Free Republic

… That naysaying has gained much greater currency in recent years as California’s population has contracted for the first time in more than a century. The “exodus” has become an industry, stoking real estate markets from Nevada to Tennessee, fanning the red-versus-blue political flames and launching a thousand what-went-wrong analyses. The latest insult — or bracing reality check? — came last week in a Los Angeles Times poll that found 50% of adults nationwide believe California is in decline. (Bummer, man.) Nearly half the Republicans surveyed said the state is “not really American.” Whatever that means. L.A. Times columnists Mark...

GREENVILLE, Calif. — Looking back, Bradley Bentz doesn’t know what took him so long to move out of Los Angeles County. For decades, he’d lived a short walk from the Santa Anita Park racetrack and a few minutes drive to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. It was the typical city life. “The cars and the smog. The noise. The lights that you can’t even tell when it’s dark,” Bentz said, shaking his head as if waking up from a nightmare. “I just couldn’t do it.” So he headed to the sparsely populated mountains of Plumas County. He joined the U.S....

When conservatives fight one another over God and country, my general reaction is — have at it, and where’s the popcorn? But the recent recall election in Shasta County that pitted a Republican ex-police chief against a far-right faction backed by a local militia is different. It’s a wake-up call ahead of the 2022 midterms that elections can go very wrong, even in liberal California. What happened in Redding should be a big, blinking warning light to what’s left of the mainstream Republican Party, and to us all that we have an obligation as Californians to protect elections across the...