Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph today has a scorching column setting out all the reasons that woke, authoritarian California has become a basket case state where no one (except illegal immigrants, who get showered with freebies) wants to live. Her tee-up is Nick Clegg’s decision to relocate from the Golden State to rainy Blighty.
Clegg’s Remainiac heart notwithstanding, he is one of thousands who no longer feels even remotely Californian. Rich and poor are calling time on the Golden State. Billionaires Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of Oracle, Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir, and Elon Musk of Tesla, have all relocated their companies to cheaper, friendlier states. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s main residence is Hawaii.
For everyone else, with remote work becoming mainstream in Covid lockdowns, net emigration has hit record highs. In 2021 the population of California fell by 117,500. People are fed up of soaring taxation, the high cost of living, groaning regulation, an authoritarian impulse on full show during Covid, and stagnating job growth. The heavy-handed state continually fails to solve the lethal social problems that are on permanent display, from mass shootings, which happen about every eight days (this is still lower than the national average), to spiralling homelessness. California’s dynamism and sense of possibility – where, despite high prices and social strains, those with hustle and good ideas could become fantastically successful – has been sucked dry. Why would you stay?
It is sobering to watch the state most associated with the miracles of American capitalist and creative glories become scorched earth – consumed with fires both real (this year has already seen whole settlements in northern California razed by flames) – and metaphorical.
The sad truth is that California is reaping what it has sown: not simply with its heavy-handed regulation, but in its deep and committed embrace of wokeness, which permeates from its courts via Hollywood to schools and hospitals. The ideological disintegration of the state was always going to hasten its economic decline and now, as the rest of the country descends into full-scale cultural war in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade and the ghastly normalisation of mass shootings, there is no wider structure to act as a bolster.
The Californian rot, long in place, became pronounced in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Amid soaring crime rates, the mayors of both Los Angeles and San Francisco announced plans to defund the police, slashing hundreds of millions from budgets. It wasn’t the smartest plan: Los Angeles was experiencing a terrifying rise in homicides.
California’s committed progressivism has been evident in its embrace of illegal immigrants, offering drivers licences and free health care. If this boosted the economy and made life better for everyone, then great. But such measures do not go down well with those they are supposed to celebrate.
Blacks and Hispanics – according to U.S. Census Data – fare worse in California than almost anywhere else in the U.S., with a third of Latinos living in poverty compared to the 21% average elsewhere. Since 1990, the black population of Los Angeles county has dropped by nearly 200,000. More than half now express interest in leaving the state. Woke hasn’t worked.
Nowhere is this clearer than the state’s schools, which are failing kids from all backgrounds. San Francisco, the world’s epicentre of warped social justice ideology, has the worst scores for black students of any county in the state, and yet its educators continue to shovel woke rubbish at them instead of the basics. Half of California high school students can barely read, and yet they are expected to take ethnic-studies courses. No wonder Clegg, a father of three, felt uneasy.
Then there is sex. Despite the long-running horror of many parents at the state’s ‘inclusive’ sex education curricula, which has included teaching their kids about ‘blood play’, the Los Angeles Unified School District has now formally adopted a ‘trans-affirming’ curriculum to ensure classes are ‘queer all school year’. Teachers are to instruct on the ‘breakdown of the gender binary’ and encourage students to experiment with gender pronouns such as ‘they’, ‘ze’, and ‘tree’. Schools have collaborated with therapists and students to keep parents in the dark about their children’s use of cross-sex hormones and name-changes.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
In 2021 the population of California fell by 117,500
Out of a population of 39 million, that’s not very much. In the early 1990s and early 2000s, net taxpayer migration out of California was a lot higher https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265
I came to make a similar comment. California is much much more than the big coastal urban metropolis’s of LA and San Fran. Context is important when quoting figures.
Compared with traditional net inward movement it is significant, and it’s not the quantity it’s the quality that counts.
California is the blueprint for the Biden administration and Democrats.
it is a great success as it is achieving the aims of progressive government.
According to this CNBC article more than 360.000 people left California in 2021…
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/11/californians-working-from-home-are-moving-to-mexico-amid-inflation.html
….looking at other articles is looks as though the majority of people leaving California re-located to one of the reddest of red states, Texas…??
Which must say something??
Great article. I have never been to California, but I can imagine that the picture painted here is pretty true.
And let’s just put one little thing straight – Elon Musk left California because it could no longer afford to shower him with gifts (courtesy, of course, of the taxpayer) for being “green”. It’s no surprise that – while Tesla ownership is negligible in the US (as it is everywhere else in the world) – it is by far the highest in California. But they don’t look after their electricity grid, so BEVs have had their day.
And one of Musk’s biggest investors, Larry Ellison, is just as bad. But not quite as manipulative.
I couldn’t access the article as I don’t pay for my propaganda right or left. However, it looked like this critique didn’t mention the incredibly pernicious and excessive covidian lockdowns, masking and mandated vaccinations that only New York beat in their levels of horror.
Meh, but then the telegraph will only get you so far and the cabal loves getting everyone livid about woke one way or the other.
(Blood play? Ffs if that isn’t some Satanic sheite I don’t know what is….)
I haven’t the foggiest, either.
But then I am nothing special. Heck, I hadn’t even heard of QAnon until I was accused of being a member, back in March 2020, when I pointed out to my work colleagues that SARS-CoV-2 was really unremarkable and that we should just ignore all the fear porn…
Well you probably know by now that QAnon is a deep fake organisation that uses some real conspiracies mixed with nonsense ones to discredit the real ones and suck in well intentioned people who buy into the nonsense and end up looking like fools as well as getting put on Homeland security lists for future reference…
Its like those FBI terrorist honey traps or the kidnapping plot of Governor Whitmer, and probably most of the high profile high school shootings…
“Zee” and “tree”? Are they off zeir tree?!
Fired By Childline For My Child Safety Concerns. Abusive Practices Are Damaging Our Children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4fTIfxNP3o
James Esses is James is a Criminal Barrister and Trainee Psychotherapist. He is the co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists and advocates around the political, legal, health and cultural impacts of gender ideology. In 2021, 3 years into his 5 year therapy course, James was expelled from university for launching a public petition trying to safeguard therapy and counselling for vulnerable children with gender dysphoria. He was also fired as a volunteer for Childline. He is now taking his university and his regulatory body to court and has crowdfunded over £100,000 for this from concerned members of the public.
The New Culture Forum
Yellow Boards By The Road BUILD BACK FREEDOM …
Monday 8th August 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction A329 London Road &
Fernbank Rd, Winkfield Row
Ascot SL5 8ED
Stand in the Park Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham
Howard Palmer Gardens Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Bracknell
South Hill Park, Rear Lawn, RG12 7PA
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
The States not infected with woke should close their borders to fleeing Californians. They might bring the infection with them.
Go woke …… go broke.
I’ve been to California on business quite a lot, mainly in the noughties. Fabulous state then with friendly people. Socialism funded by a corrupt DC and the US taxpayer will ultimately destroy what was once the envied Sunshine State. Nobody apart from illegally infused immigrants will be left. Nobody in their right mind will move there. Pray for the US at this sad time.
I’ve lived on and off in California most of my adult life. What is going on there is heartbreaking. It has gone from the best place to start and run a technology company to one of the worst.