Back To Alabama, For Now

California is overdue for a reckoning

A Los Angeles encampment

I am uprooting once again, transplanting myself across North America to where I came from, heeding the call of family. My father took a bad fall recently and the old folks will need me around to help. Dad will want to read my book draft anyway, so it’s good to go home.

In truth, I had not anticipated staying in downtown Oakland permanently. I am not a big city boy. It is very nice to be surrounded by restaurants, not so nice that the homeless will sit at your table and ask to drink your beer.

In Alabama, the local catfish restaurant might have a bit too much Christian kitsch. On Telegraph Avenue, around the Black Panther Party Museum, every sight angle brings me a fresh woke witness to annoying and destructive causes.

Being in Oakland feels like that party in Havana that Code Pink and Hasan Piker enjoyed this weekend. Patients reportedly died in hospitals under electricity blackouts while the Democratic Socialists of America partied the night away with every available generator in Cuba.

Imagine Haight-Ashbury on the deck of the USS Titanic, just before the iceberg. I get this feeling all the time, in California, that I am watching a slow-motion disaster brought on by an ideology of theft.

While Gavin Newsom insisted that “THOUSANDS” (all caps original) of mentally ill homeless people had been helped by his “CARE Court”, the state could only produce evidence of 22 people being helped in four years.

“Even under the most NARROW definition (court-ordered treatment plans, which is one of many treatment outcomes), the number is 600+ and growing,” his press team tweeted. Thousands is actually hundreds. Call it ‘California math’.

“Out of roughly 3000 petitions filed by October statewide, 706 were approved but of those, 684 were voluntary agreements that were never the intended point of the program”, the Daily Mail reported. That left out a lot of people who needed the help Newsom proposed to give.

Celebrity parents like the late Rob and Michele Reiner, allegedly murdered by their long-troubled son Nick, or the parents of former Nickelodeon child star Tylor Chase, who has been living on the streets of Riverside and resisting efforts to help him, faced the same often insurmountable challenges as Deplazes and other families when trying to rescue and aid their children.

To recap: a program that the governor created with great fanfare, ostensibly to help families put homeless members in housing on an involuntary basis, spent $236 million to help 22 families. This kind of waste is just normal in California. In that sense, it is already a Third World country.

California is the perfect place for a single 38-year-old man to bill the Medicare system for over $90 million in fraudulent claims. Standards simply do not exist in this state unless someone is trying to create a job, in which case California will punish them severely.

Environmental regulations have become so onerous that California is losing their petroleum refineries. Gas is more expensive here than anywhere in the United States, now, because more of it must come from somewhere else, but the attorney general is suing to stop the federal government from reopening a pipeline that connects to existing refineries. This is degrowth in action. The cost of the virtue is supposed to be the signal Californians are meant to feel good about sending.

San Francisco made headlines last week by once again allowing middle school students to skip pre-algebra class if they can already handle the material. This was always the policy during my lifetime, all across America, until San Francisco tried to be different.

They wanted to hold back the highest achievers in order to achieve equity in educational outcomes: Harrison Bergeron, basically. No wonder California children are basically illiterate. Here again, Newsom tries to dress his failure up as a huge success. He passed a law, you see, and then scores went up.

When people show you that they are Communists, believe them.

Meanwhile, next door to Alabama, Mississippi is described as a “miracle” because they restored phonics education instead of sticking with decades of failed experiments in “whole language learning”.

In California, the Democrats want to make it easier to harass and defame Jews in public schools. Jews thrive in the American south. I attended a Hannukah dinner at a synagogue in Alabama just weeks after 10/7. I am going somewhere less exclusionary than California. I need more diversity than this.

I am returning to the summer sweat and baking sunshine of home. I go back to a town that banished the homeless by not giving in to the satanic temptation of weaponized empathy. There are places in America where people can still just rebuild their homes after a fire with minimal government involvement. Those places are not in California, which is a zombie state. I prefer the company of the living. I want my home again.