…our decision was made during a pleasant late summer evening’s post-barbeque chat sipping beers on the patio, when we concluded that the [socio-political] problem in California wasn’t the idiot politicians, but was rather the idiot voters who kept electing them.

Voters. Sigh. What’cha gonna do about thirty million implacably moronic know-nothing voters.

The state was never going to recover its political sanity. The 1960’s were never going to return. There was no point to struggle for change; an effective swing of the pendulum was never going to come in our (my, at least) remaining productive lifetime.

We researched a bit, pondered a bit, made a brief visit to Spokane (liked what we saw and heard), added up the costs …and some months later, said our final goodbyes and packed up our lives into a huge rental truck+Jeep+trailers caravan …and at 60 escaped the political insanity that was the root of the fiscal irresponsibility of the Golden State.

Starting anew, like teenagers. Well, almost lol.

Crazy stuff.

Looking back, now, we should have moved a decade earlier. At least lol. Regardless, we’ve prospered.

Never to return.

Lee Says:
June 5th, 2018 at 4:31 am

I so miss the weather, and the scenery. But then I read an article about the upcoming water rationing, or some nonsense from Kamala Harris, or Gavin Newsom, and realize I got out in time. But too many other escapees bring their ruinous progressivism with them. They’re ruining Idaho…

I didn’t realize how brainwashed I’d become until I left. It took me a few years to recover. I think a lot of escapees don’t.”

Ask them if they don’t realize what they were fleeing is the product of them being themselves.

Story I’ve told before and it may differ slightly from other tellings. : Late 1980’s just getting started. Met a woman in a business I was working at. She was a main office secretary and a pleasant, social gospel/justice Episcopalian; very active back in the 1960’s and 70’s movements.

For those familiar with the Detroit area, she lived in the city just across from Northland; somewhat south of 8 mile road. It was an area where, for some reason a large number of socially progressive and active Detroiters lived; generally in newer style houses that were built in the late 1940s and early 50’s, when there was still room to build suburban style houses in the city.

Eventually she got what she had been campaigning for. And for a while she attempted to live it. But with the persecution of her kids and the thefts and so forth she decamped northwest to the safety of a redneck municipal enclave.

She related it all in the most unreflected and unselfconscious manner imaginable. Like it was just something that happened, and not something related to cause and effect.

After she told me this story I asked her why she didn’t stay on. “Because the kids, and the bicycles and …”

She liked me, and helped me with office politics and warnings and I liked her as a person. So I went as easy as I could while still probing for the moral core of her “argument”.

‘But isn’t that what you wanted? Should you not have lived what you created?’

What I remember is that she just looked silently at me as if I asked either a question her mind could not process, or I had mentioned something so intimate and intrusive and embarrassing, that not even outrage would have been an appropriate reply. I did not press it anymore. She was a slight, short woman well into her sixties, and what could I do? Punch her in the face for breathtaking hypocrisy? Grab her by the throat and demand a coherent answer?

But if it had been her husband telling me this, (he had died) I would have pressed the issue. Hard. I would have asked why he refused to stand the ground he had himself staked out. And I would have asked him what moral claim he imagined he had on the civility of those to whom he had fled.

But it never quite works out that way.

And church-going devotion to Christianity is an unavoidable must. Judaism regrettably does not count since >75% of Jews are Progressives, irreversibly. They could all be Californians!

Minden was an agricultural town (cattle, mostly) since it’s founding at the beginning of the last century, and is 25 minutes’ drive from Lake Tahoe and outstanding skiing and other outdoor sports. California yuppies are happy to move here, especially when they discover that the million dollars they got for an 800 square foot bungalow in Palo Alto will buy them 15 acres and allow them to build a 5,000 square foot baronial estate.

The trouble is, as Colorado and Idaho are finding out, transplanted Californians, who say they are fleeing destructive social and economic policies, bring a lite version of that life with them. So we all bemoan what we are becoming (with our bumper stickers “I don’t care HOW they do it in California”), but we are losing the fight in the long term.

The alternative, of course, is to say “well I’ve got mine, so the rest of you Californians stay out.” There’s a certain inconsistency there.

I didn’t move here to escape Governor Brown — I came from Ohio for the world-class soaring here. So I feel a little more entitled to stay “stay out.” Just a little.

But the point I wanted to make is that the Bay Area’s spectacular scenery and lifestyle has been irreversibly altered by liberal politics, and the same thing is happening now in all the places Californians are moving to. Glenn Reynolds suggests we conservatives set up a “welcome wagon” with flyers we give to newcomers, essentially saying “don’t do to our valley what you are escaping from.” It’s a good idea, but we don’t do it. Sloth, I guess.

My ultimate question is, can the liberal playbook ever be reversed? The USA has sort of done this in its move from Obama to Trump, but the future probably holds more Obamas, and once the huddled masses taste free goodies, how likely are they to vote for someone who wants to take that away?

I didn’t realize how brainwashed I’d become until I left. It took me a few years to recover. I think a lot of escapees don’t.

So, it is not the city I landed in and not even as livable as it was in 2009. I am honestly feeling unmoored and not sure where to live but I am in Colorado now. It is also getting expensive though it doesn’t compare.

The left has ruined that city. Beware of it happening in other places.

This is the dream of every idealist and ideologue to the Left of Left-of-Center (though some may not quite realize it).

This includes, of course, so-called “progressives”.

It is their program; and ultimately everything they stand for must include this key stepping stone. (Or keystone…for collapse!)

Venezuela has been a particular “success”; but it has precedents in the USSR and every Iron Curtain country, as well as the more “revolutionary” catastrophes in East Asia and Latin America. (To be sure, the Peronist-style right were nothing to emulate.)

I (more than) suspect that this dream was the impetus behind Obama’s economic policies, such as they were; paramount among them “ObamaCare”—the target here being small businesses and the need to hogtie that vast sector of income generation, job creation and social stability—and the reason for a relatively sustained lack of growth, along with less-than-impressive unemployment statistics throughout the eight years of the Obama administration. (Though to be fair, the first several years were encumbered by the burst economic bubble, but still, there should have been incentives for growth; instead there was the opposite.)

California is merely following suit in the “great experiment” of utopia (which really ought to work…it really should; it’s such a great idea!! Let’s keep trying!)