The Nightmare of Californication
by Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter, Center Street; 304 pp., $30
When you find yourself at the bottom of a deep hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging. But it is a long time since this commonsense advice has been followed in California, according to Fool’s Gold, a scathing examination of the state’s politics and social decline. Instead, the approach of the governing elite has been to dig ever deeper.
The authors of this book are well-suited for the task. Crabtree is the senior White House and national political correspondent for RealClear Politics, the popular news aggregation site. McFatter is the director of research at the respected Government Accountability Institute in Florida. Crabtree also spent part of her younger life in California, so she is a good judge of how much has changed since the time when the state was a magnet for artistic, energetic, and entrepreneurial people.
These days, California is bleeding residents, and the exodus shows no sign of abating. Crabtree and McFatter track the myriad causes: spiraling lawlessness, soaring costs, blackouts and brownouts, collapsing infrastructure, crippling regulations, ever-escalating taxes, pervasive corruption, and a failing court system. The state that was once hailed as a model for the rest of America has become a place where nothing works—except the government’s PR machine. San Francisco, once a showcase city, has become infected with drugs, vandalism, and psychosis. In 2023, 28 percent of all the homeless people in America were in California, even though the state has only 12 percent of the national population.
Crabtree and McFatter cite figures showing that violent crime has spun out of control under Newsom’s watch. In 2022, homicides jumped by 33.9 percent and aggravated assaults by 25.3 percent. Retail thefts skyrocketed to the point that many stores simply closed up and moved away.
Given the plummeting quality of life suggested by these trends, perhaps the most surprising thing is not that so many Californians have left, but that many others have not.
Crabtree and McFatter make it clear that these problems are the direct result of left-wing government policies. They pin most of the blame on Gavin Newsom, governor since 2019 and, before that, lieutenant governor and mayor of San Francisco.
“Every problem he encounters, Newsom addresses in typical performative progressive fashion,” the authors write. “Convene a commission, appoint a czar, hold a press conference, and ultimately, just throw more money at it. The result of his reign in California has been abject failure.”
Newsom likes to portray himself as having bootstrapped his way to political success and personal wealth, but Crabtree and McFatter do not buy the story. He has had a series of powerful supporters, starting with the super-rich Getty family and continuing with a parade of political operators. He has been very good at courting corporate leaders for huge donations, and Crabtree and McFatter devote a chapter to his connections with shadowy Chinese companies that he has invited into the state. These include Huawei Technologies, a firm with tight links to the Chinese Communist Party that U.S. federal authorities allege has stolen U.S. trade secrets, engaged in racketeering and bank fraud, and has done business with Iran and North Korea.
The authors do their best to trace the flow of donations, grants, dubious investments, and shady incentive payments from these benefactors to California’s Democrats, but they also admit the task is almost impossible. It is a money-go-round with vast sums disappearing into private pockets.
Newsom’s agenda has been relentlessly progressive, from identity politics to alternative energy to “sanctuary city” protections for illegal immigrants. However, he has mastered the art of saying different things to different audiences in an attempt to seem like a reasonable centrist. So nailing down his actual beliefs is tricky. He often seems to make up policies as he goes along. He is also adept at manufacturing conspiracy theories to shift blame away from himself. He has been able to buy off interest groups, exchanging their endorsements for grants and promises.
Since Newsom hadn’t begun posing as a centrist when the book was written, I reached out to the authors to ask them about it.
“Everyone knows that Gavin Newsom is a self-promoting political shape-shifter who has run California into the ground,” McFatter told me, via email. “No amount of re-branding can change the facts. Newsom is so self-absorbed that he helped fund a monument to himself. Worse than that, he sold out his state to Chinese communists, cronies, and thieves.”
The monument McFatter references is a bronze bust of Newsom that now resides in San Francisco City Hall. Newsom has always claimed that it was financed by private donations unconnected to him. However, in their book, Crabtree and McFatter show that the money trail leads back to two companies owned by Newsom. In other words, he paid for a good part of the sculpture of himself, “and he took great care to ensure that no one knew it,” they wrote.
