Can California Be Saved, or Is It Too Late?

Mark Levin appeared at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California on Saturday night. The event was a celebration of his new, bestselling book, Unfreedom of the Press. It was a glorious evening. The auditorium was packed with several thousand fans with an overflow crowd in another room. Levin delivered not a speech but a conversation. John Heubusch, the director of the Reagan Library introduced Levin then the two of them sat down. Heubusch asked questions and Levin answered in his usual inimitable fashion. The crowd loved it. But as we were all sitting in that spectacular library in California, the state of our state was the initial topic of discussion. How did this state, once the envy of all others, become the pathetic, indebted loser state it is today? The answer is simple, single-party Democratic rule. Levin worked for the Reagan Justice Department and, like everyone else in the room, reveres the man. But the state that Reagan once governed (1967-1975) has become the prime national example of the abject failure of Democratic policies, all of them. Jerry Brown's imaginary high-speed rail that was to initially run from Bakersfield to Merced in Central California is a bust. The cost was projected to be $77b but has forecast to be $98b! It most likely will never be completed. Billions have been wasted. Our state debt is over $1.5t. We have the highest gasoline prices in the nation. Oh, and we are a sanctuary state that protects all manner of illegal immigrants, no matter how serious the crimes they've committed. Think Jose Garcia Zanate who killed Kate Steinle. He had been deported seven times but was out and about on the streets of San Francisco with the blessings of SF law enforcement; they aim to protect the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding. ICE is the enemy in sanctuary cities and states, the thugs are victims.

S tate taxes in California are the highest in the nation, as are our sales taxes. We fall nearly last in education. We have the most homeless, the most illegal migrants. The state spends $30.b on illegal immigration per year. Like all cities run by progressives, our entire state is a disaster of Democratic making. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego have been overrun by homeless people, most of them drug addicted and/or mentally ill. Entire areas of these cities are befouled by used needles, feces, trash, garbage, rats and now diseases long-thought to be extinct in the West. Persons who work in downtown Los Angeles have contracted typhus! As true in other cites long run by Democrats (Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, Flint) it is the implementation of ridiculous utopian Marxist policies so beloved by progressives that has destroyed these once grand cities. Socialist strategies always fail. Democrats cheat, (ballot harvesting) are re-elected, and the state continues to decline. Venezuela is the current example of the massive failure of socialism on the world stage. What is happening there is beyond tragic; the people are starving in every sense of the word. But will our own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemn socialism? Absolutely not. She, Bernie Sanders and their fellow travelers mean to take this country the way of Venezuela, the road California has already been on for too long; possibly too long to ever recover. This state is slowly becoming a third-world nation. But, as in Venezuela, the rich and politically powerful stay rich, keep their mansions and their private planes unperturbed by the devastation they generate. Donald Trump may have lost the popular vote in California; too many illegals vote thanks to the motor voter bill that was passed to do exactly what it did, let noncitizens vote. But he won the 2016 election to stop the destruction our self-appointed progressive betters have wrought and mean to escalate. They want to control how we all live our lives by pretending we are causing global warming, as if we mere humans are more powerful than the sun! They seek to destroy capitalism, the one economic system that has elevated more people out of poverty and tyranny than any other in human history. They have successfully indoctrinated two generations of malleable young people with the false notion that America is a racist nation, illegitimately founded by white men so it must be destroyed and rebuilt according to their monstrous, failed progressive policies. They loathe our founding documents, our anthems, our families, our traditions. They want to do to the nation what they've already done to California. They must be stopped. As Levin's extraordinary and profound book pounds home, our mainstream media is part and parcel of the progressive plan, in Obama's words, to "fundamentally transform America." One has only to watch a few minutes of CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, or read the NYT and the WaPo to know this is true. Fake news hardly describes the rubbish they spew and call news. They lie, they calculate, they agree on a phrase of the day and all repeat it like the puppets they are; they seem to think they are masters of neuro-linguistic programming but they are just parrots who repeat what they've been directed to say. Since the moment Trump became a candidate for the presidency, they set out to demolish him. Once elected, they shifted into high gear, devised a full-on conspiracy to frame him for crimes he never committed. They are still at it, even though the Mueller Report cleared him. While the facts of their grand plan are being revealed, they still hope to defeat the man. But they will not. The American people are on to them, enough of them anyway. We see our left for what they are, America-hating control freaks who lay waste to everything they touch.