From Golden State to Welfare State
The devolution of California and the growing dichotomy between 'free' states and 'social justice' states
California was once a pinnacle. It was a place to dream about - a place to travel to. Tourists from all over the world still come to the Golden State to experience the geographic diversity, ranging from cobalt-blue Pacific seas to sharp, jagged high deserts. California is the birthplace of dreams, boasting a range of mountains and cities, rural farming valleys, and quaint seaside retreats.
Economically, California has one of the largest economies in the world (5th, if it were to be viewed as its own country). Sprinkled along the coastline is a veritable smorgasbord of culture and history, ranging from the California missions to the snow-dusted slopes of Mt. Shasta. The Central Valley is comprised of a 450-mile swatch of fertile farmland, where neat, green bricks of stone fruit and citrus trees stitch together a patchwork quilt of foliage when viewed through the window of an airplane.
California, unlike the U.S. colonies on the East Coast, has a deep history rooted in Spanish colonization, Catholic friars, and the rough-and-tumble gold rush that drove wealth-hunters to Sacramento. The Golden State, aptly named, didn’t enter the Union until 1850, becoming the 31st state.
My own great-grandparents, Chetko and Andje, immigrated here from Yugoslavia in the early 20th century, determined to carve out a life for themselves, heading first to Montana and ultimately settling in the Central Valley of California.
Until recently, California itself was a mosaic of cultural diversity deftly woven into the fabric of an adventurous history. The landscape of California changed, sure - the Tulare Lake is no more, and the rolling, overflowing Kings River that captured the imagination of John Muir was long ago dammed while fields were plowed to make way for large-scale farming.
California became a titan of industry and agriculture, exporting goods from the valley as well as intangible entertainment from the southern region. “California Dreamin" is still one of the most recognizable songs in the world, and for good reason - California is a beautiful place to live, and it’s among just two percent of few locations in the world that boasts a coveted Mediterranean climate. That means no snow, no blizzards, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, and no monsoon season. The weather is extremely temperate, with the winters at their worst punching Californians with cloying fog or, sometimes, slightly-below freezing temperatures in the early morning between February and March.
California is a dream.
Or, at least, it was.
California since 2000
The last true conservative governor California had was Ronald Reagan, who was elected in 1967 and served for two terms. It’s pretty much been all downhill from there, but that devolution hasn’t come on the heels of poor gubernatorial leadership alone.
For Californians, it’s easy to see the steady decline in the overall culture of the state, ranging from rising crime to the simple cleanliness of our cities. Once sparkling-clean farm towns filled with mom-and-pop cafes and gift shops are gone, replaced with smoke shops, WIC offices and state-sponsored daycare centers. Highways and country roads are interspersed with piles of dumped garbage, old furniture, and junked televisions. Almost every major city from Los Angeles to Fresno is bowing under the weight of a catastrophic homeless problem. Transients set up tents on freeway offramps and live in massive encampments in downtown metropolises. Violent crime has exploded in rural areas, particularly in the tiny, once-quaint farm towns where pockets of gang and cartel-related activity has skyrocketed.
In 2000, when George W. Bush was president, Trending Politics reported that more than one million illegal migrants crossed over U.S. southern border. In 2021, more than 1.8 million crossed over - and the total number is likely much higher than that.
Along with this uptick in illegal crossings come an influx of drug and human trafficking, introducing cartel violence into our once-safe city streets. MS-13 gang graffiti is visible just down the road from my house, and I live in a “very rural” part of California.
Police logs in the Central Valley indicate an overwhelming uptick in gang and cartel-related activity. Even worse, open borders mean that another modern crime is flourishing: human trafficking. In fact, a recent report from Yahoo News indicated that more than 200 potential victims of human trafficking were located by the FBI in California - including children. Open borders facilitate the easy and open flow of both sex slaves and bioweapons like fentanyl (I call it a bioweapon because it has the potential to cause mass destruction).
It is the influx of illegal immigration that is hugely responsible for the denigration of safety in California. People have flooded into the state from all over the world, mostly unvetted, and the welfare programs here facilitate their ability to stay comfortably and easily. In California, for example, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policies have cemented a long-term population of millions of what California likes to call “undocumented” immigrants. The children of illegal migrants are protected from deportation and given a work permit.
The issue, of course, is not that they’re given a work permit - the issue is that often, the entire family is all here illegally, and they’re bringing more people over the border, continually. Even that alone is not necessarily horrible (although common sense dictates that any country, for the sake of its own safety, premeditatively VET their incoming immigrants for obvious reasons). What becomes an issue in California is the amount of welfare programs gifted to an illegal population that is facilitating, often, the defacement of law and order.
California further offers so many welfare programs for the illegal population that it is almost impossible to drive into any city without seeing the deluge of state-sponsored programs. There is a United Health clinic on every corner, along with a WIC center, a First Five/Headstart Center (state-run daycare), immigration offices, and more. Years ago, a former coworker of mine who was working on the DACA program proudly told me, “I get to go to college for free because I’m a DACA kid.”
