People talk about the California disaster, but I don’t think we fully appreciate the severity and the manifestations of it. And the best barometer to discover that is how many people are leaving. It’s estimated that somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Californians left in ’25, ’26.
Now, the problem with that is they’re not leaving a barren state. They’re not leaving a cold Alaska. They’re leaving the most beautiful state in the country that for years under a bipartisan system of Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, and to some extent Arnold Schwarzenegger, it had wonderful governance.
So, why are they leaving? Why have 11 to 12 million people, a quarter of the present population, left California?
Well, the Reason Foundation just did a comprehensive study of all the roads in all the states and ranked them according to congestion, quality of roads, bridges, everything. California was 49th, 49th in the country.
In terms of school scores, it’s down to about 40 to 41 in the nation, even though it’s 13th in the amount of money it spends. It’s got one-third of all the homeless people, maybe up to nearly a half in some studies.
It’s got a third of all the welfare recipients. Twenty-two percent of the people live below the poverty line.
Think of this. It has the highest gasoline taxes in the nation and the highest gas prices, and that’s a combination. It refuses to tap its considerable fifth-in-the-nation oil and natural gas reserves to the full extent that it could.
It shut down the timber industry. It shut down the mining industry.
So, we’re paying because of our green fanaticism on oil blends, and we’ve been driving out oil refineries, and we have these high taxes.
We’re paying $7 to $8 a gallon right now for gas. We have the highest electricity rates in the continental United States. Only Hawaii has it higher. Think of that.
We have some of the highest property crime rates in the country. San Francisco, until recently, was the highest property crime rate city per capita in the nation.
Our sales tax is among the top 10. We have the highest income taxes. Now, we know why this is the problem.
We know why, why this all happened. We haven’t had a Republican governor in nearly 20 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger left. We have no statewide offices that are Republican, no attorney general, no lieutenant governor, no state controller, nothing.
We have 52 seats in the Congress. We only have seven, you know, it’s like 12% … We only have seven Republican congressmen, and yet Donald Trump almost got 30%, 40% of the vote. So, we have less than a third of what we should be proportionally represented in Congress.
All of the state and local judges, after 20 years of governance by left-wing [officials], are left-wing themselves.
So, the judicial, the executive, and the legislative branches are all one party, supermajorities in both legislatures. No statewide officer that’s a Republican.
What do you do about it? Well, who is the iconic victim? Who has been at the center of this maelstrom for the last 30 years? One man, Gavin Newsom.
Hellbound and Down 