Part 1 of an occasional series on California’s political future

It was always, shall we say, curious. In California during the pandemic, liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries, casinos, and big box stores were allowed to remain open full time, while Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature shuttered schools, parks, houses of worship, mom and pop shops, restaurants, barber shops, and pretty much every other place where human beings interact. They even shut down the mountains and the beaches, two places where one was least likely to catch COVID. Added on top were the shabby scenes of the state’s political class exempting themselves from their own draconian mandates, dining at Michelin rated restaurants, getting their hair done at high end salons, even taking Mexican vacations. We know now – and many of us knew at the time – that the more extreme lockdown measures were not only unnecessary but counterproductive. The harm inflicted on millions of children in particular will take decades to fully manifest.

Anyone who thinks we’ve “gone back to normal” isn’t paying very close attention. California’s political class got a taste of absolute power during the pandemic, and boy howdy did it leave an impression. To the susceptible, power is an intensely powerful narcotic, and a highly addictive one. Some people need the spotlight the way normal people need air and water. The pandemic delivered a massive mainline hit. It made minor celebrities out of formerly anonymous bureaucrats like Los Angeles County Health Director Barbara Ferrer. They liked it. They liked it a lot.

Ever since the pandemic, those politicians and bureaucrats have continued flexing their muscle at the expense of local democracy. Ferrer’s Health Department, fresh off lockdown orders that were extreme even by California standards, is now running a countywide needle distribution program for homeless drug addicts. Under the pretense of “harm reduction,” the county is paying millions of dollars to nonprofits to hand out free needles to addicts in parks and other public spaces, often in the immediate proximity of families and children. There is no reduction of harm, as the minimum wage nonprofit employees have close to zero incentive to engage with the people their bosses claim to be helping. Many of the needle recipients are in no condition to have a rational conversation in any case.

I documented these realities extensively in Santa Monica, where despite resident’s protests the Department continued handing out needles in parks near playgrounds, on the Santa Monica Promenade, and on the bluffs next to the Pier. In my observations, not once did an employee from the nonprofit responsible for the program, Venice Family Clinic, interact with anyone to whom they gave needles. In June 2022 I participated in a a face-to-face meeting between Ferrer, two other senior Department officials, and members of a local activist group. She and her deputies were unable to provide even rudimentary data capturing how many homeless people had obtained services, much less treatment and housing, through the needle program. Promised follow up never materialized.

In short, the numbers don’t exist. Los Angeles County taxpayers are spending $5 million a year based on nothing more than Ferrer’s verbal assurances. The program works because she and the political class say it does. Ipso facto, quod erat demonstrandum, res ipsa loquitur.

This young woman, suffering from addiction, received a package of 10 syringes at Reed Park. The VFC worker did not exchange any words with her, nor retrieve any used needles. He did not offer her so much as a pamphlet. The interaction took less than 30 seconds. Image from video shot by Christopher LeGras.

What “harm reduction” and the lockdowns have in common are a paucity of actual data to support them coupled with the obviousness of the political manipulation behind them. No one argues that COVID was not a major global health crisis. Still, why was it a matter of life and death for 40 million Californians to not go out to dinner, but when it was time for Newsom and his wife to meet some pharmaceutical industry lobbyists at the French Laundry a cone of immunity descended? Do aristocrats like Nancy Pelosi possess some natural resilience the plebes lack?

The political class learned during the pandemic that the average Californian will do almost anything they’re told, as long as there’s a government seal in front of the person doing the telling. There were no acts of civil disobedience in Santa Monica when the city literally placed metal barriers on the basketball hoops and yellow police tape around the playground structures, exercise equipment, and picnic tables at Christine Reed Emerson Park, even as the liquor store two blocks away remained open to sling the sauce 8am-midnight and VFC continued handing out those needles. The church across the street from Reed Park was closed for 18 months, while the marijuana dispensary three blocks away puffed away contentedly.

