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Why I'm Leaving California
Townhall.com ^ | September 30, 2020 | Ben Shapiro

Posted on 09/30/2020 4:15:10 AM PDT by Kaslin

My family and my company are leaving California.

It's heartbreaking.

My parents moved to California four decades ago. I grew up here. For 33 of the 36 years I've spent on this planet, I've lived here. I was born at St. Joseph's in Burbank; I attended elementary school at Edison Elementary; I went to college at UCLA. I co-founded a major media company here, with 75 employees in Los Angeles. I met my wife here; all three of my kids are native Californians.

This is the most beautiful state in the country. The climate is incredible. The scenery is amazing. The people are generally warm, and there's an enormous amount to do.

And we're leaving.

We're leaving because all the benefits of California have steadily eroded -- and then suddenly collapsed. Meanwhile, all the costs of California have steadily increased -- and then suddenly skyrocketed. It can be difficult to spot the incremental encroachment of a terrible disease, but once the final ravages set in, it becomes obvious that the illness is fatal. So, too, with California, where bad governance has turned a would-be paradise into a burgeoning dystopia.

When my family moved to North Hollywood, I was 11. We lived in a safe, clean suburb. Yes, Los Angeles had serious crime and homelessness problems, but those were problems relegated to pockets of the city -- problems that, with good governance, we thought could eventually be healed. Instead, the government allowed those problems to metastasize. As of 2011, Los Angeles County counted less than 40,000 homeless; as of 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 66,000. Suburban areas have become the sites of homeless encampments. Nearly every city underpass hosts a tent city; the city, in its kindness, has put out port-a-potties to reduce the possibility of COVID-19 spread.

Police are forbidden in most cases from either moving transients or even moving their garbage. Nearly every public space in Los Angeles has become a repository for open waste, needles and trash. The most beautiful areas of Los Angeles, from Santa Monica beach to my suburb, have become wrecks. My children have personally witnessed drug use, public urination and public nudity. Looters were allowed free reign in the middle of the city during the Black Lives Matter riots; Rodeo Drive was closed at 1 p.m., and citizens were curfewed at 6 p.m.

To combat these trends, local and state governments have gamed the statistics, reclassifying offenses and letting prisoners go free. Meanwhile, the police have become targets for public ire. In July, the city of Los Angeles slashed police funding, cutting the force to its lowest levels in over a decade.

At the same time, taxes have risen. California's top marginal income tax rate is now 13.3%; legislators want to raise it to 16.8%. California is also home to a 7.25% sales tax, a 50-cent gas tax and a bevy of other taxes that drain the wallet and burden business. California has the worst regulatory climate in America, according to CEO Magazine's survey of 650 CEOs. The public-sector unions essentially make public policy, running up the debt while providing fewer and fewer actual services. California's public education system is a massive failure, and even its once-great colleges are now burdened by the stupidities of political correctness, including an unwillingness to use standardized testing.

And still, the state legislature is dominated by Democrats. California is not on a trajectory toward recovery; it is on a trajectory toward oblivion. Taxpayers are moving out -- now including my family and my company. In 2019, before the pandemic and the widespread rioting and looting, outmigration jumped 38%, rising for the seventh straight year. That number will increase again this year.

I want my kids to grow up safe. I want them to grow up in a community with a future, with more freedom and safety than I grew up with. California makes that impossible. So, goodbye, Golden State. Thanks for the memories.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; US: California
KEYWORDS: benshapiro; california; shapiro; talkstoofast
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To: Kaslin

I was born and raised in the Bay Area of CA and lived there until we moved north of Sacramento in 1972 when I was 15. California was a wonderful place to grow up; it was a state where you could ski in the morning in the Trinity Alps and find yourself enjoying the beach in the afternoon. The schools and colleges were top-notch and jobs were plentiful. But the downward spiral of that state which started in the late 1980s has resulted in the overtaxed, filthy hellhole we see today. I left that state in 1976 when I joined the military; I only go back there to visit family, but will never live there again.


21 posted on 09/30/2020 5:18:16 AM PDT by ScottinVA (First, letÂ’s deal with the election; then weÂ’ll deal with BLM.)
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To: Kaslin

“Looters were allowed free reign”

I think Ben means “rein”... unless he’s got a king/queen thing going on somewhere.


22 posted on 09/30/2020 5:19:05 AM PDT by MayflowerMadam (Disappointment is inevitable. Discouragement is a choice.)
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To: Kaslin

I left in June, after 16 years in the school system. My neighborhood went from ritzy in 2007 to a homeless mecca by 2020.


23 posted on 09/30/2020 5:25:51 AM PDT by A_perfect_lady (The greatest wealth is to live content with little. -Plato)
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To: Technical Editor

Nashville. Which will be interesting, because while the state is Right Wing, Nashville is pretty Leftist.


24 posted on 09/30/2020 5:28:21 AM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: LouAvul

So Texas is going to fall into the Gulf of Mexico because Oklahoma no longer sucks?


25 posted on 09/30/2020 5:29:12 AM PDT by Vendome (I've Gotta Be Me https://youtu.be/wH-pk2vZG2M)
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To: Kaslin
The saddest part of this is that it was all foreseeable. In fact, it was foreseen.

The once-Golden State--the envy of the world--is now a Third World Hellhole.

Perhaps the fatal flaw was hubris and denial.

Perhaps it was mindless faith in good intentions, as they paved the Road to Hell.

