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Historian Victor Davis Hanson described why he feels his home state of California is America’s first “Third World state” during a Monday night appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Hanson’s comments came after the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said that national Republicans will go “into the waste bin of history, the way Republicans of the ’90s [in California] have gone.” Responding to host Tucker Carlson’s question about why he considers California a “Third World state,” Hanson pointed to “symptoms” we typically “associate with failed states” such as high taxes, poor schools, a super-rich class, and a significant percentage...

Talk to almost any Californians (that is, to any who’ve been in the state since before the ’90s) and they’ll tell a simple story of conservative decline. A crucial 1994 ballot initiative that attempted to enact stricter restrictions on illegal immigrants, Proposition 187, was pushed by a radicalizing GOP in a diversifying California. This initiative was a draconian effort to lash out against minorities’ political gains, and it especially enraged and energized Latinos, long a sleeping giant in California politics. In short, overreach tinged with racism caused Republicans to go the way of the grizzly on the state flag: extinct....

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Twenty years ago this month, 59 percent of California voters passed a ballot measure designed to set up a state-run immigration system and deny most public benefits — including K-12 education — to illegal immigrants. Proposition 187 was widely viewed as one of the harshest anti-immigrant measures in the country. But when President Barack Obama last week signed executive orders to protect about 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, there were only muted protests in the Golden State. And polls show that more Californians back Obama on this than oppose him. “It’s a very different atmosphere from what we had...

The issue with Republicans in California has been the long-standing habit of going liberal on certain issues and inflaming the base Mid-year 2016, the Sacramento Bee trotted out their same tired line about Prop 187 and the long-lasting damage it caused to the California Republican Party. The media narrative loves to demonize conservatives as anti-immigrant bigots who pushed this agenda so far in 1994, which in turn caused the GOP brand to suffer.

With the California primary fast approaching, the media are rolling out their favorite fairy tale about how Republican Pete Wilson’s support for Proposition 187 in 1994 was a historic, game-changing error for the GOP, driving Hispanics from the party for good! Both CNN and MSNBC retold this completely bogus narrative this week. NPR rolls it out once every two weeks. I — along with other people capable of reading election returns — have written about this forever. I did most recently in “Adios, America,” in a chapter titled, “I Wrote This Chapter After Noticing How Stupid Rich People Are,” inspired...

Recently, the House passed, by an overwhelming margin, a resolution to condemn the Russian Federation for actions considered hostile and aggressive within its sphere of influence, specifically with regard to the politically torn country of Ukraine. Ten Members voted “nay,” myself among them. I wish to explain why I took this unpopular position. Above all, while Vladimir Putin’s government may well have engaged in questionable behavior toward neighboring countries, Resolution 758 was nothing more than gratuitous, needlessly provocative and shortsighted. Moreover, reasonable observers the world over can see it as tantamount to a declaration that Russia is America’s enemy. The...

There’s a ghost haunting next week’s elections in California. It’s been there 20 years. Proposition 187 – a measure Californians overwhelmingly voted into law on Nov. 8, 1994 – was never enacted. The law would have denied public services, including public education and non-emergency health care, to immigrants living in the state illegally. This summer, state legislators officially wiped it from the books, calling it the “most mean spirited and un-American” measure in the state’s history. But the legacy of Prop. 187 lives on. And the people initially targeted – Latinos in general and undocumented immigrants in particular – are...

Immigration: California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a repeal of 1994's overturned Prop. 187, calling it a law that "has no place on the state's books." What do you call a man who claims voters' choices have no place in government? In most places out there, the name would be "tyrant," even if the word seems a bit fancy for the increasingly unpopular Gov. Brown. Because the hard fact remains that in 1994, millions of California's voters, by a margin of 59% to 41%, voted in favor of denying "free" welfare, education and other benefits to illegal immigrants on the clear...

Like his mentor Jack Kemp, he’s pro-immigration.This week, there was a new development in the House: Paul Ryan may be the key to passing comprehensive immigration reform. But that should hardly come as a surprise. Long before he was a vice-presidential nominee, Ryan was an adviser to former New York congressman Jack Kemp at Empower America, a conservative think tank. It was there, in his early twenties, that Ryan began to share Kemp’s politics. Beyond fiscal issues, that meant supporting pro-immigration policies, such as an expanded guest-worker program. Kemp often spoke passionately about how immigration was necessary for economic growth...