Ask yourself: What kind of government makes it easier to get drunk and high than go to the park and exercise or attend a spiritual service during a public health crisis? What priorities were at work? Where was someone more likely to be exposed to COVID, inside that dark, dank liquor store or in the 85 degree sunshine at the park?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t truck with the more extravagant conspiracies regarding the pandemic and the lockdowns. I subscribe to Hanlon’s Razor, a corollary to Occam’s Razor that holds one should not attribute to malice or conspiracy that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. And there are plenty of both in government. Still, there was an unsettling degree of enthusiasm, sometimes bordering on euphoria, in the way California’s political class responded to the pandemic. The government even halted holiday gatherings, christenings, weddings, and funerals. Meanwhile, Ferrer at one point was giving daily briefings – daily! – in front of those sweet, beautiful camera lights. It’s surprising she never intoned, “I’m ready for my close up.” There’s a similar sort of manic energy in the needle distribution program, bureaucrats self righteously convinced they are saving lives despite the total absence of corresponding proof and a great deal of anecdotal and experiential evidence suggesting that they are making the crisis of homeless addiction considerably worse via enablement.

Like the County needle distribution program, the lockdowns ultimately had as much to do with raw political power as with public health. The City of Santa Monica has officially protested the program, with the City Council asking that at least it be brought indoors in more appropriate settings like city buildings or fire stations. No dice. The County is gonna County, and the local representatives of the people can get stuffed. Similarly, cities and counties statewide have protested new state housing mandates that are quite literally physically impossible to meet in the vast majority of places, resulting in a surplus of unneeded luxury housing even as prices for average home buyers continue their stratospheric climb. Again, no dice. The State is gonna State.

A giant sucking sound

It’s all part of a gradual but accelerating process by which political power is moving upward through our federalist system. That giant sucking sound you hear in the background is authority being channeled away from local governments and up to the state and federal levels. The California legislature passes, and the Governor signs, an average of 900 new laws every year, touching everything from mass disaster preparedness (or lack thereof) to how late bars can sell booze. That’s actually a decrease from past eras. In 1985 the legislature passed and Governor George Dukmeijian signed a staggering 1,607 bills into law. Yet back in those days the relationship between Sacramento and cities and counties was not antagonistic. State government dealt with statewide issues and city councils handled local affairs. A contemporaneous summation of that 1985 slate of legislation in the Los Angeles Times reveals very little to which a reasonable person would object, and no meddling in local self determination.

How things have changed. Over the last seven years Sacramento has enacted at least 500 new laws that in one way or another impinge on local control. Whether the issue is criminal justice, education, development, homelessness, even sanitation, Sacramento’s meddling has bored a deep well of mistrust between state and local government.

An (inscrutable) graphic showing 100 of the 400 new laws stripping local governments of control over virtually every aspect of housing development. Graphic courtesy Our Neighborhood Voices.

Belatedly, and after being beaten about the heads for the last decade at least, Californians are starting to take note. The consequences of policies sounded anodyne, even beneficent in theory – “harm reduction,” “criminal justice reform,” “Complete Streets,” “streamlining housing development,” and all the rest – are coming into stark relief as reality sets in. There’s a yawning, and growing, chasm between what the political class says and what normal people experience every day. 

Californians are being told that crime is trending downward, even as they see stories on the news almost every evening about smash and grab robberies, street takeovers, carjackings, violent assaults, even rapes. Murders allegedly are down, but this is a state in which barely half of murders result in arrests, and fewer still in convictions. They’re told that homelessness decreased last year for the first time, even as they watch the illegal encampment fester and expand across the street from their children’s’ school.

The results are starting to show up in elections. In March, San Francisco voters approved a ballot proposition that for the first time requires drug screening and treatment for adults with addiction issues in order to continue receiving city and county funded services. In 2022 San Franciscans recalled radical District Attorney Chesa Boudin and three members of the School Board. These are political earthquakes in famously liberal Frisco. Currently, residents are fighting to prevent the Complete Streets closure of the Great Highway on the city’s Pacific coast. In Los Angeles, voters are poised to oust Boudin’s mentor and predecessor, the equally noxious George Gascon, and replace him with an erstwhile Republican.

Governor Newsom, for one, appears to be paying attention. A consummate political creature who blows with the winds, in the last two weeks he suddenly discovered his inner enforcer when it comes to homelessness. Two weeks ago he issued an executive order to state agencies requiring them to start clearing illegal encampments on state properties. He followed up last week with a threat to withhold funds from cities that don’t start clearing encampments within their boundaries (I wrote about the sheer chutzpah of Newsom’s order last week).

