Everything Becomes Los Angeles

with an abbreviated weekly roundup

At the Federalist this week, I wrote twice about the land around Bakersfield: Once about Gavin Newsom’s Potemkin railyard (with a response from the state, if you’d like to see that), and once about a rancher who should be running a thriving business but is instead tied up in court with appalling nonsense and watching his innovative work bleed red ink. His ranch is Santa Carota — Saint Carrot — and you’ll find out why if you read the thing.

To write those stories, I drove up to Bakersfield and spent the night in a Hampton Inn, so I could hit the ground running in the morning. My morning view from the hotel room:

Newsom-era California, land of favelas.

Bakersfield was settled by Okies during the Dust Bowl era, and it lived that way for decades.

If you drive east from the airport, you’ll do it on Merle Haggard Drive. The settlers made the three Fs — food, fuel, and fiber — and they did well. (The oil boom started before the Okies got there, but they jumped in with both feet.) This is not what you think of when you think of California:

It’s like somebody loaded some West Texas onto a plane and then dropped it on California. Making things, the settlers produced affluence, which lived alongside a rough culture of…well, Merle Haggard. If you wanted to get into a bar fight in Bakersfield in the 1950s, you probably could. But the affluence was real, and the Petroleum Club of Bakersfield was an elegant private meeting place for gentlemen, with reciprocal privileges at comparable clubs. You wouldn’t get this impression driving through the city now, but Bakersfield in the 1950s became a “prominent center for Mid-century Modernism on the West Coast.” There was abundant oil and ag money to commission famous architects, so why not?

The proud culture of that era lives on in the mascot of Bakersfield High School:

All of that is dying. I got these graphics in a reply on X:

Declining as an energy-producing region, Bakersfield and its suburbs are becoming deeply government-dependent: “More than 2.2 million Medi-Cal enrollees live in the agriculture-dominated Central Valley from San Joaquin County south to Kern County. Spending cuts would perhaps be felt most deeply in Kern and Tulare Counties, where up to two-thirds of residents are enrolled in Medi-Cal. Medi-Cal participation in Kern and Tulare far exceeds the statewide Medi-Cal enrollment rate of one in three Californians, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.”

And so Downtown Bakersfield was remarkably full of homeless dudes, this week, and obvious drug use on the street.

The old culture lives on at the edges, and I watched a man in a cowboy hat take off the hat to address a lady this week, but it’s…at the edges.

Big government produces monoculture. And people who live in tents next to the freeway. Fight it.