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A Mass Exodus from the Democrats’ America, Part II

May be an image of 2 people, car and road

Anecdote is proof of nothing but anecdote.  So goes logic, but some anecdotes are more notable than others.  I was informed by a friend of mine in California that their neighbor moved to a state in the South, a red state of course.  I don’t know the reason but it does seem that more and more neighbors have fled the not-so-Golden State over the past few decades.  A Washington Examiner editorial sheds more light on the glaringly obvious trend in states run by Democrats.  Indeed, “A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America”.

I’ve previously written that California would have lost two to three congressmen after the 2020 census, instead of just the one, if the 2021 population numbers were included.  There’s more.  15 of the 15 fastest-growing cities and towns are in states under Republican rule: Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho.  14 of the 15 fastest-declining are in Democrat states.  If we combine the 2020-2021 losses for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, we’d have the population of Miami.

It really doesn’t matter if an individual jurisdiction has more of a Republican lean if it still resides in a state run by Democrats.  You can’t avoid the political suffocation coming out of the state capital.

See the source image
California 2012 Presidential election results by county. Notice the red counties are overwhelmed by the population concentrations on the coast. San Diego-to-San Francisco controls Sacramento.

Draconian COVID restrictions of Democrat governors certainly acted as an accelerant for the flight.  COVID brought out the inner totalitarian in the governing class of lefty progressives.  We should have known the inner totalitarian would be unmasked since wokeness and progressivism are functionally synonymous, and the thuggishness has been on display for quite some time in the “cancellations” on campuses and everywhere else its acolytes hold sway.  Giving these people power is an invitation to “cancellation” of basic liberty, and more refugees.  Who wants to live and raise kids under that, the governing equivalent of North Korea?

Further, two Democrat states – Colorado and Washington State – fell off the growth list after COVID.  Apparently, Democrat governance is toxic to growth.  I guess that making your state repellant to its residents is one sure way to achieve the lefty dream of zero population growth.

Chris Stokes, left, and Angel Zickefoose ...
Two Colorado residents openly smoke marijuana during the 4/20 event (day to celebrate pot) at Civic Center Park on April 20, 2017 in Denver. In Colorado, marijuana was legalized for almost any use in 2012.

The California boom of the 1950’s and 60’s is over and is going in the opposite direction.  Other states who followed California’s lead into radical lefty rule saw their booms of the 80’s/90’s/early 2000’s evaporate as well.  The key to personal, family, and state well-being is NOT to be like California . . . and New York, Washington State, Colorado, Illinois, etc., etc.  Biden, are you paying attention?  Are the rest of you paying attention?

RogerG

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We Are Birth-Controlling Ourselves to Death

The 2020 Census shows more than the scoreboard of the number of congressmen per state. It’s a comprehensive snapshot of the country’s population after 10 years. What does this census tell us about ourselves? Among other things, it told us that there are more people 80 and over than 2 and younger. That’s a catastrophe!

A synopsis of the report can be found here.

If you think it’s great, think again. Who’s going to wheel you out into the sun from your nursing home room? Who’s going to be around in sufficient numbers to pump money into the fund for your Social Security payments and Medicare benefits? Who’s going to man the labs to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? What’ll happen to entrepreneurialism if more and more of it will be expected to be performed by people suffering from age-related memory loss? This is more than a trifling happenstance.

We need kids at more than at replacement levels. So, how did we get here? Two things worked hand-in-glove: (1) the cultural infantilization of adults and (2) the unstated acceptance of the population-bomb myth.

First, mature judgment is hard to achieve when narcissism is a widespread national trait. Today, in my estimation, self-actualization is the hidden goal of far too many Americans. Self-absorption has proceeded apace as religious commitment has reached the event horizon of the cultural black hole. A life of personal fixations doesn’t bode well for thoughts about posterity like family formation.

Too few of these.

Second, people seem to recoil at the words “population growth”. Maybe it’s due to too many images of Calcutta or the teeming hordes of Shanghai. Certainly, the notion gets a boost by the writings of popularizing academics like Paul Ehrlich and his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Sci-fi horror movies and programs fortify the misperception. In my college and high school classes as an instructor, I would ask some form of the question, “Is it worse to have many people or fewer?” Whether I reversed the order or restated it, it made no difference. The vast majority chose many. Something has seeped into the popular imagination that doesn’t bode well for having a robust next generation.

We are about to experience a live-action social experiment. Numbers point to the following shift: today’s scenes of old folks in the care of sons and daughters with the assistance of state programs morphs into the likelihood of the aged herded into state institutions, alone in their isolation, waiting for death. There being no one around to care.

Too much of this.

What a self-fulfilling dystopia.

