VIDEO ON SAN FRANCISCO AND LOS ANGELES
The De-Civilization of America | Victor Davis Hanson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7e34f22HXY
Exclusive—Victor Davis Hanson: California Is a Confederate Society with ‘Sick Fixation’ on Race
California is a neo-Confederate state with a “sick fixation” on ethnicity and race, historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson said in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
California’s hemorrhaging of residents to states with more freedom and prosperity is exacerbating the state’s social stratification in terms of wealth, Hanson stated. He said the state’s volume of illegal aliens further amplifies the wealth divide.
“The middle class has left,” he said. “About ten million people left California in the last 40 years, and we know where they went. They went to Nevada, Idaho, Texas, Florida, Tennessee. We have half of all the undocumented illegal aliens in the country. Twenty-seven percent of Californians were not born in United States, whether they’re legally [here], or residents, or citizens.”
Hanson characterized California’s polarization based on wealth as resembling the Antebellum South’s racial segregation.
“That is the nexus: great wealth, great poverty. But the way I look at it is — they would not want to hear this — but just think of the old Confederacy or the Antebellum South — one party, Democratic — this is a one-party state. They had Big Cotton. We have Big Tech. Big Tech runs the whole state, just like Big Cotton [ran the Antebellum South].”
He continued, “The Old South, we had the plantationist class. [Today], these are the people that live in Woodside or Berkeley Hills or Palo Alto, then you had everybody else: black slaves, and you had the poor, what they called ‘white trash.'” There was no middle class. When I go to Stanford, I see all these wealthy kids there, and then I go along El Camino, everybody’s living in a trailer.”
“I go to the Apple or Google or Facebook campuses, and people are living in the streets that work there,” he added.
Contemporary racial agitation pushed by Big Tech’s management and the broader left is reminiscent of racial segregation in the Old South, Hanson said. He noted how today’s left-wing fetishization and commodification of imaginary victimhood based on ethnicity and race resemble the focus on racial designations within the Confederate States of America.
He remarked, “The other thing about the Old Confederacy, they were obsessed with race, and it was the one-drop rule. Everybody was trying to figure out, when a baby was born, what the precise percentages [were], and then they were a ranked society. When I get my email in the morning, it’s all about one thing: race — race, race, race, race, race. I turn on the television: ‘white privilege.'”
“Can Elizabeth Warren pass as a minority? Can Ward Churchill pass? Rachel Dolezal? It’s like African Americans in the South trying to pass as white people.”
He concluded, “It’s just a sick fixation on our superficial appearance. It’s a very Confederate society, California. It’s medieval, feudal. There is no middle class anymore.”
Hanson is the author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
California is Leaving
No children, no middle class, and no future.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
For the first time in its history, California lost a House seat. California Democrats are resorting to conspiracy theories about President Trump and the census, but these are the numbers they got after spending $187 million on outreach and after rigging the census to make sure illegal aliens would continue to participate. And those are far better numbers than California deserves.
The decline and fall is not a surprising development out here where moving trucks are a frequent sight and everyone knows a family that is moving.
I know three of them in under two years.
The population numbers only tell part of the story of a big state that is rapidly losing its future.
California’s fastest growing population is senior citizens. By 2030, every 1 in 3 Californians will be over the age of 50. The over 60 population will increase by 166 percent by 2060 going from 5.5 million to 13.5 million. Hotel California is rapidly becoming a retirement community.
By 2030, California will have a higher percentage elderly population than Florida.
In 1970, the median age of Californians was 27 years old. Jerry Brown became the state's youngest governor of the century. When he next ran for office, he became its oldest governor at the age of 72. California’s median age is now 38. And it’s only headed north from there.
By 2050, a third of LA will be over 65 and by 2060, the median age in LA will be 48.
California’s elderly population is increasing faster than any other age group. While the young population will remain flat, the middle aged population will only increase by a fifth, even as the elderly population more than doubles. These numbers paint a portrait of a state with no growth.
The state’s birth rate fell 10% just last year. A one month comparison actually showed a drop of 23%. While the pandemic suppressed birth rates, the numbers had been dropping in California long before anyone had ever heard of Wuhan. Two years ago it hit the lowest level in a century down to half of the state’s 1990 birth rate. In the last decade, California’s birth rate dropped twice as much as the national average defying its own demographic destiny.
The news is much worse than these numbers make it look.
States with a large older population are often more conservative, but that’s less likely to happen to California. The fastest growth among its older population isn’t among white people, but the large Hispanic population that fundamentally altered the state’s demographics and politics.