In a state with a functioning political system, all this would probably not be possible. But California is effectively a one-party state, with the Republicans battered into submission. In the legislature, the Democrats hold a supermajority, so there is no avenue to hold Newsom accountable or even ask him questions. The legacy media has fallen into line, happy to be fed a diet of easy stories about government initiatives.
Crabtree and McFatter explained that California politics is essentially an elite operation run by a Democrat clique, which is held together by a long history of relationships, favors, and money—buckets of it. Kamala Harris, Willie Brown, the late Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi: it is a cast of the connected, backed up by billionaire oligarchs from the real estate, technology, and finance sectors. Nowhere is it more obvious than in California that the Democratic Party has transitioned to the party of the affluent.
The book contains a remarkable chapter on the links between Adam Schiff and the Armenian mafia, which was very active in Congressman Schiff’s Los Angeles district. One of this gang’s most lucrative scams was Medicare fraud. It is difficult to believe that Schiff, who was one of the key figures pushing the hoax that Trump was compromised by Russia, was unaware of it.
Like Schiff, Newsom was able to leverage anti-Trump sentiment to his own advantage. During Trump’s first term, California sued the Trump administration more than 123 times—an average of one lawsuit every 12 days. The cost to taxpayers has been put at over $41 million, but the strategy helped to cement Newsom’s place in the national firmament.
Crabtree and McFatter are clear in their view that Newsom’s long game is the White House and that it would be a disaster for America if he got there.
“There’s no doubt that Newsom is seeking the Democratic nomination in 2028 and/or 2032,” Crabtree wrote in an email. “Because he’s such a slick politician who believes his own lies and because the Democrats are in such disarray, I think he has a good chance of winning the nomination and a real shot at the White House.”
“But the tide might be starting to turn in California. Trump flipped ten counties in 2024, and he won six million votes to Harris’ nine million. A tough-on-crime initiative passed with a resounding 70 per cent vote across the state. Nevertheless, it looks like California still has to learn the hard way.”
Newsom recently launched a podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, which seems to be part of his push to portray himself as a centrist and to disavow many of his past positions. Unfortunately for him, he has taken too much credit for his far-left policies to convincingly back away from them. The Internet never forgets.
Even if Newsom were to win the Democratic nomination, he would face a hard road to the Oval Office. Because of term limits, he has to stand down as governor in 2026, but his record is likely to stick with him. Nationally, California is no longer seen as a success story, but as a basket case with terrible problems. It is not hard to imagine what a Republican campaign against Newsom would look like: videos of filthy homeless encampments and demented drug addicts, interviews with victims of crime, traffic snarls, the botched response to the Palisades wildfires, and so on. The statistics would reveal the dismal story. Newsom has nice hair, but will that be enough?
The story of one of Newsom’s pet projects, a high-speed bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, would be deadly to his chances. It is currently running $100 billion over budget and four years behind schedule, and the first segment of track is still incomplete. Viewed from this perspective, it seems unlikely that Newsom would have much chance of Californicating the nation. But in politics, anything is possible, and three-plus years is a long time.
To the hard left, Newsom remains the golden boy from the Golden State. The denizens of the woke bubble will probably dismiss out of hand the revelations found within this book. The legacy media, for its part, remains committed to a vehement anti-Trump, anti-Republican position and will fully support any Democratic candidate.
But to less partisan readers, it is hard to deny the rampant corruption and incompetence exposed in Fool’s Gold. Crabtree and McFatter assemble their case with forensic detail and have a good eye for a Didion-esque vignette. Anyone who has wondered how a state so rich in natural endowments could have dug itself into such a deep hole will find the answers to his questions here. It’s clear that the Democrats of California have only one plan: not to stop digging, but to get a bigger shovel.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/the-nightmare-of-californication