San francisco

More through historical accident than anything else, Gavin Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic resistance. His dubious attempt to redistrict California along partisan lines won at the ballot box last month. It was a gamble – an open and explicit attempt at gerrymandering – which voters have rewarded. He is conspicuously modeling his image on Bill Clinton’s and Slick Willie is returning the compliment by letting insiders know that he is hugely impressed by Newsom’s talents. Newsom is also audaciously recasting himself as a working-class hero. He has said he spent his childhood “hustling” and that he “raised himself.” That rather downplays his rise as a protégé of the Getty family, which employed his father as its lawyer.

Alex Byrd was shooting meth in his wife’s bathroom while looking up a rehab center to check into. Before his most recent stint in prison, he’d been a major player in the drug trade, controlling distribution at every strip club on San Francisco’s Broadway Street and dealing all over the Bay Area from Oakland to San Jose. But while he was locked up, a leader in Nuestra Familia, his prison gang, offered Alex the chance to retire. When he got out, Alex promised his wife he’d never go back to prison again. But he was still an addict — and now it was a lot harder than it had been before, since he no longer had a constant supply of drugs. Now he had to work for his drug money, which is to say to engage in petty crimes like robbing Amazon stores. “It was a burden,” Alex says.

When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, an overjoyed Los Angeles Times boasted that his goal was to “make America California again.” Biden has fulfilled the Times’s vision, if with less than complete success. Over the past few weeks, however, lunchbucket Joe from Scranton has been unceremoniously dumped by the Golden State elite — Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, George Clooney and a passel of tech oligarchs — to be replaced with one of their own, Vice President Kamala Harris. But given the chances of a GOP win this year, the Californians have another favorite in the wings, Governor Gavin Newsom, for 2028. Harris’s elevation and Newsom’s looming challenge are but parts of what can be best described as the Californication of the Democratic Party.

California’s derelict legions are everywhere — under bridges, near railroad tracks, blocking off-ramps and weaving unsteadily across busy avenues on bicycles.  The soft-woke rich can no longer hide in luxe enclaves. Taxpayers are fleeing the troubled state, hundreds of thousands of them since 2020. California’s fabled quality of life is taking a rapid dive, yet the cost of housing, already outlandish, goes up and up. Five years ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Martin v. Boise, declaring that municipal laws, “prohibiting sleeping outside against homeless individuals with no access to alternative shelter,” violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, thus voiding local vagrancy laws.