Sitting in a park in Paris, France
Reading the news and it sure looks bad.
They won't give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had.
Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn't wanna stay here.
It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here.
Oh, but California
California, I'm coming home.
I'm gonna see the folks I dig.
I'll even kiss a Sunset pig.
California, I'm coming home.
— Joni Mitchell, California, 1971
Charlie Daniels was wrong. The devil did not go down to Georgia. He went down to California sometime in the 1960s. Easier pickings. The devil took an American paradise of homes, sunshine and beaches and turned it into a chaotic mess with rows of pup tents filled with strung-out people. Illegal aliens have replaced middle class people who either died or left. The stores are under assault by shoplifters as the police must look the other way lest they get in trouble and risk their pensions.
The Los Angeles Times foolishly compared California to Florida in a 2,000-word story that mentioned everything except population. Allow me to mention that.
In Fiscal Year 2022, 343,230 people left California for other U.S. states, a net loss of 113,649 people. It led the nation in population loss.
Politico reported on December 22, 2022, “Florida is the fastest growing state, Census data shows.” It gained 416,754 people.
Instead of reporting those easily attainable numbers, the LA Times went anecdotal and showed a poll from Kenneth P. Miller, a professor at Claremont McKenna College.
The story said, “In California, for example, 70% of Republicans are interested in moving out of the state, compared with just 27% of Democrats; and in Florida, 49% of Democrats and just 19% of Republicans said they would ponder leaving, Miller found in an October poll of voters from the two states as well as Texas and New York.”
You see, the paper argued, it is just a difference of political opinion. Never mind that more people not only want to leave California but that more people are leaving. More U-Haul trucks left California than any other state in 2022. It has been one of the top evacuation states since 2016.
One reason people leave is money. California has the nation’s highest state income tax rate at 13.3%. Florida has no state income tax.
Ah, but they always get you at sales tax, defenders of state income taxes state. Florida’s sales tax is 6%. Oh but California — California — comes in at 7.25%.
However, the Golden State is broke. California is headed to a $22.5 billion budget deficit.
Meanwhile, Florida has a budget surplus of $21.8 billion.
Money woes are a symptom of the sickness of Satanism. California is where the American dream crashed and burned. The slide down the slippery slope began with Ronald Reagan on June 16, 1967.
On that date, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, “Gov. Reagan yesterday signed a landmark bill liberalizing California’s 96-year-old abortion law.
“The relaxed ceremony in Reagan’s office contrasted with emotional hearings in the Legislature and the governor’s own last-minute reservations about the bill.”
By liberalizing, the newspaper meant legalizing. Never compromise with the devil. The bill that Reagan signed into law helped create the fake right to abort babies in Roe v. Wade, a case based on lies including one that the plaintiff had been gang-raped.
California’s slide since has had a few speed bumps. In 1978, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13, which slapped a strict restriction on property tax increases.
Voters also fought back in 1994 with Proposition 187, which banned the use of taxes to provide state services to illegal aliens. But it was to no avail.
The History Channel reported, “Within a week of passage, a legal challenge had prevented the new law from taking effect—it was held up in the appeals process until 1999, when a Democratic governor dropped the state’s appeal. Studies have since shown that Proposition 187 played a key role in galvanizing immigrants’ rights activists and pushing Latinx and Asian voters away from the California Republican Party. Over the next decade, 66% of newly registered California voters were Latinx and another 23% were Asian. In the same period, Republicans went from holding roughly half of elected offices in the state to less than a quarter. California has since formally repealed Prop 187 and enacted some of the United States’ most sweeping protections for the [illegal aliens.]”
But, hey, the Replacement Theory is just a racist conspiracy theory, right?
As of 2019, more than 2.7 million illegal aliens live in California. That gives the state four extra congressmen.
Then there are drugs. In 1996, California began legalizing marijuana. Some readers may scoff, but marijuana is a gateway drug. Oh, not every person who smokes pot turns into a druggie. Far from it. Reefer Madness is just a movie. But enough people do start on pot and move on to harder drugs to justify its ban because the cost of junkies to society is paid in unlivable cities.
Parts of Los Angeles are overrun. Axios reported on December 21, 2022, “The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's annual report on homelessness, released this week, found there were 171,521 unhoused people in California in its one-night point-in-time count, with 44 people experiencing homelessness for every 10,000 people in the state.”
It’s the drugs.
The homeless not only are ruining California’s highways and byways, but combatting homelessness also is costing the state $7.2 billion a year. Given its looming deficit, that’s a huge problem. The $817 million it received in marijuana taxes in Fiscal Year 2021 barely covered a tenth of the cost of fighting homelessness.
The devil is not through but the LA Times ignores the problem. In fact, it helps him.
Its story began, “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the weeks since his re-election warring with ‘woke’ enemies: picking a $2 billion fight with the world’s largest money manager over its environmental policies and vowing to go to court to defend a new law that blocks teaching about racial oppression and white privilege.”
Translation: DeSantis pulled state money from a company that invests not based on making money but on politics and DeSantis opposes teaching Critical Race Theory, which teaches that the nation is hopelessly racist and therefore its constitution is invalid because it was written by slave owners.
CRT advocates deny schools teach while at the same time demanding it not be banned. Colleges have promoted the discredited theory for decades. The teachers then pass their bias on to students. It is subtle. Now after two generations, the devil tees up to overturn the work of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others to bring racial equality to the United States.
While the LA Times compared its state to Florida, the San Francisco Chronicle gushed, “$5 million for each longtime Black resident? S.F. has a bold reparations plan to consider.”
