” … basketcase Britain seems to be preferable to California. It’s not just Clegg: Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, owned by Facebook parent group Meta, and the firm’s chief marketing officer Alex Schultz, have also chosen to relocate to Britain. Clegg, who six months ago was promoted to head of global affairs at Meta, in charge of handling its incessant political firestorms, said in an interview in last year that his “heart belongs massively 5,000 miles away” and that he feels “European”.
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 US Census Data – fare worse in California than almost anywhere else in the US, with a third of Latinos living in poverty compared to the 21 per cent 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.”
Comment: Lived there a couple of times. The first was ’49 to ’53 in the LA area. It WAS a kind of paradise. Weather, infrastructure, general culture, the works. All gone now. pl
I am one of those Kalifornia expats. Wife and I both born and raised in California. When we were kids (before we met) Ronald Reagan was governor. We raised our kids in Chico, CA. I knew it was all but over when the dems gained the office of Governor and a veto proof majorities in the state Assembly and Senate. Followed two of our kids and our family lineage back to Texas in 2015. We had friends who did not survive the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. I was a sole proprietor FFL, specializing in building custom AR platforms. Cal DOJ doesn’t send me Christmas cards.
Gas on the fire–
https://www.oann.com/how-progressives-sold-out-rural-calif-to-drug-lords/
Yup, yup, yup, don’t disagree one bit. I’m born here, I’m Californian. My father was taken prisoner in Tunisia, Bersaglieri, Royal Italian Army. He was sent POW to Santa Barbara. From there he led a team of Italians to decommission Camp Dunlap, near Salton Sea. When I was young, we camped and fished often at the Salton Sea. On his return to Italy, although the last three generations on his side were in Egypt (my great grandfather, Angelo, ran the Egyptian Botanical Gardens), his older brother, my middle name, was shot in the back of the neck by a communist. His wife’s brothers offered to make it right, but my father had seen too much killing and came back to America. He met my mom in Florida and they went to Vieques to run a hotel for a friend of his. Although he had become a citizen, my mom flew to Long Beach, so I would be born on American soil, in Lynwood. I grew up hiking, camping and riding dirt bikes all over San Diego and the desert east. I developed a deep relationship to the land. My father was a professor at San Diego State, in the Geography Department, where I grew up. I have a deep, deep connection to the land here in CA. My wife is a Cambodian war refugee and her family is here. I ain’t leaving, so that means I’m here. California is America and it is the world, and it is sick and needs strong medicine.
My roots in NYS are similar to yours (though not nearly as interesting) in California. NYS is America too … the empire was literally wrapped around NY.
Much like California, NY is really two states which have nothing to do w/one another. People who don’t understand NY don’t get that NYS is more than NYC.
NYS too is getting sicker and sicker. The same group of ill (I was going to moderate my language but no, they are mentally ill) people in San Fran and L.A. who infect Calif. infect NYS which needs strong medicine also. What do you prescribe? Absent suitable remedy the state should be torn in two, or three. There simply is no political representation for New Yorkers who live apart from NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Syracuse
Bill, you have nailed it. It is mental illness. It has been indocrinated, brains in the wash cycle too long. If you aren’t in cult ‘A’, you must be in cult ‘B’. This might sound silly, but it is all I can say here & now “Live strong, love strong, ride hard, surfs up.
And yet in the referendum to eject him from office, Governor Newsome was retained by a substantial majority.
Bill Hefner
The land of fruits and nuts.
Bill, I don’t know the socialist voter registration in San Fran and LA but my guess is like NYS’s big five cities, these two cities drive the politics of the rest of the state of Calif. In NYS, if Stalin were to run for Gov next Nov., the Big Five would elect him. NYS has gone mad.
Ca. is what comes from one party rule, especially the current party in charge. Couple that with the same party controlling all the institutions and here you go. Dems in charge want to star over with year ‘one’. With themselves in charge of course.
You get what you vote for. The sad part is that they refuse to accept it’s the policies that they voted for that are the problem. Now that they’ve destroyed Commiefornia, they move to other states and vote the same way. And will again be clueless as to “why it all went hell” in the next state.