Would Newsom Californize America? Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

The Palisades fire rebuild is still anemic, stalled with all sorts of state and local mandates and zoning blocks. Only in California would an ancient and historic neighborhood go up in flames due to the DEI incompetence of letting reservoirs remain dry, allowing hydrants to sit out of commission, prohibiting cleaning of combustible fuel on surrounding hillsides, having officials either junketing to Ghana or be under house arrest due to phoning in fake bomb threats, or cutting fire departments and hiring by race, gender, and sexual orientation criteria.

So, I think the plan is to do nothing, block rebuilding, and drive insane the burned-out owners—so they sell their scorched lots to developers, who then cheek by jowl with state and local officials will get rich building low-income, high-density “equity” housing.

If Newsom were not podding, tweeting, and campaigning for president, would it be any better to have him on the job?

When he is acting as governor, we got the highest gas prices and steepest electricity bills in the nation. The highest state income tax rates in the nation bookend steep sales taxes and soaring property taxes due to inflation-driven home values.

Newsom has no clue how to deal with 25 percent of the state not paying their power bills, 40 percent of the state on state- and federally subsidized Medi-Cal healthcare, and half of all births paid for by Medi-Cal. Nor does he know how to stop 200,000–300,000 of the entrepreneurial, professional, and small business high-tax paying residents from fleeing him and his state each year.

His elite college campuses are either being sued by the federal government for unchecked anti-Semitism or have been found culpable of such anti-Jewish bias by in-house commissions of liberal professors. He and LA mayor Karen Bass egg on riots to stop ICE detentions in Los Angeles, even as the largest illegal alien population in the nation has caused social services costs to spike, crime to grow out of control, and a huge untaxed black market to expand untouched.

We have too much daytime energy and too little nighttime power. So, of course, we are building more subsidized solar and wind farms, in hopes that someday our new nocturnal battery plants will stop exploding and burning up billions of dollars in investment.

When food prices are sky high, what is so brilliant about removing thousands of acres of prime farmland to build more subsidized solar farms to produce daytime energy that is already in abundance, mostly non-storable, and overpriced?

Does the governor ever reflect that the state’s dilemma might be due to Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, a Democratic monopoly of state-wide-elected officials, an 83-percent Democratic congressional delegation, and a few California politicians like Nancy Pelosi (insider stock trading), Sen. Adam Schiff (leaking classified documents, improper property tax deductions), or Kamala Harris (the worst run presidential campaign in modern memory) facing ethical questions or becoming national objects of jest and caricature?

What is Newsom’s immediate future?

More unchecked wildfires, more insurance companies fleeing the state leaving more thousands of families uninsured, more indigents in need of free electricity and obstetrics? More dams blown up than built?

A quadrafecta of the highest income taxes in the nation, the highest gasoline prices, the highest electricity rates, and the greatest number of homeless? A trifecta of the most residents on state or federal assistance, the most residents fleeing the state, and the most illegal aliens?

What then will be Newsom’s 2028 campaign slogans?

“Make America California” or “California Gasoline Prices—a Model for the Nation” or “I promise I will tear down more dams than I build” or “I drove Elon Musk from California” or “Turn Our Cities into Los Angeles” or “The 99—Highway to our Future” or “California—Home to Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi—and Me!”