Whoa, Hang on Here. There’s Trouble in Culver City

By Naya Na @Adobe Stock

Let Them Take Trains

California isn’t stupid about its climate regulations. It appears the state’s goal is to goad Californians into buying electric vehicles as gasoline prices rise.

Democrats, unwilling to pay the political cost for the consequences of their policies, search for cover by lashing out at Governor Gavin Newsom’s regulations.

The governor’s response to the fury over sky-high gas prices? Let them take trains.

Fueling California’s high gasoline prices are its cap-and-trade and low-carbon fuel programs, which raise costs on fossil fuel businesses and consumers to subsidize electric vehicles and the construction of the state’s high-speed train to nowhere.

Recently, reports Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness, California Governor Newsom observed the efforts of ICE to detain those who entered and reside here illegally:

From Gavin Newsom:

Continued chaotic federal sweeps across California, to meet an arbitrary arrest quota, are as reckless as they are cruel. Donald Trump’s chaos is eroding trust, tearing families apart, and undermining the workers and industries that power America’s economy.

Hang on, here, Governor Newsom. As VDH writes, Newsome’s points are a bad combo of either fictitious or deceptive. The mayor of LA and Gov. Newsom are blaming President Trump for their own failures to maintain order. The WSJ adds, Mr. Newsom really is living in LaLa Land if he thinks Americans will side with radicals over Mr. Trump.

The Biden-Era Norm

Chaotic? What is chaotic was allowing 12 million unaudited migrants into the U.S. ahead of those waiting years for background checks and legal permission.

The current antidote to a truly chaotic, nonexistent border was to bring some legality and order back to immigration —and not to perpetuate a wild-west border, drug smuggling, cartel profiteering, and child trafficking and abandonment, which were the Biden-era norms.

Chaotic are 1,000 rioters in southern California swarming ICE officers, endangering their safety and lives—and then being contextualized, excused, or even supported by the governor of the state, who supposedly is an upholder of our laws and their enforcement.

Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsoe seem oblivious that their support of violent protests. That, coupled with the intimidation of ICE officers, increases the chance that an officer will be seriously injured of killed. Apparently, (the mayor and governor) think they are riding a wave of public support, when in fact the latest CBS poll found 54 percent of Americans support such deportations.

Are California politicians clueless to the optics of illegal immigrants torching autos, attacking law enforcement, or pelting bystanders, while waving Mexican flags? Where is the logic, questions Mr. Hanson, in waving the flag of the country to which one is violently opposed to returning, while assaulting the officers and infrastructure of the very nation in which one is demanding to remain?

Next up is Newsom’s claim of an arbitrary arrest quota. In just four years, President Joe Biden allowed between 10–12 million illegal entries, or 2.5–3 million a year, or somewhere between 200,000–300,000 per month, or between 7,000–8,300 a day.

To find, audit, and deport even 10–20% of that daily figure, or 800–2000 a day over four years, is not an “arbitrary arrest quota.” It’s a formidable, although often vain, effort “to return illegal immigration numbers to where they were before Biden’s systemic lawlessness.”

… with the current level of deportations, ICE cannot possibly reduce the population of illegal aliens back to the pre-Biden range of 10–12 million resident illegal aliens before the additional and contrived 10–12 million four-year influx.

How many would be acceptable to Governor Newsom? Wonders, VDH, would ten, twelve, or twenty million work for Newsome?

Reckless? Where was Newsome when the southern border was being destroyed? VDH has his own interpretation of Reckless:

• allowing an unchecked amount of cartel fentanyl, disguised as prescription or less toxic illicit drugs, to kill 70,000–100,000 Americans per year.
• drumming out of the military 8,500 American soldiers who balked at the experimental mRNA vaccine while allowing more than 10 million illegal aliens to flood the border without any medical or inoculation scrutiny.
• demanding 2–3 forms of independent IDs from U.S. citizens to qualify for the required “real ID” to fly, while allowing tens of thousands of illegal aliens to be exempt from even rudimentary identification.
• leveling the highest income tax rates in the U.S., the highest gas taxes, among the highest aggregate sales taxes, and still ending up with annual multibillion-dollar deficits.
• driving 200,000–300,000 middle-class taxpayers out of the state every year, who cannot afford sky-high California prices and receive so few services in return for such high state taxes.

Creul is overtaxing state social service facilities with hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals, whose sheer numbers imperil the health care of California’s own beleaguered citizen population.

Perhaps Creul is defined as the highest gas prices in the nation, while sitting atop some of the largest gas and oil reserves in the country.

Cruel is watching poor people in Fresno or Tulare County buy gas in increments of $30 in cash rather than filling up their pickups at a prohibitive cost of $130.

Creul is California high-speed rail boondoggle that has wasted nearly $30 billion without a single foot of track rail installed and may well be abandoned—its concrete overpasses now testaments to our modern Stonehenge monoliths.

Cruel are the state’s ossified “freeways”— especially the 101, the 99, and I-5—that have remained unchanged for the last half century and record some of the deadliest traffic statistics per mile driven in the U.S.

Cruel is the way California citizens were treated during the recent LA fires. How cruel was it when the derelict mayor hamelessly attacked those who were trying to enforce federal law while she junketed in Ghana during the height of fire season?

Cruel was the Los Angeles deputy mayor (tasked with public safety, no less), who was arrested and convicted for reporting fake anti-Israel bomb threats.

Creul was the fire chief who obsessed over DEI hiring while leaving scores of fire hydrants across the city inoperative.

Creul were state directives that prevented sane clearing of brush kindling that guaranteed plentiful fuel to ensure an inferno among Pacific Palisades homes.

Creul are Coastal Commission and the city of Los Angeles that make it almost impossible to rebuild burned-out homes promptly, laments VDH.

Creul are destructive regulatory policies that have driven out of the state everything from Tesla to refineries to insurance companies, ensuring that the struggling and vanishing middle classes cannot afford the staples of life.

In LA County, there are roughly 40,000 annual traffic accidents. Cruel is when the culpable drivers often flee the scene of the accident.

Does the governor or mayor ever ask why that is so, or worry over some 8,000 or so victims who are killed or injured?

Cruel are California’s renewable energy” mandates. The skyrocketing costs of electricity have impoverished state residents—”one in four of whom now default on their monthly power bills.”

Cruel is the boutique leftism of a generation of elite multimillionaire Bay Area politicians—from Jerry Brown to Nancy Pelosi to Gavin Newsom—whose wealth, office-holding, influence, and zip codes ensured that they were never subject to the baleful consequences of their virtue-signaling ideologies that fell only on distant and vulnerable others.

Trust? Who do you trust?

Probably not the state of California, which has become a bifurcated medieval society of the very rich and the subsidized poor, with a complete disdain for the struggling middle class who cannot afford houses, power, fuel, or insurance?

Undermining is a governor and a mayor deliberately ignoring or nullifying federal law in neo-Confederate fashion and siding with violent protestors, while offering the offenders implicit assurances of impunity.

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno.