Radicals Have Burned California Before In the Golden State, good intentions have often paved the way to disaster.By Eli Lake
When I think about the recent tragedy of the California fires—and the questions we all have about what went wrong—there is one story I keep coming back to.
A few years ago, an amateur botanist was hiking above the Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles when he noticed several shrubs had been flattened by construction work. What he had stumbled across was an effort by the LA Department of Water and Power to replace the wooden poles of power lines with steel ones. The old ones, you see, were a fire hazard.
But the hiker was more worried about those flattened shrubs, which turned out to be a rare plant called a milk vetch. And so he rallied environmental groups—which ensured that the fire safety project got put on pause.
To me, this episode captures something fundamental about California: Its path to ruin is paved with the noblest intentions.
The Golden State was once the place where industry and imagination locked arms and showed us how great the American experiment could be. It secured our democracy by manufacturing and engineering the weapons that won the Second World War. It built the dream factory of Hollywood and the workshops of the future that we call Silicon Valley. Without California, The American Century would never have begun.
But in our current century, and 50 years of Democrat rule, California has fallen apart—largely thanks to progressive policies attempting to make the world a better place. Tent cities have popped up under bridges and beside freeways; in just the past 10 years, homelessness has risen by over 50 percent. Downtown San Francisco has also become the site of multiple open-air drug markets. Opioid overdose deaths reached an all-time high in the city in 2023. Violent crime has risen, too: As of 2022, rates were 31 percent higher in California than in the U.S. as a whole. Last month’s fires were only the latest reminder that the state is burning up.
To understand how the state unraveled, we need to go back to a decade of despair and decadence: the 1970s. The dark turn began—where else—in the petri dish of progressivism that is San Francisco, which around this time gave birth to the hippie movement. If you want to understand how the radical left can burrow deeply into a state’s bureaucracy, courts, and political machines, look no further than the San Fran ’70s.
California has been a battleground before, and it all began with the summer of love. The year was 1967; the setting, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a magnet for the dreamers, Vietnam vets, and fans of the new psychedelic rock. It was a wild time. Marijuana plants were everywhere. Communes cooked dinner for anyone who wanted it. A group called The Diggers opened a store where everything was free. The hippies were remodeling their little corner of society. They wanted to spread peace.
But the high didn’t last long. Haight-Ashbury became a magnet not only for the dreamers, but also for the lost, the reviled, and the damaged. Hearing tales of free love—and free food—runaways, pimps, biker gangs, and smack dealers flooded the hippie mecca. The cult leader Charles Manson hung his hat in Haight-Ashbury.
Violence followed, inevitably. There was the Zodiac Killer, who murdered five people then started writing disturbing letters to the San Francisco Chronicle about how, in the afterlife, his victims would be his eternal slaves. Then there were the Zebra killers, black militants who randomly murdered white people between 1973 and 1974: At the height of the frenzy, San Franciscans on some nights were advised by the city not to leave their homes. And as if the Zebra and Zodiac killers were not enough, on February 13, 1974, Patricia Hearst—an heiress and granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst—was kidnapped by a revolutionary new left group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. (She reemerged 19 months later.)
The veneer of civilization was peeling away, and the average Californian blamed one man: San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto. He was a Democrat, but a traditional one: the kind who runs on a platform of being tough on crime. Nevertheless, the people wanted regime change.
Enter: George Moscone, a fun-loving, charismatic California state senator. In 1975, he began campaigning to be the next mayor of San Francisco. He appealed to the traditional constituencies like the labor unions, but he also embraced the legendary gay activist Harvey Milk. He appealed to environmentalists, hippies, and other radicals who were on the outside looking in. It was a political coalition as experimental as any of the art being made across California at the time.
In David Talbot’s history of the San Fran ’70s, Season of the Witch, he describes Moscone’s visit to a commune, where the candidate was given the “ultimate Haight-Ashbury test:” a “pillow-sized reefer.” He and his staff were sitting at a giant wooden table with some hippies while the joint was being passed around. One of Moscone’s aides tried to intercept it, to save the future mayor from violating federal and city law, but Moscone was having none of it.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
Then he proceeded to take a huge toke.
“The whole room burst into applause,” Talbot writes. “The candidate passed the test. The Haight was in his column.”
