Trump, Newsom, and the War for California

A lot of attention is paid to the crime-infested urban cores where some great American cities — New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Baltimore — used to be. But not enough attention is paid to my blighted hometown: Los Angeles, California. 

The violence and mayhem that took over downtown Los Angeles last week has finally ceased. The reason was pretty simple: a show of federal force. President Trump sent the National Guard to stand in front of the federal buildings and federal immigrant detention centers, which were under attack. The craven and evil people who are running southern California (straight into the ground) shrieked about the military presence, but the wall of soldiers actually helped calm the violence — without firing a shot. The presence of soldiers supporting the police — after many of them were subject to attempted murder by the Latinx mobs sicced on them by idiot Mayor Karen Bass — boosts morale. It let them know that the country is behind them, even though the city’s leadership can barely lift a finger to protect its own officers.

As soon as the first group of immigration “protestors” started pelting the police with huge chunks of concrete and burning those cute little Waymo cars that never hurt anybody, Mayor Bass started blaming Trump for causing “chaos.” Excuse me? You mean, the chaos you and your party caused by opening the borders in the first place? She used the word “chaos” over and over to describe ICE nabbing a few illegals. She totally ignored the actual chaos until Day Three, when she was finally forced to condemn the violence committed by a few “bad actors,” as she keeps calling them.

Mayor Bass, I haven’t seen this many “bad actors” in one place since I watched the Oscars. 

When the National Guard got activated and the story got nationalized, suddenly, the eyes of the world turned to L.A., and everyone could see who was causing the chaos: the usual suspects, including radical socialist unions, the SEIU, various left-wing “action” groups, and the far-left, America-hating “La Raza” types who do everything they can to subvert this country but refuse to return to the foreign lands they seem to cherish so deeply.

These “bad actors” are literally local union members, Antifa-adjacent socialists, city employees, local looters, and illegals — loyal Bass voters all! 

But the worst actor of all is our eternal governor. California must have lost a bet with a sorceress, because I can’t otherwise explain how we became cursed with this comically terrible man as our highest state official. Gavin Newsom is someone I have trouble looking at or listening to; he lays on the smarm and duplicity so thick it’s almost painful. But he’s not a total idiot: he immediately realized how terrible the optics in L.A. were for him, so he started compulsively, schizophrenically, posting on X about Donald Trump. His political advisors (i.e., Barack Obama) told him to deflect all blame to the president. That’s easy to do in L.A.: Everyone is suffering from a terminal, chronic case of TDS. 

All Newsom had to do was utter the magical incantation (“It was Trump!”) and the legions of dopey liberals came out to support him, the millions of illegals here, and the utter lawlessness they don’t ever seem to mind (because they all live miles away from any brown people).  

California is officially America’s biggest basket case. It needs the President’s involvement badly: not to cause “chaos” but to finally, at long last, after decades of neglect, enforce the country’s laws. Why is the most important state in the Union allowed to act as if the United States did not exist? 

As the new administration begins to enforce the law on immigration — with a focus on those accused in particularly heinous crimes — our liberal friends frantically insist that the vast majority of illegal aliens have not committed, e.g., rape or murder. That may be true, but every one of them steals: their presence here costs California citizens over $100 billion each year. We are forced to underwrite free education, health care, food, policing, legal aid, and all the rest to people who are foreign nationals. Every time I gave birth in an L.A. hospital, I was paying my own hospital bill — and the bill for at least three of the illegal alien mothers giving birth down the hall. I have to send my kids to private school since English speakers are few at our local public school, but I am still forced to pay for the operation of the schools I cannot use. It never ends.

Many people on the Right ask me why I live here. After all, my current neighborhood and my childhood neighborhood both just burned down. The fires came within two blocks of my current home, my old childhood home burned down, and for good measure my mom’s house (that she’s just sold!)  burned down. I’ve been caught in bad traffic and drive-by shootings. I lived through Covid insanity and BLM riots. What am I doing here?

The answer is simple: my husband and I live here because all our parents moved here decades ago, drawn by its many charms. We stayed to be near them and because it is a hard place to leave. The weather’s perfect for me, the geography is beautiful, and it’s as familiar to me as my own hand. Unfortunately, it’s aging even faster than I am. The decline has been swift, visible, and overwhelming, in every direction. Over the last ten years, everything has gotten so much worse that sometimes I drive around in shock as I see block after block covered in graffiti and trash. The nice neighborhoods are still nice, but they are tiny islands of relative calm in a sea of urban dysfunction.

I am therefore sending out an SOS to President Trump: California cannot be allowed to secede into the rest of the socialist third-world. If you decide to try and save it, we will be with you all the way.

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