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How Socialism Captured the West Coast

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Cities including Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles have become new political battlegrounds for a socialist resurgence.

New York’s far Left may think that it is the vanguard of an envisioned American socialist commonwealth, but the real action this fall will be on the West Coast, where socialist candidates have won the mayor’s office in Seattle, seem on track to take control of the Portland City Council, achieved a critical congressional victory in Denver, and, most importantly, could even triumph in the mayor’s race in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city. Read more

Is Gavin Newsom’s White House Dream Fading?

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Gavin Newsom is, as usual, indulging in a public relations blitzkrieg. But some suspect he may be losing his grip on his real ambition: a move to the White House.

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Can Los Angeles Be Saved?

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Last March, a makeshift drug factory exploded next to Los Angeles resident Juan Galicia’s craftsman-style home, built in 1910. The flames spread to his gas line, setting off a fire that destroyed the house and killed his three dogs — he tearfully shows me their picture. Had the accident happened an hour earlier, it would have killed one of his sons, as well. “I lived here 18 years and now it’s gone,” the 55-year-old father, an immigrant from El Salvador, tells me. The empty lot next door, he says, was occupied by homeless squatters who cooked methamphetamine there. “People occupy a place and the city does nothing,” he says.

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Why Latinos Are California’s Best Hope for a Sane Housing Market

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Californians rank housing as their biggest concern — and Sacramento politicians seem determined to keep it that way.

To be sure, there are much-hyped new bills meant to speed up new construction — but they favor high-density around transit stops while imposing taxes on homes in places where people have to drive to get around. Read more

SpaceX Spinoffs Launch El Segundo into Economic Orbit

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El Segundo’s Chris Pimentel may be California’s happiest mayor. As his counterparts in Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco struggle with budgetary nightmares, Pimentel has at his disposal rising revenues, a booming job market and an energetic business community.

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I’d Like to Believe California Can Be Saved from the Left

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In the coming weeks, the conservative media will have a field day thanks to the seemingly strong primary election performances of Republican Steve Hilton in the race to become the next governor of California and of Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayor’s contest.

Hilton, a former advisor to David Cameron in the UK, as well as a Fox News commentator, is certainly a brainy candidate, with personal appeal and a constructive platform. Pratt, a former reality-TV star, has run an eye-catching campaign.

But however much the Right will enjoy the notion of a Californian rebellion against its entrenched establishment, it very much remains a one-party state. Conservatives may party during the so-called “Pratt Summer” or tout “the revenge of the bourgeoisie” but the Republicans’ chances are between middling to non-existent.

It’s not even certain that either of them will reach the general election. California’s insanely slow-moving vote count leaves the possibility that one or another will fall behind once the union-led “ballot harvesting” of late ballots alters the result. This has become increasingly common, with conservative candidates often eliminated weeks after election day.

Indeed, political, demographic, and economic trends are against the Republicans’ chances. The state that spawned Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is now reliably Democratic. Overall registration in the state is almost two to one Democratic over Republican. There has not been a Republican elected statewide for two decades.

California’s demographic profile is increasingly bad for Republicans. The state has been consistently losing its Anglo population, as well as the middle class, particularly families of all ethnicities, to Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. Those most likely to stay, notes the Public Policy Institute, tend to be young and often underpaid professionals, the very class that elected New York mayor Mamdani, public workers and their wards.

Long gone are the days when California was a job-producing machine in everything from manufacturing to logistics as well as tech. These constituencies were the ones who cared most about brutal income taxes, the nation’s highest unemployment (as well as youth unemployment), unaffordable housing, poor roads, mediocre schools and ever fewer good jobs. Increasingly, these constituencies and the companies they work for are just choosing to leave.

In the governor’s race, Hilton will also be up against the full power of current governor Gavin Newsom’s political machine, largely financed by public unions and Left-leaning oligarchs. Shawn Steel, the state’s irrepressible GOP National Committeeman, told me that Hilton’s financial resources are paltry compared to what his thoroughly mediocre opponent, former Biden cabinet member Xavier Becerra, will be able to draw on.

Read the rest of this piece at Yahoo News.
The piece first appeared on Telegraph.

Joel in the Media: Is Fascism the Wave of the Future?

RealClearInvestigations Podcast hosts, J. Peder Zane and James Varney speak with Joel Kotkin about his recent article for RCI exploring how and why fascism hasbecome a buzzword of American politics.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage image: composite of election results from Wikimedia data accessed June 7.

Steve Hilton’s Rise Won’t Kill California Progressivism

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California, a place not known for its psychological normality, went crazy last night. Two separate elections show the political direction of travel for the state, with many of the details still far from certain. In a gubernatorial race that was always slated to be close, overnight results point to Republican Steve Hilton narrowly leading Democrat Xavier Becerra, while Left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer trails in third. Read more

Tom Steyer proves things can get worse than Gavin Newsom in California

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Tom Steyer proves one thing about California politics: As bad as things get, they can always get worse.

After Jerry Brown, a true intellectual whose ideas were often at odds with reality, we got Gavin Newsom, an ideological fashionista driven by vainglory and ambition.

The two combined to create a California reality that worked for their friends — greens, oligarchs, nonprofits and public employees — at the expense of pretty much everyone else. Read more

Is Spencer Pratt the Hero LA Needs?

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Reality TV stars have been fixtures of Los Angeles for decades, but now there’s a chance one could run the city. Spencer Pratt — who appeared in The Hills, among other series — may not succeed in his mayoral bid, but his candidacy has produced a social media campaign that is taking apart the progressive rot long embedded in LA’s politics.

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The Fall of the Golden State

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In the last decades of the 20th century, California reinvented a brash new capitalism that created new, more innovative archetypes. Today, some of those companies – Apple, Google and Facebook – are among the largest in the world, with assets greater than those of all but a few countries.

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