[SNIP] ....Based on my limited interactions and after reading more about [San Antonio Mayor Julian] Castro, it is clear that he is superficially very different from the older Latino leaders but very similar in other ways. The most prominent Hispanic mayor in America is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Before Castro was born, Villaraigosa was at UCLA leading the openly racist, secessionist, and anti-American group MEChA. After engaging in protests to try to get the ChicanoStudies Department to give money to an openly communist group, he dropped out of UCLA and attended the unaccredited People's School of Law. He took...

Change is in the air. States from Arizona to Virginia have enacted laws cracking down on illegal immigration. Some target the immigrants; some target their employers. Some rely on local police to do the job; others require that employers use the federal e-Verify system to check the immigration status of employees. Many of these statutes have been challenged in court. Some have been put on hold while others — including an Alabama statute regarded as the most stringent of all — have been endorsed by federal appeals judges. These initiatives share a common goal: enforcement of federal immigration laws, something...

Revising food-stamp rules affecting undocumented immigrants in Utah may have saved the federal government more than $2 million, an analysis by the state Department of Workforce Services (DWS) shows. Between July and October, 2,724 households with undocumented immigrants lost benefits; 788 of those households saw a decline in financial assistance. That equals an estimated $2.1 million in cost savings, according to the analysis. Food stamps, which help low-income families buy food each month, are available to all eligible U.S. citizens based on household income and family size. A blended household with U.S.-born children and undocumented parents could potentially still qualify...

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government . . . -Thomas Jefferson California voters have long been scoffed at by activist judges substituting their own agenda in place of the law. The ignominious Jerry Brown state Supreme Court appointee, Rose Bird, habitually overturned death penalty cases because she personally didn’t approve of the death penalty. The people of the Golden State eventually threw her out of office. The California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994 by a margin of a mere 58.93%. Prop 187 would have, in accordance with Article II, Section 8 of...

Joy Tiz ©2010 The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government -Thomas Jefferson California voters have long been scoffed at by activist judges substituting their own agenda in place of the law. The ignominious Jerry Brown state Supreme Court appointee, Rose Bird, habitually overturned death penalty cases because she personally didn’t approve of the death penalty. The people of the Golden State eventually threw her out of office. The California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994 by a margin of a mere 58.93%. Prop 187 would have, in accordance with Article II, Section 8 of...

California’s special October 7 election on whether to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis ought to resurrect an issue that fainthearted Republicans have too long avoided: Should taxpayers be forced to fund education, non-emergency health care and welfare benefits for foreign nationals living illegally in the United States? In 1994, California voters answered this question with a thundering "No Way." By 59% to 41%, they approved Proposition 187, terminating non-emergency state services for immigration lawbreakers. Eight days later, Federal District Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer, a self-professed "liberal" appointed by President Jimmy Carter, issued an injunction suspending enforcement of the law. In...

Translation: "No on Prop 187 and No on the Law in Arizona."

A reader just sent us evidence of GOP guv candidate Meg Whitman's latest outreach to Latino voters: A Spanish-language billboard saying she (would have) opposed Proposition 187 and opposes the controversial Arizona immigration law. The billboard, spotted on Highway 99 about 2 miles north of Earlimart in Tulare County, says: "NO a la Proposicion 187 y NO a la Ley de Arizona -- Meg Whitman." ...As we told you about a while back -- and again during our rundown of this week's Field Poll on the guv's race -- Whitman is trying to distance herself from her campaign chair's Pete...

Meg Whitman, pivoting away from a primary that drove her much father to the right than she would have liked, will remind Hispanic Californians that she opposed Arizona's controversial immigration law in an ad slated to run on the Spanish-language broadcast of today's Mexico-France World Cup game. "She respects our community," says the ad's narrator, according to a Spanish text provided to La Opinion's Pilar Marrero. "She's the Republican who opposed the Arizona law and opposed Proposition 187," say the ad, referring to the 1994 initiative -- later ruled unconstitutional -- to bar illegal immigrants from receiving public health care...

San Francisco -- The last time a state aimed its laws at illegal immigrants, it was rebuked by a federal judge. "The state is powerless to enact its own scheme to regulate immigration," U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer said in a ruling striking down California's Proposition 187, a 1994 initiative that sought to deny health and welfare benefits and public schooling to the undocumented.Pfaelzer said California voters were understandably frustrated with ineffective federal enforcement of immigration laws. But no matter how serious the problem, she said, "the authority to regulate immigration belongs exclusively to the federal government."It's a message that...