WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF OFFICIAL POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE? Poorest Sections of Los Angeles Blighted with Most Illegal Dumping, Litter, and Decay.

Victor Davis Hanson frequently sees the strange dichotomy of California up close and personal on his family’s farm and neighboring hometown of Fresno. As he has noted on several occasions, the state’s leftwing elites in Sacramento are utterly obsessed with passing more and more environmental laws, which impact primarily its middle-class citizens (ban the shopping bag!) and its business owners (try building anything in California without obtaining a stack of permits first). Which makes for a sharp contrast with their see-no-evil attitude towards illegal immigrants and their crimes.

As he wrote in 2013, along with a photo he took of refuse dumped alongside his family’s vineyard, “The miscreants had already dumped their trash: chemical drums, paints, solvents, oils, concrete, tires, garbage, and lots of broken fluorescent glass tubes — something a bit worse than the usual toxic brew that is left on San Joaquin Valley property. How strange that the California legislature can pass all sorts of new laws over the last six months — transgendered access to either boy or girl restrooms in the public schools, the banning of lead bullets, driver’s licenses for illegal aliens — but it cannot go after the epidemic of destroying the ecology of the San Joaquin Valley countryside. If only there were a spotted toad or a lavender newt native to the vineyard, perhaps the Bay Area intelligentsia would change their views about unchecked illegal immigration. I think the rationale of the dumpers is that there are always enough law-abiding citizens left to pick up after the casual law-breaking of the fewer. But are the fewer still the fewer?”