Moscone’s rival in the race was John Barbagelata, a realtor who wanted to return San Francisco to what it was like before the hippie invasion. But Moscone had an advantage: The 1975 mayoral election was the first race under a new law that limited campaign spending to just over $120,000. This tempered the influence of the wealthy downtown real estate developers and lawyers who had powered Alioto’s campaigns in 1967 and 1971, and would naturally get behind Barbagelata.
In a runoff on December 11, 1975, Moscone beat Barbagelata—albeit narrowly. In a city of 700,000 people, the margin was 4,315 votes.
Many of Moscone’s moves were admirable. He got rid of the mayor’s limousine and announced that his door would always be open for any San Franciscan that wanted to talk. He appointed Milk to the powerful board of permit appeals, making him the first openly gay city commissioner in the U.S.
But other reforms were ill-considered. Moscone appointed Charles Gain—a so-called “sociological cop”—to be the chief of police. One of Gain’s first moves was to remove the American flag that hung outside the commissioner’s office and replace it with a plant. He also insisted on repainting all the police cars baby blue. And, in the fall of 1977, he attended something known as the Hookers Ball, “the social event of the year for heterosexuals, bisexuals, trisexuals, transexuals, nonsexuals, and other minorities who feel they are discriminated against.” Gain was photographed wedged between one of the city’s notorious madames and someone calling herself “Wonder Whore,” a superhero with a dildo in her holster.
San Francisco’s rank-and-file cops couldn’t stand Gain, whose policy interventions were rarely relevant to the actual fighting of crime. Their attitude was best captured in the 1971 movie Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood played Inspector Harry Callahan, who doesn’t care for the mayor’s passive approach to crime. He’s got his own approach—killing the bad guys.
Moscone, who stood by Gain, was exactly the kind of do-gooder liberal that Dirty Harry despised. Whereas his predecessor sent SWAT teams to the Haight communes, the new mayor shared a joint there. But he was popular in the city because he was willing to share power with the left-wing street organizers and political activists that had been relegated to the margins.
To build a new San Francisco, Moscone was willing to work with anyone—and I mean anyone.
Take the Reverend Jim Jones. He’d been the leader of a religious cult known as Peoples Temple for a couple of decades by the time Moscone welcomed him into his administration in 1975.
Jones was considered a progressive leader in a very progressive city. His church catered to the poorest San Franciscans, and he dressed his sermons in the vocabulary of social justice. Radicals like Angela Davis and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale considered him an ally. But Jones was not actually interested in progress. He was interested in power, and cultivated relationships with politicians accordingly. At the time, it sometimes felt as if every major leader in San Francisco was an ally of Jones. Milk considered Jones a friend. Governor Jerry Brown praised his work with the community. Rosalynn Carter, Jimmy Carter’s wife and First Lady at the time, appeared with him at a Democratic fundraiser.
Often, he got powerful people on his side by doing them favors. For instance, during the mayoral election, Jones bussed hundreds of members of the Peoples Temple from all over California to vote for Moscone. In return, the new mayor appointed him head of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.
Moscone also hired Tim Stoen, another member of Peoples Temple, to work in City Hall as a deputy district attorney. This allowed Jones to defend himself. When the San Francisco Police Department began investigating his cult, conducting sensitive interviews with defectors who shared stories of humiliating sexual rituals and the corporal punishment of children, Stoen allegedly leaked the information to Jones, who retaliated against the whistleblowers.
Nowadays, of course, Jones is best known for being responsible for the deaths of 918 people, after he forced them to drink a fruit-flavored cyanide cocktail in the jungles of Guyana. He’d decamped there from San Francisco in 1978, urging his followers to accompany him. They called their new settlement Jonestown.
Relatives were alarmed by the sudden emigration of their family members, and appealed for help. On November 18, 1978, California congressman Leo Ryan arrived in Guyana to investigate, accompanied by a group of journalists. The trip did not end well: Ryan, along with three journalists and a church defector, were shot and killed on a jungle airstrip by members of Peoples Temple. This was the end for Jones. He told his followers it was time to kill themselves, in a final revolutionary act. Those who refused, including hundreds of children, were made to drink the poison. Chillingly, Jones recorded audio of the whole barbaric event.
But this horrendous experience didn’t come out of nowhere. Long before these atrocities, there was evidence of the cult’s depravity. Defectors had told reporters of beatings, and leaving the church was thought to be a death sentence. San Francisco’s political leaders should have known better.