A generation of cheap labor is coming of age. Its members are a lot less likely to leave the state than white seniors. As a Calmatters fellow noted, “older Californians are actually more likely to be immigrants than younger Californians”. They’re also more likely to be lower income.
These estimates are just projections of the future. They show trend lines rather than the escalating consequences of a state that is becoming increasingly unlivable.
California’s golden years were fueled by new industries and cheap land. The land isn’t cheap and the industries are pricing themselves out of the youth population they used to attract. Millennials have been moving out of New York and California in large numbers, and heading to Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. Industries will be forced to follow their potential workforce.
Big Tech monopolies will still maintain their Bay Area enclaves for now, but older and more traditional tech firms are heading to Texas. Sleeping six to a room in a decrepit building converted into a dorm may be part of the price of admission in start-up culture, but even much of the tech industry is opting out of the hellscape of the talent rat race.
This exodus probably won’t have good political consequences for either California or Texas.
The middle class provides political and economic stability and it’s vanishing from the state at rapid rates. What’s replacing it is an itinerant hipster class drawn to Big Tech and the entertainment industry, driven by radical politics, but with no commitment to the state.
This same hipster class wrecked New York City, before abandoning it in droves, and is busy wrecking its hubs in Portland and Seattle. Not to mention any other cities where it got a foothold.
It’s why California’s birth rate has declined twice as fast as the rest of the country.
California swapped a settled and more conservative population for a more itinerant population of millennial hipsters and immigrant laborers. The state lost its future even as the gross population numbers still looked good because there were still people even if they were becoming less likely to have children, buy homes, or do any of the things that a settled population actually does.
The short term fix looked good on the census, it looked good economically, but it had no future, and the state is slowly coming off the high and coming face to face with a bleak future.
California’s doom loop of radicals wrecking its cities and the state, enabled by the cheap labor imported to cater to their whims, is just getting started. As conservatives and the middle class flee the state, it becomes even more of a playground for urban elites, trashing rural counties, enabling crime, social dysfunction, and economic ruin that they expect to be immune from either because they’re walled off, expect to move on, or not to be alive when the social bill comes due.
Jerry Brown’s old California could outgrow and survive its worst follies, but the new California isn’t actually growing and is running out of the future it’s burning through at a rapid rate.
California Democrats are complaining that population growth has slowed because of President Trump’s immigration enforcement. But that hasn’t stopped immigrants from heading to other states. Their real problem is that younger immigrants and migrants are less interested in California because its economic potential and opportunities are running out like everything else.
The cost of living relative to the economic rewards are unappealing even to many illegal aliens. Those who do come are more likely to have plans for more profitable work in organized crime.
Meanwhile, poll numbers show that California Latinos have been turning on Governor Newsom over the lockdowns. The state’s new working class is on a collision course with the Democrats, and the Democrats are getting nervous because without constant migrant churn, new immigrants supplementing and displacing the old, their political hegemony might come apart.
The coalition between cheap labor and radical Democrats worked as long as there was work to go around. As California’s social stability collapses, its economic growth will go with it.
A reckoning is coming and a lost House seat is the least of it.
A scam works as long as everyone involved thinks they have something to gain. It falls apart when they wake up and realize that the Nigerian prince will never write them that check.
California Democrats have been writing checks post dated to the future. But there’s no future and the demographic checks are starting to bounce.
"My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It's been a place of dreams,” a younger Jerry Brown would rhapsodize. But it turns out that California is not such a unique place after all. It’s a land of dreams, and dreams are not a good basis for policy. When leftists turn their dreams into reality, they wake up to discover they’re living a nightmare.
Rising crime and homelessness, unaffordable housing costs, exorbitant tax rates, and a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic are among the factors fueling the effort to oust Newsom, who was busted on several occasions for flouting the state's pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings.
California's leaders delude themselves about why their state is losing people
The 2020 Census results are a complete embarrassment to California's ruling Democrats.
Despite opening the floodgates to millions of illegal aliens, making the state the home to one out of four foreigners who break into the country without authorization, the state has made substandard gains in population over the last decade.
The population that the state did gain over the last decade was well below the 7.4% national average, according to the New York Times, and really bad compared to places like number-one Texas. As a result, the state is losing a congressional seat, for the first time in its 170-year history. It's happening despite the 6.1% gain because the number of congressional seats is capped at 435. Any state that gains a seat does so at the expense of another. Hello, California.
