On the day Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom was sworn into his second term in office, he took to Twitter to make a remarkable—even risible—claim, that “California is the true freedom state.” Newsom went on to write, “Protecting liberty from a rising tide of oppression taking root in statehouses. Weakness, masquerading as strength. Small men in big offices. Freedom is who we are – anyone from anywhere can accomplish anything here.”
Understanding the basis for Newsom’s claims helps put the entire left wing progressive project into perspective.
The first thing to understand is that Newsom here replaces the classical concept of freedom and liberty—the freedom to do the right thing—with the libertine concept of freedom.
This includes:
Using harmful drugs while sleeping on the street and defecating in the doorways of homes and businesses.
Paying for the late-term abortions of both California women and women from around the nation.
Supporting the irreversible provision of sterilizing operations on minors—castration, hysterectomies, and double mastectomies—including for children trafficked into California from other states.
And, because it costs money, a lot of taxpayer money, to provide such “services” for “free” California’s state and local tax burden in 2022 was estimated by the non-partisan Tax Foundation to be the fifth-highest in the nation, with New York, Connecticut, Hawaii and Vermont edging out the Golden State.
So, if “freedom is who we are” in California and “anyone from anywhere can accomplish anything” there, why has the state managed the remarkable unenviable feat of losing population for three years running?
Throughout most of human history, people vote with their feet—they move to places where they surmise they and their families will prosper.
The Cold War-era Berlin Wall was built by the communists to keep East Germans from escaping to the West—from defecting to freedom.
People generally don’t move to, as Newsom put it, states that feature a “rising tide of oppression.” Yet here’s an irony only a Californian politician could invent with a straight face: California bans official state travel to 23 states on account of those states being discriminatory hellholes. Of the top 10 states that saw the greatest population growth as of July 2022, only one isn’t banned by California. Odd, isn’t it? It’s almost as if the things California’s calls evil the American public finds good.
In George Orwell’s “1984,” the Ministry of Truth had a simple summation of how it viewed truth:
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
And if Orwell wrote today, we might add: California is the true freedom state.