There is a parallel here to the struggles of modern California Democrats. Just as Moscone’s compassion for the downtrodden blinded him to the darkness of the Peoples Temple, compassion for addicts and vagrants has blinded leaders in Los Angeles and San Francisco leaders to open drug abuse and tent cities. The road to ruin, remember, is paved with good intentions.
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The dark side of Moscone’s legacy is often airbrushed out of the history of San Francisco. The reason is simple. Just nine days after the Jonestown massacre, he was assassinated in San Francisco, along with Milk. It was future Senator Dianne Feinstein, then a city supervisor, who found Milk’s body—and it was she who appeared at City Hall to give San Franciscans the news: Two beloved political leaders had been shot dead.
In a decade of death cults and domestic terror, the man behind the most high-profile murders in San Francisco turned out to be a conservative, clean-cut former cop and firefighter named Dan White. He was angry that the mayor had replaced him on the board of supervisors. At least that is what he said at first. Much later, White would admit that he was actually motivated by what he saw as the moral rot in San Francisco.
White ended up getting only five years in prison. He made the case that he was not in his right mind the day he pulled the trigger, with the help of a food scientist who peddled a debunked theory that a drop in blood sugar could cause temporary insanity. In what came to be known as “the Twinkie defense,” his lawyers claimed that White was plunged into depressive states after binging on sugary drinks and snacks. And in one of those only-in-California moments, it actually worked.
When the verdict was announced, San Francisco suffered its own bout of temporary insanity. Gay supporters of Milk began a march to City Hall. As more joined, they began breaking windows and smashing police cars. It was a fitting end to a decade of chaos.
After the assassinations, Feinstein was named mayor and presided over a period of both calm and plague. The AIDS crisis was arriving, and the bacchanalian revelry of the San Fran ’70s came to a somber close. Feinstein undid some of Moscone’s reforms—she fired Police Chief Gain for example—but, by this point, the radicals had firmly established themselves inside the halls of power. You’d think the Jim Jones catastrophe would make a lot of voters question whether it might be time to teach the Democrats a lesson, but Moscone’s murder made him a martyr, erasing his wrongdoing. In the 50 years since, California has acted like a one-party state.
After Moscone, many Republican voters who helped elect governors like Ronald Reagan in the 1960s moved out of the state as taxes rose and the quality of services declined. Willie Brown, Moscone’s longtime ally, would emerge as one of the most powerful political bosses in the state, eventually mentoring—and briefly dating—a young prosecutor named Kamala Harris. After two terms as mayor, Feinstein would be elected to the U.S. Senate, a seat she held long into her senescence until she died in office at the age of 90.
Meanwhile, it has taken time to see the damage wrought by the one-party Golden State, partly because of the tech boom and the infusion of trillions of dollars into Silicon Valley in the 1990s and 2000s. By the end of the 2010s, the renaissance was fading, and San Francisco, like California itself, was struggling. In the Tenderloin district and elsewhere, streets were filled with human feces, fentanyl addicts slept (and sometimes died) on sidewalks, and chain stores were ransacked by organized shoplifting gangs. The combination of dysfunctional government, disorder, and high taxes has proved unsustainable.
It’s a similar story in Los Angeles. Karen Bass, who was voted in as mayor in 2022, said her first priority would be dealing with the tent cities that plagued the city. The plan was to help the homeless get temporary housing at low-end motels, but it was so poorly considered that some of the case workers employed to enact it had to sleep in their cars because the rents were so high. Even more disastrously, while Bass was funding motels for the homeless, she was also cutting the fire department budget. Good intentions paved the way to disaster.
Now the fires are contained, the voters of California have a choice. Will they continue to empower a party that has failed them time and time again? A party that, with the best of intentions, paints cop cars baby blue and saves the milk vetch at the expense of the Palisades? Or will they demand a change?
There is reason to hope. In Los Angeles, the radical District Attorney George Gascón lost his reelection in November. London Breed, the super-progressive mayor of San Francisco was sent packing as well. And in 2023, the voters recalled Chesa Boudin, a district attorney raised by unrepentant domestic terrorists. Last month, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times said he regrets the paper’s endorsement of Karen Bass in 2022.
I hope the trend continues. Because if the fires become California’s death spiral, it’s not just a tragedy to the largest state in our union. It’s the end of an American dream that has sustained our great republic for nearly 200 years.
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