If adopted nationally, the plan would cost $48 trillion. It would bankrupt the country if Presidents Bush 43, Obama, Trump and Biden had not already run up the national credit card by $27 trillion through their collective maladministration. Much of that debt comes from past reparations in the 1960s through HUD and welfare. In the 1970s, liberals pitched affirmative action as reparations. Heck, Obama’s election as president was part of reparations.
The point of reparations is to divide and conquer by race. That the devil started in California, a free state, and not the South shows that like water, he takes the path of least resistance.
The money is not really the problem. We can always print up more and we will. The damage is to the soul of the nation and to a race. Reparations allow 13% of the population to blame all their personal problems on a discrimination that ended more than a half-century ago and then was replaced by a discrimination that favors their race in hiring, schooling and many other ways.
White guilt is toxic. The press ladles it on.
The Chronicle said, “San Francisco is a 47-square-mile city that’s home to more than 60 billionaires and at least 7,000 homeless people, around 40% of whom are Black, despite Black people representing only 5% of the population.”
The devil whispers into their ears (through the newspaper) “Failure is not your fault.”
If you think reparations are not inevitable, please remember they said the same thing about LGBT, which is a good way to segue to that part of the devil’s plan.
In its story, the LA Times said of DeSantis, “He campaigned on his resistance to COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates; championed laws that forbid discussing LGBTQ issues in public kindergarten through third grade; and restricted teaching about racial oppression throughout the public education system. All of those stances, he argues, empower parents and attract businesses.
“His allies say they see Florida, where the Republican edge has been modest for decades, as a fully red state since DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 percentage points. That included a victory in Miami-Dade, the most Latino county in the state, just weeks after he used taxpayer money to ship unsuspecting Central American [Venezuelan] migrants [illegal aliens] from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
“DeSantis has also been eager to fight what he calls ‘woke capitalism;’ he signed a bill in April to revoke Disney’s special tax status after the company criticized Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law.”
By “Don’t Say Gay,” the paper referred to the Parental Rights in Education Act. You also cannot say Jesus or God in school. All the law did was make any talk of sex by teachers age-appropriate, the codifying what everyone assumed was the rule. Floridians were so appalled that they gave DeSantis a 20-point win in the general election after he signed the Parental Rights in Education Act into law.
The LA Times tried valiantly to portray Florida as a horrible place, saying at one point, “homeowner insurance companies are imposing 30% rates hikes or leaving the market entirely, due in large part to hurricanes that have been made more ferocious by climate change.”
Meanwhile, another flood season has replaced drought season in California. The paper blames that on the imaginary climate change. The state has not built a water reservoir in 40 years, thus the rain from these floods just washed to the sea where it cannot help Californians endure the next drought in this endless cycle of droughts and floods which gave been going on for thousands of years.
Breitbart reported, “California received some 32 trillion gallons of water in three weeks of atmospheric river storms across the state, according to Fox News. In 2014, the state used 42 million acre feet, or about 1.4 trillion gallons, annually, according to the Desert Sun, citing the U.S. Geological Survey. (A more recent figure from USGS suggests the state withdraws up to 28,800 gallons per day, or about 1 trillion per year, from the environment.)
“Given that the state only taps half of its water supply for human uses, about 16 trillion gallons of the rain that fell on California in the last few weeks could theoretically be directed to human use — if it were stored. That means that enough rain fell to supply the state’s water needs for at least another decade — and maybe longer.
“However, the state’s water storage capacity is only 43 million acre feet, matching about one year’s human use. Given that most reservoirs — even in the ongoing extreme drought — have some water in them, not all of the 43 million acre feet of storage space is available to capture the ongoing rains — and some dams’ floodgates have been opened. More than 95% of the rain that is falling on the state is simply being allowed to wash out to sea.”
Instead of building reservoirs, Democrats are destroying dams.
On May 22, 2022, the San Francisco Chronicle bragged, “California is about to begin the nation’s largest dam removal project. Here’s what it means for wildlife.”
It is a Kingdom of Clowns.
In its Florida vs. California piece, the LA Times tried bravely to portray Governor Gavin Newsom — the Great White Hope of the Democrat Party in 2024 — as dealing with serious problems while DeSantis rags on drag queens. It said, “Newsom is battling a homelessness crisis that has crippled major cities, an energy crisis that threatens the state’s prosperity and a water crisis that has failed to abate. After decades of population growth, the state is seeing more people leave for other states than are coming in from elsewhere.”
Those are serious problems that were created less-than-serious Democrats in the legislature and governor’s mansion. Legalizing drugs and allowing people to defecate and urinate in the streets — while providing them with welfare and food stamps — attracted the homeless. Replacing perfectly good power plants with windmills and solar cells created rolling blackouts. Mandating electric vehicles will exacerbate the problem. Building welfare programs instead of reservoirs led to a water crisis. Overregulating businesses and not regulating the border forced people to move away.
Joni Mitchell’s song, California, was not about the state but about a lover as all her songs seem to be. Still, she captured the Golden State when it was golden. The Eagles captured the state as it is now in Hotel California.
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before.
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave.”
I am happy to report that last line is in error. Californians can leave and they are. No amount of spin about its self-inflicted wounds and no amount of demonization of Florida will slow them down.
The LA times is trying to put lipstick on a pig. It isn’t working. Amazing that all of California’s problems are self-inflicted and easily solved, if only liberals weren’t in charge.
You're right to have noted part of Reagan's role in the collapse of California. Even at that I expect you will receive many rude and unhinged replies.
Reagan also signed the law decriminalizing homosexuality, to which Bob Hope retorted "I hope I'm out of here before it becomes mandatory!"