CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria, one of the many Democrats who would never vote Republican. At the same time, on his show, he outlines California’s “failed state model of governance” as it heads for collapse. Behind the propaganda, he exposes the truth. However, he doesn’t explicitly give a solution. The solution is to elect people like Spencer Pratt or Steve Hilton, who outlined solutions. It is by bringing back competition and being open to another party.
Democrats continually double and triple down on destructive ideology because there is no competition. It’s a one-party state where politicians throw money at friends who suck taxpayer purses dry. They promote woke educators who hate the country. Then, they bring in massive numbers of foreign, uneducated people for votes. Many have no commitment to this country. Once in school, they are taught to hate white people and America with DEI. Then, they add to every problem.
California is overtaxed and overregulated solely to meet ideological goals that do nothing for the state.
Fareed ignored crime and sanctuary cities that protect criminals. That was deliberate. However, it is part of what he calls a “failed state model of governance.” He’s not ready to take that on.
🚨 CNN Just Broke: California Is Collapsing
Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is now admitting it. California is a failing state after decades of one-party Democrat control.
They spend more and more, billions on homelessness alone, yet deliver less and less. Streets in chaos,…
— James Bradley (@JamesBradleyCA) June 14, 2026
Transcript
The frustration is real and justified. California is one of the most dynamic places on the planet. It has Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world-class universities, extraordinary agriculture, ports, talent, and natural beauty, but it is a case study in how a rich society can spend more and more while producing less and less of what its ordinary citizens need.
The paradox of California today is a successful economy attached to a failing model of governance.
Fiscal
Since 2000, California’s population has grown by roughly 15%, but the state’s general expenditures have grown more than 200% from 78 billion to about $248 billion. General spending per person has risen from about 2300 to about $6,300. The number of state employees has grown by more than 50%, according to one count. Does anyone think that California government and its benefits have gotten 200% better in the last 25 years? Housing is the central failure.
Housing
Alicia Finley writes in the Wall Street Journal that from 2021 to 2024, the LA metro area, with nearly 13 million people, issued only 118,000 building permits for new homes. Atlanta, with about half that population, issued 163,000. California has made it too hard, slow, and expensive to build. The result is predictable. Home prices soar, rents rise, workers commute farther, homelessness grows, young people leave, and people are leaving.
Over the past seven years, the state has lost a net 1.9 million people through domestic [illegal] migration. For generations, people moved to California to pursue the future. Now, many middle-class people are leaving because they can’t afford one.
Education
Total spending on education through 12th grade has more than doubled since the early 2010s, and per-pupil spending by 2023 was well above the national average. Yet the results remain dismal.
In the 2024 nations report card, California was 43rd in fourth-grade math, 39th in fourth-grade reading, 36th in eighth-grade math, and 38th in eighth-grade reading.
Homelessness
Homelessness tells the same story in a more painful register. A 2024 audit revealed California had spent $24 billion on the problem over a five-year span, yet in 2024, California reached a record high in homelessness, almost 200,000. Homelessness did decline by about 3% from 2024 to 2025, but the state’s expansive, expensive, and elaborate homelessness aid complex has not proven to solve homelessness in any significant way.
Industry
California’s headline prosperity, generated in good part by a few industries like high tech, masks its weaknesses underneath. Job creation has been sluggish in 2025. California essentially failed to add any new jobs on net. Private industries outside government and government-supported health care actually shed jobs, according to the Center for Jobs and the Economy.
The state is using public spending to paper over private sector stagnation. Nowhere is this more vivid than in Los Angeles, where Hollywood, the city’s defining industry, is in slow-motion collapse. The effects have been felt not by celebrity actors and influencers, but by the carpenters, costumers, sound engineers, camera operators, editors, drivers, caterers, dry cleaners, prop houses, and small businesses that once formed one of the world’s great industrial clusters.
One report found LA shoot days fell from 36,792 in 2022 to just 19,694 in 2025. Another report estimates that jobs in film, television, and sound fell by nearly 30%. Motion picture employment in LA County fell from about 142,000 at the end of 2022 to roughly 100,002 years later.
Hollywood is still the symbol, the brand, the mythology, and it still houses the big studios that produced most of the world’s greatest entertainment for almost a century, but thanks largely to high taxes, costs, and regulations, the work has moved elsewhere to Georgia, New Jersey, Toronto, London, and Warsaw.
Michael Linton, who ran Sony Entertainment, told me that the big studio lots look like ghost towns now, with 10s of acres of sound stages and recording studios, when nothing is happening. He said Los Angeles is becoming a sunny version of Detroit.
Consider the simple fact: according to Fortune, none of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture this year were primarily produced in Hollywood. Los Angeles still hosts the Oscars, but increasingly, it does not actually make the movies being honored there.
Democrat One-Party State
For years, Democrats in California have governed without any real competition. The recent primary results suggest that even in deep blue territory, voters are restless. They’re not becoming Republicans, but they are asking a reasonable question: Why does a state with so much money, talent, and promise make life for ordinary people so hard? I’m frustrated.
