squalid homeless encampments, mismanaged utilities, gun-grabbing Democrat politicians, a potentially bankrupt public employee pension fund, and wildfires in California…
The state is becoming over-run with illegal aliens. The state legislature granted them driver’s licenses. And now there is talk of illegals being appointed to state boards and commissions–all for the sake of “fair representation.” In California’s larger cities, the streets are strewn with human feces and hypodermic syringes. Rats now breed in piles of uncollected trash. Homeless mental patients wander through neighborhoods shouting obscenities, there is public nudity, burgeoning homeless encampments, legalized recreational marijuana…
JWR is right. Leftism is an infection in the body politic. This disease has spread to many states, but it is most advanced in California.
Within recent memory California was consistently conservative. Its citizens voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988. That’s 9 of 10 elections in a row.
Then the left’s dominance of California began. This is, as JWR says, in part a result of California “becoming over-run with illegal aliens.” JWR could have added that it is also in part a result of California becoming over-run with legal immigrants as well. Immigrants total 15 million of the state’s 40 million people, representing over 37 percent of the state’s population, according to figures that are a few years old and are probably an underestimate today. From a 2018 National Review article:
Survey after survey shows that immigrants are disproportionately big-government liberals. As one overview of the data concluded, “solid and persistent majorities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their children share the policy preferences of the modern American Left.” As a result, as University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel has demonstrated, in the nation’s largest counties (which are where immigrants tend to settle), “Republicans have lost 0.58 percentage points in presidential elections for every one percentage-point increase in the size of the local immigrant population.”
If an immigrant entered the country through legal channels, he or she committed no crime. But allowing this flood of legal immigrants was a policy choice made by Washington, D.C. politicians a generation or two ago. It was not inevitable. That, coupled with a lack of border enforcement, gave us the leftist contagion in California. JWR thinks it cannot be cured. He may be right.
The left’s plan is to take the California model and infect the rest of these United States. It is no accident that JWR did not choose Texas or Arizona (which have solid gun laws and cheaper rural properties) and is instead living in an undisclosed state in the American Redoubt near the Canadian border. This is as far from the southern border as you can get.
Excerpt from JWR’s Lament for California:
JWR is right. Leftism is an infection in the body politic. This disease has spread to many states, but it is most advanced in California.
Within recent memory California was consistently conservative. Its citizens voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988. That’s 9 of 10 elections in a row.
Then the left’s dominance of California began. This is, as JWR says, in part a result of California “becoming over-run with illegal aliens.” JWR could have added that it is also in part a result of California becoming over-run with legal immigrants as well. Immigrants total 15 million of the state’s 40 million people, representing over 37 percent of the state’s population, according to figures that are a few years old and are probably an underestimate today. From a 2018 National Review article:
If an immigrant entered the country through legal channels, he or she committed no crime. But allowing this flood of legal immigrants was a policy choice made by Washington, D.C. politicians a generation or two ago. It was not inevitable. That, coupled with a lack of border enforcement, gave us the leftist contagion in California. JWR thinks it cannot be cured. He may be right.
The left’s plan is to take the California model and infect the rest of these United States. It is no accident that JWR did not choose Texas or Arizona (which have solid gun laws and cheaper rural properties) and is instead living in an undisclosed state in the American Redoubt near the Canadian border. This is as far from the southern border as you can get.