That's a significant reversal, because until now, California's story has always been about growth, with Census data often showing that its population had doubled.
Worse still, the population has gone negative, not merely substandard in growth, just in the past year. Residents are voting with their feet.
According to Breitbart News:
California's population declined by more than 182,000 people last year, marking the first time in the state's history that it has experienced a year-over-year loss.
State officials said Friday that California's population slid 0.46 percent to slightly under 39.5 million people between January 2020 and January 2021, the Associated Press reported.
Yet despite these embarrassing numbers, brought on by one-party leftist rule in California, state officials delude themselves that it's nothing to do with their policies. Breitbart notes:
State officials chalk off the declining population over the past year to a declining birth rate, reductions in international immigration, and deaths from the coronavirus.
In 2020 alone, 51,000 Californians died from the coronavirus.
Really? I just went to a farewell party last night in Lake Elsinore, California — a very multi-racial one, where nearly all of the attendees were black and Mexican. They were homeowners. Industrious immigrants. Entrepreneurs. Cops. Military people. The street they were on, in a very pretty, newish neighborhood of McMansions with big yards and swimming pools, was loaded with "For Sale" signs.
My friend, her husband, and their kids were pulling up stakes for South Carolina. They weren't the only ones planning on going
Reasons cited? Not just high housing costs — the party attendees already had their own homes, as Breitbart cited, quoting the former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, who's now running in California's recall referendum to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.
They cited a feeling of non-representation in the one-party state run solely by Democrats. They felt shut out. They detested the state's ever rising taxes and ever falling services. They loathed the rising crime and the war on cops.
Probably the biggest reason so many cited for leaving was strong desire not to expose their multi-racial kids to wokester education and Critical Race Theory. They said they didn't want their kids to grow up to be victims full of hate for others. They very much liked that red states such as South Carolina and North Carolina and Texas and Florida are full of people who "have manners."
"You can breathe in a place like that," said one.
All of these things are realities of why Californians are fleeing. It's not COVID as they claim. It's not reduced legal immigration, well made up for by illegal immigration now.
It's wokester socialism and the high cost of living.
In South Carolina, my friend said everyone else they were meeting who was buying a home was from someplace else, and most were fleeing the horrors of their own one-party blue states. Yes, they intended to vote conservative, not liberal, as some areas have been seeing from earlier waves of leavers who made their way to places like Phoenix and Austin. It suggests that that this intense wave of people fleeing California are more values-motivated.
This ought to be a huge embarrassment to California's ruling Democrats. They've gotten every last thing they've wanted on the wokester wish list — illegals, goodies for illegals, wokester education, high taxes, greenie policies, rolling blackouts, high electrical bills brought on by greenie mandates, cultural supremacy, falling educational scores, non-stop lockdowns — and people don't want to live in it. They don't like the socialist paradise, and they're fleeing like Venezuelans.
Yet amazingly, they delude themselves that none of this is their fault.
As was said by Jack Nicolson in A Few Good Men, "you can't handle the truth."
They're losing huge chunks of their tax base as well as a congressional seat to human flight (they even lost billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to Texas), yet they still have no intention of trying to find out why. There's no light on; it's no wake-up call in those quarters.
Seems it's because they are counting on Joe Biden to take from the prospering red states and use them to bail out their socialist failure. Nobody's thinking of solving this by finding things to do that might just persuade people to stay. They don't care that people are fleeing. Yet they're the loudest voices out there talking about "sustainability" and "sustainable growth." Everyone can see that on the sustainability front, they fail, big time. Bearing only socialism, they are nothing but revolting leeches.
California Population Declined in 2020 as Thousands Fled Newsom-Boudin Axis of Terror
California's population fell by more than 182,000 in 2020, the state's first yearly population decline in recorded history, as thousands of residents fled the Democratic-controlled state.
The shocking exodus could be an issue for embattled governor Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), who will face a recall election later this year. Earlier this week, the California secretary of state announced recall proponents had collected enough valid signatures to trigger a gubernatorial recall, the first of its kind in nearly two decades.
Rising crime and homelessness, unaffordable housing costs, exorbitant tax rates, and a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic are among the factors fueling the effort to oust Newsom, who was busted on several occasions for flouting the state's pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings.