Perhaps the abundance, the golden light, the beauty and the ease of living lulled the population into a trance, as destructive and as addictive as the narcotic drugs, now ubiquitous in the California population.

Perhaps Californians lacked the wit of Odysseus, whose only declined adventure was the lotus.

Maybe its a combination of all these, but I think that, fundamentally, the deadly disease that has placed beautiful California on her deathbed is the decadence of Western Civilisation.

This disease is more deadly than any of the deadly plagues that brought Europe to the brink of destruction. It will destroy Western Civilisation and the nations of the Free World where all the plagues, wars, genocides, totalitarian regimes, and evil doctrines failed.

If California were a sovereign nation, it would already have passed the point of no return on its descent into decadence and destruction.

Whether or not the rest of the USA has passed this point remains to be seen.

Donald Trump thinks not. He thinks that the destruction of America can yet be halted and reversed, that the USA can be sent soaring once again into ascendancy, that, in his words, the best is yet to come.

So convinced is he of this, that he gave up the luxurious life of a multibillionaire to save his beloved USA and the American Dream from the destruction of decadence.

Pray that he succeeds.

Pray that America can be saved, and with it California.

Only God can save America.

26 posted on 09/30/2020 5:41:07 AM PDT by Savage Beast (America is in a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. Pray for the triumph of President Trump.)
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To: ComputerGuy

“Don’t come here.”
_______________________

Yes, this is the problem...Ben Shapiro is not a Leftist loon, but some of those folks jumping ship from Commieformia will take their Liberal mindsets and voting to Blue states...

I have met a number of CA women (strange they were all divorced women) who moved into our small midwestern hamlet in. recent years...they have all been flaming Libs...they will vote to Sleepy Joe and Cameltoe...

These liberal-minded people are like the floating cancer cells that have broken off from the primary tumor to metastasize another distant healthy organ...

Like metastases that eventually kill the whole body, we should be wary of the effect of these migrations on the body politic across the fruited plains...

The CA from CA could have a long term effect on the country...


27 posted on 09/30/2020 5:46:20 AM PDT by MCEscherHammer
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To: Kaslin
NYS may be the most beautiful state really....endless very green forests, farms, orchards and lakes....

but, I thought Ben Shapiro was gay....

28 posted on 09/30/2020 5:49:50 AM PDT by cherry
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To: Theoria

I remember when people use to flee TO California for a better life, and most of them got it....


29 posted on 09/30/2020 5:51:29 AM PDT by cherry
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To: HighSierra5

I was born in Long Beach in 1953. I left California in 1995. AZ has been fine so far. But CA leftists have been inflectington the state.

I will not move again. “Death to tyrants is obedience” to God.


30 posted on 09/30/2020 5:52:15 AM PDT by nonsporting (.Only hits count.)
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To: Kaslin

Dear Kaslin, may you and your family find a safe haven to live, love, serve, and flourish in this world, and may our Blessed Lord give you safe haven in the world to come.


31 posted on 09/30/2020 6:04:15 AM PDT by Samuel Smiles
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To: MayflowerMadam

I think you are probably right...

but at least he didn’t use “rain”...I’ve seen that too.


32 posted on 09/30/2020 6:05:04 AM PDT by Paleo Pete (I smile because you are family. I laugh because you can do nothing about it...)
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To: Kaslin

If you could eliminate every city in California and the azzholes that run them along with everyone who voted for them then California would be a nice National Park.


33 posted on 09/30/2020 6:06:34 AM PDT by maddog55 (Only thing systemic in America is the left's hatred of it.)
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To: Samuel Smiles
I didn't write the article, the author is Ben Shapiro. I just copied the Op-ed and posted it in FR.

Besides I live in TN and wouldn't even want to visit California.

34 posted on 09/30/2020 6:11:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: maddog55

The federal government owns 47% of California land and many national parks already.


35 posted on 09/30/2020 6:11:38 AM PDT by bert ( (KE. NP. N.C. +12) t Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay My, oh, my, what a wonderful day)
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To: Theoria

I hope it’s Middle Tennessee where I live.


36 posted on 09/30/2020 6:14:22 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

Lived in CA for two decades. Left 10 years ago. LOVED the beauty and the activities of the Golden State, now very tarnished. Lovely for our son to grow up there as we lived in a Conservative valley.

That valley, due to the legal ballot harvesting, actually elected the ‘throuple’ advocate in 2019. The Left has a stranglehold on the state and will not stop until it is completely dead/unlivable.


37 posted on 09/30/2020 6:14:24 AM PDT by originalbuckeye ('In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act'- George Orwell..?)
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To: ScottinVA

California citizens exist to work and pay taxes. They are in effect slaves that have their wages taken to be spent by Euro wannnabes to further political projects doomed to failure.

California has failed and seceded from the union by abrogating federal law

California longs to be Canada


38 posted on 09/30/2020 6:15:57 AM PDT by bert ( (KE. NP. N.C. +12) t Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay My, oh, my, what a wonderful day)
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To: ComputerGuy

You could do far far worse than having Ben Shapiro as a neighbor.


39 posted on 09/30/2020 6:18:27 AM PDT by kevao (BIBLICAL JESUS: Give your money to the poor. SOCIALIST JESUS: Give your neighbor's money to the poor)
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To: Kaslin

Good - just leave the voting habits y’all instituted behind when you do leave.
Try not to create another liberal paradise in your new locale.


40 posted on 09/30/2020 6:19:14 AM PDT by LFOD (Formerly - Iraq, Afghanistan - back home in Dixie.)
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