The United States does not embody the stupidity and failure of politics more progressive than California. California is a “golden state” whose image has been traumatized by overderived the politics of identity led by an elite class that is so ignoring it with fellow working-class citizens. State's harmful co-response policy – locking public school children out of class while private schools remain open – It perfectly symbolizes such myopia thinking. But California's housing policy similarly promoted “redistribution” style laws, such as the “Community Opportunity To Buying Act (COPA), which sought to force Santa Clara County homeowners to sell their homes to progressive nonprofits. As an author and as a news contributor to Fox, Steve Hilton detailed in his new book, California: Abolishing America's Worst Conditions, with the law likely to have defeated homeowners whose property is often the most valuable asset.
California's left-wing elites love to cover their actions with “compassion,” but we don't know if there's anything more cruel and heartless than receiving taxes from hardworking legal immigrants who can't afford a home for newly arrived illegal immigrants to do. (The ordinary complainer is just proving that the elite is more enlightened and more moral. See how it works.)
This is a pending law that has not yet been considered in Santa Clara County, not at the state level. Voters in Santa Clara County, known as Silicon Valley, can be either the very wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs and employees, or the very poor people who have evacuated from other parts of the Bay Area at the highest housing prices in the state.
The county is also very left-wing and very elitist. Each time another technological innovation emerges from a corporate campus, it becomes easier to have some degree of self-respect. So how do they deal with affordable housing and ramping homelessness? Their enlightened activists tend to force people selling detached homes to give “nonprofits” the first opportunity to buy their local homes.
These are organizations that have already waste billions of taxpayer-funded subsidies to build expensive free homes that are inadequate to accommodate more than a small portion of the eligible population. Meanwhile, housing prices for all others continued to rise along with the number of unsheltered homeless people.
Given the benevolent and benign name, the Community Opportunity Buying Act (COPA) “gives nonprofits the first right to purchase a rental property and prohibits sellers from listing their property on the open market.”
Here's how this works:
Rental property sellers must inform nonprofit housing groups of their intent to sell their property before they can be put to the market. If a nonprofit is interested, the seller must grant the nonprofit the first rights and cannot place the property in the market during that time. If the seller refuses the offer, the seller can place the property on the open market. That's bad enough. But there's more!
If the seller receives an acceptable offer, they must return to the nonprofit and give them the opportunity to match the price. If a nonprofit matches the price, the nonprofit has the right to purchase the property at that price. However, the timeline does not have to work. Nonprofits still need months to get funding. At that point, negotiations end without the original potential buyer unable to make a counter offer.
What's not going well? Imagine the impact this ordinance will have on young families looking to buy their first home. They will compete with nonprofits on budgets of hundreds of millions of nonprofits already proven to be indifferent to costs. The entire project, which has earned echo on the Los Angeles activist-controlled city council, is a crude takeover of property rights.
But can it be discontinued in court? The biggest hope to stop schemes like Copa, which remain unpaid in Santa Clara County, is the grassroots opposition of the rest of San Jose small businesses and individual homeowners' communities. But siren songs of compassion and compassion towards the underprivileged can often deceive voters. If there is evidence of that, then it's California.
It is luxury for California elites to prioritize unfeasible schemes over these abstract issues and practical solutions. Just as the elites have their gorgeous goods, they also embrace these gorgeous policies.
It may feel to them as noble and “highly evolved,” but what it really translates is the Cavalier's indifference to the core challenges of creating and destroying families and homes. These airy aspirations that we can call luxury beliefs accurately reflect the group thinking of California's elites.
They are very attached to their lofty ideals and are insulated from the consequences of implementing them, so they are unaware of the harmful effects of these beliefs on the working families. Or they feel so strongly about their extravagant beliefs that they believe sacrifices are necessary to achieve them. But when the sacrifice is being made by someone else, you will not personally experience the difficulties that your policies pose.
Of course, this is overwhelmingly an extravagant belief in California's elite, and that is extreme environmentalism. Elitist politicians have passed laws that restrict almost all forms of productive activity, including tangible materials. Agriculture, ranching, mining, logging, manufacturing, construction, home buildings, investment in practical infrastructure, running small businesses, all of which were narrowed down by extreme environmentalist laws, regulations and endless interference in the diversity of the heart-infected government agencies and funerals of the same drear, Anto Antoiman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Antoa Newman, Anto
The people who are hits are the working class. Working people and families in California are absolutely hampered by “climate” extremism. This is an example of how California's left-wing ruling class simply loses contact with working people and cares only about the ideological obsessions of university-educated elites on so many issues.
This is exacerbated by self-righteous, self-obsessed isolation. Power in California tends to live in wealthy coastal enclaves surrounded by like-minded peers. The policy that kills everyone else in California seems extreme and destructive if you live in a wealthy bubble and rarely encounter any opposing opinions.
Meanwhile, blue-collar workers in California are under attack, with infinite burdens placed on small businesses. California elites control the majority of politicians, restrain speech, shut down opposition, and dismiss disagreement with moral lewds. Elitists tend to think that rules for others do not apply to them.
California elites don't have to live with the consequences of the policies they enact. Their wealth and their privileges, the epic success that has long defined California, and perhaps even the weather, sequestering them from the reality they create and nurture their rog arrogance. Perhaps they see themselves as the new master of the universe.
Ultimately, the core doctrine of the modern Left is the belief that some people have fairly good morals and intellectual judgments, and therefore they should make decisions for the rest of us. How do you find such enlightened people? Easy: They are already at the pinnacle of liberal society.
Excerpt from Steve Hilton's “California: The Reversal of America's Worst Conditions.” Copyright 2025 by Steve Hilton. It is published with permission from the publishers of Broadside Books and Harpercollins.
