How Gavin Newsom’s ‘compassion’ ruined California

Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities didn’t have much of a head-start in life. But when a city does have something going for it, it takes a certain amount of skill to actively wreck it.

Gavin Newsom has been governor of Amer­ica’s most beautiful and prosperous state since 2019, and also won re-election in 2022. Before that he was mayor of San Francisco, which should be one of the world’s most beautiful cities. But Newsom has a skill for wrecking everything he touches.

During his mayoralty, San Francisco became ever more dystopian. The rich would descend from unaffordable apartment com­plexes on to once-desirable streets on which the “unhoused” roamed around on crack and exposed themselves furiously. It became perfectly normal to walk down any road and think you must have been transferred into a zombie movie, with the undead pushing around trolleys of their possessions. Under Harvey Milk in the 1970s, San Francisco famously cracked down on dog littering. By Newsom’s time as mayor the one thing you could say with confidence was that whenever you saw feces on the streets, it didn’t come from a dog.

Yet from the time of his election as gov­ernor, Newsom tried to wheel out his San Francisco model on a state-wide level. The policies that had done for San Francisco and then Los Angeles include (in no particular order) incentivizing illegal migrants to come into the state, ensuring that homelessness is encouraged and home-ownership punished, legalizing just about every mind-altering substance known to man and presenting law enforcement as the enemy of the people.

Of course Newsom did all these things under the same glorious cover that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan wears – that great cloak of left-wing “compassion.” Law enforcement is easy to present as lacking in compassion. Mak­ing a city a “sanctuary” allows politicians to present themselves as “kind” and filled with “empathy.” Saying that illegality cannot be allowed is “mean” and “unkind.” Promote mass illegal migration? “Healing.” Try to stop it? “Divisive.”

Most of the problems in America, as in Europe, can be chased down to this asymmetry. If you encourage lawless­ness you can be seen to be doing it for all the right reasons. If you encourage following the law you will be portrayed as doing it for all the wrong reasons. Allow people to break the law on a grand scale and there is no punish­ment. Try to mop up that mess and you will be the bad guy.

So it is with the stand-off between Don­ald Trump and Newsom. A conservative estimate suggests that between 10 and 12 million people entered the US illegally in the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency – almost doubling the number of illegals in the country. Trump has already fulfilled his cam­paign promise of sealing the southern bor­der, so that the number still breaking into the country via that route is effectively zero. But he is also intent on fulfilling his campaign promise of removing the people already in the country who shouldn’t be. He and his border czar, Tom Homan, have made it clear that they are prioritizing the removal of the more than half a million illegal migrants in who are thought to have criminal records.

On a good day the Trump administration has managed to deport around 800 illegals. But you can do the math yourself on how long it would take to complete the task. At the current speed, assuming there are no more legal or physical challenges, Trump and Homan might be able to deport all the illegal migrants with a criminal record by 2027 or 2028. If they want to deport the 12 million who came in between 2020 and 2024 alone, President Trump would have to remain in office for years, if not decades. Which is not actually a proposal.

The unrest that broke out in Los Angeles this week was not even the result of Homan’s team simply detaining illegal migrants. They were seeking people who were engaged in criminal activity. But the unwiser parts of the American left decided to assume their nor­mal position. They blamed law enforcement for causing the problem and pretended that the resulting violence was peaceful. All this as the public could see footage of masked left-wing activists spitting in the faces of policemen and throwing rocks at them.

Now Trump has sent in the National Guard and Marines and told them that they can hit and arrest anyone who assaults a federal agent. Newsom, Hillary Clinton and other Democrat bigwigs are pretending that it is Homan, Trump and law enforce­ment who are the bad guys, while the peo­ple burning cars on the streets and looting the local Apple store are merely reacting to the provocation.

Which brings me back to that central imbalance of our time. Why is the person who caused the mess allowed to be presented in the kindliest light, while the people trying to clean up after them must be portrayed in the crappiest?