“No state wears its multicultural veneer more ostentatiously than California,” writes Joel Kotkin, a longtime observer of social trends in the Golden State. In the state’s decades-long effort to shake free of bourgeois unifying concepts like a common culture, language, shared values, and a rule of law that applies to everyone equally, California has turned itself into a modern dystopia.
Of course the biggest bugaboo for California politicians is immigration law. No state has worked harder to thwart the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, shield immigration law violators from federal authorities, or lavish benefits on illegal aliens. Even the state’s looming $54 billion budget shortfall has not seemed to inhibit California from doing still more for illegal aliens.
With the exception of its fine weather, California is at the bottom of the heap when it comes to just about every measurable quality of life indicator.
- The streets of California’s major cities are choked with the tents of the homeless, human waste and discarded needles.
- Crime is soaring, but rather than address growing safety concerns of citizens, California’s knee-jerk reaction is to lead the nation in defunding police in response to the horrific crime of four police officers half a continent away.
- California’s schools are failing. The state ranks 49th in overall academic performance (the answer is Alaska, in case you were wondering). As Kotkin and fellow scholar Roger Hobbs reported in 2019, half of California’s high school students are barely literate. In place of reading and other stuff, you know, like math and science, schools concentrate of teaching Woke ideology. The biggest losers in the abject failure of public education, of course, are black and Latino students who constitute 60 percent of California public school enrollment.
The list of policies accelerating California’s race to the bottom goes on and on. But for all its emphasis on “welcoming,” “inclusion,” “tolerance” and every other woke buzzword and policy, the objects of California’s affection just want to get the hell out. And it is no surprise why. While catering to illegal aliens, California’s most disadvantaged minorities, Latinos and blacks, are even more disadvantaged than their racial and ethnic counterparts in the rest of the country.
Nationally, 21 percent of Latinos live below the poverty line. In California one-third do. Likewise 28 percent of black Californians meet the official definition of poor, compared with 22 percent of blacks living outside California. All the supposed love being shown to these groups is unrequited. Some 58 percent of black Californians wish they lived elsewhere, as do 45 percent of Asians and Latinos.
The policies that have California headed in a downward spiral were never about doing what is best for immigrants and minorities. It has always been about self-righteous elitists (mostly white folks) and political revolutionaries using immigrants and minorities to wage their revolt against a bourgeois capitalist system that they detest and want to overturn.
