On Saturday, I noted that while attending a clean-up at a ravaged Los Angeles rail depot, Governor Gavin Newsom exclaimed: ‘It looked like a third world country, these images, the drone images that were on the nightly news. ”
Not 24 hours passed before Newsom walked back part of his unusually insightful assessment of the Progressive Thunderdome that Los Angeles has become.
California Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for calling a group of cargo train thieves ‘gangs of people’ and, fearing the term was offensive, clarified that the criminals were actually ‘organized groups’ of people traveling from place to place.’This is not one-off. This is organized theft. These are organized gangs of people that are coming out,’ Newsom said during a Los Angeles news conference Thursday, before clarifying: ‘Forgive me for saying “gangs” – that’s not a pejorative.’They’re organized groups of folks that move from site to site.’The woke Democrat also likened the site of the freight train package thefts to a shanty town exclaiming: ‘It looked like a Third World country, these images, the drone images that were on the nightly news.’I took off the suit and tie and said I’m coming because I couldn’t take it,’ he added. ‘I can’t turn on the news anymore. What the hell is going on?’
It appears that the pillaging of the trains escalated when the state was experiencing a spate of “smash and grab” robberies of luxury goods.
State officials and the Department of Transportation say they are acting now after weeks of trains’ cargo containers being raided in Los Angeles during station stops. The thieves grab the contents of packages and throw the empty boxes and envelopes onto the tracks causing a mountainous pileup of debris.“A lot of this stuff ends up on platforms you shop on,” Mr. Newsom said Thursday. “I promise you, all of you — some of you have bought some of this stuff that was not in those boxes because they ended up on some online platform at a remarkably discounted price.”He said more than $2 million in items have been recovered so far.
As a reminder to Newsom, here is the definition of gang.
Other terms Newsom could justifiably use include:
Meanwhile, polling shows that more than half of Californians wanted to refugee to another state, including almost two-thirds of millennials.
According to the California Policy Lab, which is affiliated with the University of California, the number of people leaving the state is up 12 percent since before COVID-19.In fact, there are more people heading out than coming in.Even before the pandemic, a survey from Edelman Intelligence found that more than half of residents in California said they wanted to high-tail it to another state. Among millennial residents, it was almost two-thirds.Chalk it up to cost of living — the 13.3 percent max income tax rate is the country’s highest — as well as safety and other quality of life issues. And then there are the housing prices: Per Zillow, the median home value in San Francisco is almost $1.4 million. (No wonder “Should I move out?” has topped the Google search rankings there.)
My husband and I are now beginning to formulate retirement plans. Moving out of California is at the top of the list.
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