Let me catch you up on several articles that caught my attention this last week.

California, KO-lifornia

Michael Shellenberger, a progressive who was mugged by reality and author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, published a devastating article in City Journal about California, which is no longer what it used to be. The place which embodied the American Dream has become quite the opposite, a woke dystopia with serious problems related to energy, drugs, violence, housing, and social disorder. Those who can get out do so without looking back. 

If the Golden State (who would call it that now?) were an island, we would have to remember to Cataneo said to Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power: "Only those who can swim will be saved." Shellenberger is less pessimistic and calls, better yet urges the state, in the name of a non-socialist, non-nihilist, non progressive to react against this drift that has given California the nickname “KO-lifornia”:

At the heart of the new anti-woke alliance’s offering to California voters is a memory of what California once was—and anger at those preventing its restoration. California’s cities should be safe, its schools the greatest, and its people the healthiest, yet they’re not—and taxpayers’ money too often makes things worse. In the grip of ecological and human pessimism, the state’s leaders are pursuing an antihuman agenda.

(Miracles of progressivism: the Third Worldization of California. Also, be sure to read this article by Matthew Crawford, a Californian by birth who, after leaving in the 1990s, returned to his home state in 2019 to find that, in California, in order to survive the suffocating bureaucratic tyranny imposed by the Democratic Party, you have to resort to someone with connections: the fixers).

The big apple is rotting: see you in Florida

New York is a Democratic stronghold and it also bleeding out demographically. New Yorkers are voting with their feet and heading south to the Sunshine State, which is stronger than ever thanks to Ron DeSantis, the real bête noire of today’s progressivism. That same progressivism has caused tremendous problems with energy, drugs, violence, housing, and social disorder which are destroying California.

New Yorkers are heading to sunny Florida in search of low-taxes, low-crime, a pro-business anti-woke atmosphere and a less suppressive governance, proven throughout the pandemic. Of course, they want to stay. This doesn’t come as a surprise, except for one outlandish columnist from the NY Post and the unspeakable governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, who last year, in the middle of an election debate, had the nerve to tell her opponent, Republican Lee Zeldin, who was almost stabbed at a campaign rally and whose daughters were distressed by a shooting in September outside the family home (where two other teenagers were wounded): "I don't know why [crime] is so important to you."

While the solipsistic Hochul asserts that "Florida is overrated," New Yorkers are trading in their New York driver's licenses for ones from Florida: 61,728 made the change in 2021 and 64,577 in 2022. Do these figures seem high to you? They are, but they’re not as high as this one: 67,321. This is the number of homeless people who slept in NYC shelters in the first week last January. More than 22,000 were minors.

Judith Miller and Paul du Quenoy talk about all of this and much more in their "See You Soon, Alligator," which was also published in the City Journal, a daily. It’s a must-read.

Indian representation in the Republican Party

The GOP currently has three contenders going after the party's nomination for the 2024 presidential nomination. Two of them, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are of Indian origin, which is still shocking, since they come from a community made up of only 1.3% of the American population and which votes overwhelmingly Democratic: no less than 72% in the 2020 elections.

At The Wall Street Journal Sadanand Dhume, an Indian-American journalist argues that, regardless of whether or not they clinch the Republican nomination, Haley and Ramaswamy will have achieved something very important. Indeed, he refers to "victory," but only if they can stop the Democrats from taking the immigrant vote for granted.

The odds that either former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley or businessman and antiwoke pundit Vivek Ramaswamy will win the nomination appear vanishingly small. Nonetheless their candidacies carry great symbolic value. They puncture the corrosive myth that America is a racist nation constantly threatened by the phantom of white supremacy. And they underscore why striving immigrant communities from all parts of the world need an alternative to the Democratic Party, whose obsession with identity politics undermines the principles of merit and fair play that make the U.S. great.

If the small but prosperous Indian-American community managed to swing their vote, it would be quite an event. A swing in the huge and increasingly thriving Hispanic community would be as well, but of a much greater magnitude. It would be a true game changer.