The coming civil war within the California Democratic Party

These are promising developments, but the lunatic Left remains firmly in charge in Sacramento. To cite one of myriad examples, a bill is working its way through the legislature that would allow the most violent, depraved convicted murderers to apply to a court to have their sentences reduced, and to become eligible for parole. The bill specifically targets convicted first degree murderers whose crimes involved “special circumstances,” which is a wordbleached term that includes torture, rape, lying in wait, mayhem, and other atrocities. And California’s political class wants to give them a chance to get out of prison! It’s tough to know which is more evil, the depraved murderer-rapist, or the politician that wants to give him another chance.

Then again, the Assembly killed an identical bill last year in the face of public outrage. They’re trying again, and using every legislative trick in the book. That’s a tell that they are worried. When a veto-proof supermajority still feels the need to resort to backroom machinations, it means they have something to hide. There’s actually been a pattern over the last decade, as local news outlets slashed and eventually eliminated their Sacramento bureaus. The absence of an independent media operating as a watchdog has unleashed Sacramento’s worst impulses. Yet every now and again a story manages to percolate through the white noise of modern media and social media. In every single case, when voters learn what their representatives are up to, they mutiny.

A major question in California politics these days boils down to a race against time. There is a new generation of start-up outlets — blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, even print — that are swarming into the void left behind by the demise of traditional print media. I know because I’m part of it. The question is whether those outlets will reach a critical mass of audiences in time to check state overreach and extreme ideology in time.

Because make no mistake: There is a civil war brewing inside the California Democratic Party. Down in L.A., fresh off her global debut at the Paris Olympics closing ceremonies, Mayor Karen Bass has made clear she intends to defy Newsom’s threats on homelessness. She refers to clearing even the worst, most violent illegal encampments as “criminalizing homelessness.” It’s a tired and mendacious trope that few Angelenos still buy, outside those who profit from human misery in the Homeless Industrial Complex. She is clinging to the failed “housing first model.”

This sets up an intriguing internecine fight in a party that is typically a model of internal discipline and message control. Bass is one of the only politicians in California who can give Newsom real trouble. She’s not just mayor of the state’s largest city, she’s a former member of Congress and Speaker of the California State Assembly. She wields immense power, though she is a quieter operator than the Newsoms and Pelosis of the apparatus. Her political machine rivals Newsom’s, and she has a network of connections in Washington, D.C., that he can only dream of. For the next four years (assuming she wins reelection) she’s going to benefit additionally from the global Olympics spotlight. She is formidable.

Formidable, but also an embodiment of failure. Bass represents the quasi-Socialist progressive experiments of the last decade, in which public policy prioritized permanent housing as the only solution to homelessness. She favors soft crime policies like those of George Gascon (though she is not politically foolish enough to remain on his sinking ship). She is promising a new front on the progressive war on mobility in the form of a “car free’ 2028 Olympics. All of which, as a side note, is a shame. After 12 years of Eric Garcetti, Angelenos were craving a better way forward. Her calm demeanor was a welcome break from her predecessor’s camera-hungry attention seeking. Alas, she is proving to be not a reformer but an old school Leftist who apparently is willing to go down with the Battleship Potemkin

In contrast, Newsom is a political survivor who has no such ideological convictions. His motivation is self-promotion. Over the course of his career he’s gone from a “business friendly” centrist when he first ran for Mayor of San Francisco to the wokest governor in America. Still, he knows that San Francisco liberalism is DOA in the swing state’s he’ll need to achieve his ultimate prize, the Presidency. He knows that he has two years to reinvent himself a final time for the big show. The last two weeks augur that he already is beginning the process.

Here’s the thing. As hard as it is to type these words, Gavin Newsom’s political and moral shamelessness may be California’s last, best hope. He may be the only one with the political capital and standing within his party to drag California back from the brink to which he himself dragged us.

God help us all.

Support independent journalism! The All Aspect Report depends on contributions from readers like you to continue presenting the best investigations, analysis, and opinions from California, the country, and the world. You can make a one-time donation or sign up for recurring payments.