 years on probation will work the psychoses out of your systems.)
I guess it will be interesting to see what happens?