Posted on 06/16/2025 12:51:29 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Mass immigration from Mexico, legal and illegal, transformed California and created a fractured, riotous, and unstable polity.
The sad news that Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind the Beach Boys, died last week at 82 carried with it a strange and foreboding symbolism. His death came as Los Angeles was reeling from a series of riots — and poised to plunge into a period of sustained civic unrest.
The immediate cause of the unrest is violent opposition to the legitimate enforcement of federal immigration law, especially among Mexican nationals and Mexican-American residents of Los Angeles. In recent days we’ve all heard impassioned declarations from anti-ICE protesters, rioters, and many in the corporate press along the lines that “Los Angeles belongs to Mexico,” or that California was “stolen” from Mexico.
At the heart of these protests and riots we have seen, in short, the assertion of a specifically ethnic and Mexican national identity over and against an American national identity — immortalized in the striking images of masked rioters waving the Mexican flag amid burning vehicles, rubble, and beleaguered police.
That all this was happening in California, and that Wilson passed away in the middle of it all, underscores just how much California has been demographically and culturally transformed by mass immigration from Mexico since the 1960s. Put bluntly, the California that Wilson sang about died long before he did. Through the mass immigration regime established by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, what was once a stable bastion of American life and culture — that for many people epitomized the American dream — was replaced by an inherently volatile and fractured polity built on the unstable foundation of multiculturalism and competing ethnic identities.
When the Beach Boys released their first album Surfin’ Safari in 1962, and in quick succession released...
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Mr. GG2 is from LA county and grew up there to adulthood. He says its so different now he doesn’t even want to go back to visit.
There is no more “California Dreamin’”.
Your people I do not understand
So to you I wish to put an end
And you’ll never hear surf music again
yeah, this is the heart stopping part.
I was born in San Francisco in the old presidio at letterman general hospital in 1953. My dad was in the army. we moved frequenty. We went to ft bragg nc and then to germany and then back to california again....for the second time
... between 1960 and 1964...for two years in South San Francisco and two years in (ft ord) monterrey california. what a blast those years were. beach boys and telstar played on japanese radios.
That age is so not California anymore. It was a different country.
That age betweem 1960-65 when the possibilities were unlimited actually died with the viet nam war as it heated up in 1965. It was gone by 1970.
Curiously, it was technology that made the early 60’s so exhuberent with possibilities. Technology is again changing the horizons to something limitless today. But the characters have all changed.
I’m grateful to God that He let me see it before it went to Hell.................
And $-sucking wars intrude to darken those horizons once again :(
.....Brian Wilson’s California Died Decades Ago.....
Yup! Too bad!
Me too!
That’s an excellent article that sums up how Democrats destroyed in the past 50 years destroyed what had been created by Americans the previous 125 years.
I was born in 1951 in NYS. We lived in the Westchester area by LAX for a couple years, 1953-1954. My folks didn’t like the smog, traffic or culture even then, so we moved back to NYS where I grew up. I remember very well listening to The Beach Boys in Junior High School starting with “Surfin’ Safari” around 1963. A couple years later, the Mamas and the Papas released “California Dreamin’” which reinforced the Beach Boys (and Jan and Dean).
Just ten years later I graduated from college and moved to California (probably to live some of that California Dreaming. We still have our house in the Bay Area...but we have another place in North Idaho to keep us sane.
It just breaks my heart to see how the 1965 Hart-Celler Act destroyed California and much of the USA. California suffered a triple-whammy: 1) unchecked immigration from Mexico, 2) the growth of Silicon Valley creating unimaginable wealth, and 3) the rise of the seemingly permanent single party Democrat Machine in Sacramento.
I feel sorry for the people who never got to know the real California, that first 125 years or so it was quite an American place.
NO KIDDING! Used to be THE place go live and visit......NOT ANYMORE!
I have never been to California. Always wanted to go to see the California coast between LA and SF, Hearst Castle, the Reagan and Nixon presidential Libraries, etc.
Over the years, I’ve got to meet a few people who’ve grown up there at various time thru the 1960’s thru 80’s. Almost to a person, they said it was a great time to live there.
Sure there were problems - smog, food prices, traffic, etc. But almost everyone said it was as great a place to be as someone could hope for.
It sounds like that is all long gone.
A MEN...ME TOO....LIVED IN SF.
The DEMONIC DEMOCRATS KILLED THE GOLDEN GOOSE OF FABULOUS CALIFORNIA.....ITS NOW A HELLHOLE.
Yes, the "Dream" is dead. Still, I have those wonderful youthful memories and still listen to their music on occasion. For people all over the US, California was indeed a "dream" they want to experience. I got to live it.
BTW, Brian was a musical genius along the lines of Phil Spector and Berry Gordy. Also, most people don't know that Brian would hire the Wrecking Crew (famous studio back up ensemble) for the studio recordings.
I wonder what Sergeant Joe Friday would have to say today about his Los Angeles — the onetime “City of Angels.”
It’s now a California nightmare.
I grew up in Long Beach in the 50s and early 60s. It was a wonderful place to grow up. Left Cal in the early 70s. Long Beach hasn’t gotten better with the passage of time.
Step sister lives in Rancho Cucamonga, which she says is deteriorating from both the L.A. and San Berdo directions—homeless and apparently open prostitution. It used to be a place where you didn’t have to lock your doors.
Brian Wilson’s California was my California, minus the surfing. You kind of had to be there to see how nice it was.
I grew up in Rust Belt midwest. My uncle stayed in SoCal for medical school after deployment in WWII, so I had cousins grew up a block from the ocean at Hermosa Beach, not far from The Beach Boys home in Hawthorne CA.
My uncle brought them back occasionally to visit, and we stayed in contact - so while I lived through snow, strict Catholic social mores, and economic depression, I would hear constantly from my cousins about surfing, fishing, sunshine, their new cars and all-night partying on the beach.
It all seemed so other-worldly.
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