RogerG

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California’s Demographic Slide Is Now Official

A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

It’s in, the 2020 Census Report, that is. California is set to lose its first House seat since . . . ever. Each census has resulted in California gaining seats since it entered the union in 1850. It’s a momentum that is slowly beginning to recede, as all shifts in population tend to be. Big shifts don’t happen overnight but start with a gradual decline in the advance and eventually end in a grudging reversal. It’s happening to California as it happened in prior decades to New York and the upper Midwest.

In the prior demographic momentum that accelerated in the 1950’s, it was opportunity and climate that propelled California’s growth. California benefitted from the post-war economy and its pleasant coastal climate. It grew, grew, and grew. Then it all came to a grinding halt.

The astonishing aspect of the state’s current decline in status is its conscious decision to squander its inheritance. People aren’t leaving the state because the climate is better elsewhere. They leave because of willful decisions by its electorate to choose people to run the state into the ground.

The state’s leaders in the 1950’s to 1960’s bequeathed an infrastructure of cheap power, water projects, and roads that worked to make life easier for its residents and businesses.

Then-Governor Ronald Reagan at the 1972 opening ceremony of the Edmonston Pumping Plant, a key feature of the California Water Project.

Then, off the rails it went. It became a one-party state run by lefty nincompoops. Term limits only intensified the lunacy by adding “inexperienced” to “lefty” and “nincompoop” to the résumé of state legislator.

Taxes and regulations went through the roof. It seemed as if there was an umbilical cord between the crazies in the faculty lounges and the legislative chamber and governor’s mansion. Nearly every crackpot fantasy generated from the minds of people in tenure-secured positions was turned into law and policy. Resources shifted from the simple and necessary things to trendy and lefty fascinations such as trying to make solar and wind work and drives to see how fast they can go in destroying western civilization, the nuclear family, and the state’s economy. All that the state’s people got for it was raging wildfires, power rates through the roof, regulations that turned business activity into Sisyphean torture, urban environments littered with needles/feces/homeless encampments, and the privilege of paying the highest taxes in the nation. If there is such a thing as anthropocentric climate change, California invented anthropocentric social and economic ruination.

The Camp Fire rages through Paradise, California, in 2018. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

The Census report paints a dire picture for the state. It gained population but not as fast as other states added. Rarely do states lose population unless the Black Death returns with a vengeance or left-wing monsters ascend the throne like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. If nothing else, people still procreate.

California did the trick by pushing people out. People started leaving the state long before but the numbers were obscured by the influx of the foreign-born, legal and illegal. Even that has started to wane. The fertility rate cratered and domestic out-migration accelerated. 1.3 million more people left for other states than entered. The most precipitous decline occurred in the category of native Californian.

A group of migrants arrested crossing the border near El Centro, Calif. in August 2005. (photo: SANDY HUFFAKER/GETTY IMAGES)

The heavy train of demography has ground to a halt for California and is beginning to back up. How far will it go in reverse? That’s hard to say. It all depends on how long the crazies remain in power. After all, the devastation was man-caused, so the solution will have to be man-caused. I’m not betting the bank on the lunatics in Sacramento suddenly experiencing a road-to-Damascus moment.

As for me – a native Californian – I’m not going back to that asylum.

RogerG

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The Census Hustle

SACRAMENTO, CA – JULY 29: Secretary of State Alex Padilla is photographed in his office on Monday, July 29, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)

I’ll be a “census enumerator” for a couple of months to do my very small bit to prevent declining blue states – like California – from poaching a representative or two from the others.  Actually, the motive is more than altruism.  They’re paying me $17/hr plus mileage.  But the probable antics of the deteriorating coastal-corridor states to pilfer what rightly belongs to others got me off my duff to join the fray.

California is pouring $187 million – compared to $10 million in 2010 – to find and/or invent humans so as to inflate its count.  They’re even implementing a phone survey, not knowing who’s really on the other end and possibly doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the count from the other end of the line.  Homelessness is rampant so tallying those folks – when they may not be around next week, next month, next year, or even in the land of the living – will make for abundant opportunities for hanky-panky.  For the chief statewide Democrat ward healer, Sec. of State Alex Padilla, keeping the state’s congressional count at 53 is a matter of life and death.

The most commonly cited number for the flight of native Californians from the state over the past decade is about 400,000, nearly equal to the loss of one House seat.  Meanwhile, other and more deserving states (mostly red) have blossomed.  With foreign immigration declining (legal and illegal), the state can’t count on that source to makeup for the losses to red states like Texas and Florida.

Make no mistake about it, this is about the maintenance of raw, partisan political power.  Padilla put it quite succinctly: “If people [bodies – real or imaginary – in California] don’t participate in the census, Trump wins. If we are successful in counting every Californian, Trump loses.” Translation: Screw the Republicans!

You can read more about the hustle in an August 15, 2019, interview with Padilla in the San Jose Mercury News here.

RogerG