POLITICS: California’s leaders destroyed my home and my state — which is why more of us are becoming conservatives

Matt Himes is a writer and editor at Blaze Media who lost his Pacific Palisades home when the wildfires struck Los Angeles. A former liberal, he says the ineptitude shown by Democratic leaders like LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have made him — and many of his neighbors — more conservative.

Want to cure a liberal? Ship them to California.

One-party rule has been squandering California’s abundant talent and treasure for decades, turning a one-time exemplar of the middle-class American dream into a crumbling, crowded and crime-ridden hellhole.

Los Angeles especially has suffered a steep decline. The enlightened liberals of Hollywood and Silicon Beach simply chose not to see it — gated communities and private schools certainly helped.

That was before this month’s catastrophic wildfires leveled whole communities — and took out some of the choicest real estate in the country.

Now the grossly incompetent leadership of our climate-change-crazy, DEI-obsessed overlords have many in this bluest of blue states seeing red.

Take it from me, a former registered Democrat on the ground: California is at a tipping point. Anyone still shocked by the presidential election results better buckle up for the unthinkable: the MAGA-fication of the Left Coast.

Seeing the decline

It’s been a long time coming. For the past couple of years we Angelenos have had front row seats for California’s decline.

What first infuriated my crowd of west side parents were the draconian COVID school closures. As our children grew glassy-eyed from “remote learning,” public health interventions expanded to include interrogations of white supremacy (and exemptions for looters).

Presiding over all of this was California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a smarmy, small-time huckster with all of the obnoxious swagger of the president — and none of his virtues.

Many a lawyer and MBA-turned-stay-at-home mom — long accustomed to expending their skills and savvy running the annual fundraising carnival or school auction dinner — found a new target for their pent-up energies.

I saw those same mothers as we retrieved our children early from school. As the noxious black cloud of smoke loomed in the hills above the bucolic campus, the panic was palpable — and it made sense. We were used to rote fire evacuations, but never before had it been so close — and so fast moving.

Days later, of course, we realize the situation was far more dire than we could have imagined.

We lost our house, as did more than half my 11-year-old’s class. My in-laws — a marine biology professor at USC and a retired high school Latin teacher — lost the home they bought in 1976 and in which they raised my wife and her four younger siblings.

Like it was bombed

The heart of the Palisades — not oceanfront mansions but a grid of relatively modest family homes purchased 60 or 70 years ago when Southern California exemplified the middle-class American dream — looks like it’s been firebombed. Schools, banks, churches, grocery stores all went up in smoke.

Even for those whose houses survived, the neighborhood will be uninhabitable for quite some time.

The only thing still anchoring the community is local developer Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village shopping center, which has revitalized the somewhat moribund town center since opening in 2019. Caruso saved it by bringing in his own fire brigades.

Caruso, a former centrist who had spoken out in support of Black Lives Matter, ran for mayor in 2022.

He narrowly lost to Karen Bass — who miraculously overcame his polling lead after a surge of last-minute mail-in ballots.

That race was a coming-out party for local closet conservatives. Before, we were content to trading clandestine smirks at dinner parties when the armchair Russiagate theorizing dragged on.

Now we were openly broadcasting our support for the mean, white, male, Catholic, billionaire “Trump surrogate.”

But if we were emboldened then, you should see us now. We’re finally done with liberals and their pet causes — and we don’t care who knows it.

Asking questions

The smoke hasn’t cleared, but the shock is wearing off. Between making arrangements for new housing and new schools and navigating the maze of the woefully inadequate California Fair Plan, we’re starting to compare notes and ask questions.

For LA’s affluent creative class, dissenting from liberal orthodoxy has long meant a one-way ticket to the D-list.

But when you’re breathing in the ashes of countless “in this house we believe” placards, a tongue-lashing from Barbra or Oprah or Leo doesn’t carry the same weight.

Donald Trump has been the villain in our national drama since 2016. Naturally, Angelenos have been particularly caught up in the story.

This last week, however, we’ve reached what the screenwriting gurus call the “all is lost” moment — the low point just before the break into the third act. Seasoned moviegoers know to expect a twist. How’s this: what if the “fascists” were the good guys all along?