Why law-abiding citizens are fleeing California

It’s no secret that Americans are leaving California in droves: in 2011 the Los Angeles Times reported that more were moving out than in. In February, the San Jose Mercury-News did a front-page story on a group of tenants who planned to leave en masse to follow their landlord to Colorado. They complained that their expenses were going up and their quality of life was going down, which is a common criticism these days.

(Article by Brenda Walker republished from VDARE.com)

Retired engineer Carole Dabak spent 40 years living in San Jose and she packed up a couple months ago for Tennessee. She said she “loved it here” when she first came, but now is disappointed in how California has changed for the worse. “We don’t like it here anymore,” she said. “We don’t like this sanctuary state status and just the politics here.” She got a mention from Rush Limbaugh on February 10 as an example of the California Exodus.

California has definitely lost its luster.

One politician who left got an interview on Fox News Tuesday morning: one-time California State Representative Chuck Devorewas smart enough to leave in 2011:

He wrote an opinion piece for FoxNews.com posted below that brought attention to the subject. He hangs the Republican Party’s failure in California on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s leftward moves — an interesting analysis — but overlooks the changing demographics caused by extreme immigration.

California’s crazy one-party liberal politics is why I had to finally leave the state — and I’m not alone, By Chuck DeVore, Fox News, April 16, 2018Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, infamously tweeted a link in early April to a story calling for a bloodless civil war to solve America’s problems. The piece, “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War: Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win” was authored by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira.

The duo assert that this new civil war will follow a path blazed by California 15 years ago, namely, the crushing of the Republican Party. “The Democrats won; the Republicans lost,” they intone, “California is the future…”

Living and working in places like Washington and San Francisco as Teixeira and Twitter’s Dorsey do, tends to distort the view of the real world.

Teixeira’s and Leyden’s summary history of the California Republican collapse may seem convincing for people who didn’t live it, as I did as a lawmaker in the State Assembly from 2004 to 2010. To summarize: Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected in 2003 as a populist, governed as a conservative for a year and then veered to the left to preserve his political hide, massively boosting spending and signing the Global Warming Solutions Act. Democrats then started winning elections.

Conveniently left out of their narrative was Schwarzenegger’s championing of the largest state tax increase in U.S. history and a terrible national electoral climate in the 2006 midterms, due, in part, to war weariness, and the 2008 election blowout coinciding with the onset of the Great Recession.

In 2011, after spending my adult life in California, working in the once-thriving aerospace industry there, serving 19 years in the state’s National Guard and six years in the legislature, I picked up my family and moved to Texas.

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