Why do Californians continue to vote for destructive Democrats like Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, and their political clones despite their incompetence at basic duties like fighting fires and facilitating post-disaster reconstruction? As Victor Davis Hanson notes in devastating commentaries, the state has a third of the nation’s welfare recipients, half its homeless, crumbling infrastructure, staggering home and rent prices, massive social service expenditures for illegals, shocking electricity rates, aging power lines that spark wildfires, and (until a voter initiative last November reversed it) legalized looting. That’s a short list.
Recently, the overwhelmingly Democrat state Legislature passed a bill that enabled a sixty-five cent increase in energy prices based on the climate hysteria that infects the state’s coastal elites and journalists. That tax will doubtless fall primarily on gasoline and other utilities. Predictably, a group called California Environmental Voters Education Fund began running a commercial for the state’s voters, who sport an illiteracy rate near 25% among persons 15 and over. It blamed California’s high gas and electricity prices on “dirty energy greed.”
It’s a slick 30-second spot that begins with a printed warning — “Dirty energy companies are costing Californians” — then shows a lady sweating an electricity bill of $277. Next comes a gas pump reading that spikes from $83 to $101. A final scene features oil company reps clapping happily at Wall Street’s closing bell as superimposed profit figures rise from 166 to over 200 billion dollars. A final plea reads, “Don’t make Californians pay for dirty energy’s greed,” followed by the website: “FightTheGreed.org.”
It’s a message designed to appeal to semi-literates, stoners, Hollywood groupies, and coastal elites who may know better but also know which party butters their bread by providing a massive influx of illegal and H-1B labor. The spot isn’t meant for anyone sharp enough to discuss California’s highest-in-the-nation 61-cent-per-gallon gas tax or to ask why oil companies aren’t so greedy in other states, much less for anyone who ponders the price to be paid for progressively eliminating California’s oil production and refinery capacity.
You can be sure the Silicon Valley gang will fund similar propaganda pieces for any legislation that threatens their stranglehold on the 60/19 (House), 30/10 (Senate) Democrat majorities in Sacramento. But you can also count on local news programs to function as lapdogs for Democrat politicians. A Karen Bass press secretary could hardly formulate more sympathetic and uncritical coverage for the mayor who partied in Africa while her city burned, fired her DIE fire chief when the latter criticized department budget cuts, and pretends cleaning up rubble after seven months constitutes lightning progress.
The same local news almost never identifies criminal “migrants” as illegal and, needless to say, employs a consistent anti-ICE narrative. ACLU lawyers are featured who denounce the racist “targeting” and “kidnapping” of anyone who’s “brown.” And despite unavoidable coverage of the real or attempted gunshot during ICE’s marijuana field raid last month, the news slant was clear: “Protesters” are defenders of “the community,” and ICE is getting what it deserves. Little or no mention is made of the fact that the farm used hundreds of illegal aliens as laborers, including, according to government sources, fourteen minors.
When I moved to the San Diego area in 1984, Ronald Reagan was about to win the state’s presidential vote overwhelmingly (57%) and for the second time. Those POTUS elections followed two terms served by The Gipper as governor (‘67–’74). For sixteen straight years, from 1983 to 1998, California had GOP governors (Deukmejian and Wilson). Today, no Republican has occupied any statewide office since 2011, and, as noted above, Democrats possess supermajorities in both state houses.
What accounts for this radical shift? Primarily demographics.
In 2012, Ann Coulter noted that California’s non-Hispanic white population over the prior half-century fell from 80% to half that number. By 2022, the percentage was pegged at 33.7%. Meanwhile, the Latino population grew from less than 10% to over 40%, a number that includes 2.6 million “undocumented immigrants,” according to a 2022 estimate by Mayorkas’s Department of Homeland Security — a figure that doubtless grew over the final two years of Autopen’s open border.
So it wasn’t necessary to change the minds of Californians. Just change the population residing in the state, and keep a large percentage of them poor and uneducated — much like the pyramidal population of Mexico. The Democrat plan was to do the same with Texas. So far, that plan has backfired as traditional Latinos along the Rio Grande rebelled against the invasion that upended their lives via crime, drugs, and the sheer number of strangers who ignored their property rights just as they ignored the American border.
Barring a catastrophe that makes the L.A. fires look like a weenie roast or some dramatic and unexpected political about-face by the state’s Latinos, it’s likely that the poor, ill informed, 27% foreign-born population of California will continue voting to Make California Mexico Again.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is available on Kindle.
