How California’s Paradise Become our Purgatory; Victor Davis Hanson

  American Greatness (amgreatness.com)  How and why did California end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?  . . ."In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory."

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft. 

"California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

"How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

"The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

"Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

"Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

"At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

"Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

"Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power,
irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

"California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.

"The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police." . . .

Leftist NYT Scribe Nicholas Kristof Weakly Admits Progressive Policies Are Destroying West Coast Cities

Newsom Crows About Rise in CA Retail Theft Arrests—Gets Roasted for Creating Lawlessness in First Place   . . ."And you can arrest as many criminals as you want -- if those arrests don't result in prosecutions, convictions, AND prison time, arrests are worthless. Newsom is actively closing prisons (making it impossible to take criminals off the street) and many DA's refuse to prosecute." . ..