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My beautiful home state of California has become synonymous with dysfunction, homelessness, drug use, and criminality.
But during Tuesday’s election, Golden State voters said they’ve had enough of rampant crime.
By an overwhelming margin, voters passed Proposition 36, a measure that will ncrease penalties for property crime, illicit drug use, and retail theft. By the latest count, over 70% voted “yes” on Prop 36.
The measure essentially repudiates Proposition 47, a soft-on-crime law approved in 2014 that drastically reduced penalties for a whole host of crimes.
That wasn’t the end of California’s turn against the most noxious elements of the Left’s criminal justice reforms.
Voters cast aside rogue prosecutor George Gascon, the radical Los Angeles County district attorney whose pro-criminal policies had already led to two recall attempts.
Here’s what two Heritage Foundation legal experts wrote about Gascon right after the Democrat’s defeat:
The utter scope and breadth of Gascon’s policies were stunning. Each of them inured to the benefit of criminals and ignored or punished victims. No civil society, even one with uber-liberal values, could tolerate for long the degradation of law and order that came as a result of the district attorney’s policies.
Over the years, Gascon has been sued by dozens of his own prosecutors, including for creating a hostile work environment, for workplace retaliation, and for discrimination, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Gascon has lost almost all of those cases, costing Los Angeles County millions of dollars.
Now, he’s gone.
And that wasn’t all. The anti-crime wave hit the San Franciso Bay Area too. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, was given the boot, to be replaced by independent Daniel Lurie, who ran on a tough-on-crime platform.
In the deepest blue Alameda County, where socialists almost certainly outnumber Republicans—the county I grew up in by the way—voters recalled leftist District Attorney Pamala Price, a Democrat.
Oakland voters recalled Mayor Sheng Thao too, a Democrat who has presided over a city that became trapped in the textbook definition of a “doom loop.”
It seems most Californians are finally fed up with the crime and the chaos.
Biased California media, of course, portrays this enormous backlash against crime as if it’s just clueless voters who’ve been misled by “disinformation” and imagery of rampant shoplifting.
As if people don’t notice that when they go into a drug store, practically everything is behind lock and key.
I’ll offer this bit of advice to California and corporate media: Your gaslighting isn’t working anymore.
Americans with common sense wouldn’t believe you if you said, “Good morning.” Maybe instead of rebuking Americans for their lying eyes deceiving them and desperately trying to craft narratives, have some humility and try to do better at covering issues people care about.
This wasn’t merely a 70-30 issue, a blowout by any measure. What’s remarkable is that Prop 36 received majority support in every single district of California.
It says a lot that despite this turn against crime being wildly popular, the Democratic regime that controls the state tried to stop it.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, tried to have Prop 36 removed from the ballot. He quietly worked to have it defeated.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who votes in California—she was a U.S. senator and the state’s attorney general after being San Francisco district attorney—refused to say how she would vote on Prop 36 on the eve of the election.
You can add that to the long list of reasons she lost the presidential race.
The crime and disorder issue has been percolating for years. Americans—rightly—see the Democrat Party as the party that opened the Pandora’s box to chaos and dysfunction. From the lawless border, to defunding the police (which Democrats now laughably deny they had anything to do with), to recklessly empowering criminal behavior in our cities, Democrats were at the forefront of “progressive” criminal justice reforms that have led to rampant crime and injustice.
I often shudder at the idea of “as goes California, so goes the nation. But in this case, I think what happened in California is the sign of a much larger national trend that seems to be shifting many blue cities and states red.
Americans have had enough of crime and coddled criminals. They don’t want political prosecutions, they want genuine law and order.
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