People are fleeing California the way Europeans and others once fled to the New World

 Monica Showalter:

The 2020 Census results are a complete embarrassment to California's ruling Democrats.

Despite opening the floodgates to millions of illegal aliens, making the state the home to one out of four foreigners who break into the country without authorization, the state has made substandard gains in population over the last decade. 

The population that the state did gain over the last decade was well below the 7.4% national average, according to the New York Times, and really bad compared to places like number-one Texas.  As a result, the state is losing a congressional seat, for the first time in its 170-year history.  It's happening despite the 6.1% gain because the number of congressional seats is capped at 435.  Any state that gains a seat does so at the expense of another.  Hello, California.

That's a significant reversal, because until now, California's story has always been about growth, with Census data often showing that its population had doubled. 

Worse still, the population has gone negative, not merely substandard in growth, just in the past year.  Residents are voting with their feet.

According to Breitbart News:

California's population declined by more than 182,000 people last year, marking the first time in the state's history that it has experienced a year-over-year loss.

State officials said Friday that California's population slid 0.46 percent to slightly under 39.5 million people between January 2020 and January 2021, the Associated Press reported.

Yet despite these embarrassing numbers, brought on by one-party leftist rule in California, state officials delude themselves that it's nothing to do with their policies.  Breitbart notes:

State officials chalk off the declining population over the past year to a declining birth rate, reductions in international immigration, and deaths from the coronavirus.

In 2020 alone, 51,000 Californians died from the coronavirus.

Really?  I just went to a farewell party last night in Lake Elsinore, California — a very multi-racial one, where nearly all of the attendees were black and Mexican.  They were homeowners.  Industrious immigrants.  Entrepreneurs.  Cops.  Military people.  The street they were on, in a very pretty, newish neighborhood of McMansions with big yards and swimming pools, was loaded with "For Sale" signs.

My friend, her husband, and their kids were pulling up stakes for South Carolina.  They weren't the only ones planning on going 

Reasons cited?  Not just high housing costs — the party attendees already had their own homes, as Breitbart cited, quoting the former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, who's now running in California's recall referendum to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.

They cited a feeling of non-representation in the one-party state run solely by Democrats.  They felt shut out.  They detested the state's ever rising taxes and ever falling services.  They loathed the rising crime and the war on cops.

Probably the biggest reason so many cited for leaving was strong desire not to expose their multi-racial kids to wokester education and Critical Race Theory.  They said they didn't want their kids to grow up to be victims full of hate for others.  They very much liked that red states such as South Carolina and North Carolina and Texas and Florida are full of people who "have manners."

"You can breathe in a place like that," said one. 

All of these things are realities of why Californians are fleeing.  It's not COVID as they claim.  It's not reduced legal immigration, well made up for by illegal immigration now.

It's wokester socialism and the high cost of living.

...

Wokesters are basically intolerant liberals who want to impose their bad policies on everyone.  Among those bad policies are confiscatory taxation and a lack of freedom. It is sad to see how liberalism has ruined a once-great state.  It was not the pandemic that caused this but their reaction to it.  Blue states reacted with control freak policies and red states were more measured in their response.  The red states clearly lost fewer jobs and fewer people.