In fact, California is now poised to protect healthcare benefits for illegal immigrants thanks to a law scheduled to take effect in January 2024, which would extend Medicaid coverage to every adult here illegally.
California not only facilitates its devolvement into a welfare state - it deliberately incentivizes it. With benefits like that, why wouldn’t immigrants want to come here? The problem is - rewarding illegal actions with free benefits has a track record of attracting the bad along with the good.
In California, the crime in our rural areas and in our cities illustrate exactly how damaging the open border and welfare state system is - and it’s not getting any better.
Environmentalists are the true enemy of the forests
Another issue that has sprung up within the last 10 years, primarily, is the overwhelming destruction of California’s forests. Environmental floozies will tell you that it’s “global warming” that’s burning the woods, and that argument holds about as much water as “the earth is flat and if you sail to the edge of it, you’ll fall off.” California’s forests are not just poorly managed - they’re not managed at all. Debris and dead wood litter the ground, providing a tinderbox for any errant spark or lightning strike. Old trees and diseased trees are hardly cleared out, and environmental groups make it impossible to bring logging companies into the woods to keep things clean enough to prevent catastrophic wildfires.
Last week, I was driving with my husband through the National Forest, and I was horrified when we rounded the corner of what was previously a thickly-wooded forested area filled with giant Sequoias. The landscape was charred and wide-open, a sea of black matchstick trees extending from the top of the mountain peak to the next. Destroyed. Hollowed out. Gone.
It’s like this everywhere in California. Environmental groups bar the proper management of our forests, and every time we have a storm, lightning strikes a tree, starts a fire, and we lose thousands of more square acres.
California is not only collapsing economically because of its idiotic welfare programs, but it’s geographic beauty is being razed to the ground on such a large scale that it appears deliberate and malicious.
Even worse, our manmade “drought” continues in the Golden State, where farmers are arbitrarily denied enough water to irrigate their fields and homeowners are told to refrain from planting grass because “WATER PROBLEMS.” Rolling blackouts continue throughout the summer, energy prices have skyrocketed, and even vehicle registration in California is abysmally expensive - over 200 dollars, even for a car that’s 20 years-old.
Is it any wonder that people are fleeing the state for redder pastures like Florida or Idaho?
Red v. Blue
Dennis Prager has a wonderful point of view about states like California and states like, for example, Florida. In an opinion column he penned in 2020 for The Western Journal, he posed the question: “How long can the soviet states of America and the free states of America coexist?”
And that, truly, is the question. As California becomes increasingly communist - facilitating free and easy illegal immigration, leaving the door open for cartels, allowing homeless transients to suffer in the streets, implementing laws that deny police the ability to enforce order and peace-keeping, and even going so far as to attempt to become a “sanctuary state” for abortion - other states are becoming more conservative.
We can see a massive contrast between what states like Florida are doing and what states like California are doing. As California leans more left and pushes for a social justice welfare state, Florida becomes more “right” and pushes for a more individualistic society.
Prager wisely writes this:
There is no question that America is becoming, if it hasn’t already become, two countries: one that values liberty, from small businesses being allowed to operate to people being allowed to say what they believe, and one that has contempt for liberty, from eating in restaurants to free speech.
I am asked almost daily by friends around the country and by callers to my national radio show whether I intend to stay in California. Were it not for all the close friends who live here and the synagogue I and a few friends founded, the answer would be no.
But at a given point, I am sure that I will leave this Soviet satellite for a free state.
Unfortunately, while I believe that California is absolutely worth fighting for, the problems here will not be resolved until we can close our borders, crack down on bloody, violent crimes, and completely END the welfare programs outside of urgent, emergency, and temporary circumstances.
To change California would require, at the bare minimum, the following:
Conservative-controlled legislature,
Conservative or at least moderate governor,
Declaring an invasion at the border and closing it immediately,
Implementing a type of safe and sane deportation program or at least a pathway to citizenship for DACA children alone that facilitates personal responsibility, financial responsibility, and a total end to their financial and healthcare benefits,
Allowing our police officers to enforce laws and crack down on drug and human trafficking cartels, regardless of whether it’s politically correct or not.
Overhauling the system in California would require the dismantlement of a political aristocracy that has snaked its ugly tentacles into every area of the state. As Sacramento lawmakers worry about making sure women have the right to murder their unborn children with reckless abandon, the rest of the state is going up in flames - literally and figuratively.
Additionally, California is likely hopelessly overinflated with voter fraud, just like other states. The likelihood that our elections are influenced by dubious voting machines and ballot fraud is high, and that is yet another disconcerting element that would have to be looked at in order to restore the dignity and law and order of the overall state.
Can California come back from its entrenched, dogmatic, leftist, bureaucratic corruption? Is there hope to restore the health of the Golden State?
There is always hope, but it would require a full-scale, citizen-led fight to the finish, and we would be fighting against the corruptive might of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
California is worth fighting for - but we must also recognize that California is no longer the place we grew up. It’s no longer truly free, and if things continue going the way that they are, Dennis Prager is absolutely right:
We will be a nation of Soviet States versus Free States, and there will be little in between.