It’s one thing to imagine the ways that globalization will destroy the West; it’s quite another to see them in action. A recent trip to L.A. gave me an unsettling glimpse at the Left’s plan to unmake America and Europe.

While I’ve spent plenty of time on the road covering the presidential election, most of it is in places I’m already intimately familiar with. Having lived my entire life around New Yorkers and Midwesterners, I know them as well as the British soldier knew the Irishmen whose faces he bashed in for a living. While I can see the effects of globalization in the burned-out factories of my hometown and the tongue-clacking Sudanese refugees I was forced to share a bus with in high school, the cities I’ve been to are still recognizably—if depressingly—American.

Until now.

Last month, I visited Los Angeles to attend the West Coast premiere of The Red Pill. While I’d technically first visited L.A. two years ago, it was on a layover to Tokyo and I didn’t get farther than the airport. Throughout the whole trip, I was left with a feeling of cultural vertigo that I hadn’t experienced since my days of living in the Philippines. While L.A. is generally thought of as the epicenter of American culture (due to it being the headquarters of the movie and music industries), there’s nothing that’s actually American about the place. Mass immigration and consumer culture have transformed it into a featureless, claustrophobic hellscape, and if the globalist project isn’t turned back, the rest of the West will follow in its footsteps.

Anyone who thinks that Latin American immigration is a good idea because it’ll bring more taco trucks to your neighborhood should spend some time in the barrios of California. Los Angeles has been swamped with so many Mexicans and other Latinos that the city reminded me more of Manila than any American city I’ve visited. The third-world comparison is made even worse by L.A.’s maze-like sprawl of dirty, ramshackle buildings and lack of anything resembling urban planning. Moreover, since California’s Latinos are overwhelmingly culled from the helot classes, they lack even a semblance of upper-class culture, so being around them makes you feel like Wikus in District 9.

While no corner of the U.S. has remained untouched by White demographic replacement schemes, no city has deteriorated to the degree L.A. has. Despite their differences, White and Black Americans have a shared history, and run-down ghettos in Chicago and other cities feel distinctly American, dysfunctional as they may be. For that matter, because the eastern United States was settled earlier, it possesses a more concrete culture that is better able to weather demographic and cultural shocks. There are New Yorkers whose lineage stretches back to the 17th century and the original Dutch colonists of New Netherland, while Mayflower families are so entrenched in New England that they’re called “Boston Brahmins,” compared to the highest caste in India.

There’s nothing American about L.A.’s neighborhoods of swarthy gangbangers and illiterate mestizo single mothers. Riding the L.A. Metro made me feel like I was in a foreign country, albeit one where everyone with an IQ above 110 had been sent to the gulag. Even public transportation announcers speak in Spanish, and while heading back from Santa Monica (a wealthy suburb with beaches), I found MS-13 (an El Salvadorian illegal alien gang) tags inside the train. Hell, when I visited Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, it had been defaced with a sticker from the “Chicano Nation: Aztlan.” It’s a disconcerting feeling, being on your nation’s soil yet being treated like a foreigner from a distant land.

That’s where the second major aspect of globalization comes into play: strict class stratification. In Los Angeles, the beautiful people have their corner of town and the hoi polloi have theirs, and rarely do the twain meet. When I visited the city, I opted not to rent a car, because L.A. has a robust metro system (on paper) and I was sick of having to drive everywhere. After 2+ hours of a meandering train ride east to Watts (yes, that Watts), north to downtown, and finally west to Hollywood to where I was staying, I was gritting my teeth and dreaming of nuclear apocalypse.

Transportation in L.A. is strictly segregated by class: mass transit is only used by people who can’t afford a car or who are legally barred from driving one. In practice, this means Blacks, Latinos and White trash: if you ever see a pretty White girl on the L.A. Metro, she’s an alcoholic who got one too many DUIs. This is in sharp contrast to the East Coast; next to death, the New York City Subway is the great equalizer. Everyone rides the subway in NYC, from penniless panhandlers to llello-sniffing day traders to celebrities and politicians. Even in Chicago, the L is used by everyone from stock exchange meatheads to bums looking for a mobile motel. In California, though, if you’re using mass transit, it’s because you’re one of globalization’s losers. I took the Red Line to the Red Pill premiere and everyone on the train looked at me funny because I was wearing a suit.

Part of the West Coast’s car culture is a product of the greater room they had to expand: owning a car in cramped Manhattan is virtually impossible for all but the very rich and impractical for even them. Steve Sailer remarked years ago that Californians’ fascination with cars helped shape their comparatively mellow attitudes towards race, as the automobile allowed them to self-segregate along lines of ethnicity, class and more. Leftists used this attitude against Californians to swamp their state with hordes of Mexican peasants; as recently as the 1970’s, Los Angeles was the most white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant large city in America, relatively free of the Catholic immigrant influence that gripped New York City and Chicago.

As for that Beach Boys mellowness and chill, globalization and multiculturalism have metamorphosed it into a fake cheeriness and shallowness that betrays a lack of community. Phoniness is an attitude endemic to the West Coast in general; when I lived in Portland, Oregon years ago, I was taken aback by the sheer amount of status-striving and nastiness among the city’s derelict White inhabitants. In contrast, Californians are more polite—likely driven by their much nicer weather, compared to the Pacific Northwest’s Dresden of rainstorms—but their souls are just as empty. For example, while I was tromping around North Hollywood looking for somewhere to eat before the Red Pill premiere, people kept randomly complimenting me on my suit. Californians are compelled to flatter people like an exorcist compels demons out of little girls.

Again, globalization’s maladaptive effects in L.A. are in part a product of the city’s original atmosphere: there’s a marked difference between the cultures of states west of the Mississippi versus those east of it. The Eastern states had time to develop roots due to their long history of colonization, while Western states were settled rapidly in the 19th century, many by immigrants who got right off the boat and headed inland (such as Scandinavians in Minnesota). In lieu of a history and well-developed folkways, Left Coasters fill the void with consumerism and status-striving. This divide was shown in the Republican presidential primary: Donald Trump’s nationalism won him nearly all the states east of the Mississippi, while Ted Cruz’s apocalyptic, individualist platform was popular out West. Making America great again is a harder sell in states that are barely a hundred years old.

However, taking out a second mortgage on your McMansion so you can impress people with a Maserati does not a cohesive culture make. My trip to L.A. almost made me want to move there for a few months to do a sociological study. Blade Runner predicted that L.A. would become a massively-pollute Tower of Babel by 2019, and it’s already three-quarters of the way there; only things missing are the flying cars and genetically-engineered sex slaves. Los Angeles is the first post-American city, a blueprint for the Soros-funded re-engineering of the West.

Make America Great Again? We should start with making California American again.