Residents have been fleeing California on a consistent basis over the last decade. According to a census data analysis, 6.1 million people left California for others states between 2010 and 2020, compared with 4.9 million who moved to California from other states during that same period. Last year's population decline suggests residents are increasingly fed up with the Democratic Party's stranglehold on the state's political system and with elected politicians' inability to address the numerous crises facing the state.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, exacerbated California's already out-of-control homelessness crisis. In 2019, California accounted for 12 percent of the nation's population overall and 25 percent of the nation's homeless population. The problem got even worse in 2020, when California's homeless population rose by 7 percent statewide, 13 percent in Los Angeles County, and as much as 25 percent in San Francisco.
California's largest cities have also experienced a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes in the first quarter of 2021, according to a recent study. Racially motivated attacks on Asian Americans increased 80 percent in Los Angeles and 140 percent in San Francisco compared with the first quarter of 2020.
Newsom is not the only Democrat in California to come under fire for failed leadership. Chesa Boudin, the radical left-wing district attorney of San Francisco, is facing two separate recall campaigns that have until Aug. 11 to collect the required amount of signatures. Boudin was recently the subject of a 60 Minutes profile that was largely sympathetic to his controversial efforts to reform the criminal justice system by refusing to charge and imprison violent criminals.
Boudin, the son of left-wing terrorists who were convicted for their role in an armed robbery that left two police officers and a security guard dead and several others severely wounded, worked as a translator for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez before being elected district attorney in 2019.
Boudin's efforts to crack down on law enforcement have not been especially well-received, even in deep blue San Francisco. Several people were killed last year by repeat offenders who might have otherwise been in prison for past criminal acts. They were on the street because Boudin's office declined to file charges in the name of social justice.
In March, the radical district attorney dropped charges against a man who filmed a racially charged assault on an elderly Asian man and later uploaded a video of the violent attack on social media. The man was also suspected of violating his probation related to a battery charge.
Concerned citizens are fleeing the Newsom-Boudin axis of terror for good reasons. Those who stay are left with few viable options. One of them is to make history by electing Caitlyn Jenner the first trans governor in American history.
Tech Workers Flee San Francisco
Employees of tech companies in San Francisco, California, can’t leave the city fast enough, fleeing for the potential tech hubs of tomorrow such as Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida. One former San Francisco exec said: “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been fielding inquiries from top executives in the tech world, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a report by NBC News.
The report added that the mayor has also met with former Google Chairman and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt, and the chairman of Palantir, Peter Thiel, among others.
“There is absolutely no doubt that a big part of the reason why they are moving is that they feel that there is an inhospitable environment for regulation and taxation,” said Suarez.
Miami is not the only city experiencing this type of migration, as tech employees from San Francisco are fleeing to other states offering them better opportunities as well.
Tech workers living in San Francisco had once believed that the high rent, high taxes, long commute to work, and rude neighbors were worth it if they could live in “the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world,” reported SFGATE.
But now, in the wake of the pandemic, tech workers can’t flee the city fast enough, as spending months working remotely in other towns has shown them that the quality of life can be higher elsewhere.
“Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school,” noted SFGATE.
And so they fled to more affordable places, like Georgia, and states with no income taxes, like Texas and Florida. The report added that the number one choice of relocation for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas.
John Gardner, the founder and CEO of the remote personal training startup Kickoff — who fled San Francisco for Miami Beach — told SFGATE that he can’t help but wonder, “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
As for Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, the tech worker said that he and his wife moved into a $1.3 million house that he “only saw on video for 20 minutes.”
“It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money,” added Rothermel.
Justin Kan, who co-founded Twitch, tweeted to his followers in August last year, asking them where he should move.
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” asked Kan.
We're selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?
— Justin Kan (@justinkan) August 17, 2020
“Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society,” responded Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir.
Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.
— Joe Lonsdale (@JTLonsdale) August 17, 2020
“You start to feel stupid,” said Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup, of living in San Francisco. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
Boydas and his family ended up moving to Austin, where they were able to buy a five-bedroom home on an acre of land for the same price they were paying for their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, California.
‘We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Boydas also noted that his bills are lower, too, such as the water bill, trash bill, and the cost of dining out at a restaurant with his family — adding that he didn’t even know that there were no income taxes when he moved.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error — there’s no tax line here,” said Boydas. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.'”
The report added that there are currently 33,000 members in a Facebook group called “Leaving California,” as well as 51,000 members in its sister group, “Life After California.” In the groups, people share photos of moving trucks, and links to property listings in new cities.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” said Terry Gilliam, the founder of both Facebook groups.
Bear Kittay, the co-founder Good Money, echoed those sentiments, and even acknowledged that some people may find themselves relocating to “a place that is more conservative.”
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” said Kittay of San Francisco.
“A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity,” he added. “And maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
