California’s obsession with left-wing politics has harmful effects that extend far beyond the state’s borders.
It throws its political and financial weight around, harming itself and the other states too.
C alifornia’s well-documented decline might seem fine to you if you live somewhere east of the Sierras, and you figure the state’s myriad failures fall only upon the guilty. But you’d be wrong. Consider the evidence that California is a key force in driving America toward collapse — that we are a menace to American society, and that we’re coming for you.
CLIMATE CHANGE: Nothing so excites a California politician as talking about the state’s salvific mission vis-à-vis the planet. Press releases from Governor Gavin Newsom’s office always seem to include some version of this chest-thumping/crusading pride: “California is recognized globally for its environmental leadership.” The media are always quick to echo his claims, for instance when, during the campaign to remove Newsom from office, the Los Angeles Times editorial team wrote, “For the sake of the planet, don’t remove California’s governor.” Some of Newsom’s proclamations verge on childlike hysteria, as if Greta Thunberg had suddenly taken up residence at the governor’s mansion — like the time he said: “Cars shouldn’t melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines.” But big states are also big markets, and California’s political establishment uses market access as a tail to wag the national dog of automobile emission standards, which determine the cars available to Americans everywhere. Similarly, California trumpets its reliance on solar and wind power, but when the sun sets or the wind drops, Arizona plants running on fossil fuels are tapped to supply the electricity that powers California’s Teslas. The result: Every Californian and every Arizonan pays more for energy, but the earth’s air is just as befouled as ever. Of course, the real goal here was always about self-satisfaction, allowing us to declare with our governor, “Once again, California is taking on the mantle of global climate leadership and advancing bold strategies to fight climate change.”
FOREST MISMANAGEMENT: Referring to the state’s wildfires, the New York Times reported: “Summer after summer, California, a global leader in battling air pollution from vehicles, sends giant clouds of haze filled with health-damaging particles across the country.” The solutions — logging and prescribed burns — have been well understood for millennia. Similarly, the state’s environmental obsessions, refracted through the powerful Public Utilities Commission, compel power companies to invest in green technologies rather than replace the ancient transmission lines that are routinely blamed for sparking wildfires. Instead of implementing these fixes, our governor uses every wildfire catastrophe as a Hollywood backlot for the emission of noxious claims about climate warming and capitalism. Stomping through incinerated rural California communities while trailing obsequious stenographers, Newsom poses and roars into bouquets of microphones and cameras that he knows the cause of this cyclical pyrotechnic disaster: “It’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change. It’s about corporate greed meeting climate change. It’s about decades of mismanagement.”
THE UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICE: For decades, state auditors have warned California’s Employment Development Division that EDD’s medieval internal accounting systems were liable to hacks. But EDD ignored those warnings because it has a loftier goal: expanding access to government benefits in the name of social justice. Anything else was dismissed as contemptible, an unnecessary hurdle imposed by bigots and bigshots who hate the poor. The social-justice warriors won, and now Californians can legitimately claim that we’ve spread the wealth: When Trump and then Biden pushed trillions of dollars in Covid unemployment benefits to the states, California lost up to $31 billion of its share to fraudsters. A former U.S. Department of Justice attorney hired to track the money says at least $20 billion ended up in the hands of global and domestic crime rings. But we’ll recover it, right? Because we’re a global leader in technology? “At the end of the day it’s all going to be pennies on the dollar,” said the investigator. “Most of it is long gone.”
THE SUPPLY CHAIN: Americans who had never heard these two words used in a compound noun now know firsthand the failures of America’s supply chain. But they may not appreciate California’s role in creating the crisis. The cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach run their ports, which together provide a gateway to 40 percent of the nation’s imports, and state and local regulations make it nearly impossible for trucks to enter the port complex to move containers unless they comply with emissions standards that ban older and out-of-state vehicles; impose costly innovations (such as pollution trackers) on new ones, and discriminate against independent drivers in favor of union-run companies. Contracts with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union prohibit new technology if it reduces employment; that makes California’s ports among the world’s least efficient. No California Democrat wants to confront the ILWU ahead of the 2022 campaign season, especially not with the union stacking cash in its strike fund. You can see the result: container ships anchored for miles just off the coast. But there’s a lot you can’t see because it’s below the surface — a web of pipes moving oil from offshore drilling rigs to onshore refineries. In early 2021, a storm tossed one of the waiting ships so fiercely that its anchor, dragging along the ocean floor, snagged an undersea pipeline. The resulting spill of 126,000 gallons triggered a flurry of state and local denunciations of fossil fuels — but not of the government officials who produced the port crisis and then directed cargo ships to park directly above critical oil infrastructure. Litigation followed quickly, with lawsuits against the pipeline company and the shipping firm whose anchor may have ripped the pipeline, but no one suing the state or cities for their absolute fecklessness. Speaking about the leak as if government had no role in creating it, Governor Newsom blamed oil: “It’s time, once and for all, to disabuse ourselves that this has to be part of our future. This is part of our past.”
THE COMING BACON APOCALYPSE: State regulators will, in the next few weeks, ban the sale in California of chickens, veal calves, and pigs raised in conditions prohibited under 2018’s Proposition 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. Remarkably, the law covers producers everywhere on the planet. Producers are scrambling but say they won’t meet the deadline. The resulting meat shortage will be nationwide. Pork producers in Iowa and other midwestern and southeastern states, and poor people all over the U.S., will pay more so that most California voters can feel less bad about themselves.
THRILL KILL KULT: Denouncing Texas’s new abortion law, Governor Newsom convened the dystopian-sounding California Future of Abortion Council and conjured from that coven a strategy to make California a “sanctuary” — a sanctuary! — for abortion. The council’s “recommendations are more than wild ideas,” a Los Angeles Times reporter asserted, because “some of the state’s most important policymakers helped write them.” “Important”! “Policymakers”! CFAC is in fact made up of run-of-the-death-mill abortion advocates offering 45 ways to accommodate women seeking to end their pregnancies, no matter whence they come, even non-citizens who travel here from outside the U.S. There’s clearly an economic-development play here, with a Planned Parenthood official saying the governor is helping the abortion industry “build capacity and build workforce,” something that requires “partnership and investment with the state.” CFAC proposals backed by the governor include reimbursing abortion tourists for transportation, lodging, child care, and the abortion itself. Another proposal would deputize medical students who, in exchange for performing abortions in rural California, will receive financial help with their student loans and liability-insurance premiums. You might have been conceived anywhere in the U.S. — Austin, Indianapolis, or Billings — or anywhere in the world, but now it’s entirely possible that the first and only thing you’ll see in your all-too-brief life is a California med student working off his student loan.
WELCOME! Never mind the U.S. Constitution. There’s a lot that a big, bold, and beautiful state can do to make it easier for illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. via California’s international border. California has been a sanctuary state since 2017. The next year, state attorney general Xavier Becerra, now President Biden’s secretary of health and human services, threatened to fine businesses $10,000 for assisting ICE. If those businesses “start giving up information about their employees or [give ICE] access to their employees in ways that contradict our new California laws,” Becerra proclaimed, “they subject themselves to actions by my office. We will prosecute those who violate the law.” That edict put California employers in the tough legal position of cooperating with either the feds or the state. Newsom has upped our commitment to illegal immigration by funding nonprofits that assist people who enter the U.S. illegally, providing everything from housing and health care to legal representation. “It just goes to show what you can do when you have a state that’s willing to respond, willing to be innovative, and willing to take some responsibility even though technically, they could just point the finger and say this is a federal problem,” said an American Civil Liberties Union official. Few who arrive here from such benighted places as El Salvador would ever think of leaving California, but if their dreams lead them to your state, well, that becomes your problem. React badly to that challenge, and we’ll provide a service to the Democratic National Committee: “evidence” of your racism.
SPEAKING OF XAVIER BECERRA: Becerra learned about “harm-reduction policies” while climbing California’s political ladder. Designed to address the problem of drug addiction, these initiatives have turned San Francisco, to take the most obvious example, into an open-air drug market and transformed significant numbers of its citizens into zombies — if they’re lucky enough to survive an overdose. “San Francisco is engaged in an unethical refusal to mandate proven medical treatment to drug addicts that is no different from the denial of medical treatment to syphilis sufferers by U.S. government researchers in Tuskegee, Ala., between 1932 and 1972,” writes San Fransicko author Michael Shellenberger. “Of the approximately 600 men enrolled in the Tuskegee experiment, 128 died of syphilis, over a 40-year period. Six times more people died of drug overdoses and poisonings in San Francisco last year alone; 178 of them were black.” Immune to science, Becerra declared the Biden administration ready to implement San Francisco’s failed policies nationwide: “We are willing to go places where our opinions and our tendencies have not allowed us to go before,” he told NPR — except, of course, we have been there before, in California.
THE INVESTING WORLD’S BIG, DUMB CASINO WHALE: California’s government pension managers oversee $469 billion, one of the world’s largest institutional investment funds. Their decisions affect finances everywhere. Despite recent runups in the stock market, the fund still has only 65 percent of the cash it needs to pay retirement benefits. That’s why the agency announced in late 2021 that it will now leverage investments in riskier “alternative” assets. Chasing those investments with half a trillion dollars in cash will distort the markets, with the risk that the California system, already falling behind in its obligations, will follow Puerto Rico’s example and seek a federal bailout — this time with disastrous implications for the U.S. economy. There are other, less obvious dangers when a fund becomes so engorged: California’s pension-fund managers have begun using the threat of divestment to shape corporate personnel policies regarding a host of “social justice” issues. In one recent case, California beat up game maker Activision over allegations of workplace harassment. Axios cheered “state treasurers who aren’t afraid to utilize billions of dollars of investments, often through pension funds, as a way to trigger corporate change.”
WE’VE ACTUALLY BROKEN THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT: California is so dysfunctional that big-name American progressives worry we’ll destroy their program. Cataloguing the state’s failures in the New York Times, California’s own Ezra Klein concludes, “If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?” Elsewhere in the New York Times, Johnny Harris and Binyamin Appelbaum observe, “In many states — including California, New York and Illinois — Democrats control all the levers of power. They run the government. They write the laws. And . . . they often aren’t living up to their values. In key respects, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states.” So there’s a silver lining after all.